Dear Friends, please ask questions about these passages from the great Kabbalists. The commentaries in brackets are mine.

What Is a Prayer?

When concealment [of spirituality, the thought about bestowal and love of others] overpowers one and he comes to a state where the work [attainment of the property of bestowal and love of others] becomes tasteless, and he cannot picture and feel any love [of the Creator, the single property of love] and fear [that he won’t be able to respond to Him with the same love that he receives from Him], and he cannot do anything in holiness [reach it by his own strength], then his only counsel [this is how it becomes revealed to him] is to cry to the Creator to take pity on him [since he can no longer further it in any way himself] and remove the screen [the shield of his egoism] from his eyes and heart.

The issue of crying is a very important one. It is as our sages write: “All the gates were locked except for the gate of tears.” The world asks about that: If the gate of tears is not locked, what is the need for all other gates at all? [Why can’t one enter the upper world right through the gate of tears?] He said that it is like a person who asks his friend for some necessary object. This object touches his heart, and he asks and begs of him in every manner of prayer and plea. Yet, his friend pays no heed to all that. And when one sees that there is no longer reason for prayers and pleas [and sees no other solution], he then raises his voice in weeping [out of hopelessness and despair, despair because he desperately wants to reach the desired and hopelessness because he became convinced that it is beyond his power].

It is said about that: “All the gates were locked except for the gate of tears.” Thus, when was the gate of tears not locked? Precisely when all the gates [that one has tried in the attempts to enter the upper world] were locked [he became personally convinced of their uselessness]. It is then [he personally sees] that there is room for the gate of tears and then one sees that it was not locked [for him and only then is he able to use them, meaning to truly plea for redemption from egoism and acquiring the property of bestowal].

However, when the gate of prayer is open, the gate of tears and weeping is irrelevant. This is the meaning of the gate of tears being locked. Thus, when is the gate of tears not locked? Precisely when all the gates are locked, the gate of tears is open. This is because one still has the counsel of prayer and plea.

This is the meaning of “My soul shall weep in secret,” meaning when one comes to a state of concealment, then “My soul shall weep” because one has no other option.
– Baal HaSulam, Shamati (I Heard), Article No. 18, “What Is My Soul Shall Weep In Secret”
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Dear Friends, please ask questions about these passages from the great Kabbalists. The commentaries in brackets are mine.

What Is a Prayer?

We should understand what our sages said, “One does not find himself in debt” (Shabbat, 119). Accordingly, one cannot correct his actions, for he will never see that his actions are corrupt and require correction. Thus, one must always remain corrupt.

The thing is that it is known that man was created with a nature of wanting only to delight himself. Therefore, in everything he learns, he wishes to learn how he can enjoy. Thus, if a person wishes to enjoy, he will naturally avoid learning things other than what his heart desires, for this is his nature.

For this reason, one who wishes to draw near to the Creator and to learn things that show ways by which to bestow upon the Creator, must pray to the Creator to give him a different heart, as it is written, “Create for me a pure heart, O God.” This means that when he has another heart, when the desire in the heart is a desire to bestow, then in everything he learns, he will naturally see ways that show only how to bestow upon the Creator.

However, he will never see against the heart. It is said about that, “And I will remove the stony heart from within you, and I will give you a heart of flesh.”
– Rabash, Steps of the Ladder, “One Learns Only where One’s Heart Desires”

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Dear Friends, please ask questions about these passages from the great Kabbalists. The commentaries in brackets are mine.

What Is a Prayer?

When one goes to pray to the Creator to help him, he must first prepare and examine himself, to see what he has and what he is missing, and then he can know for what to ask the Creator’s help. This is the meaning of the words, “Out of the depths I have called upon You, O Lord.” “Depth” means that a person is in the lowest possible state, as it is written, “Depths of the nether-world,” meaning his deficiency is below and he feels that he is beneath all other people.

In other words, he feels so remote from Kedusha (holiness), more than all other people, meaning that no one feels the truth, that his body has no connection to Kedusha. Hence, those people who do not see the truth—that they are remote from Kedusha—can be satisfied with their work in the holy work. But he is suffering from the state he is in.
– Rabash, The Rungs of the Ladder, “What is, ‘A Woman Who Inseminates First, Gives Birth to a Male,’ in the Work”
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Dear Friends, please ask questions about these passages from the great Kabbalists. The commentaries in brackets are mine.

