Entries in the 'Daily Kabbalah Lesson' Category

A Home for the Newborn

530If you look at all the desires created, a person is just a single point. Everything depends on how much he can connect with the others, whether with individual desires or with a group. If he has a yearning to unite with others, this means he is digging the ground for the foundation of a building. After all, he doesn’t dig into himself; there is nothing to dig there, he is merely a point.

His body remains on the outside and has nothing to do with this; it is an animal body. And the point is the human, the beginning of the soul. The extent to which he can connect with the others is how deep he is digging. He receives desires from them, material, then sees how capable or incapable he is of accepting them, and from the desires he manages to take in, he builds the structure of his soul with the help of the light.

Each of us has no more than a single point. I try to connect with others and discover how opposite I am to connection. But I am willing to endure it, I annul myself in relation to the desires of the friends with whom I want to unite, perceiving them as a mother, as a womb, which is what the group truly is.

I annul myself before it, and then I receive all this material of desire that has joined me. I then unite with this formed place and gain “volume.” But as I do so, I overcome my resistance, and therefore, in annulling myself, I ask for correction. And then comes the surrounding, upper light that returns to the source and actualizes our connection—between me and the group.

This is my first connection with the group on the zero level of Aviut (Aviut Shoresh), in which I feel the light of Nefesh. And now I am called a “spiritual embryo” (Ubar). I have reached my first spiritual degree!

Then my egoism in relation to them grows, and I suddenly feel a great heaviness of the heart—the first level (Aviut Alef). On this level, I already had my “living space,” the place where I united with the group as one. But with regard to others, not yet. Now I want to encompass an even larger area through my connection; this will be called “the neighbor” for me. I consider it my mother, my group, and I work to become an inseparable part of it.

And again: study, the reforming light, self-annulment, and so on, until I acquire all this shared desire in addition to what I had, and this entire area becomes mine, level “1,” Ruach.

And so, I continue further. That is, I dig ever deeper into the group, penetrate them, and take their “material,” desire. I have nothing of my own apart from the point and the animal body that desires only material pleasures. With this single black point, I enter spirituality, and the rest of the vessel of my soul is built from others’ material.

Therefore, it is said: “Love your neighbor as yourself,” meaning, connect the others to yourself. This is the fundamental spiritual rule, the main tool (common vessel) for revealing the light within you. That is why all the work takes place in the group and depends on how deeply we manage to dig into it, to annul our animal body that remains behind, to enter the group and acquire its desires, intentions, thoughts, strengths, and the importance of the goal. All of this is there, along with the upper light and the Creator. And it is precisely in the place of penetration into the group that we build the structure of our soul.
[42990]
From Daily Kabbalah Lesson 5/13/11, Writings of Rabash “What Is the Foundation on which Kedusha [Holiness] Is Built?”

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How to Bring Contentment to the Creator?

222Question: If the Creator is the quality of bestowal, then how can one bring contentment to the quality? Does He need anything from me?

Answer: What the Creator wants me to enjoy. The host desires only one thing—for the guest will delight. But He places a condition: I can only receive pleasure if I become like Him.

After all, we do not want a child to enjoy at a tiny, undeveloped level. We want him to constantly grow, to become more mature and wiser. We surround him with toys that help him develop, not just for him to have fun. We seek additional benefit in children’s activities. The Creator treats us in the same way. He does not want us to remain like small animals.

If I continue receiving for my own sake, I will only feel a short-lived existence, and even within this life, I will never be truly fulfilled. But if I receive pleasure by fulfilling the Creator, even the smallest pleasure I bring Him in His desires that are now connected to mine never disappears and I feel it constantly.

Why do all the pleasures we feel in our life vanish? I want them to stay! Why must they disappear? It is as if we have agreed to this. But why?

Spiritual pleasure is called eternal. Because if you once feel the delight there, it remains and fills you all the time. This is because the pleasure does not cancel the desire. The pleasure exists in one place, and the desire in another.

And then you have no problem, you just keep adding and adding. That is why there is ascent through spiritual degrees.

In this world, everything happens on the same plane, you move from loss to loss until life ends, and that is it.

Let’s hope that we understand this unique opportunity embedded in the wisdom of Kabbalah, the science of how to receive infinite, eternal pleasure, and that we realize it.
[11487]
From the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 3/17/10, The Book of The Zohar

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Standing at the Gates of Tears

232.06Our sages said (Berachot 59), “Rabbi Elazar said, ‘Since the day of the ruin of the Temple, the gates of prayer have been locked. Although the gates of prayer have been locked, the gates of tears have not been locked’” (Rabash, Article 3, “What Is the Difference between the Gate of Tears and the Rest of the Gates?”).

