You shouldn’t torture yourself because of your qualities or the bad things that you did or do. After all, it is the Creator who “trips you up” and arranges all the different states for you. This is how He brings you to the recognition of evil and actually does all the work. And you, instead of revealing the truth, reprimand yourself for your actions.

Question: But if you don’t pay attention to these things, isn’t it like running away from the struggle?

Answer: It isn’t a struggle at all. You are like a donkey in front of which an obstacle has been placed: He doesn’t understand how it can be bypassed, and tries to break through it. There is no point in that.

We have to rise above all the actions and feelings, above all the imaginary calculations, and through the group, connect with the Creator. It is the only way to reach the right decision. All the rest is a game, the show of life. It costs us great pain and suffering, but this is our evolution: It is impossible to avoid the mistakes here before we discover the opportunity to rise. One day it will happen.
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From the 3^rd part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 1/17/12, “The Study of the Ten Sefirot”

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Question: When we speak about evil, what exactly do we mean by the term “evil?”

Answer: I discover the Creator as the source of evil and at the same time I understand that I see Him that way because of my bad qualities. So, I understand that it all depends precisely on my attributes.

There are three things before me: the Creator, my evil, and desire. Can I think about the Creator as the good and the benevolent? After all, I feel bad and see troubles and darkness. Still I determine that the good is Above and the evil is inside me. The reason is that in the middle there is something that turns the good into evil.

I feel it in my bones that this is what happens. I am made of these three discernments, and they are in my feeling and my understanding. Such a state is called “double concealment.” In the spiritual space it is the furthest level from the Creator, and everything before it belongs to the beastly level.

It is important to remember that these things already exist in me: I feel the Creator as good and benevolent, I feel my own evil and I can’t get rid of this feeling, and I also understand the fact that I myself corrupt the Creator’s good attitude when I feel it as bad. If we annul this mechanism of turning the good to evil, if we correct it, I will certainly feel the goodness.

Then there is a question. What is the goal: to feel good or to not curse the Creator? From here on the clarification begins: Why was I given the bad feeling? What should I do with it? If I annul it, I will deny myself the option to be corrected. It is by being opposite from the Creator’s goodness that I can reach His good attitude in order not to curse Him.

This means that I use the evil on the way to goodness. Does that mean that now, when I feel bad, it is actually in my favor, and that it is actually what is good for me? So what am I correcting? [Read more →]

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According to the wisdom of Kabbalah, a “righteous” person is a person who justifies the Creator, understands the reasons and the essence of his state, and can clearly cut his state into slices of cause and effect.

At the same time he can be in a state of double concealment from the Creator. How is that possible? The whole point is that the concealment and the revelation are determined only by one’s attitude towards the Creator as being “good and benevolent.” It doesn’t matter if I feel good or bad; what’s important is how the Creator is revealed to me. It is important for me to reveal Him as good and benevolent, and not to enjoy His goodness egoistically, because they are two totally different things.

Suppose I have diabetes and you give me a candy. As far as my natural love for sweets goes, it is good. But according to your attitude, it is bad. So it all depends on an internal criterion with which I assess it. What is sweet for the egoism may be bitter if we look at your attitude.

Therefore, to discover the double concealment is to feel all these discernments: I rise above my desire to receive and look at it from the side. Then I see that there is an egoistic intention in it that feels good, while in the desire to bestow, in the intention of in order to bestow, I feel bad. This is the double concealment of the Creator.
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From the 3^rd part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 1/17/12, “The Study of the Ten Sefirot”

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The Creator doesn’t hide from us; rather, it is our ego that hides Him. Our opposite nature is what separates us from Him. So how can we take on the Creator’s form? How can we reach Him according to the law of equivalence of form? How can we discover Him and find out that He is in us?

In order to do that, we have to perform certain actions. Who performs these actions, us or Him? There is probably a need for cooperation here. We can’t advance without the upper Light. By “rocking” us, It demands our cooperation, which is called “free will.” This cooperation is all of our work. There are no restrictions here. It is open to everyone and is implemented by the correct studying of Kabbalistic books.

These sources can be the “elixir of life” or the “potion of death.” It all depends on our approach.

