Question: What is "Zivug?"

Answer: "Zivug" is a connection according to the equivalence of form, the similarity of properties. This action is not based on what each of us used to be, but rather on how similar to each other we have become after corrections.

At first, we were completely separated and opposite. Then we performed corrections, and to the measure of these corrections we come to a "Zivug" (unity, adhesion).

Question: What is "Parsa"?

Answer: "Parsa" is a partition which separates the receiving desires from bestowing ones by the force of Bina. A person himself has to wish for such division to take place within him. And then he attracts the force of Bina, bestowal, the force of the Creator, so that it will protect and save him by separating bestowal and reception within him. This is called "to distinguish day from night, light from dark."
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From the 3rd part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 1/20/2011, Talmud Eser Sefirot

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As we examine the universe, we see that nature together with our world are concealed from us. We are revealing the world over the course of thousands of years, from generation to generation, and we are becoming more familiar with it.

The Creator is the common force of nature, and this is why we will need some more time to attain Him. However, why is reality concealed from us? Why is the Creator hiding from us?

After all, He is not like the laws of nature that conform to Him: the still, vegetative, and animate levels of development or the human level. He is the common law which contains the thought, as well as the beginning and the end of the universe. Everything is included in Him. Then, why did He create everything so He would be concealed from us?

What is so special about attaining His revelation on our own and asking His help with it? What is this game? He conceals from us, and we need to suffer over the course of thousands of years of our development until we come to the question of, “Why is the Creator concealed?” Only then does the wisdom of Kabbalah, the method of revealing Him, become revealed. What do we get from it? So, we will reveal Him, and what will happen then?

People say that we will be happy then because the Creator is Good and does good, and we will exist in love above all the suffering once we attain His revelation. However, if the Creator is the force of infinite love and bestowal, then why did He create us to be so miserable and sordid? Why do we need to work so hard to come to the one who loves us?

We see that everything is also the same in this world. People who have been through different obstacles on their way to attaining love, unity, and revelation value it; they feel how they have benefited and discovered something great, dear, and important.

We also see that every person in our world essentially wishes to be loved for who he is. However, this kind of relationship between us cannot exist. Only a mother experiences these feelings toward her child, and this love is corporeal and animalistic. It has come to the mother from nature, and it obligates her to love her child, give him life, sustain him, and facilitate his further development.

This is the only exception. Since we do not love other people for who they are, we want to have proof of how this will benefit us. All of this helps us to understand, at least slightly, why the Creator needed this game (the concealment).

He wants us to come to this love without expecting it to benefit us. Just like we want to be loved for who we are, He also wants to be loved for who He is without our expecting any personal benefit. This is why we will not be able to understand how to begin to establish a connection with Him before we free ourselves of our ego.

The first thing we need to do in order to develop the sensation of the Creator within us is to rise above our nature. In other words, we need to rise above personal interest, above “How will this benefit me?”

This will be possible when I manage to become absolutely free from it, as if I did not exist, as if I were absolutely independent and objective, and able to see and judge things this way. Then I could begin to perceive the Creator, the force of bestowal, the force of goodness, from that moment on.

Otherwise, if He were to reveal Himself, I would come to Him because this would benefit me. This is because if I were to feel that He only evokes love, security, health, and happiness, I would be forced to love Him because He is the source of everything good. This love would be compulsory and dependent.

This is why I need to arm myself with a screen, a restriction and my anti-nature, and to become free from my own ego. Then, both of us would become carriers of infinite and pure love without personal benefit, and we would begin to understand that it is not the Creator who conceals Himself from man, but man who conceals Him with his ego.
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From the Introductory Lecture “Why the Creator is Hidden” 12/14/2010

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Question: What does a person who has experienced the ten plagues, came into the desert, and entered the land of Israel feel? I think that anyone can imagine blows.