We strive to unite. We hold unity days and other events that symbolize what true connection is. Unity with the Creator is attained through unity among the created beings through a common Kli that we correct by uniting with one another.

To do this, it is necessary to correctly arrange all the components so that a person contemplates the conditions for achieving unity with the Creator, and thereby can clearly define those conditions.

As they reflect on these conditions, they begin to examine themselves: Do I feel a need for unity with the Creator? Do I genuinely want to unite with my friends? Am I willing to bow before them and accept them as the greatest of the generation?

Of course, this refers to spiritual connection and not the corporeal connection of the friends. Although Baal HaSulam writes that it can be helpful to externally lower oneself before the friends, we are not yet ready for that, and doing so prematurely may bring artificiality, confusion, and damage to our inner relationships.

Starting from the final goal—adhesion with the Creator—a person unfolds the stages of the path and evaluates the means. Then they see how necessary the goal is to them and whether it leads them to the gate of tears.

The gate of tears means that a person really wants to unite with their friends but is incapable of doing so.

In that case, there is no point in continuing to seek the path toward unity with the Creator because they cannot even fulfill the first condition. Standing at the gates of tears, one must only search for sorrow over the desired goal in order to reach a point where one can truly weep.

This depends entirely on mutual work in the group: how much the person absorbs the spiritual yearning of the environment and recognizes that there is nothing more important than this. One must feel a burning fire inside from not yet having reached the goal and is torn apart by the intensity of the desire and the pain.

Only the environment can bring a person to such a state. Then their outcry will certainly be answered, it will lead to unity with the friends, to one great shared desire in which the upper force is revealed.

Everything depends on that inner necessity, on the yearning, the raising of MAN, the feeling of the deficiency for unity, for the correction of the shattered state. In the end, everything comes down to that.
[31009]
From the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 12/28/10, Writings of Rabash “What Is the Difference between the Gate of Tears and the Rest of the Gates?”

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Daily Kabbalah Lesson – 8/8/25

Preparation to the Lesson

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1st part of the Lesson — Writings of Baal HaSulam, Shamati #42 “What Is the Acronym Elul in the Work?” (10.31.2021)

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2nd part of the Lesson — Writings of Baal HaSulam, “Preface to the Wisdom of Kabbalah,” Item 81, (7.18.2006)

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3rd part of the Lesson — Writings of Rabash, Article 11 “Concerning Ancestral Merit” 1984

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4th part of the Lesson — Writings of Baal HaSulam, “Introduction of The Book of Zohar,” “The Donkey Driver”

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The Patent for Infinite Pleasure

198Question: What does it mean “to receive from the Creator in order to bring Him pleasure”?

Answer: Baal HaSulam explains this in the “Preface to the Wisdom of Kabbalah” using the example of a guest and a host.

A guest comes to the host. The host has laid a table full of food for him because he loves the guest with boundless love, without any calculation, and wants to give him pleasure very much.

The guest feels how the host loves him and wants to bring him pleasure. But suddenly the guest feels such shame that he cannot accept anything from the host.

The host loves him so much and so deeply desires to bring him pleasure; he already knows how much the guest wants to receive and what dishes he likes. He has prepared everything exactly according to the guest’s wishes, both in quantity and quality.

But the guest feels shame. What should he do? The guest refuses to accept the meal:

“I do not want to receive anything! I want to bestow like you do! You have shown me your love, and I feel it. How can I do the same to you?” The guest begins to think: “But if I do not accept anything, I will give it back to the host. Is this how I respond to his love?! What can I do?!”

And then he finds a solution: “I will receive only for the sake of the host. Since the host has the desire to bestow and wants me to receive, I must first enter into his desire so that it becomes my goal. I enter his desire and feel how he loves me, how much he wants me to receive, how he suffers from my refusal to accept his offering. I work with his desire and think only about how I can fulfill it.”

Through being inside his desire and striving only to fulfill it, I discover the ability to do so within myself by accepting the meal and enjoying it, because only through the pleasure that I feel can I bring pleasure to the host. I am obliged to receive and enjoy without limit because I feel how this fills him.

In this way, each one works with the other’s desire. The host thinks about how the guest will receive from him and enjoy. And the guest thinks about how he will receive and enjoy in order to fulfill the host’s desire to bring pleasure to him. Each uses their own desire to fulfill the other’s desire.

At the same time, each benefits doubly, or even more, because each exits themselves outward, and thereby experiences infinite, boundless pleasure.

