Comment: On the eve of Yom Kippur, the ceremony of Kaparot (atonement) is performed. It looks like a pagan rite: they take a rooster, twist it over their head, and then kill it.

My Response: The fact is that rituals of many religions seem barbaric to us today. On the corporeal level, for the sake of redemption, a person seemingly sacrifices a rooster instead of himself, imagining himself in the form of this rooster.

In fact, all this should not be so because from the point of view of Kabbalah, everything happens on a spiritual level.

Comment: There is also a custom to wish for us to be recorded in The Book of Life—Gmar Hatima Tova (A good record in The Book of Life).

My Response: The Book of Life is also an allegory, a symbol of the upper light, which records all human actions. To the extent that he wants to use this light for his correction, his similarity to the Creator, his good deeds are recorded.

It turns out that a person himself, during not only a year but throughout his life, writes down his deeds; through attracting the upper light corrections are made and these are good deeds, without attracting the upper light are evil deeds.

Question: It is believed that you will live next year the way you spend Yom Kippur. Does it somehow affect our corporeal life?

Answer: In fact, nothing in our world affects the spiritual world except for our relationships to each other. So it is said that Yom Kippur does not correct them. Man must fix them himself.

The Creator can seemingly forgive all sins on this day except for our evil attitude toward others. This is above His mechanism under which our world, the Universe, was created. And the closer we are to each other in sensation, spiritually, the closer we are to the Creator.
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From KabTV’s “Spiritual States. Rosh HaShana and Yom Kippur“

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Comment: On Yom Kippur, there is a tradition to read the story of the prophet Jonah, which clarifies the responsibility of all the people of Israel, especially those who aspire for spiritual attainment, to correct themselves and pass this on to others.

My Response: This is a story about how the Creator instructed the prophet Jonah to go to the city of Nineveh to save people, that is, to rescue them from egoism. Jonah did not want to go there, got on a ship, and sailed out to sea.

The Creator brought a storm to the sea, and in order to save the ship, the sailors started to look for who was responsible. In the hold of the ship, they found Jonah sleeping peacefully and asked him: “How can you sleep peacefully? We are sinking! What should we do?” He replied: “It is because of me. If you want the storm to subside, throw me into the sea.”

The sailors had no choice but to do this, and the sea immediately calmed. Jonah was swallowed by a large fish that brought him to the shore near the city of Nineveh.

He came to this city and fulfilled what the Creator had ordered him to do, to make all the inhabitants of Nineveh righteous, that is, to turn their evil relations into good.

Question: Does it mean that he could not escape his duty?

Answer: Man will never be able to run away from the Creator! It is obvious.

Every person has his own mission to do some good deeds in the world. He must do it and not run away from his duties. This is what Yom Kippur (the Day of Atonement) symbolizes to us, namely the part of the Torah called the “The Book of Jonah.”

There is a program of creation, and if a desire for correction was awakened in a person and he has started this process, then it is impossible to run away.
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From KabTV’s “Spiritual States”

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Question: The foods we use at Rosh HaShanah for the festive table symbolize some kind of internal changes. Why is it necessary to eat them?

Answer: The fact is that when we want to convey some laws, we put them in the form of folk customs and make them into something like sayings. In this way, they are preserved and passed on from generation to generation.

If you start saying: “The light of Hassadim, the light of Hochma, etc.,” then nothing will come of it. If people do not have adequate feelings, they will not preserve them. Therefore, everything is transmitted in this way.

In order to preserve the inner meaning of spiritual phenomena and actions, Kabbalists clothed them in some kind of material manifestations. At Rosh HaShanah we eat carrots, which symbolize kindness. We dip the apple in honey so that we have a good, sweet year. The pomegranate symbolizes 613 desires that we need to correct from reception to bestowal, from egoistic to altruistic.

That is, all these are particular signs in our world. This is how folk customs are passed from generation to generation although Kabbalists have put a much deeper meaning into them. We know and appreciate them because traditions are passed on in this way. But what matters most is what these customs indicate. They indicate their very high inner meaning. This is what we must perform.