What Is a Prayer?

There are three conditions in prayer:

1. Believing that He can save him, although he has the worst conditions of all his contemporaries, still, “Is the Lord’s hand waxed short” from saving him? If not, then “the Landlord cannot save His vessels.”
2. He no longer has any counsel, that he has already done all that he could, but saw no cure to his plight.
3. If He does not help him, he will be better off dead than alive. Prayer is the lost in the heart. The more he is lost, so is the measure of his prayer. Clearly, one who lacks luxuries is not like one who has been sentenced to death, and only the execution is missing, and he is already tied with iron chains, and he stands and begs for his life. He will certainly not rest or sleep or be distracted for even a moment from praying for his life.
   – Baal HaSulam, Shamati, Article No. 209, “Three Conditions in Prayer”
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If I truly wish for the Light to come to me, I have to ask for transformation of my entire spiritual vessel (Kli): from Keter to Malchut. In spirituality there cannot be any partial decisions, when I am “almost willing” but not completely. I must demand this correction for all my “10 Sefirot” for all the four levels of desire: the still, vegetative, animate, and speaking.

Once I know my evil at all the four levels, then I can draw the Light that Reforms. My desire for this to occur has to be so intense that I will feel it with every fiber of my being, “to my very bones.”

However, if I awaken on my own right now and start demanding the Surrounding Light, scream, and ask for correction, it’s great, but it won’t help. Desire to which the Light responds must reside between the souls, in their relationships with one another.

In other words, I need to inspire myself to sing with the others, dance, and perform certain actions so that all of this would help me engage in the group: bond with the environment and demand from it to tune me to bestowal. Let it give me the desire to be in bestowal and become one with the others.

In the degree of my eagerness to bond with the environment, I will receive a reaction, a desire from it. And if I use this new desire to appeal to the Surrounding Light, then I have a chance to have it work on me.

Therefore, I must motivate myself to appeal to the group and in return receive inspiration from it, which would impress me. Then I can turn to the Surrounding Light. After all, if I appeal to the group, it is a sign of the following:

1. I realized that I cannot achieve anything on my own,
2. I desire to bestow more than to receive,
3. I value them more than myself.

In other words, it is a correct request; it forms me in the spiritual direction correctly. If I am willing to accept everything they give me by faith above reason and emotion, as if from the most spiritual source, it means I am prepared to be transformed. This means I have risen above my egoism, have become aware that I am a total zero, and now desire correction. And the only correction I want is to be able to bestow.

Such a request will definitely be answered by the Surrounding Light since it corresponds with its nature, “the reforming Light, precisely. And I ask to bring me back to it!
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From the 3rd part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 1/25/2011, Talmud Eser Sefirot

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Question: I am certain that each of us wants to build an environment that would be pushing him or her forward since that is all we talk about. On one hand, we desire such an environment, while on the other, we discover our inability to choose this environment even though everybody wishes for, seeks, and hears that it is necessary. How do we get out of this state?

Answer: You are asking me how to “walk the talk,” to move to the inner action in the heart? Ask the Creator! There is no chance it will just happen on its own. You need to keep begging.
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From the 2nd part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 1/25/2011, “Introduction of The Book of Zohar,” Article “Two Points”

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Question: How is it possible to differentiate a real desire from an excessive one? How can I know that I’m not asking for excessive things?

Answer: Bestowal is never excessive. It is unlimited because there was no restriction on the Light of Hassadim. Ask as much as you want; don’t limit yourself. The most exorbitant requests are fine. There is no calculation with the Light of Hassadim.

The calculation begins only when you shift from the Light of Hassadim to the Light of Hochma, reception.
From the 1st part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 1/26/11, Writings of Rabash

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Question: In a few days I will come to the convention where I will meet people whom I have never seen before, who speak different languages, and belong to other cultures. What do I have to convey to them and what do I have to receive from them in order to hold on to the thread that leads into spirituality?

Answer: You have to give each other mutual support, the understanding that if we inspire each other, then we will attain the goal. Don’t count on the Creator or some “kind God.” We see that the whole world cries out to Him, but did this ever help anybody? You can only turn to the group.

