Question: How can one best visualize the concept of bestowal?

Answer: Only by making efforts in this direction. How else can one clarify what bestowal is? Invest effort in it; show diligence. In short, do this from the moment you hear that such a thing as bestowal exists.

Know that within this bestowal are the Creator, the concept of the “neighbor” (who is outside you), the group, study, and the upper worlds—everything you can imagine, except your ego. It is not something small. On the contrary, it is everything outside you.

Your ability to relate to and feel something as though it exists outside you is called bestowal. Begin clarifying this. Then, at least, you will not be mistaken. When “Creator” is mentioned, it means the quality of bestowal. If you invest precisely this meaning into the words each time, it will immediately become clear how much you are lying to yourself and to what extent you imagine Him incorrectly.

Instead of any concept, term, or action that you want to discuss in relation to the Creator, you can use the word “bestowal.” You say, “Great, mighty, and awesome,” this is how the concept of bestowal appears opposite the desire to receive.

This is the essence of Rosh Hashanah (“Head of the Year”): to clarify this concept and place it at the head of the path.
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From the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 9/11/26, Rabash, “The Rosh Hashanah Prayer”

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Question: For whom do I ask for the light that reforms and returns to the source? Is it for my friends, who supposedly are already corrected, or for myself?

Answer: A person asks from a deep inner need, from a desire. The desire must be for the society. After all, if we are talking about attaining spirituality, then in spirituality there is no personal calculation with anyone.

There is no such thing as “I” that exists in spirituality. I am the collective of souls into which I am included. And therefore a person cannot remain there alone, detached from others.

So for what kind of life does one ask for strength? The life force is for the common body, the one soul. Therefore a person should ask for strength in order to bestow to this body. One’s entire life is determined by how much they give to the common system.

Therefore, even if one’s prayer is caused by a desire to receive strength, it is a prayer that one be given the strength to bestow to the common body of the soul. And therefore, whether a person asks for everyone or asks for oneself, it is one and the same prayer.

When we speak about there being a “prayer of one” and a “prayer of many,” this is still an uncorrected prayer. There is no other prayer except the “prayer of many,” a prayer for the society.

But as long as a person is not yet in a completely corrected state, one partially asks for oneself and partially for the society. According to this, a person is corrected by having one’s direction adjusted so that one feels where it is better and where it is worse, and in this way a person is brought to the correct prayer.
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From the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 5/24/10, The Zohar

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From above, we are given a point in the heart, a certain aspiration toward spirituality. I do not yet know what spirituality is, but I want something. Therefore, I gradually begin to clarify it, study, participate in the group’s work, and listen to the teacher. Then it becomes clearer to me that spirituality is the upper force.

I begin to understand that all my strength and desires come from there and I start to feel my dependence on it. At the same time, however, I feel that when I think about the Creator rather than myself, I lose strength because my desire to receive does not support this.

Or, conversely, I feel that my entire self, my whole desire to receive, has become a slave in the hands of the upper force. I pass through various stages of sensation and begin to see, in different forms, how I am connected to the higher force: sometimes I want it and sometimes I do not. I feel that perhaps it would be better if it did not exist; I feel dependent on it and unable to control myself because of it. I want to rule over it, fear it, and sense that it separates me from my desire to receive—my ego.

I already begin to hate my desire to receive and think about how to please the Creator because I am told this is how it should be: if He is pleased, I will be pleased, and if I do not think about Him, things will be bad. I begin to experience all kinds of relationships between us.

I am told that a group is necessary because without one I cannot accurately determine my attitude toward the Creator. I am told that my attitude toward Him must be expressed in the same way as toward a stranger. If I love someone, even someone who is my biggest hater, without any material reason, not because I have found qualities in him that appeal to my ego, but because I regard such an attitude toward another as elevated and great, this is called the quality of the Creator.

I have neither taste nor benefit in this. It could be any stranger toward whom I feel no inclination or particular attitude. Yet I am told that this is the only way to test whether I truly have an attitude toward the Creator, because this is His quality, this is how He relates to us.

Does this mean that He loves us? When I relate this way to a stranger, I do not feel that it comes from the heart, so it is not called love. Therefore, I remain confused and do not know what to do. I have no preparation for the measure of love I am being told about.

In other words, a person gradually clarifies their entire connection, attitude, dependence, or, conversely, independence concerning the Creator. This is our work. In most states and degrees a person passes through, they do not feel that they are being built in relation to the Creator. It seems to them that everything is happening in relation to the friends, the group, and various concepts that explain what spirituality is. In essence, however, they are being formed in relation to the Creator, who is concealed behind all of it.

A person clarifies all this. We say that they are in a special state on Rosh Hashanah, an important point that determines their entire subsequent path. At that point, they crown the Creator as sovereign over everything that happens and decisively determine that they depend on Him.

The desire to receive, having reached this conclusion through the states it has previously undergone—that the Creator is the king of the entire earth, meaning that He rules over all desires—places the Creator at the head of the path it intends to follow. In this way, it has already entered the state of Rosh Hashanah (head of the year).
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From the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 9/11/26, Rabash, “The Rosh Hashanah Prayer”|

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Our sages (RASHI, Tavo 3 (Deuteronomy 26:16), in Yitro 13:10) said about the verse, “This day the Lord your God commands you to do these statutes and ordinances. You shall be careful to do them with all your heart and with all your soul,” “Each day, they will be as new in your eyes, as though you received them today from Mt. Sinai, as though on this day you were commanded them” (Rabash “What Is, ‘Every Day They Will Be as New in Your Eyes,’ in the Work?”).