Question: That is, a Kabbalist feels the desire to receive with the intention for his own sake. In this world to somehow convey the signs of correction to everyone else, he takes an apple, which symbolizes the desire to receive, dips it in honey, as if sweetening it with the right intention, and thus the semantics are obtained?

Answer: These are just external signs, nothing more. We should understand that at the same time a Kabbalist wishes that the fruit of that tree, which deliberately threw out the person from the spiritual level, now with the help of Amtakat Hadinim (sweetening the judgment), that is, sweetening with honey, would correct the evil inclination of a person and he would rise to the level of his correction.
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From KabTV’s “Spiritual States”

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Question: Ten days after the New Year, called the days of atonement, Yom Kippur begins, the day of correction. What corrections are taking place during these days from the point of view of the spiritual work of a person who is already advancing?

Answer: A person who is advancing, checks himself during these ten days. He must clearly determine in what he is different from the Creator. This demonstrates his concern to observe the spiritual laws of equivalence with the Creator.

Ten days symbolize ten Sefirot, ten qualities. In each quality, he checks how different he is from the Creator.

Question: Can he check particularly this?

Answer: A person who exists in the spiritual world is obliged to do this. So he does. On the corporeal level, however, this remains as a habitual custom and a person who is not engaged in spiritual work simply asks to have a good year.
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From KabTV’s “Spiritual States”

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All holidays symbolize special states in the spiritual elevation of a person. If we work as we should, then from year to year, day by day, we climb the spiritual ladder more and more until we reach complete adhesion with the Creator.

The ascent above egoism is called Passover, the exit from Egypt, and the acquiring of the force of bestowal is called the holiday of Shavuot.

Then a person judges himself and sees that he is not capable of giving, which is called the 9th of Av. And then he decides to start his whole life anew with a new relation to the Creator, which is called the New Year, Rosh HaShanah.

And the most important thing is to make a correct calculation of how to enter this new period, this new time. Many times in his life, a person wanted to change his life and, as though, start it all over again. This is a sign of the Day of Judgment, Yom Kippur, one of the days that a person must pass through to achieve equivalence with the Creator.

Yom Kippur comes from the word “atonement” (Kapara); it is when a person asks for forgiveness from the Creator. After all, he tested himself and saw that many times he had the opportunity to correct himself and achieve adhesion with the Creator, but he neglected this and could not overcome his egoism.

A month before Yom Kippur, a person begins to check himself and sees that he is in egoistic desires to get pleasure for himself and does not want to use them to correct himself and get closer to the Creator. And for this he asks for forgiveness, one realizes that at that time he did not have any strength and opportunity to overcome his pride and ask for help. After all, our entire correction consists in asking the Creator for the power of correction.

It turns out that our whole crime is that we did not ask for help, and we should ask for forgiveness for this. “I am sorry I did not ask,” which means, to ask the Creator to forgive us for not turning to Him with a request to correct us.

The Creator created egoism, but man must realize that egoism is the only evil that exists in him. Through the prism of this evil, we look at the whole world and therefore the whole world seems bad to us. And in accordance with this we relate to the Creator because this whole spoiled picture of the world allegedly comes from Him. It turns out that we blame the Creator for making us and this world so bad.

And at this moment, a person does not realize that the Creator gave him egoism and the ability to look through it at the whole world in order to ask the Creator to correct this egoism and replace the evil nature with a good one.

This is the person’s work. The only thing we need to do is to know the evil contained in us and realize that the Creator gave it intentionally so that we would turn to Him and ask Him to replace egoism and the inability to do good deeds, to correct all the evil to good.

After all, there are no good forces in us and there will not be if we do not ask for them from the Creator, and then we will be able to feel and see the whole world through a good desire. Then the world will seem like a real paradise to us.

Therefore, all our work is to reveal our evil, the reason why we see evil around and inside ourselves, and then turn to the Creator to turn this evil into good. This work is done by the Creator and therefore it is called the work of the Creator (Avodat Hashem). And the request for the Creator to do this is called the day of repentance, Yom Kippur.

It turns out that this is not a day of mourning, but a day of joy because we judge ourselves and see that in order to correct our condition, we only need to ask the Creator to turn the evil desire with which He created us into a good desire.

