Workshop
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Shamati #33 “The Lots on Yom Kippurim and with Haman”
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Writings of Baal HaSulam “Introduction to The Book of Zohar“
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Lesson on the Topic: “Preparation for the Convention to Arava”
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Psalms 91:1 – 91:4, 91:11: He who dwells in the covert of the Most High will lodge in the shadow of the Almighty. I shall say of the Lord [that He is] my shelter and my fortress, my God in Whom I trust. For He will save you from the snare that traps from the devastating pestilence. With His wind He will cover you, and under His wings you will take refuge; His truth is an encompassing shield. For He will command His angels on your behalf to guard you in all your ways.
The person who is found “in the covert of the Most High,” meaning that he feels the concealment that approaches him and must be careful not to fall into double concealment. In regular concealment a person understands that the concealment comes from the Creator, and in the double concealment, he already forgets that it is sent to him by the Creator and he succumbs to despair and discouragement.
Only mutual Arvut in a group and a rigid schedule can save him from regular concealment, that is something that works on the level of the still: the connection with the group and the rigid schedule. And besides this, it could be that they will have mercy on him from above and will give him awakening. But the main thing is how he prepares himself for these states from the start. It is impossible to rely on miracles and a special relationship; rather, he must constantly think about how not to depart from the process of advancement.
If a person is found a bit above double concealment, meaning in regular concealment, he must understand that he is “In the Covert of the Most High,” meaning that both the concealment and its form are sent from above. Everything, down to the last smallest detail, is arranged according to the relationship between the Light and the Kli that are optimally arranged for the person’s purposeful advancement.
So he must be thankful for this concealment. It is clear that he has no elevation, no power, nothing illuminates him or draws him forward, and nothing pushes him forward. Yet together with the absence of the power that attracts and pushes, in spite of the lack of energy that he has in general, he must draw conclusions in order to clarify his desire: How much is he ready or not ready to overcome?
He must analyze his life when he is awakened and illuminated from above and his life is in concealment.
What is the difference between this and that? How much does his system depend upon the awakening from above? Can he attain it through awakening by the group? After all, it is said: “They helped every one his neighbor” (Isaiah 41:6), “The envy of the scribes increases wisdom” (Baba Batra 22a),”Envy, lust, and honor take a person out of the world” (Pirkei Avot 4:28), meaning, from the bad state in which he is found to the good state.
It is impossible to submit to states where you are in a shadow, in concealment, “In the covert of the Most High”; rather, it is necessary to try to find signs of the work in them. As with the piano, where there are white keys – major, and black – minor, and it is impossible to play without the black, they are required.
Even though spices are only an addition to food, it is impossible to do without them as then the food would lack taste. So in darkness there are many discernments and it is necessary to prepare for it well. It is said: “Don’t be afraid of the dark night,” for if you use the states of darkness correctly, then only with them can you discover the courage, your good preparation, stability, and proper organization.
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From the Preparation to the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 5/18/14
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Shamati #33 “The Lots on Yom Kippurim and with Haman”
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Questions and Answers with Rav
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The Zohar, “Shlach Lecha” (Send Forth), Item 83: Israel are happier than all the nations in the world for the Creator wanted them, called His name by them, and was glorified in them, for the world was created only for Israel, so they may engage in Torah. It is so because one connects to one, ZA and Malchut, and Israel below, in this world, are His existence, whereby their good deeds they raise MAN for their Zivug, and they are the existence of all the other nations, who exist for Israel, who do their Master’s will.
The general soul was divided into two parts: GE and AHP. The desires that belong to GE received the sparks of bestowal during the shattering, and are therefore attracted to the Creator. They live in this world and ask about the meaning of this life, about their goal, and about the purpose of our existence here.
These questions don’t stem from a practical useful benefit but from an inner instinctive aspiration to discover the Creator, the source of our life. Such desires are called Israel, which means Yashar-El (straight to the Creator), and therefore, when the Light operates on the desires, it is this type of desire that emerges first before all the others.
The scrutiny is focused on the connection between us above our ego, which we define as the force that prevents unity. These circumstances were first revealed in a state called ancient Babylon.
