Question: What does it mean “to receive from the Creator in order to bring Him pleasure”?

Answer: Baal HaSulam explains this in the “Preface to the Wisdom of Kabbalah” using the example of a guest and a host.

A guest comes to the host. The host has laid a table full of food for him because he loves the guest with boundless love, without any calculation, and wants to give him pleasure very much.

The guest feels how the host loves him and wants to bring him pleasure. But suddenly the guest feels such shame that he cannot accept anything from the host.

The host loves him so much and so deeply desires to bring him pleasure; he already knows how much the guest wants to receive and what dishes he likes. He has prepared everything exactly according to the guest’s wishes, both in quantity and quality.

But the guest feels shame. What should he do? The guest refuses to accept the meal:

“I do not want to receive anything! I want to bestow like you do! You have shown me your love, and I feel it. How can I do the same to you?” The guest begins to think: “But if I do not accept anything, I will give it back to the host. Is this how I respond to his love?! What can I do?!”

And then he finds a solution: “I will receive only for the sake of the host. Since the host has the desire to bestow and wants me to receive, I must first enter into his desire so that it becomes my goal. I enter his desire and feel how he loves me, how much he wants me to receive, how he suffers from my refusal to accept his offering. I work with his desire and think only about how I can fulfill it.”

Through being inside his desire and striving only to fulfill it, I discover the ability to do so within myself by accepting the meal and enjoying it, because only through the pleasure that I feel can I bring pleasure to the host. I am obliged to receive and enjoy without limit because I feel how this fills him.

In this way, each one works with the other’s desire. The host thinks about how the guest will receive from him and enjoy. And the guest thinks about how he will receive and enjoy in order to fulfill the host’s desire to bring pleasure to him. Each uses their own desire to fulfill the other’s desire.

At the same time, each benefits doubly, or even more, because each exits themselves outward, and thereby experiences infinite, boundless pleasure.

This “patent” seems very simple at first glance. But when we begin to contemplate it, it appears difficult to implement.

However, ideally, if we understand it, this is the only way to fill ourselves with infinite pleasure, because I use the desire of the other, outside myself.

The Creator is an infinite desire, and I am merely a tiny point. But if I begin to attach myself to Him, I thereby acquire an infinite desire for myself that I can fulfill. And I begin to feel how I fill it and how that desire is enjoying itself.

It turns out that by treating Him with love, I receive infinite desires, infinite life, eternity, and perfection. I receive all of this if I relate to the Creator as the goal that I must fulfill.

Therefore the wisdom of Kabbalah is truly the science of reception (the word “Kabbalah” in Hebrew means “reception”), of how to receive and how to enjoy myself without any limitations.
[11490]
From Daily Kabbalah Lesson 3/17/10, The Book of The Zohar

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