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Baal HaSulam’s “Commentary to the Passover Haggadah” (From the article “This Is for Yehuda”): “That bread that our fathers ate in the land of Egypt” (The Passover Haggadah): …It follows that the Mitzva of eating a Matza was given to them while they were still enslaved, and the aim of the Mitzva was for the time of redemption since then they departed in haste.

This always occurs when we transition from state to state, leaving the degree we are presently at: in Egyptian bondage, ruled by our ego, Pharaoh, our stubborn “evil inclination” that holds us hostage and doesn’t let us rise above our jealousy, hatred, lust, and ambition.

Try as we might, we still can’t rise above these egoistic properties and bond ourselves with each other with ties that correspond to the degree following the exodus from Egypt. We are still unable to become “as one man with one heart,” achieve mutual guarantee so that the integral force of love and bestowal regarded as the Creator would become revealed.

Therefore, while we are still enslaved by Pharaoh, we need to visualize the next state, to play “make believe” with it, like children play being adults when they grow up. So do we have to play living an “adult” life, the spiritual one.
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From the 1st part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 4/18/2011, “This Is for Judah”

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If we could see the game that the Creator plays with us, we would understand that all that happens in our lives is meant to lead us to the single goal: the necessity to appeal to the Creator. And the force that gradually develops us and forces us to appeal to Him is called “Pharaoh,” the Creator’s faithful slave.

Pharaoh cunningly tricks us, gives us blows and obstacles along the path: It is all Pharaoh’s work. Our advancement depends on how we accept these blows, disappointments, and opportunities presented to us. We shouldn’t ever look at it as a chance occurrence, but see the Creator’s “guiding hand” and think of how to react to it. Clarifying these situations is what helps us advance forward.

The clarification occurs only by means of our connection because only then do we have a correct point of view that allows us to understand what the Creator wants. Ultimately, He will demand that we unite as “one man with one heart.” If we look at everything that happens to us from this point of view, we will promptly and correctly reveal what the upper force wants from us. This is very simple, but only if a person doesn’t fail to see all that’s happening to him from this correct point of view.

All the blows and concerns are leading us toward acquiring the quality of bestowal. We come for the sake of our egoism and our pride, until all of these blows and changes form a correct attitude within us that allows us to understand where we are in relation to the force of bestowal.

But the moment we change, we understand that all this was done out of love. The Creator didn’t want to assert His power and make us bow down. He wasn’t jealous of our love and commitment to Pharaoh. It was only His great love for us that forced Him to gradually teach us. And He suffered more than we did from all that was happening to us, similarly to the way parents suffer when giving a sick child shots and bitter medicine.

There never was nor could there ever be any negative treatment from the Creator. There can only be absolute love.
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From the 1st part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 4/20/2011, Baal HaSulam’s Letter 10

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We should try to recognize all the states that we anticipate seeing after we exit Egypt while we are still in Egypt, right now, when we work in the group. Despite the power of egoism, we want to reveal the spiritual world here and now. Only by exerting effort will we draw the force that will do it for us.

We need to find the place where we wish to be one and to understand how to exert effort and demand unity. We do everything we can by way of our own effort and the effort of the upper one. We beg and demand it from Him, and draw Him to help us while still remembering to provide our own contribution.

Only when we get a clear idea of the place, effort, and nature of our action will we make the right decision.
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From the 1st part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 4/18/2011, “This Is for Judah”

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Question: Will caring for the friends ever become my nature?

Answer: No, it won’t. Only egoism that rules me can be natural. All further states lie above it and can be attained by the constant exertion of effort.

To exit into spirituality is the same as to levitate above the earth in our world. You cannot just suspend yourself in the air. This requires a force that will hold you despite the force of gravity. Gravity is the force of our egoism. It always pulls me down; hence, as soon as I forget about the goal, I immediately fall to the ground.

If I wish to unite with the others, prior to anything else, I must put forth constant effort in order to “hang in the air,” in aspiration to unity. There is no cutting slack in this case: The instant I forget, I fall.

That’s why caring for the others will never become a habit or a second nature. And we should be thankful for it since thereby, we get a chance to realize our free will every next second.

If it were habit that moved me, I would be an angel. An angel obeys its nature: the nature of bestowal. It hangs in the air because it is “lighter than air” and isn’t affected by the force of earthly egoistic gravity. But a human being is.
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From the 1st part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 4/18/2011, “This Is for Judah”

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The entire development happens according to the four stages of HaVaYaH that arise from the combination of two qualities, the desire to receive pleasure and the desire to bestow, which begin to connect with one another. At first, the desire to receive prevails. Then, the desire to bestow does. Afterwards, they work together, and everything culminates with the final degree of Malchut which wishes to rule over everyone with its egoistic desire.