There for the first time began to appear these desires feeling the urge to reveal the Creator, while all the other desires yearned for the revelation of their ego. Thus, they drew apart in different directions, according to their vector. Some went to one way and the others to another.
Israel were those who discovered the method of correction and fulfilled it. This entire method is about attaining “Love thy neighbor as thyself” with the help of the Light that Reforms. Thus, a person resembles the Creator and wants to delight Him by all these actions.
All the other desires didn’t yearn for that at the time but only wanted to fill their ego and began to develop in a capitalistic manner. They lived a simple life in groups, as one nation, as one community in ancient Babylon before the ego erupted in them. They cared only about their simple wellbeing and about how to provide their bread and the basic necessities for human existence.
However, when the egoistic desire to enjoy grew in them, and some of the people began to aspire for the revelation of the Creator, the other part continued to develop its desire to enjoy, the ego. This ego pushed them to acquire more than they needed. This is where the evolution of human society begins in the form that it has evolved until this very day in order to acquire greater wealth beyond a person’s basic needs.
This determined an entirely different lifestyle and goal of life, compared to the goal of life of those who yearn for the Creator, of Israel, and, so, the two groups drew further and further apart. The Babylonians who called themselves Israel focused straight to the Creator and began to fulfill this work and thus drew further away from the others.
With time, newer parts of the Babylonians began to join Israel to the extent that the Light operated on them and clarified the desires from one generation to the next. Thus, more and more people began to feel the yearning for the Creator according to the correction of the desire to “Love thy neighbor as thyself.”
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From the Preparation to the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 5/29/14
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Because we don’t feel any connection to the upper force yet, its control over us and governance, we don’t feel any need or yearning to turn to it with a request and all the more so with thankfulness. Our desire to receive may allow us to ask but to be thankful is something that we certainly forget.
We can be thankful when the gratitude promises us some reward for our ego and it reminds us about it. Many in the world do so. But in order to be grateful, we have to advance to conditions that are not beneficial for our ego but to our spiritual advancement, and there is a need for a lot of preparation in order to do so. This is why it doesn’t really work.
We should not think that the feeling of gratitude stems from a good feeling. Gratitude is a result of the recognition that the Creator leads me through the dark and helps me struggle and win, finding all my impure desires (Klipot) and rising above them.
A prayer of gratitude is born in this state, above the darkness, the evil, and the great unpleasant corrections of my ego. To the extent that I can ascend above my desire to receive and attribute myself to bestowal, to the soul instead of the body, to the force of bestowal instead of the force of receiving, to raise myself above the earth, I can be grateful.
All this happens simultaneously: I feel the darkness in the desire to receive and above the darkness I feel the Light in my desire to bestow. One cannot exist without the other.
Therefore, we have to gradually reach this combination internally, when you have a desire to bestow, an unpleasant feeling in it, darkness, and above it restriction, a Masach (screen), and the Returning Light above the Masach. This is how we establish the attitude towards the Creator called faith above reason.
Reason is what we feel inside the desire to receive. There is nothing in it but disappointments and thoughts against the spiritual path, but we ascend above them and despite all the evil according to our corporeal mind and feelings we establish our attitude above the darkness.
Thus we arrive at the right form and establish the middle line between the two lines that negate one another. They try to erase each other until the third partner arrives and makes peace between them.
We have to try to agree to this kind of work more and to stick to it. It is very important. Then we arrive at a solution, which is the right structure when the desire to receive below is felt as darkness. After all, Egypt, Pharaoh, and Haman are all inside me. The shell stands against holiness and the soul is between them.
When I see my state this way I begin to work on the structure of my soul and to put it together and shape its form.
We have to clarify all the stages, to be more sensitive to what happens inside us, to keep the darkness, the Light that is above it, and the relationship between them. We have to live in this conflict and not simply fall because I feel bad and don’t see anything, or start floating in the clouds like a hot air balloon the moment I feel good.
I have to keep these two states and to understand that this is how I feel my desire to receive, the shattering, above which I have to gradually establish my love and concern for others by adding a new attitude each time that is correct and continuous and aimed at bestowal. It is through these states that I establish my attitude towards the general force of bestowal called the Creator and reach the feeling of gratitude to the extent that I can keep myself above the darkness thanks to it.
