Question: What kind of preparation is needed so that a person, together with everyone else, demands correction? Is it Arvut (mutual guarantee)?
Answer: What kind of preparation is needed for a person to want to fulfill a law? The same as with anything in life!
Let’s say I do not want to follow the law that says you should cross the street only at a crosswalk like everyone else does. I just do not want to!
The first time, someone yells at me, and I shrug it off. The second time, I get a ticket. Now I start watching when it is allowed to cross and when it is not. But if no one is around, I still cross like before. The third time, God forbid, I get hit by a car, and then I finally…
That is when I start to get a sense that maybe I should follow the law. This is called: “The Creator places a person’s hand upon a good fate and says: take it.” And the person must now strengthen himself in this because we cannot just desire spirituality on our own. But when that thought arises in us, we begin to consider: “Maybe it is worth fulfilling this law. I do not want to, but still, it might be worth it.”
This is where a person’s work begins.
We start looking for support, guidance, and the necessity of keeping this law despite our laziness, our evil inclination, our refusal to comply, and eventually we come to truly want it.
Now, the possibility of choice appears within a person. One becomes split in two ever since one was given the point in the heart. A person’s heart is entirely egoistic. It wants nothing but to fill itself and destroy anything that stands in the way of its desires. But in contrast to this, one was given a point in the heart.
We do not even know what this is or where it came from, but suddenly we begin to hear something that is opposite to our nature. This is called “a part of the Creator from above.” We can see this in people who are willing to get up at three in the morning to listen to a lesson. They begin to feel this inner split.
Now the person faces a choice: seek out advice and with its help gain the strength to resist one’s nature, which, truthfully, is not even one’s own. The Creator created the evil, meaning, the desire to receive and placed it in him. And apart from this desire, there is only the light, which is the Creator.
He created this evil in me, and now I must find some kind of support in order to rid myself of it or correct it to ensure that it no longer rules over me so that I might truly desire to fulfill the law of Arvut.
To strengthen oneself in this choice means that I am searching for a way to be free from evil, not that I am capable of doing it on my own. We cannot reach the state by ourselves of connecting our hearts, uniting into one Kli, and becoming worthy of the presence of the light in it. We must seek advice and truly want it, that is, to come to what is called a state of necessity.
Our readiness is called: “We shall do, and we shall hear.” I do not know what awaits me, I understand nothing about the state ahead of me because I am rising from a lower degree to a higher one. By definition, I do not understand that higher degree.
If I were already wise enough to grasp and feel it, I would already be on it! But if I am only about to leap to that degree, I do not yet know it. All I have is a sense of its necessity. This is called “We shall do, and we shall hear.” “We are ready. Just do something already!”
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From the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 5/6/2025, Writings of Baal HaSulam “The Arvut (Mutual Guarantee)”
Related Material:
Fulfilling The Law of Mutual Responsibility
What Is Mutual Guarantee?
Live in Others
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