• If I intend to discover my evil inclination and to correct it, I can succeed, and the wisdom of Kabbalah will be the “elixir of life” for me. I will discover “death,” my ego, inside me and will want to correct it in order to come to life.
• But if I study to attain egoistic achievements, if I am looking for knowledge, power, respect, control, etc., then the studying only reinforces the egoism in me and my success is opposite to bestowal and I am not even aware of it. Such a study becomes the “potion of death.”

Thus we go through the stages of the Creator’s concealment. The concealment is divided into single and double concealment; the revelation first reveals to us the governance as reward and punishment and then the revelation of His eternal Providence.

Actually it all depends on my desires, on my vessels. With regard to the Creator, there are no restrictions. He doesn’t hide and is not concealed. It is my desires, my vessels, that hide Him, and if I work with them properly, they are gradually corrected, and according to their correction, I discover the Creator. One way or another, I am the one who hides Him from myself. [Read more →]

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A person goes a long way until he finds out exactly what his work is. He reaches the study by looking for a meaning in life, in the search for an egoistic fulfillment. He stays with the same initial intention for quite a while until finally he begins to hear that it is absolutely forbidden, meaning “impossible,” to fill these egoistic desires. So what can he do?

They say that it is only possible to enjoy when in equivalence of form with the Creator. Do you want to enjoy? Learn from Him how to enjoy bestowal, but not bestowal as you see it, not bestowal from personal egoistic satisfaction. True bestowal gives pleasure to the Creator; this is the only thing you can enjoy.

This means that there is double incongruence: We have to change both our desires and our intentions—the place where the pleasure is felt. When a person moves on to these new desires, which he doesn’t understand at all, he is told: Here you are, now enjoy. This is totally different from what he imagines today in his present egoistic state. He must change his perception several times.

Going through this, he can only hold onto the group, the environment. After all, every time he advances a little, he feels that he is even more a like a child, even more confused and that he loses more of his power. This is so different from the ordinary, familiar way we advance— getting more, understanding more, and feeling more—that a person cannot bear such “progress” which seems to be headed in the opposite direction.

He doesn’t understand how it is possible to work and to feel a growing emptiness and lack of understanding, simply a state of death, of total helplessness when there is no light at the end of the tunnel—pitch darkness, the Red Sea (Final Sea – Yam Sof in Hebrew). Is all that called advancement?

A person feels totally lost, but if he continues despite everything, he begins to discover that without going thorough these states, it is impossible to reach the real desires: to receive in order to bestow. There is nothing left of the previous state, not the feeling, not the understanding, not the previous approach, not the intention or purpose of ordinary advancement. Everything seems totally new and so different from his previous experience that it is simply impossible to see it from afar.

The only thing that can help him here is to organize support around him and become incorporated in activities, studies, group work, and dissemination, so that he will develop gradually, like a child who plays and at the same time grows. Thus, step-by-step, he will gradually advance towards the state in which he can bear the spiritual idea.

He begins to understand that there are many spiritual and mystical methods in the world, but here he comes across a method that will bring him to a new reality by changing his perception. And only then will he understand what was happening to him.

Therefore, it is impossible to explain this to everyone. This is why it says: “A thousand enter the room and one comes out to teach.” After all, if a person’s soul is ready to attain the truth at any cost, it keeps him on track.

If he is really ready for that, then the environment can help him go through these phases quickly, and while still in this life to attain the world of truth!
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From the 1^st part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 1/16/12, Writings of Rabash

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Question: What does it mean” half of the half” with regards to the work we have to do?

Answer: A person has to prepare his “half” and the Creator completes the other half. But how can you do that, after all, even in preparing my desire I cannot manage without Him?

To prepare my half means to try and find the deficiency and the right aspiration. But I don’t have that at all. I have to look for the right deficiency instead of the black false bubble I am in where I imagine this false life that doesn’t exist at all that will later seem like a dream.

How can I want and try to wake up from this deep sleep and to feel willingness for it by myself, because this is the only thing I need! But without this willingness, I will not be able to receive the upper world that is revealed at the end of this dream because I have to develop a deficiency for it.

People with a great coarse egoism come to study Kabbalah in order to attain the upper world . It isn’t enlightened “spiritual” people for whom meditations are enough who come here . The people who come here want to receive and to gain big time, to discover the spiritual world. Here it depends on whether a person can hear what he is told and bear all the conditions.

Two natural spiritual laws operate here, which you cannot change in favor of your egoism. We are told that we have to do “half of the half,” but this doesn’t mean that there is some concession here. A person must perform his half, and then he will receive the other half from Above. The other half will change him and will turn him into something that is totally different.