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From the Preparation to the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 5/23/14
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Psalms 61:1- 61:7: For the Leader; with string-music. [A Psalm] of David. Hearken, O God, to my request, listen to my prayer. From the end of the earth I call out to You when my heart becomes faint; on the rock that is higher than I, You lead me. For You were a shelter for me, a tower of strength in the face of the enemy. I will dwell in Your Tent to eternity; I will take shelter in the in the covert of Your wings forever. For You, God, have hearkened to my vows; You have given the heritage of those who fear Your name. Add days to the days of the king, his years as every generation.
The struggle is for unity of man so that a person will understand that all of his feelings come directly from the Creator, and this is even though everything that is happening is in concealment and the opposite of what would be expected from the good that does good. However, it seems to be the opposite because it is perceived through the opposite desires of a person who has not yet undergone correction.
This shows a person where he needs to correct himself to feel that the Creator is good and benevolent, even to the wicked, until, for him, everything is integrated into a single source. All expressions and manifestations of evil—encountering enemies, the wicked, all of these things—happen at the “end of the earth (Haaretz),” in other words, at the extremities of desires that are still uncorrected.
He must try to turn from there to the Creator, in other words, specifically to connect with the Creator from those desires at the ends of the earth, for, as it is written, “There is none else besides Him.” He does this until he attains full adhesion in the given situation and prepares himself for the next state, and that is what happens until the completion of correction.
If a person thinks about the present and prepares himself for the future, he is in a prayer, a request, thanking the Creator, which is to say that he always expresses his desire to connect with Him, to be in adhesion, and that is how he succeeds. The Creator lengthens his days and years from generation to generation.
In the beginning, it seems to a person that he has haters, enemies. He must struggle and defend himself against them, and indeed there are circumstances where we need to go to war.
However, after the person attributes everything to the Creator, no enemies and haters remain for him, in other words, that there is no other control than that of the Creator. Everything comes only from the Creator, either from His front or His backside, which shows a person that he must build two types of relationships and differentiate between the power of bestowal that comes from above and the power of reception that comes from below, from the person. That is how he can see that his true enemy is found inside of him.
When this enemy is awakened and rises up against him, it seems to a person that the Creator has gone away from him and disappeared. However, when the person attributes all of this to the Creator, then for him there is no difference between darkness and Light. He no longer depends on his mood and doesn’t attribute what is happening to all kinds of other forces or to himself. He understands that he has no control either. Rather, everything comes from the Creator.
The moment that a person directs himself in this way, he sees that even before then he was in a revised, balanced and correct state, and never left the sacred. However, he attained this only now, and the entire difference is in that.
[135347]
From the Preparation to the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 5/19/14
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The Book of Zohar, Selected Excerpts for Purim,” Item 22
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Writings of Baal HaSulam, “Introduction to The Book of Zohar,” Item 13
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Question: Why is anti-Semitism growing all over the world?
Answer: It is in order to push you and bring you closer to the goal. This is apparently necessary in order to awaken Israel to correction. What can we do if we don’t awaken any other way?
According to the general plan, we have now come to a state that we have to correct in order to ascend to the next level. But we are not doing this, and therefore it is necessary to spur us by pressures. It is because this is the only way the desire to receive understands.
If you wave a carrot in front of a person trying to tempt him, he will run and his egoistic desire to receive will grow. But then, having a big ego, he will not want to correct himself if he refused to do so when he had a small desire. If life were beautiful and wonderful all over the world, people wouldn’t want to think about anything but corporeal comfort.
It turns out that there is no other choice but to be pressured. This stems from the adaptation between the Lights and the vessels and not because someone Above has decided to punish us. If we are influenced by the lack of Light, don’t correct this lack and don’t take care of it properly, this lack of Light keeps growing. Then it increasingly accumulates until it explodes in the form of a pogrom or a holocaust.
These are the laws of nature that are only fulfilled in ways such as through Nazis and others that emerge throughout the world. They don’t determine or decide anything by themselves. Everything comes from Above as a result of the lack of adaptation between the Lights and the vessels.