So, we have someone to turn to and what to ask for. And everything depends only on our request. And the whole past, when we were weak and unable to do good deeds, were confused and insignificant slaves of our nature that dominates us in everything, all was deliberately created by the Creator to show us our powerlessness and awaken in us the desire to free ourselves from our egoism and turn it into bestowal.

This is the main meaning of the Day of Judgment, Yom Kippur, when we ask the Creator to take away our evil, egoistic desire and turn it into a good, altruistic desire, into love. And then we will climb up from a deep hole to a high mountain.

Therefore Yom Kippur is the most significant day of the year when we spend all 24 hours thinking about how to ask for forgiveness for our weaknesses, all the evil that we have created in our egoism that was given by the Creator. And since we decide that this evil was created in us by the Creator, we have the opportunity to turn to Him and ask for the power of good instead of this evil. As a result of this request, we will gain more and more forces of good and will rise higher and higher until the very end of correction.

It turns out that each of us and all of us together should do this work not only once a year, on Yom Kippur, according to the calendar, but every day and as much as possible we should turn to the Creator and ask Him to turn our evil inclination into a good inclination. To the extent of our ability to turn to the Creator and demand this correction, we will be able to become like Him and achieve adhesion with Him and perfection, i.e., the end of correction.

This is what you need to think about and try to implement in the next twenty-four hours.
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From the 2^nd part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 9/15/21, “Yom Kippur – The Day of Atonement”

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Question: What does “Yom Kippur” mean?

Answer: Yom Kippur is Ki Purim, like the day of Purim. “Kippur” means “atonement,” “Purim” comes from the word “Pur,” which means fate.

Therefore, Yom Kippur reveals all our sins that we must gradually correct. From Yom Kippur to Hanukkah, we correct our bestowing desires in order to be only in bestowal, and from Hanukkah to Purim, we also correct the qualities of reception so that they are aimed toward bestowal. Thus, we come to the holiday of Purim.

There are certain prohibitions on Yom Kippur: people do not drink, do not wear leather clothes, and so on. This means that we find egoistic inclusions in all of our desires, and therefore, we cannot use them.

The five types of prohibitions correspond to the five types of restrictions because our egoistic desire consists of five degrees. Each degree corresponds to food, drink, clothing, and so on.

Question: Why is it forbidden to wear leather clothes on this day?

Answer: Clothes (Levush) means that you have a Kli (vessel), a certain correction, and then you can wear such clothes. However, you discover that all of your desires are egoistic, and therefore, you cannot wear them. There is a prohibition on using uncorrected desires.

In his spiritual advancement, a Kabbalist fulfills these prohibitions, meaning restrictions on his desires, checks himself and acts in this way.

Question: Do we also need to observe this in our world?

Answer: Of course, in our world, this exists as a custom. Otherwise, they would not have been passed down from generation to generation for the people and would exist only among Kabbalists who understand their essence and act in this way. Moreover, Kabbalists do this not on the calendar date of Yom Kippur, but every time they are in such a state.

Question: What does a Kabbalist ask for on this day?

Answer: He asks the Creator to help him to exit the boundaries of his egoism. He has no other requests.

There can be only two types of addresses to the Creator: the first is with gratitude for having received such a special work and the second is with a request for strength to rise even higher to the quality of bestowal.
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From KabTV’s “Spiritual States”

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My new article on Linkedin “Yom Kippur in an Interdependent World”

For the first time in history, the world today shows us how much it is one complete whole—that all human beings are inextricably bound together and thus have no choice but to take care of each other. We increasingly discover day to day how interdependent we are. This is the reason why this Yom Kippur, or Day of Atonement, is a reckoning period like no other.

Through world events such as wars, climate change, and the pandemic, we now see with perfect clarity that all we do, whether good or bad, will affect everyone, so we need to carefully examine our thoughts and deeds.

We are used to evaluating our actions, but we should also evaluate our intentions toward others: Are my intentions for my own sake or for the sake of others? Where do I stand in relation to the Upper Force whose nature is total love and bestowal?