When he is 100 percent ready to change, it means that he has done his half of the work. Then 100 percent of this change is performed from Above; this is the half that the Creator is responsible for.
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From the 1^st part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 1/16/12, Writings of Rabash

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The spiritual vessels, the desires, can be “straight” and “round.” There is a similar division in our world too. The desire of the group is “straight,” because we work with it, assess and weigh it trying to reach equivalence with the upper Light.

All the other desires in the world, which are represented by other people, are “round” because they are not related to the “line,” (the limitation by the Masach, screen, and the work that is directed by the Light), and they simply want fulfillment.

Now a growing emptiness will be revealed in them. If we do our best to connect to one line, and on the other hand, we join the world as a circle, then people will feel how they receive a filling from the “pipe” that is formed by us. Then they will be drawn to us, will adhere to us like leeches, because they will feel that here is the source of life.

But in order to avoid a situation in which we would have the fulfillment that they couldn’t have which would result in their being filled with hate, the system of integral education must be opened to them immediately in order to explain to a person how to attain the fulfillment.

The Light cannot pass from us to others just like that. We must build a network of the right connections, and an education system is necessary for that. There won’t be any contact between us any other way.

It only seems as if the integral education is meant to simply connect people to one another. On the inside, however, it is the connection of the “pipe” that passes the Light into the “circle.”

In our group we are all equal, there are no differences between us, and we make up the same vessel into which the upper Light comes. But our vessel is in the form of a pipe; we work with the Masach and the Reforming Light. We try to adapt ourselves to the Light, to resemble the Light, and the desire and the intention to bestow is a kind of channel for the Light, a kind of a pipe, we become when we connect with the friends.

The external world is a “circle.” In order to create a connection among us through which the external world will begin to receive the inner fulfillment from us, there must be a certain degree of equivalence and we need an adaptor, a connector between us and them, so that we can connect.

This is possible only by education that we will provide the world with so that people will know how to connect the “circle” to the “straight line” in this world. Then, through this pipe, the method of the fulfillment will begin to seep, and the world will begin to organize itself to receive this fulfillment.
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From the 1^st part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 1/8/12, Shamati #36

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In the “Introduction to the Book of Zohar” Baal HaSualm explains that the part of our brain responsible for our perception of reality is built like a photographic machine through which I see the world divided. I feel myself as a kind of body and see everything else that exists as outside of me. So all of reality is divided into two parts.

This, of course, is a lie and there is no such division. But the point is that there is a Creator and a created being, and the created being should attain the Creator as a result of his development. Attaining the Creator is possible only by observing Him from the outside, and so the created being has to feel that he exists separately from the Creator, standing opposite to Him.

Then by comparing the two opposites, the created being checks and understands the inverse attributes, realizes that he is opposite to the Creator, realizes that he is evil and that he needs correction to become similar to the Creator and to reach adhesion with Him. Thus he raises the level of “human” in him.

In order to allow a person to assess all these attributes, understand, get to know, clarify, and correct his perception—reality is divided into two so that it seems to a person that he and the external world exist separately.

This, of course, isn’t even close to the truth. The assumption that a person exists and the Creator is outside Him, outside the world of Ein Sof, is also not true. But such a feeling is necessary so that we will add our exertion to building our vessel and attaining the understanding and revelation. Then it will be a “human” who built all this out of his free will.

It is like giving a child challenging games and puzzles so that he will work and thanks to that grow, understand, see, try, make efforts, and build himself. The same happens to us with the dual perception that makes us sense ourselves and outside of us, the world.

All our work is to make efforts to connect the two parts into one whole picture called “there is none else besides Him” and “Israel, the Torah and the Creator are one.” This means to sense myself and the external world as one, and to understand that first I have to care about the external world and only then care about myself. After all, I will have to provide only what is necessary for the existence of my beastly body, and I have to try and see all the rest, all the external world, as most precious, my soul.

Then I will reveal that the external world is also me. It is because I treated it as something opposite to me that I hated, rejected and tried to stay away from it, that enabled me to learn about myself, about my nature, and about the “evil inclination.” I had a chance to fight all its fine attributes, the unperceivable, the coarse, and cruel attributes and by that to attain the Creator.

