Always New

231.01People follow the religious commandments with great enthusiasm because they feel great support for their desire to receive pleasure; they are willing to make efforts to receive rewards in this world and most importantly in the future world, forever. Therefore, a person is ready to work all the years of his life in order to receive eternal life.

But how can one avoid the shame of receiving such a thing so as not to work for the Creator out of self-interest? That is why the whole reality was created, so we could work in it and instead of being rewarded for our work, the work itself will give us new organs of perception that allow us to enter the world, the whole of which is a reward.

Kabbalah can never become a religion because a Kabbalist goes through changes all the time. Religion is based on rigid attitudes that are forbidden to be changed, on dogmas that cannot be deviated from,  which clearly define everything that needs to be done.

And Kabbalah, at its core, as a method of advancing to the Creator, presupposes constant changes in a person. Each time, the Creator is new, and I am new, with a new relationship, a new group. Therefore, Kabbalah is not considered a religion.

Every second, every time, every person and the whole ten together check themselves and constantly change. After all, everything is subject to change since it is being realized in our desire to receive pleasure, which is constantly changing.

People who like to obey clear orders prefer a religious framework and derive content from following them.

A Kabbalist is always in doubt, in clarification, in uncertainty, and must cling to the Creator through the group in order to attract some light that illuminates his path. And this is the right way for spiritual development, because in this way we build ourselves in the likeness of the Creator and become people, “sons of Adam,” having made our way through all this confusion and turmoil.

According to the definition of Kabbalah, Bnei Baruch is a movement aimed at revealing the Creator to the creatures in this world.
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From the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 3/29/21, “Pesach (Passover)”

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A Rope To Grab Onto

236.02Question: All the four exiles of Israel are felt to be rather severe states. How can one understand anything and advance in such terrible descents? What should one do?

Answer: Be above all problems and understand that they all are created so that you can feel them and be able to rise above them. Nothing else. After all, it is possible to pull us out of our egoistic matter only when we feel how much we suffer in it. Otherwise, you will not be able to rise above it.

Question: Where is that rope that one can grab in order to rise above this?

Answer: This rope appears when a person is in complete despairs of his abilities. It is not so easy to achieve this state. But The Book of Zohar accelerates this process.

Baal HaSulam writes that the happiest moment in a person’s life is when he begins to feel to what extent he is unable to understand and realize anything. He is completely lost, like a small child who is trembling, and crying having lost his way in a deep forest.

When one reaches such a state of absolute despair from his inability to change something in himself or in the world around him, he feels hopelessness, insignificance, meaninglessness, and then the light of redemption comes to him, which gives him a feeling of eternity, perfection, and the necessity to integrate himself into the creation.

Only in a state of extreme exhaustion of his own strength, when he sees that he cannot help himself with anything, does he begin to need the upper force that will manifest in him and lead him upward.

We believe that by our own strengths, properties, and mind we are capable of everything: “How can we sacrifice our own I”? But in fact, when a person gives up all this, he suddenly feels totally free. Therefore, our most important task is to break away from our egoism.
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From KabTV’s “The Power of The Book of Zohar” #8

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The Need To Ask Questions

938.04Question: There are students who don’t feel the need to ask questions for years. Does this prevent their advancement?

Answer: It depends on the student’s nature. There are 400 students sitting in front of me every day and about 20 of them ask me questions regularly, I already know them by heart. They cannot behave differently because they need to study through a dialogue with the teacher. They must ask a question and hear the answer that is specifically for them. Otherwise, they don’t hear what is said.

It is a big question whether they hear what others are saying. So, on one hand, I complain to them, and on the other hand, I understand that they need to hear the specific answer to their question and integrating in other’s questions is a problem for them.

Fortunately, there are not many, I already know them, and there is nothing I can do about it. Without them, there would be no questions, and if there are no questions something is missing. So let them ask. It depends on a person’s character, on the structure of one’s personality. So don’t worry if you study quietly and don’t ask questions. It is not a problem, as long as you are present.
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From KabTV’s “Fundamentals of Kabbalah” 4/4/19

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Understand Each Other’s Nature

961.2Comment: Today, people do not want any obligations to each other and therefore do not marry.

My Response: A person is an egoist. If he understood that marriage would really fill him and was created so that he could give and receive in marriage, he would see that there is nothing better.

But for this, a form of communication needs to be created so that a man is fulfilled from his wife, children, and family so that he has exactly such needs, qualities, desires that are not artificially changed s o that he is forced to run away in the evenings somewhere to clubs, bars.

It’s the same with a woman. She must be determined to create for her family, her husband, and her children the conditions from which she herself would enjoy. Therefore, appropriate education is needed here. It doesn’t matter that we’ve become more egoistic. Bigger egoism, in fact, should take us to the next level.

We must educate boys and girls properly, teach them how to interact with each other, and not give them only lessons about sex in schools. It turns out that we are just teaching animals the correct sexual relationships, but we do not teach people how to be properly connected with each other, to understand and complement each other.