When you turn to the group and desire to reveal love and unity among all of you, that will mean that you have revealed the Creator. The Tabernacle, the Holy of Holies, or the Temple is the common Kli, the common soul of the group, the nation, or the whole world. It is our unification. The Creator does not exist outside of the creatures. He is called the Creator (Boreh) because you reveal Him (“Come and See,”  Bo–Reh) inside of the common, integral, connected Kli or desire.

With this intention I come to the group or travel to the convention where I want to tell everyone, “Guys, do we want to reveal the Creator? Then where can we see Him? Where is our unity!? How does each one of us inspire and get inspired by the unity between us, meaning from the Creator, from spirituality? Can every person receive such a force from our common unification that he will fortify himself and become included back in it even stronger!?”

This will mean that we have made contact with the Creator. The Creator is our common force, the force that consolidates us!

Say there are ten of us and each one has a force of 100 pounds. Do you think that we have a common force of 100×10, meaning 1000 pounds? That is not so. Because we have united together and canceled our ego in order to come closer and unite, instead of a thousand pounds of force, we have received a million! That’s because we worked against egoism, against hatred for others, and have attained love for everyone. This effort had to go somewhere. We didn’t just add or sum up our pounds because we had to exert a great amount of effort to achieve this.

Suppose we are collecting money for some shared activity in dissemination. I don’t just throw money into the common pot, but I work against my ego and various calculations. If I simply spent that money, I wouldn’t even notice it. But I cannot force myself to pay it to the group, to the common affair. Anything but this! I am ready to burn it, to spend it so tomorrow I won’t even remember where it went, yet I will know that I still did something for my own enjoyment.

But when I give money to the group, it costs me 100 times more, so it’s as if I’m not giving $500, but $50,000! That’s the kind of effort I make. Therefore, if unification is created for the sake of revealing the Creator, mutual bestowal, then inside of it I reveal enormous forces. This isn’t just us “pitching in” to the common fund because besides our personal contributions that fund contains one more additional, “consolidating” component.

There is one more “bonus” or addition to the account whose might is a billion times greater than the sum of the contributions. This is the force that each person receives from the group because it divides into everyone, but does not get any smaller!

That is why we get together at conventions and other meetings: in order to extract that common, “consolidating” component. Each one of us receives it for himself, for his own correction.
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From the 4th part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 1/25/11, “The Essence of the Wisdom of Kabbalah”

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Dear Friends, please ask questions about these passages from the great Kabbalists. The commentaries in brackets are mine.

What Is a Prayer?

What does it mean that ‘The Lord heals the brokenhearted’? It is known that man’s essence is his heart. The heart is the Kli (vessel) that receives the Kedusha (holiness) from Above, as we learn concerning the breaking of the vessels—if the Kli is broken, anything that is placed in it will leak out.

Similarly, if the heart is broken and the will to receive governs the heart, the abundance cannot enter it because everything that the will to receive receives goes out to the Klipot (shells). This is called “the breaking of the heart.” Hence, when one prays to the Creator and says, “You must help me because I am worse than everyone else since I feel that the will to receive is governing my heart, hence nothing of Kedusha can enter my heart. I want no luxuries, but simply to be able to do something in order to bestow, and I simply cannot. Therefore, only You can save me.”

By that, we can interpret what is written (Psalm, 34), “The Lord is near to the brokenhearted,” to those people who ask of the Creator to help them make their hearts unbroken, but rather whole.
– Rabash, The Rungs of the Ladder, “Return O Israel unto the Lord Your God”
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Question: What can we do now to make the Creator happy?

Answer: Everything I do in the aspiration to unite with others in order to thereby give the Creator an opportunity to bestow to us—all of that means giving Him pleasure, even if I still haven’t attained the kind of unity inside of which He could bring His abundance.

Unification has to be total. Our Kli divides into five parts, and into five more, and so on until the 125th part. This is the smallest degree of unity between everyone, and it is already sufficient in order for the Creator to give us the corresponding dose of His Light, which we will feel.

Therefore, our entire work lies in preparing the Kli, the vessel in the unification among us. We shouldn’t work in relation to the Creator, but among us aspiring toward Him. Unlike Soviet Russia, we don’t unite for the sake of ourselves, but in order to give the Creator an opportunity to bestow to us. Then Israel, the Torah, and the Creator will really be one.

And that is enough. We work among us, keeping an intention to benefit the Creator, in order to prepare the vessels for His bestowal.
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From the 1st part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 1/24/11, Writings of Rabash

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