This “patent” seems very simple at first glance. But when we begin to contemplate it, it appears difficult to implement.

However, ideally, if we understand it, this is the only way to fill ourselves with infinite pleasure, because I use the desire of the other, outside myself.

The Creator is an infinite desire, and I am merely a tiny point. But if I begin to attach myself to Him, I thereby acquire an infinite desire for myself that I can fulfill. And I begin to feel how I fill it and how that desire is enjoying itself.

It turns out that by treating Him with love, I receive infinite desires, infinite life, eternity, and perfection. I receive all of this if I relate to the Creator as the goal that I must fulfill.

Therefore the wisdom of Kabbalah is truly the science of reception (the word “Kabbalah” in Hebrew means “reception”), of how to receive and how to enjoy myself without any limitations.
[11490]
From Daily Kabbalah Lesson 3/17/10, The Book of The Zohar

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Before the Ari, the Gates of Wisdom were Closed to Us

219.03The ARI is a great soul who descended to our world in order to open the gates of wisdom to us. And therefore, as Baal HaSulam writes, from the time of the ARI onward everything depends on man, who must correct himself and then be able to reveal the Creator, become one with Him, and reach the goal of creation.

Before, prior to the ARI, this was simply closed to ordinary people since the souls were not yet ready and needed to go through a certain path of development and mix with each other.

The ARI symbolizes the period of Messiah (Mashiach); therefore, he is called Mashiach ben Yosef, and from his period onward the wisdom of Kabbalah began to take the form of a method of correction. And before it was intended only for selected individuals in a special form.

We must respect the Kabbalists who were in Safed at that time next to the ARI and recognized his greatness. They appreciated him. RAMAK was already old, famous, and respected, but he came to ARI’s lessons and sat like a student. Although he was twice as old as the ARI, he was known and revered as a great Kabbalist.

Thanks to him and several other Kabbalists who appreciated the ARI, he was protected from opponents of Kabbalah. After all, he had only a few young (26-year-old!) students. In those days, the attitude toward Kabbalah was not at all friendly. It only seems to us that everything was allowed, as they like to write about that now.

This is somewhat similar to the fate of RaMCHaL: he was persecuted for studying Kabbalah, expelled from the ghetto of Padua, the city where he lived. Until the Vilna Gaon declared to everyone about his greatness, and he was left alone.
[18770]
From Daily Kabbalah Lesson 8/8/10, Writings of Baal HaSulam Preface “Introduction to the Book Panim Meirot uMasbirot

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Daily Kabbalah Lesson – 8/7/25

Preparation to the Lesson

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1st part of the Lesson — Writings of Baal HaSulam, Shamati #40 “What Is the Measure of Faith in the Rav?”

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2nd part of the Lesson — Writings of Baal HaSulam, “Preface to the Wisdom of Kabbalah,” Item 78-80, (7.18.2006)

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3rd part of the Lesson — Lesson on the Topic “Subjugating the Heart”

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4th part of the Lesson — Writings of Baal HaSulam, “Introduction of The Book of Zohar,” “The Donkey Driver”

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The Importance Of Connection With The Creator

276.02It is written, “The Lord is high and the low will see,” that only the low can see the exaltedness (Baal HaSulam, Shamati 26, “One’s Future Depends and Is Tied to Gratitude for the Past”).

Why specifically the lowly? After all, we usually say the opposite, that attainment of the Creator comes according to the equivalence of form between a person’s qualities and the Creator’s qualities. If I feel the Creator, see Him, it means I have become similar to Him. Does it mean that if I become lowly, then the Creator is also lowly?

So what does the phrase mean: “The Lord is high and the low will see”?

Baal HaSulam explains that The letters “Yakar” [precious] are the letters of “Yakir” [will know]. This means that one knows the exaltedness of a thing to the extent that it is precious to one.

One is impressed according to the importance of the thing. The impression brings one to a sensation in the heart, and according to the measure of one’s recognition of the importance, to that extent, joy is born in him.

Thus, joy is a result of the importance of something—an object, a state, or an event.

Thus, if one knows his lowliness, that he is not more privileged than his contemporaries, meaning he sees that there are many people in the world… who have not attained understanding of where they are, what they live for, who created them, for what purpose, and how. Meaning, they exist on a lower level than he does.

Even from an egoistic perspective, without any intention to have a special connection with the Creator, these people are not in connection with Him, not only a direct connection, but not even an inverse one. The Creator has not yet made a single move toward them.