If we don’t give them that education, the next generation will be miserable. They will come to some mechanical interaction, to something incomprehensible.

Kabbalah says that everything in nature is built on replenishment, on harmony. This replenishment depends on understanding each other’s nature.

I remember when I was in the first year of the institute, we had a professor Svyadoshch Avraam Moiseevich. He took us to different hospitals for surgeries to show us the extreme conditions that people are in immediately after an accident, during a difficult birth, or after a heart transplant.

And we, eighteen or nineteen-year-old boys, were very shaken up by it. When we first came out of the maternity hospital, it was a shock: How difficult it is to give birth, how much blood, how much pain. We almost cried, looking at the women in labor. Our attitude to many things changed. We began to treat even the girls in our group differently.

Based on what I have experienced, I would take all school children to hospitals, maternity hospitals, and morgues to explain and show children what life means, when you go through all the states from birth through various problems, injuries, death, up to the cemetery,  all this is necessary. And I would do this with a very serious preliminary preparation, so that the children would not have psychological trauma. This is how an understanding and adult attitude to life is built.
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From KabTV’s “Close-Up. Common Law Marriage” 8/11/09

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The Two Commandments: Reception And Bestowal

560Baal Sulam, “The Peace”: In general examination, we find that there are only two Mitzvot to follow in society. These can be called 1) “reception” and 2) “bestowal.” This means that each member must, by nature, receive his needs from society and must benefit society through his work for its well-being. And if one breaks one of these two Mitzvot, he will be mercilessly punished.

Question: If Baal HaSulam believed that there were only two commandments, then where should we place the Ten Commandments? Are these two are divided in 10, 613?

Answer: We lay this all out depending on our states, relationships, etc. But in reality, what else is there in nature beside reception and bestowal? Nothing!

Question: Is this like the fact that there are 365 days, so many hours, and so many seconds in a year, that is, the two main commandments are divided into auxiliary ones?

Answer: Yes. In nature, there is nothing but plus and minus. But when you start introducing them into relationships between people, you lay out people, their relationships, and each person in relation to yourself and others, and then you get a huge number of conditions—to receive and to bestow. And you must somehow bring this together into one system. This, in principle, is described in the Torah.

Comment: Rabbi Akiva went even further claiming that there is one commandment: “Love your neighbor as yourself.”

My Response: It prevails over these two so that both reception and bestowal are only for the sake of others.
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From KabTV’s “Spiritual States” 12/26/19

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“And You Shall Not Covet Your Neighbor’s Wife”

527.01The Torah, Devarim, Deuteronomy, 5:18: “And you shall not covet your neighbor’s wife.

States in which I advance must always be aimed only for bestowal and not for my own sake.

On the spiritual path, man is in a very interesting state. On one hand, I am alone and the whole world is inside me, as it is said: “Man is a small world.”

On the other hand, all my internal desires seem to me as attributes that exist outside of me. It is the same with regard to my like-minded friends, it seems to me that they exist outside of me, and I later gradually begin to see that all of them are within me.

Therefore, they are my neighbors. I must work at the degree of bestowal on all their desires, called “wives,” (their female part, the will to receive) when I clothe in them, that is, for their sake.

This is what means not to covet my neighbor’s wife. I only work at the degree of “love your neighbor as yourself.” This is already a more serious system.

After all, the ten commandments of the Torah are at the level of the ten Sefirot. The commandment “You shall not covet your neighbor’s wife” is the most serious of them because it deals with the lowest internal egoistic quality. By the way, it has nothing to do with the egoism in our world and the physical states between the genders.

It is about the way we can fully direct our egoism toward the intention for bestowal to the common connection between us at the upper level where there is no longer any division by gender. After all, men and women are desires and intentions and not corporeal qualities.
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From Kab TV’s “Secrets of the Eternal Book” 3/16/16

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Daily Kabbalah Lesson – 3/31/21

Preparation to the Lesson

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Lesson on the Topic “Pesach (Passover)”

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Selected Highlights 

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Audio Version Of The Blog – 3/30/21

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The Staff In Moses’ Hand

284.03Moses is a force that wants to pull out all a person’s desires. I decide to become good, to yearn for spirituality and bestowal, to connect with my friends, to love everyone, and to rise above the dirt of this world. I decided! But the next moment I forget about my good intentions and everything goes on as before. This happens to everyone. And what do I do?

The force that decides to go forward and pull along all the other desires of men is called Moses. And Moses sees that he cannot pull the others out with him. Then he complains to the Creator: “But, they will not believe me!”

You convince your body that you need to get out of bed to study, to strengthen the connection with your friends, and to work together on your connection. I try to persuade my heart, but it does not want to listen. It is not impressed by my appeals, that is, it does not believe that this should be done.