What does it mean that each day, they will be as new in your eyes? The desire to receive is not new. It has existed in the same form from the beginning of creation and forever. Rather, they will be as new in your eyes means that the renewal relates only to the intention for the sake of bestowal.

With regard to intention, a person is always either in an ascent or in a descent and is constantly making clarifications. It is precisely by the intention that we evaluate a person.

Initially, a person has no intention at all. He simply becomes accustomed to performing actions that he was taught through his upbringing, whether religious or secular. This is called performing learned actions or behaving as a trained person.

Obviously, there is no intention here. Habit simply becomes second nature, both for those who received a religious upbringing and for those who received a secular one. This has nothing to do with what we call intention, because there is still nothing here of the one we call a human.

Anyone can be raised in any manner, and that is how he will remain. There is not yet a man here. A man is one who, through free choice, forms within himself the image of Adam, one who is similar to the Creator. In this process, there is first the intention for one’s own sake (Lo Lishma), and afterward for the sake of the Creator (Lishma).

Lo Lishma includes all of a person’s efforts from the moment he begins working with the point in the heart and receives some awakening toward coming closer to the Creator. Although this may take many years, ten or fifteen, depending on the quantity and, above all, the quality of his efforts, even if he has worked for all those years while experiencing descents and ascents, sometimes moving away and sometimes drawing closer, passing through various states, then, when he is rewarded with the correct intention for the sake of the Creator, all his efforts throughout all the reincarnations (since he may not be able to complete everything in a single reincarnation) become included in the intention for the sake of bestowal that he has acquired and enter his work forever.

Everything else that he received through his upbringing does not belong to the degree of a man and is not taken into account. And so, he advances with regard to intention, constantly adding to it, while passing through descents and ascents.
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From the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 9/8/26, Rabash, “What Is, ‘Every Day They Will Be as New in Your Eyes,’ in the Work?”

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The thing that is the most important is not to forget about the Creator for even a moment. How can we be rewarded with this? By exerting each time more fiercely and with more power and might. By this we are rewarded with the quality of “remembering” (Rabash, “The Rosh Hashanah Prayer”).

Efforts made toward a goal give us awareness of its importance. If I invest myself in something, it becomes important to me; and if it is important, I do not forget it.

Whatever I want to make significant in my eyes, I must simply think about constantly. Effort itself evokes awareness of importance, and importance compels me to keep paying attention to it and not forget it.

Question: So, the advice is not to forget, but to remember all the time?

Answer: A mother naturally does not forget her child. Once she has given birth to him, the matter is settled. As it is said, from the moment she becomes pregnant, all her thoughts are already about him: first about the fetus and then about the child. This is nature; it is what matters most to her.

How can I make the spiritual, the Creator, acquire the same degree of importance that exists in animal nature? How can I keep Him constantly in the focus of my attention so that I always see Him as the cause of everything happening to me and the goal I wish to attain?

What else do I have besides this? All my strength, desires, and actions come from there, and I am their result. I need to add only awareness of importance and my own attention. Then, if I add what I must and relate to it in this way, it means that I “make the Creator reign” over me. And if I truly elevate Him above myself, nothing prevents me from working with my own forces for His sake.

There are stages of advancement here. At first, I simply prefer Him and think about Him because it benefits me and makes sense to me. Then come other stages, when this is not beneficial to me and does not serve my ego, from which I have already distancing myself and I recognize that it and I are not the same. Yet what becomes precious to me is that this is important, that it is spiritual.

This continues until I acquire such a degree of awareness regarding this importance and force that I pay no attention to myself, but only to His benefit. We do not yet understand what this means. It is above the qualities of Binah.

Thus, everything depends on attention to the Creator. How can this be attained? For now, through effort.
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From the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 9/11/26, Rabash, “The Rosh Hashanah Prayer”

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Talks about the Steps of the Ladder, Part 239

Why Will the Body’s Resistance Be Removed If It Is Actually a Necessary Part of the Process?

The body’s resistance does not disappear simply by saying that everything is for the best. By saying this, we are, as it were, making a restriction. We do not want to receive only the body. Instead, we want to receive it together with the Creator’s qualities that are positioned opposite it, so that we, the Creator, and His entire method exist together. Then we derive benefit from that state.

We attain nothing by sinking solely into resistance and negative qualities when nothing stands opposite them. Sometimes it seems that great suffering brings results, but this is untrue. There is no commandment to suffer even for a single second. Suffering is a problem of the body, of the Klipot (shells/peels), which constantly confuse and mislead us into thinking that through suffering we manage to attain something.

The statement, “It is a great Mitzva to be in joy,” is absolutely true. The moment we can move into joy, we should not think that we have not yet felt enough suffering, that we must still sink deeper into suffering, into the depths of the evil inclination, into the depths of creation. Nothing is attained from the evil inclination or from suffering.

One should rejoice and not judge joy as frivolity. If, in the face of suffering, we immediately move into joy, that is not frivolity. In any case, suffering will soon return, and we will emerge from it once again, and so it goes, over and over. “And from Zion…,” i.e., from coming out of suffering, “shall come forth Torah.” Otherwise, we bring about destruction.

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