Answer: No, these blows are completely different. These are not the blows that we are used to. A blow is not something that makes us feel bad; we can all imagine feeling that way. Rather, a blow is something that makes me understand that my egoism, my nature, is evil. This attainment is called a plague. Nothing else pertains to the ten plagues.

It is not a blow if I am just feeling bad. I suffer not because I am feeling bad, but because I feel the evil of my desire to receive pleasure, of my egoism. A blow points me to the cause of the evil. It, itself, is not evil.

In reality, these blows are not that much suffering. People suffer much more in our world. What matters most is that a person feels a direct connection between suffering and his egoistic qualities: “You suffer because of what you are. You will not suffer if you rid yourself of these qualities and rise above them.”

A person strives to escape this suffering, but it is not because he just wants to stop feeling it. It is because he feels his insignificance, the evil in him, especially in relation to those around him.

There are several terms here: the Creator, man, Pharaoh, the sensation of evil, and the reason for the sensation of evil versus good. Man does not want to escape the blows. This is not the problem. The blows help him discover the true causes, and he no longer wants to just escape the blows; he desires to rise over them toward the property of bestowal.

He wants to attain a connection with the Creator and to disconnect from Pharaoh not from the bad feeling. In other words, he transitions from evaluation according to the principle of “bitter and sweet” toward examining the principle of “true and false.” He wants to cling to the truth, and this is why the ten plagues lift him and take him out of Egypt.
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From the Lesson on the Weekly Torah Portion 1/6/2011

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Question: Does the law of “The general and the particular are equal” mean that one can undergo the ten blows both individually and in the group, or is it an exclusively internal, personal process?

Answer: Yes and no. As a rule, all Kabbalists go through this individually; I know this from my own experience. One feels so desperate in his egoism that he tears away from it and cannot use it anymore.

There is no doubt that it’s easier to do this while being in the group, even if the latter knows nothing about it. It can be a small group in terms of the number of members and level of advancement, but its general atmosphere, its determination and aspiration to the goal helps a person and doesn’t let him escape from this process. A person holds himself intact at the time he is receiving a blow, which is what matters the most, and he passes through it.

However, even if he tells himself, “That’s it, I give up! I can’t stand it anymore! I wish to live solely for bestowal,” he eventually descends deeper into the egoistic desire and gets revisited by those thoughts and internal discernments. He sees that at the deeper, inner level, he is still stuck in his will to receive where he hasn’t yet made a final and irreversible decision that he desires to rise above it all.

The ten blows are not only just different in character, not at all. They differ in their depth since they become more and more internal. Therefore, even if during the previous test a person decided that he wouldn’t be using egotistic desires any more, now he sees that he hasn’t worked on this particular desire yet. He hasn’t become aware and realized that it cannot be employed and that he can’t comply with his egoism.

If a person has a strong and correct environment, he passes through these states with enthusiasm. He is aware that he is undergoing a blow that will help him tear away from egoism and get refined. I don’t think a student can go through it without the support of the teacher and the group.

The blows themselves are very specific, and one should move through them quickly and distinctly. It all depends on our discipline, the interconnection between us, and our willingness to lose interest in our egoism which is our nature.
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From the Lesson on the Weekly Torah Portion 1/6/2011

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A Kabbalist has two functions: one relative to the Creator and the other relative to the created beings. In many cases, they are interconnected and one affects the other, but they are still two different missions.

Relative to the Creator, a Kabbalist does a special type of work within the system to which he belongs. There, he is connected with the Kabbalists of all generations who reside in this system as corrected souls. He realizes his designation in the root of his soul, in the place where he belongs within the system. By revealing the Creator, he delights Him.

Relative to the created beings who haven’t yet come to individual attainment, to the best of his ability, he shares the knowledge of the wisdom of Kabbalah and helps them to approach the upper system, consciously enter it, and take part in correction.

To accomplish this, Kabbalists write books. A book is a revelation. Every generation needs new books since with every new incarnation souls become renewed. They are characterized by greater egoism and a new type of perception. Besides, even in our corporeal world, the conditions for the Creator’s revelation are changing as well.