After all, in every incidence of hate towards the external world, there is a need for the Creator’s help in some way. So my rejection of the external world and my decision to connect to it, the power I receive for that from the Creator, and the unity I attain, all bring me to adhesion with the Creator.

So it turns out that there are actions of connection with the external world and there is the acceptance of this world, the feeling of unity or the Creator. By the creation of this division of me and the external world and the “neutral zone” (“Klipat Noga“) between us, I get help from the Creator—a state that is already partially prepared to attain the connection with Him because of this false perception.
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From the 1^st part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 1/8/12, Shamati #36

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The group is part of the external world for me, but I can’t work with the whole world at once to get a response from everyone and measure myself in relation to the world. The world cannot support me along my path because it doesn’t have the same goal I do. It has all kinds of different goals and doesn’t know where it is headed.

So I find a group, a part of this external world that I can connect and work with to clarify things. Indeed, on one hand it is foreign, a part that is external to me, but it is close to me according to its goal, perception, and studies. So it is worthwhile for me to connect to the group in order to get power and support from it. I see that with them it will be easier for me to advance.

Eventually I begin to understand that this isn’t a group of people, but they are the very parts of my soul that I need to collect and add to myself. Or perhaps to the contrary: I need to exit myself and to find myself within them rather than in my present “self.”

Then, together with the group, we want to expand our relationship with the whole world into a wider circle. This circle does not share the same goal; it has different aspirations. This is my more external part.

The parts of my soul called “root,” “soul,” “body,” “attire” and “hall.” “Root, soul and body” are the internal part, which I feel as myself, the “attire” is an external part but it is adhered to a person, and the “hall” is the more external part.

And so I play with the group as the external part that is closest to me, that is ready to join the same purpose. I don’t see it as a group of people but rather as my desires that are only dressed up in these masks that make faces at me. But I understand that I must connect to them because it is there that I attain the goal. If I exit my ego and become incorporated in them, there I will find the attribute of bestowal.

But we can’t just work among ourselves on our connection. We need to work together on something external. This external thing is the world. But here too, my desires seem to oppose me; these are my seven billion different desires that are showing me that they don’t belong to me. My ego separates me from them and blinds me, confuses me, and obliges me to perceive them as foreign and opposed to me.

I must work with the world, but it is much more difficult than working with the group. After all, at least I have something in common with the group: a goal, studies, and common processes. In the group it is as if I am in a kindergarten, in comfortable conditions that constantly help me exit myself.

But the external world has no conditions that help me: There everyone is against me. The only thing that ties us together is a collective problem, although it seems to us that we are headed towards different goals. The world by running away from pain eventually has no choice, it will reach the same goal that I see as good and desirable. So I should relate to all the circles around me—the group and the rest of the world—as to myself. They are only presented to me by the Creator in this opposite form so that each time I will learn to work with a more external circle. I perceive the inner circle, and together with it I begin to work on the more external circles.

We cannot worry only about one another. Like a young couple: How long can you look at one another before you get to know each other and become used to one another? Then they need to have a child so that they will both take care of him!
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From the 1^st part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 1/8/12, Shamati #36

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Baal HaSulam, “Introduction to the Study of the Ten Sefirot“: Indeed, you should know that the reason for our great distance from the Creator…is for but one reason, which became the source of all the torment and the suffering that we suffer, and for all the sins and the mistakes that we fail in…. Clearly, by removing that reason, we will instantly be rid of any sorrow and pain…. And I tell you that, that preliminary reason is none other than the “lack of our understanding in His Providence over His creations,” that we do not understand Him properly.“

So our only problem is that we don’t understand the leadership, His Providence. So let’s understand!

But no, we don’t want that. Therefore, the most important thing for us is to discover His Providence, to discover the way He treats us, the connection with Him. After all, this connection has a form, a formula, and a format that enables us to locate Him.

It is about the line between us and the Light of Ein Sof. The “Light of Ein Sof” is the Creator’s attitude towards us, which is above all the circles. In other worlds, it is the line that passes through all the circles until the central point.

We can’t attain the Creator by ourselves, but through that line we can build, we discover His attitude towards us, and so we rise up the spiritual ladder. Eventually, when we go through all the levels and reach Gmar Tikkun (the end of correction), we fill all our desire with the Light in all the circles. This will be a sign that after having corrected our desires, we feel the Creator and understand Him. After all, we reveal only Him.
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From the 3^rd part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 1/16/12, “The Study of the Ten Sefirot”

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