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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