Therefore, Kabbalists have to keep improving the method of Kabbalah. This is the very same method that was revealed by Adam, but in every generation, it has to match the collective desire. As the desire grows, the conditions between the Creator and us change, and this is what Kabbalists write about.

When we attempt to penetrate the depth of a Kabbalistic text, we see that it isn’t simply letters and words, but rather a mechanism that works on us as we speak. The text is a program that is put on a person to work with his desire so that it starts corresponding with the upper system. That’s when the person becomes a part of it.

Through the book, a Kabbalist passes on to the students how to build the intention, how to act and interconnect. Moreover, he passes along the internal force from the spiritual system. It enters the person while he is reading, but affects him only on the condition that he desires to change to be like the Kabbalist whose words he is reading and that he wishes to penetrate the text to reveal that which is being described.
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From Kabbalah for Beginners “Who is a Kabbalist?” 12/13/2010

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Question: Suppose I reached complete bestowal and harmony with the Creator. How can I make this state continue and work from a plus to a greater plus?

Answer: The instant you feel that you are neutral and work with the Creator in total tandem, start searching immediately: "Where can I get foreign desires in order to start working together with the Creator, to act the way He does? Let Him show me how to relate to others!" And you immediately witness how He fills them all.

Your eyes suddenly open and you see: Everybody is in the world of Infinity, completely filled. In reality, the poor ones scream that they have nothing, and they curse everything. And you see them as absolutely filled, absolutely spiritual.

That is, on the next stage you begin to work as the Creator, in the same system, being ahead of Him and wishing to act instead of Him. You become His partner. You do it. You even take Him by the hand and pull Him, like a little child pulls a grown-up, asking Him to carry it out. You add your desires to it. You feel the pain of others, and you force Him to fulfill them.
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From the Lesson 1 in Moscow 1/14/2011, "Introduction of The Book of Zohar"

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Question: Who or what is the “Light that Reforms?” Is it the Creator?

Answer: The Light, the Creator, the Upper Force, are all one and the same: the integral force of bestowal that governs the world, the enormous sphere inside of which all of us reside. Today, it is increasingly contracting above us, affecting us with its might.

It is regarded as Nature or the Creator since in Hebrew, a numeric equivalent (Gematria) of these words is the same, and emanation expanding from it is defined as the Upper Light or bestowal.
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From the Introductory Lecture in Netanya 12/12/2010

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Question: Why can’t changes for the better happen without suffering?

Answer: Suffering is any sensation that takes me out of the present state into the next. Suppose that right now I am in an absolutely comfortable state. If my matter and essence is the will to enjoy and all my desires are fulfilled, then I don’t have any opportunity to move forward. Only the sensation of lack moves me toward the source of fulfillment. When I want to drink, I move closer to the bottle. When I want to sleep, I move closer to the bed, and so on. If I don’t have any desires, it means there is no movement or development.

So what kind of suffering should I feel in order to advance? For a smart or energetic person a very small suffering suffices for him to start moving forward in order to solve the problem. Lazy people will keep suffering, but it will still be difficult for them to move from where they are. Fools feel pain, but don’t understand where it comes from and why. They sit there and cry, but cannot move from where they are.

The suffering also comes in different forms. For example, an uncomfortable position makes me sit differently, which is also a kind of suffering. “Suffering” is the absence of total, absolute comfort. If suffering—meaning additional empty desire—is not evoked in a person, then he won’t move or develop.

The Upper Force created us absolutely opposite to it so we would gradually desire to become equal to it. This is impossible until we feel that we are opposite to this force in some way. We are always moving only in relation to the Creator, only in relation to this force. No matter what we do or feel in life, in the end we only feel our attitude to Him or our oppositeness to Him.