While he was imparted the desire and thought to at least occasionally to remember Him, to aspire toward Him, to be with Him in one system, to feel that he is approaching or even moving away, but is still in some kind of coordination, some kind of connection with Him, even the simplest.

And if a person can appreciate such an attitude of the Creator toward him, regardless of whether it seems good or bad, if he assigns importance to this connection, then he must thank and praise the Creator, and one is elated by every single point in the holy work, he knows Whose servant he is, and thus soars ever higher.

Even if it is just to be in some kind of mutual reciprocal contact, some movement toward one another even without any special intention to become like Him

Still, if I simply remember that I have a connection with Him, one that exists right now, then I already come to some feeling of joy in the heart.

Even if I would like more, the very fact that there is a contact, and that the Creator reaches out to connect with me should fill me with joy.

As soon as we begin to realize that we are in contact with Him, the next opportunity arises: I can now expand this connection by constantly praising Him according to how great this connection appears to me.

In truth, we are unable to measure a person’s connection with the Creator, and to the extent it seems great to us, so it indeed will be. I become permeated with this sensation of connection and rise to ever-higher levels of gratitude, awareness, and importance.

I begin to feel all the details of the spiritual work, all the mutual connections between us, I attain with Whom I have a connection, and in this way, I reveal more and more nuances and summits of our bond.

It is precisely through this effort that a person—even from the most initial, lowly, and minor connection—reaches the greatest possible state of adhesion with the Creator.

Baal HaSulam briefly mentions this in the article “The Future of a Person Depends on His Gratitude for the Past.” That is, a person’s future depends on the extent to which he cherishes his connection with the Creator even in the smallest doses of interaction.

This is the meaning of what is written, “I thank You for the grace that You have made with me,” meaning for the past, and by this one can confidently say, and he does say, “and that You are destined to do with me.”

Therefore, it is necessary to restore full connection with the Creator and to express gratitude for the past, present, and future, relying on the fact that we have reached such a lofty evaluation of this connection.
[249667]
From the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 4/28/2019, “What does the future depend on?”

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Everything Was Created with One Thought

703.04Everything was created by a single thought, and this one thought encompasses and includes everything from the beginning of creation to its end. Everything that comes from there is contained there, which due to our lack of correction appears to us as fragmented and contradictory to the extreme.

But all this division and separation, all the “antagonism” and opposition between these parts, exists only in us, in our perception. We simply lack the unity to see them as a single whole where each detail complements the other.

If we correct our desire by equipping it with an intention for the sake of bestowal, then these two poles (the left and the right) will merge together and unite in the middle line. Then for us, everything will unite into one, both the force of the Creator and the force of creation. We will come to understand that all these separating forces, which tore us apart, were only necessary in order to reveal our unity. Without them, we would not have been able to attain it! The advantage of the light is attained from within the darkness.

The advantage of the light, unity, bestowal, love, is attained only through darkness, through its opposite states. Otherwise, we would not be able to attain it, to understand and feel the taste of adhesion. A person understands everything only through the contrast of two opposites.

Therefore, in the thought of creation there is only one quality. But in creation itself two opposite qualities were embedded so that it could correct itself and unify them into one. In doing so, it becomes similar to the Creator.

The perfection of the Creator lies in His singular quality—bestowal. Creation is perfected when it includes two qualities: the desire to receive, but with the intention to bestow. Its intention is bestowal, and in contrast, it possesses a desire to receive fulfillment. It is precisely from the difference between these two that it perceives unity.

That is why it is said, “The greater the person, the greater his ego.” The greatest separation and opposition are revealed just before attaining the world of infinity. There a person feels an infinite gap between reception and bestowal, the utter impossibility of uniting them and making them complement each other. This is what one feels right before making the final correction.
[43098]
From Daily Kabbalah Lesson 5/15/2011, Writings of Baal HaSulam “Study of the Ten Sefirot”

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Questions about Spiritual Work—245

281.02Question: You said that through the changing of states of separation and connection, we can come to understand the nature of the Creator. How can this be done?

Answer: I don’t know! We will advance toward it, and eventually from within the qualities that divide us, we will gradually learn how to connect above those qualities. In this way, we will understand what the Creator is, and what is prepared for us.

Question: Baal HaSulam writes: “First, the body divides and completely denies him of the radiance of the soul, and by the force of the Torah and the Mitzva [commandment], the body is cleansed, and to the extent of its cleansing, the common soul shines on him.” What is this shining of the common soul?

Answer: When we attain it, then you will feel it and understand.
[346622]
From Daily Kabbalah Lesson 7/26/2025, “The Ruin as an Opportunity for Correction”

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