If I have established that the Creator is bestowal, then I must investigate this concept, understand it, draw closer to it, and attain it, so that it alone governs me instead of my own nature. And I must do all this through my own efforts. So how can I achieve this?

I am told that the quality of bestowal can be revealed to me in a group among a few people who are striving toward the same goal. Through working together, you can explore it from both the positive and negative sides, in different kinds of relationships.

Why should you choose friends who are also genuinely striving for the quality of bestowal, that is, students who study Kabbalah and want to reach the Creator? Because then you can help one another: “Each one shall help his friend.” Everyone can set a positive or negative example for others, as well as provide them with strength and support.

In this world, there is no other way for us to advance than to see our neighbor as the goal. Moreover, your neighbor can help you and become a source of strength and support for you.

Otherwise, you will follow the old path described by Baal HaSulam. In the past, a person seeking to attain the quality of bestowal would be content with bread and salt and water, living in poverty, and suffering so as not to give their desire to receive anything beyond what was essential for survival. Everything else they had, they would give to others in order to break their desire to receive in this way. If you want to follow this path, go ahead.

However, today the desire to receive can no longer be corrected through such actions. Our actions must be carried out with the help of the light that reforms, not by breaking ourselves in this way. If you were at the level of Aviut Shoresh or Aleph, you could work with your desire to receive and correct it in this manner. But given the degree of Aviut we have in our generation, we are no longer capable of doing so.

The sages of the Gemara and those who came before them prepared the surrounding light for us as a force that enables us to recognize evil and correct it.

Therefore, instead of giving everything away for the benefit of humanity, working for others 24 hours a day, living in poverty and suffering, and “toiling in the Torah day and night,” that is, doing what we are incapable of doing, we have been given the light that reforms. It is not that one method replaces the other; the previous method simply does not suit our current state. We cannot act that way.

When the desire to receive is small, people can live in poverty, striving for a kind of “nirvana.” But this does not work when the desire to receive is great. Besides, why did they live that way? Because they had no other option. If they had had more than a cup of rice a day, they would have occupied themselves with something else. All these methods arose from poverty, not from an urgent need to attain the upper one.
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From the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 9/11/26, Rabash, “The Rosh Hashanah Prayer”

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