Question: How can I clarify what a particular state is sent to me for?
Answer: You see there are many people in the world who turn to the upper force. I remember a visit to San Francisco where statues of Christian saints, the Madonna and child, etc., stand right on the streets. People worship these statues, they come up right on the street and kiss them. We see pure idolatry in a modern American city. This is a clear example for you.
Or consider Baal HaSulam’s example about the kibbutz members in the Negev desert that suffer from drought and, without realizing it, turn to the Creator with a request for rain. This request comes from the heart. Whether they want it or not, they ask the upper force for help, because it is precisely the Creator who arranges this situation for them, although they do not know it.
That is, people all over the world turn to the Creator for help. Even a little flea that suffers because it has nothing to eat does; its suffering is also an appeal to the source of its suffering, to the Creator.
The question is how to correctly turn to the Creator, starting from the little flea up to the big animals, up to the person worshipping statues, up to the kibbutzniks of the Negev, up to religious Jews on the inanimate level of holiness, and up to those who already truly wish to turn to the source and to know to whom they are turning. Yet the appeal of the latter has a completely different goal.
The request of a flea or of a person who asks for his own good in this world and in the world to come remains within the framework of the material world. But when a person begins to ask not that he should feel good in the future world, because in his request there is already some feeling toward the Creator (meaning it is simultaneously a mix of Lo Lishma and Lishma), then becomes a targeted request.
This is the essential difference between our request and the request of a flea or an idol‑worshipper, because it is truly an appeal to the Creator. After all, we do not ask like the kibbutzniks, who pray because there is no rain and suffer from drought, and we do not cry out to the Creator that we feel bad so that it will become good. We speak of an appeal that is difficult to express in words.
If I ask the Creator for correction so as to become like Him, this too is a request “on my own account,” it is also Lo Lishma. Lishma is a feeling that we are not even able to put into words. How can I turn with such a request that will be as if disconnected from myself and directed exclusively toward the Creator?
Therefore, our entire work passes through various relations with the upper force, in order to finally come to “Israel, the Creator, and the Torah are one.” That is, the steps I take in the process of my clarifications in relation to the Creator are called “Torah”; it is about how I relate to Him so that these steps, instead of being directed toward myself, will be more and more directed toward Him.
Making a reversal in the direction of my actions is the work.
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From the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 7/3/26, Rabash, “What Is, ‘There Is None as Holy as the Lord, for There Is None Besides You,’ in the Work?”
Related Material:
A Kabbalist’s Prayer
The Prayer of All that Exists
What Is Hidden in a Prayer for Rain
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