For this reason, when the Light influences the desire, it causes it to develop according to the four stages until the stage of Dalet (Four). This is the law of spiritual physics. This results in development according to the still, vegetative, animate, and human levels. Man, himself, also develops according to the same four levels: the still, vegetative, animate, and human levels within.

This is why we need to enter a state every time, to be in it, and feel its faults. We “stew” on a certain degree of development until we understand its deficiencies and begin to search for the new degree. All of this happens according to the law of the four stages of development, according to which every current degree always contains the opposite side of the next degree which attracts us.

This is why we initially enjoy every new attained state, but then we begin to feel that this state is our “exile.” It begins to feel bad and insufficient. This way, we lack the “vegetative” life on the “still” level, the “animate” life on the vegetative level, and the “human” life on the animate level. However, what do we lack on the human level? We lack the Creator!

We go through these four stages in this way, which are referred to as the four exiles. Every time that we feel that we are in exile, we want to come out of this state. Every time that we are no longer capable of remaining in a certain state because the sensation of lack becomes intolerable, we go to a new state, and this transition is called “redemption.”

In summary, there are four exiles and four redemptions. As of today, we have been through four exiles and three redemptions over the course of the history of mankind, and we are on the threshold of the fourth and last liberation.

In our current state, we have everything except the Creator, the sensation of and connection with Him so that we can feel His quality: bestowal and love of others. When a person specifically lacks this, it means that he has reached the final fourth stage, the sensation of lack of the revelation of the Creator.

There is no greater lack; this is the final lack. This is the lack we need to reach with our efforts, exercises, and mutual work. Man must verify whether this is really what he is missing. If not, he has not yet come close to liberation. However, if he has a strong environment that is entitled to come out of exile toward redemption, it is possible that they might carry him out of exile as they exit as they would carry an elder, a woman, or a child.

The first to come out are men (Gvarim), those who are able to overcome (Midgabrim). They pull everyone else along; they help and guide in some way. The others just need to be ready to join them, not to resist, to have a desire to come out even being weak and lacking the necessary strength to unite. However, they must not be against it.

In other words, we need to reach a state where we will specifically feel the lack of the quality of bestowal and love, unity, the mutual guarantee. This state precedes spiritual birth.
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From the 1st part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 4/18/2011, “This Is for Judah”

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Baal HaSulam, “This Is For Judah”: “‘This year—here… next year—free.’ It is written above that with the aim of this Mitzva (commandment) we can evoke the guaranteed redemption destined for us, as in the Mitzva of eating the Matza of our fathers in Egypt.

Thereby, we demonstrate our confidence that we will surely exit to freedom. We will come out of bondage, the hold by the alien power of our ego that intentionally oppresses us. When we grow eager to shake it off and become willing to rise above egoism, then we will break free from it.

Pharaoh hardens our heart as if adding weight to the barbell a person exercises with. With each new degree, we have to lift greater weight and more frequently in order to achieve a certain result. Pharaoh is regarded as “help against him.” The Creator intentionally sets the tyrant, Pharaoh, against us so we are forced to unify against him.

However, we are unable to unite despite repeatedly trying to do so. The more effort we exert, the more powerful Pharaoh becomes, loading us with additional burden. It looks like we are weakening on this path and our energy diminishing, but it is not so. On the contrary, we are getting stronger, while our work gets even harder in quality and amount.

If we don’t quit but continue on this path, then gradually, we build an environment for ourselves and get ready to exit from Egypt. It all depends on our preparation. Our strength must grow to such a degree that Pharaoh will run out of weights to harden our hearts. At that point, we will break free from Egypt.

We don’t know beforehand when this state will finally come, when the power of our unity and aspiration for it will grow to outweigh the heavy hand of Pharaoh and he will have nothing left with which to burden us. To the contrary, the further we advance, the denser the darkness becomes. We start building “cities of poverty” that bring us no satisfaction and moan under this heavy labor.

In other words, we will pass through difficult states. In the end, we will even pass through the “ten plagues” and the black Egyptian darkness on top of all kinds of other problems that we must overcome by way of establishing the interconnection among us. No matter how hard it is and how much discord we feel between us, if we unite still, we will break free from our nature.
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From the 1st part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 4/18/2011, “This Is for Judah”

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Question: On the night of Passover we read the Passover Haggadah instead of reading excerpts from the Tanakh like we do on all other holidays. What is the reason for this?

Answer: For each holiday Kabbalists of the past have established a certain order. If a person wants to realize a certain spiritual state or a spiritual level within, even if it’s just an impression of spirituality, then these instructions from Kabbalists tell him what to do in each state.

The spiritual root touched the corporeal branch within a group of Kabbalists that came out of ancient Babylon, and through the connection between them, they were able to realize all of the corporeal traditions within the spiritual actions except for the final redemption, which was realized in the corporeal world along with the spiritual actions.