After such a blow, the nation that should have already advanced and disseminated the wisdom of Kabbalah, which means the method of correction, reaches a peaceful period. It is because those certain vessels are gone now since they all died, and so there is a certain limited period of peace. But at what cost! The pressure between the Lights and the vessels forces us to perform the correction in some way, and if we don’t advance along the path of Achishena (hastening time) then it is along the path of “in its time – Beito” (the path of suffering).
Don’t delude yourselves that we are in a better situation today than we were before. Then we had a place to run to and now there will be nowhere to run and the whole world will be like this. Anti-Semitism is growing all over the world and it is because we are not advancing and are lagging behind in our corrections.
If we see how evil increases each day, it is a sign that we are not doing our job each day.
Question: What else should we do so that anti-Semitism will disappear?
Answer: We must go out to the public even more actively and explain and gather people around the idea of mutual guarantee, which is the condition for reaching “love thy friend as thyself” by the Light that Reforms.
In the meantime, however, we don’t manage to advance in the necessary speed according to the timeline. This is the reason that our debt keeps growing every day. No matter how much you profit, your debt to the bank only grows. What should we do if our profit isn’t enough and we don’t have enough time? This is a great problem. We must hurry!
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From the 4th part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 5/26/14, Writings of Baal HaSulam
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Question: What does this mean, “I dwell among mine own people” (Kings II 4:13), and how is this connected to our work with the wider public?
Answer: “I dwell among mine own people” means that we discover the Creator in Divinity, in all the desires that are accumulated in the speaking level and want to resemble the Creator. Divinity is the collective, the community, all of humanity that gathers to itself the nature of the still, vegetative, and animate and becomes a backing, a substance for a desire, in which the Creator, the Upper Light, is revealed.
We are now working according to the following sketch: Above – the Creator, in the middle – the group, and below – the community. We go out to the wider public, absorb their deficiencies, make them into our deficiencies, and raise them up to the Creator. The answer reaches us from the Creator, MAD 1 (The Light), and now we have something to transmit to the public, MAD 2 (in the sketch).
First of all, I correct myself with respect to the group, and then I must imagine it in its perfected form, in the world of Infinity, seeing it as Divinity. If she seems broken to me, this is only to the degree of my brokenness. So I must accept her as fixed, and constantly change myself to see the group as more and more advanced, higher, spiritual, sacred in my eyes, where the Creator is revealed more and more. And when I am in descent and look at it egoistically, I say that it is I who is determining this and they will change for my good; meaning, I won’t serve them, rather they will serve me.
And when we take care of the public and through it (within the center of the group) reach the Creator, then the public becomes precious to us. The Creator is precious to us and the public is precious. That is how we begin to clarify the relationships between Light and vessel. In the vessel it depends on what kind of Light we discover in it and how we feel that we are causing the Creator contentment.
In this Light we discover the higher identity that comes to be expressed through the nature of the world. The Creator has no other form other than what we give to Him. Now we attribute zero form to Him, so He doesn’t exist for us. And to the degree that we can give Him some kind of form of bestowal within the vessel, to that degree He is revealed.
So it is said, “I dwell among mine own people.” In the next stage the group will be like our “point in the heart,” and all of the work will be in discovering humanity as the right backing for the complete discovery of the Upper Light.
This stage will come by itself to the degree of our development, but from this it is already necessary to understand how important dissemination is today. We don’t just do something good for the community; rather, we work on our spiritual vessel for discovery of the Creator.
In our day, we require a group; one is not enough for this. There was a time when two could discover this relationship by working together. Each one worked outside of himself within the connection, and this was enough, as is written: “The minimum of many is two” (Yerushalmi Yoma 13a).
But now even a strong and advanced group of a thousand people cannot discover the higher power. The beginning of the Divinity must be here, and so the emphasis will be more and more in the direction of the public. And we will discover very quickly that the public is not just Israel, but all of humanity.
The vessel will begin to react. All of humanity will suddenly begin to react all over the world.
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From the Preparation to the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 5/26/14
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