How can the group feel that it needs the effort of every friend? It is much easier to work on the principle of “myself in relation to the group,” and much harder to work from the side of the group relative to each person.

Baal HaSulam writes that a person must be concerned with spiritual flourishing and feeling gratitude to the Creator for twenty-three and a half hours a day, and only after this to dedicate half an hour to critical analysis.

It is the same here. We must analyze the contribution of the friends to the group only after we have unequivocally made efforts to understand the concept known as the “group.”

Once we perceive it as a spiritual concept and share a mutual understanding of what it entails, then we can discuss, at a gathering of the friends, how to evoke an extra measure of effort from everyone and how we can lift up the group.

Ultimately, we will not make demands of any individual: “Why are you not bringing benefit to the group?” Instead, we will hold ourselves, the group as a whole, accountable for failing to bring people come to the correct understanding that they contribute to the group and integrate with it heart and soul, or they see that they are outside the group.

In that case, if they remain present despite clearly standing outside and opposite to the group, then either they leave on their own or they are removed.

In spirituality, when you look at a person from the group’s perspective, the group is upper relative to that individual. And the upper must awaken the lower. If he cannot awaken the lower, then he leaves him be; and if he leaves him, it means the lower does not belong to the upper.
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From the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 5/22/26, Rabash, Letter 59

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