During the Ten Days of Repentance in which Yom Kippur is the climax, when we fast, pray and ask for forgiveness, we arrive at the point where we review all our memories and measure them against the rules that we are obliged to keep to see where we have failed. Of all these precepts, the most important one is “love thy neighbor as thyself,” the great rule of the Torah.

A key part of the customs of the Day of Atonement, the most solemn day of the Jewish calendar, is reading the book of Jonah the Prophet. In the story, God orders Jonah to tell the people of Nineveh, who had become very hardhearted toward one another, to correct their relationships if they wanted to survive. However, Jonah fled his mission and took to the sea in an effort to escape God’s command.

Like Jonah, we avoid our mandate and refuse to unite. It is our divisions, frictions, quarrels that trigger humanity’s imbalances and destabilization. Therefore, our stubborn refusal to draw closer to one another is the sin we need to repent for.

Each person should hold himself accountable for what he or she does from day to day. But on Yom Kippur we sign off on the year, we close the balance of what we did for the whole year so we can start a new year with the clean feeling like a newborn. The measure of our individual success or failure is not the most important thing. What matters more is the process of soul-searching that we apologize for our missed opportunities and start again from scratch.

Yom Kippur is also called the Day of Judgment. Who exactly is judging us and what is being judged? First of all we need to examine and judge ourselves. However, instead of waiting the whole year to go through this process, we should make this assessment daily. Before we go to sleep, we should also close the account for that day and ask the Creator to forgive us for all we did and did not do.

Our intention for a clean new beginning should be to conduct ourselves carefully in order to avoid hurting anyone, and to make every effort toward good connection with all human beings. And if we truly and wholeheartedly ask for forgiveness for the harm we have caused to others, then we are ready to turn to the Creator and ask Him for total forgiveness. Mending our human relations is the precondition for mending our relationship with the Upper Force.

On the one hand, during Yom Kippur we are supposed to feel sorry for our shortcomings. But in this sorrow we are also happy because we then open the opportunity to apologize and finish the year in a beautiful and clean way, a way in which all our debts are covered.

We live in a special time called the “Last Generation,” the period of the emergence of a new world. This period is characterized by the spiritual search for the correction of our egoistic attributes of self-benefit to transform them into attributes of care, cooperation, and giving to others.

Hopefully, the whole world will swiftly come to understand the change we need and make the decision to bury all weapons and only focus on the development of connection and love between us. Surely then we will reach the state of general love and the revelation of the Creator to all creatures. However, first the people of Israel must lead the way. As Rav Yehuda Ashlag, author of the Sulam (Ladder) commentary on The Zohar, wrote in his essay entitled “The Arvut” (Mutual Guarantee): “It is incumbent upon the Israeli nation to qualify itself and the rest of the people in the world to evolve into assuming this sublime work of love of others.”
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Comment: Rosh Hashanah (the New Year) dates back to the day when the first man, Adam, was born in 3,760 B.C. He attained the spiritual system we call the Creator.

My Response: Adam is the first man born spiritually in our world. There were people on Earth before him, and he was the first person who reached the spiritual level. That is why he was called Adam, from the word “Edome”—similar to the upper force.

Question: Now we say that each of us must also become Adam. Let’s say, I want to reveal this upper force. What is this state?

Answer: We cannot reveal this force through our inner intuition like Adam or people after him. But he immediately began to develop a method of attaining the upper force and even wrote the book The Angel Raziel (Raziel HaMalach).

This went on for a long time until this knowledge reached Abraham and his followers.

The science of Kabbalah—meaning “receiving”— studies how to attain, receive, and reveal this upper force called the Creator while living in our world.

Question: Our desires are constantly evolving from basic ones: for food, sex, family, safety, to desires for power and wealth. Several hundred years ago, a desire for knowledge appeared in humans. And when the desire to attain the root cause manifested in him, that is, to find out what the meaning of life is, does this mean that the desire of Adam is manifesting?

Answer: Yes, he should raise a human inside. And when the desire to attain the root cause is realized inside him for the first time, then it is considered that man was born in him.

Question: Who is Eve?