Then the Creator ordered Moses to throw the staff on the ground, the staff turned into a serpent, and Moses got very afraid and ran away. The fact is that there are only two states: egoism or sanctity, and there is no middle ground. The same staff turns into a snake if you throw it on the ground.

If I value spirituality no more than the values of this world, then my staff turns into a snake, and I will of course run away from the spiritual path. Therefore, even if I do not see the value of spirituality, I must increase it, grab the serpent by the tail, lift it up, and it will turn into a staff.

Whether it is a staff or a serpent is determined only by the person himself. That is, I decide how to move forward, either to spirituality, to connection and bestowal, or to corporeality, to separation, isolation from my friends and from bestowal, and this is called the staff or the serpent. And it all depends on what I value more and what I value less, that is, I need to work on my scale of priorities.

This work is mainly carried out in the ten when I am impressed by how much my friends value spirituality. Everyone is obliged to show his friends that spirituality is much more important to him than corporeality, and so: “They helped everyone his friend.” This is the most important thing.

The serpent represents all the intentions for my sake and I must grab them by the head in order to be on top of them.

The Creator teaches Moses by giving him the staff with which to advance and go forward. This means that corporeality will always be lower in importance than spirituality, and this will pave the way. But if you do not keep the importance of spirituality high and you throw the staff on the ground and decide that spirituality is not particularly important, that heaven is not more important than the earth, then the staff will immediately turn into a serpent. In this way, the Creator shows that spiritual elevation must be preserved.
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From the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 3/25/21, “Pesach (Passover)”

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Egoism Poisons Our Lives

115.06We all have to go through two stages of our path, and the first is the exile from spirituality. This stage is very long because first the inanimate, vegetative, and animate nature develop.

Then a human appears who also has to go through four levels of development: inanimate, vegetative, animate, and speaking inside human, until he begins to realize that he is under control of the will to receive for his own sake. Egoism keeps us in slavery, preventing us from being free. Therefore, a human himself defines his state as an exile from the force of bestowal, the force of love and connection.

Throughout history, only a few people have come to this conclusion, but in our time we have entered the period of what is called the “last generation,” when nature pushes all of humanity to reveal that we are in exile from the will to bestow, from mutual love.

Egoism holds us in this terrible slavery. When we realize this, we will understand that there is only one way out: to shout, to ask, to demand with all our might, the upper force, which has placed us in this exile, to bring us to freedom. The difference between exile and redemption is only one letter “Aleph – א,” which symbolizes the revelation of the upper force, the Creator, in our world.

If the Creator is revealed in our lives, we will feel that we are coming out of exile, out of the control of our egoism, which no longer locks us in the dark corner of the entire vast reality. Therefore, the most important thing to begin with is to realize that we are slaves of our egoism, our Pharaoh, that we work for him with devotion and love and obediently fulfill all his whims. We do not detach ourselves from him, so much so that we are in solidarity with him. It is only when we begin to receive blows for associating ourselves with egoism that we recognize that it is concerned with its own good, and not with our benefit.

This revelation comes only through a special illumination from above, from the Creator, who awakens in us the feeling that there is another governance in the world, not only of this terrible egoism. There is another governance in the world of the forces of connection and love.

Now we feel ourselves between these two forces fighting with each other, and we want to belong to the force of love, the force of good. The evil force that controls us is egoistic, and therefore, it is not related to the upper force. It turns out that instead of enjoying our egoism, we begin to perceive it as evil and ask the Creator to take us out of the control of the evil force.

This is how we gradually become free from the enslavement of our egoism, we come out of Egypt, out of the control of the Pharaoh, the evil inclination, and come under the control of the good force of bestowal and love. We are always under control of one of these two forces, it is impossible otherwise: either one or the other. If one of them rises, the other one falls, and vice versa.

Therefore, looking at the historical process that humanity has gone through, we can say that it is all called the Egyptian exile, starting from the first days of the creation of the world. There was not even a human being yet, but the will to receive was already dominating the world. Only there was no one to identify it and to want to change this dominion.

When a person discovers the control of egoism over him, he tries to come out of it, and then he enters the next stage already outside of Egypt, in the land of Israel.

There is nothing more than these two states: either Egypt or the land of Israel, and now we stand right on the border between them, between these two desires. Let us hope that we will quickly discover the control of the evil inclination over us and that we will not want to remain under it, will define egoism as evil, and we will move to the control of the good desire.

Therefore, there are only two states in history: Egypt and Israel. Until today, all of humanity has existed in Egypt with the exception of  selected individuals, the Kabbalists, who have already emerged from it and are illuminating our path. All the rest of nature is under the control of egoism, but in our time we are already able to reach bestowal.

The sooner we discover that we are under the hated control of Pharaoh and want to escape from this slavery, the closer we will come to the exodus from Egypt. This discovery will be made by all of humanity, with the realization of the evil of egoism that poisons our lives, and then we will all exit to freedom.
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From the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 3/23/21, “Pesach (Passover)”

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