A person would kill an animal and at the same time he would be “killing” the desire to receive pleasure. He would roast the animal on the altar and simultaneously correct his egoistic desire. Then he would eat the animal and receive pleasure for the sake of bestowal on the third level of his Aviut (thickness of desire). They carried out all the customs in the corporeal and simultaneously carried out actions (commandments) along with the Surrounding and the Inner Lights and the spiritual desires.

The holiday of exiting Egypt is an exit from the desire to receive to the desire to bestow. Here we carry out specific external actions as a sign of exiting from egoism to love, from hatred and separation to connection and unity between us.

This is why when we read the Haggadah we go through all the actions that reflect the spiritual actions which help us exit Egypt: “Kiddush” (blessing), “Urchatz” (washing of the hands), “Karpas” (dipping the greens into salt water), “Yachats” (breaking of the middle Matza), “Maggid” (the story of the exodus), and so on. If we carry out this order of actions on the night of Pesach (from the word “Pasach,” to pass over, leap over), we leap over our current state and enter the new level, which is the first spiritual level.

But this order doesn’t correspond to the standard order of stages of development (“conception,” “feeding,” and “maturing”), which we study in Part 12 of The Study of the Ten Sefirot: three days of the attachment of the sperm, 40 days of the fetal formation, nine months of fetal development, the fetus turning head down, contractions and birth, blood that rises from the womb to the breasts and creates milk, two years of infant feeding, and the following stages until the grown-up stage (Gadlut): 3 years, 6, 9, 12, 13, 20, and 70.

The exit out of Egypt isn’t standard in its order of development. The Light of the big state (Gadlut) comes first before the Light of the small state (Katnut). First you enter a new world with the help of the great Lights, and then you begin to develop in it.

We don’t understand the essence of “birth” even in our world. We are simply used to perceiving it as a natural process: The fetus develops inside an animal organism, and then continues to grow outside of it. We don’t even question why these three kilograms of flesh that were inside the mother is now coming out? Why does the fetus come out whole?

After all, on the next stage of development it should have started of as some sort of a drop and then start to grow from it. The previous stage of development is over at three kilograms, and now on the next stage these three kilograms should have turned into a drop…. Where have you seen that all that was acquired at the previous level, the desire (Kli) with its entire fulfillment advanced whole to the next level, as is? How is it possible?

If I finished the development on the level of NRNHY de Nefesh, I reach the level of Nefesh de Ruach. But here I don’t attain the level of Nefesh de Ruach, and instead I exit with my three kilograms of flesh out of the mother’s womb and continue to grow. In theory, I should have started my development on the outside as a single cell, from a drop of semen, just like I began inside the mother but only on the next degree.

All of this underlines the unique order of Passover, the exit from Egypt, which becomes possible only because the Lights of the great state come before the Lights of the small state, and thereby we make a leap.
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From the 1st part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 4/18/2011, “This Is for Judah”

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Question: Should I force myself to unite with the friends if I don’t feel the desire for it?

Answer: Of course, you need to force yourself. How else will we reveal Pharaoh if we don’t express our desire to free ourselves of him?

If I don’t pressure myself to unite with others, I don’t show my desire to exit egoism. It follows that I’m doing just fine in Egypt, meaning that I advance via the path of suffering (Beito) instead of “hastening time,” the path of Light (Achishena).

To “hasten time” means to exert efforts above desire, that is, against desire. I have absolutely no desire to unite with others, no desire to annul myself, no need for the Creator. All I want is a good life for myself and to discover the spiritual world, the way I envision it to be. That, too, is quite tempting, to rise above this world and soar alongside angels.

However, quite obviously, I don’t yet realize that the spiritual world means self-annulment and unification with others. If I remain in my regular “human” desire where I come to study and work in dissemination, but don’t pressure myself to unite with others and to annul myself with respect to the friends, then I’m not involved in the spiritual work. That is not advancement by way of “hastening time.” I can do a thousand things in the group, come to the lesson every day, disseminate, and speak beautifully, but none of that means that I advance spiritually, study Kabbalah, and follow the path of Light (Achishena).

Only if I pressure myself against my desire, forcing myself to connect to the group, in at least some form unite with everyone in one heart, even artificially, to be together with everyone in some measure of thought and desire, these efforts of mine are called Achishena or group work. Everything else is not.

That is why we have people who have studied in the group for years, but are yet to take even a single step forward. But if a person begins to take these steps forward, exerting inner efforts to unite with others in their inner desires, he achieves the exodus from Egypt very quickly. The key here is to grab on to this point and to influence it.

A few solid blows in this point, and we will make it.
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From the 1st part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 4/14/2011, Shamati No. 90

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