If only we realize this and stay constantly sensitive to it, then we will advance forward by small steps without any breaks, always staying inspired and experiencing a pleasant adventure. We must only understand that everything inside me is awakened by the Creator. At every second, constantly, no matter what I feel, I must connect everything to Him. This will move me toward Him ceaselessly and nothing else will be necessary!

In the end my entire life will be the right movement toward the eternal, perfect goal, toward unity which really exists. Let us be stupid or lazy; after all, we were deliberately created that way. Each one of us “simmers” inside his own problems which were deliberately created by the Creator in order for us to solve them together.

If we create the right environment or society around us which will hold us together, then at every second we will feel comfortable in very small doses, sufficient for us to advance.
From the lesson in Moscow on 1/16/11, Writings of Rabash

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Question: How do I achieve the similarity of properties with the Creator when both His intention and His action are bestowal, and I only have the ability to correct the intention? How can I become like Him in the full sense of the word?

Answer: You become absolutely like Him according to the essence of the action. Do you give to Him? You do. Does He give to you? He does. Do you do everything in your power to express your love to Him? He does the same.

When an infant does everything to make his mother happy, it does not matter whether he receives something from her or gives to her; it is the quality of the action that counts. It is the same with people: You are looking at the direction of the fulfillment, but what happens here is the revelation of the relationship, and it can be that the receiver bestows.

Only our world lives without an intention (attitude) sustained by the spark of Light that exists in it and gives it life. However, the entire spiritual world only operates according to the intention. When we say that the Lights of NRNHY (Nefesh, Ruach, Neshama, Haya, Yechida) fulfill us, what do these Lights represent? They are a relationship with one another, and nothing more than that.

“I receive from Him.” What does this mean? I receive and feel His attitude toward me. What do I give to Him? Also, it is only my attitude toward Him, and this fulfills us.

Then, what do we give to each other? This does not matter at all. We do not take this into consideration. I do not need to receive anything, like Hafetz Hesed (wanting nothing for himself), and we build our attitude above this.

The desire (Kli, vessel) created by the Creator is no more than a black point in an ocean of Light. However, what does the “ocean of Light” mean? “Ocean of Light” points to the Creator’s attitude toward that point.

This point also must expand to the point of infinity in its attitude toward the Light. This way, it will become a vessel, a receptacle for the Light. But what does it receive? It receives the Creator’s attitude. We do not understand that the pleasure here only comes from the attitude toward one another.

There can be no pleasure without attitude. Pleasure without attitude can only exist in our world, which is why this world does not exist. It is an imaginary world from which we rise into the spiritual world where everything is only determined by intention.
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From the 2nd of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 11/30/2010, Talmud Eser Sefirot

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Question: What is our reality like in the worlds of BYA (Beria, Yetzira, Assiya), when we ascend along the degrees of these worlds to the world of Atzilut?

Answer: Presently I perceive everything in my desire which is entirely egoistic, aimed only at self-gratification, and disconnected from all the spiritual forces and the Creator. I have no spark of bestowal and live the life of a beast. Such a state is called “this world.”

When I begin to scrutinize which of my desires I can elevate to correction, it means I am in the worlds of BYA. That is, I can annul myself before the group, receive the strength of my friends, unify with them to some degree, and achieve the mutual guarantee, unity, and wholeness like one man with one heart.

To the extent I am able to do this, I rise to Malchut of the world of Atzilut. Elevating my desire, changing it for the better, means that I ascend. I connect to Malchut together with everybody and then in our collective desire (Kli) called Shechina where we are all united together as one man with one heart, we receive the revelation of spirituality, the Creator.

It follows that the worlds of BYA are states in which I scrutinize myself while studying and working in the group where I have the opportunity to connect with the friends to at least some small extent.

The difference between the worlds of BYA is the degree of our connection according to which we can elevate our pleas to Malchut of Infinity and achieve correction. But we always remain in the worlds of BYA, only we bring about their ascent, together with us, to the world of Atzilut.
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From the 3rd part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 12/1/2010, Talmud Eser Sefirot

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