Answer: Hava (Eve) is his desire in connection with which he attains the Creator.

The fact is that a spiritual desire is split into male and female parts, into right and left lines called Adam and Hava. And the attainment of the Creator is born precisely on the connection between them.
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From KabTV’s “Spiritual States”

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Question: All Jewish holidays symbolize certain spiritual states a person comes to as a result of spiritual work. On the other hand, on these dates, as you said, there is a certain awakening, a certain illumination from above. What are these states called holidays?

Answer: The fact is that we are in a field of light. This is not ordinary, corporeal, but spiritual light, the property of bestowal and love, the property of life, energy for all types of existence.

This light emanates, changes, and affects us, and by its altering influences constantly elevates us, teaches us, and makes us more and more complex and composite, and thus moves us forward. It is our spiritual evolution.

In principle, corporeal evolution also comes from the same light, only at the lowest level.

There is a correlation between corporeal and spiritual levels. Light affects the entire volume of the universe: inanimate, vegetative, animate, human, our spiritual properties and states, as well as the degrees we study in the wisdom of Kabbalah. And at the same time, we study how to master them, how to really begin to feel them and climb them.

All this is with a certain reliance on each other in a cycle called “a year.” According to this, the effect of the light on us and on the world around us changes. Therefore, in our world, we symbolically celebrate different dates relative to the spiritual world in which these states are getting implemented.

A month is a lunar cycle. A year is a revolution of the Earth around the Sun. Yet, there is no week. Thus, the day and all other time-markers come from the influence of the upper force, of the light, which changes everything around us and changes our corporeal world at the same time.

Therefore, in the corporeal world, we can celebrate all sorts of dates, that is, their correspondence to the spiritual world. But in our world these dates are carried out automatically according to the movements of the Sun, Moon, Earth, and so on, and in the spiritual world, these influences occur only because of man—to the extent that he aims through his actions to ever increasing similarity to the spiritual Earth, Moon, Sun, and so on.

This is the meaning of all the holidays, the so-called “Moadim,” and all the events in our world.
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From KabTV’s “Spiritual States”

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The desire to receive does not disappear and does not extinguish in us, but gradually we learn to use it for the sake of bestowal. The quality of reception, which is called Malchut, remains in us, and the quality of bestowal, the quality of Bina, is clothed on it. Therefore we become like the Creator and are called man, Adam, that is, like (edome in Hebrew) to the upper force.

In this way, a person can advance becoming more and more like the Creator. This means that he rises up the degrees of equivalence of form to the upper force. He wants to prefer the governance of the Creator to the governance of creation, to prefer the desire to bestow to the desire to receive. So he rises from this world, where the quality of Malchut reigns, to the upper world, where the quality of Bina rules.

We still do not understand what “faith above reason” means, that is, the rule of Bina over Malchut. These seem to be empty words to us until we make this transition from Malchut to Bina. Malchut remains but hides inside Bina, and Bina wraps Malchut and gives it form, that is, determines its behavior, controlling Malchut.

And Malchut supports Bina; the more Malchut grows, the higher it raises Bina. Therefore the Creator says to the creatures: “You made Me.”

Within our egoism, the Creator is at the lowest degree of all possible degrees, and therefore hides from us. But the higher we raise Him above the level of Malchut, the more we can reveal Him. We raise the Creator, Bina, to reign over Malchut. This is how we overcome our egoism and establish the Creator as king over the world.

From the moment we make an internal decision that Bina will rule over Malchut, that faith will rule over reason, the human level begins to develop in us. And this milestone of our development is called “Rosh HaShanah” (new year). We declare that on this day the first man, Adam HaRishon, was born, a man was born in us, already somewhat similar to the Creator. From this moment a new period begins, the “new year.”

This is why this world was created: so that a person would raise the quality of bestowal above the quality of receiving, replacing the force of egoism with the force of bestowal. And the higher the quality of Bina rises, the higher our desire to receive rises with it, until all Malchut rises to Bina and then to Keter. This completes all the corrections of creation prepared for us by the Creator.
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From the 1^st part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 9/8/21, “Faith Above Reason”

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