Question: A person is governed by desires. How can we make the desire for the Creator the greatest desire?

Answer: Suppose I have to choose what I am going to drink. The doctor has told me that it is good for me to drink a medicinal tea. If I believe him, then I will drink the tea. Besides, the Torah says that a doctor has permission to heal. Perhaps this tea is not tasty. I may not like it and feel no “taste of life” in it at all. Yet I drink it and enjoy it because I feel the light of my future health, for I believe it will come! In other words, I myself determine what is pleasant for me and what is not. This medicinal tea becomes more enjoyable to me than ordinary tea, even the finest variety.

From this example we see that all we need to do is ascribe importance to the Creator. We are capable of giving importance either to ourselves or to the Creator. This is the only thing we can do.

Question: But what if I have no taste for the Creator?

Answer: That does not matter at all! Enter a certain society and constantly listen to what the people there are talking about. Disconnect yourself from everything else! Turn off the television, do not watch football. Listen to what is being said in the group.

Of course, this alone is still not enough. You must work together with the group and make your own efforts so that the opinion of the friends becomes important to you. You need to unite with them in such a way that their thoughts will carry weight for you.

After all, you listen to what your children say. It is important for you to know what they think of you. I know this from my own experience. For example, the day before yesterday my daughter told me that she wanted to start driving lessons. I answered that I did not have the money for it. The very next day she booked the lesson! So yesterday, after the night lesson, I rushed home so that I could give her the money in time. It was so important to me that she would be able to pay for the lesson.

Would I have done that for someone else? I do not know. Just for anyone? Of course not. That person would have to be just as important to me as my daughter. But for that to happen, I would have to work on it. It does not come by itself. For this, I would have to invest in that person as much as I have invested in my daughter over the past twenty years. For twenty years I have been giving, giving, and giving to her. And now I see that everything I have invested is within her, it all came from me.

If a baby were taken away from its mother immediately after birth, then despite everything, in the end she would forget about the child. Everything depends on how much has been invested.

As for my daughter, yesterday I simply could not calm down. I kept thinking that she had already booked the lesson and how uncomfortable it would be for her to tell the instructor that she did not have the money and would pay later. That is why it was so important for me to get the money to her in time. And when she thanked me, what great pleasure I felt from it! Can I relate to my friend in the same way? It is not so simple.
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From the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 7/5/26, Rabash, “What Does, ‘Everything that Comes to Be a Burnt Offering Is Male,’ Mean in the Work?”

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Question: How can I not see the greatness of the Creator and feel the Shechina in the dust and at the same time understand that the Creator must be great when I’m in a state of caring only for myself?

Answer: How can these two sensations exist simultaneously? Why not?

You ask how you can have such a state when you look at what is happening inside you and see that, on one hand, you hate the Creator, do not love Him, despise Him, He is nothing for you, and you think only about yourself, but on the other hand you already begin to realize that this is a state of shattering and ruin and that the Creator is great, real, awe‑inspiring and everything else, yet in you it is the opposite.

How can one hold these two sensations inside? Together they build the feeling in us that is called the recognition of evil; it is when I see who He really is and how I perceive Him in the opposite form. This is possible because we receive this sensation by means of the light descending from above, which shines in the form of surrounding light.

It can shine for me even though I am not in equivalence of form with it. Then I see my Kli: how it thinks only about itself, nothing nothing in this life concerns it other than its own self-interest, and I see the light, as it were, opposite this Kli. There the Creator is great, eternal, and perfect, and I do not care. This state, resulting from the two opposite states of the Creator and the creation, is built in me because the surrounding light shines from afar into my egoistic Kli.

In our world you do not encounter such a state; we are not opposite to some phenomenon. I can think that a person is bad, and a moment later that he is good. But when I now think well of him, I can only remember that a second ago I thought otherwise. Yet to think at the same time that he is bad and that in truth he is good ,that does not happen because everything takes place in one Kli, in one awareness.

In relation to the Creator, this does not occur in one awareness, in one Kli, because we are in a process where the Kli has not yet been corrected, and from the Creator the surrounding light comes to us. The result is a state of oppositeness,” two distinct forms (reception and bestowal [reception in me, bestowal in Him]), existing as if on two sides of the Machsom (barrier).

It is only because of the Machsom the surrounding light shines for me and provides this awareness, within which MAN is built. MAN is, essentially, the tension that exists in me between how I relate to myself and how I relate to the Creator, according to what I am and what the Creator actually is. It is the critical examination of these perceptions that generates MAN within me.

This constitutes a request for correction, a desire for my will to receive to be directed to the Creator to the extent that the surrounding light gives me this understanding. The will to receive by itself will never want this, no matter who stands opposite it. It is like Pharaoh, opposite whom the Creator can stand, but he says: “Who is the Creator that I should obey His voice?”

Here there must be an awareness that serves as an intermediary between the two: whether it is a person’s state of Lo Lishma or the group (it does not matter in what form we speak of this) that connects these two sides.
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From the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 7/23/26, Rabash, “What Is, ‘Anyone Who Mourns for Jerusalem Is Rewarded with Seeing Its Joy,’ in the Work?”

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Question: How do you prepare for sensing spirituality?

Answer: According to the correction of the Kelim, we receive a filling that gives us a sense of the Creator. The Creator fills a person and “clothes” Himself within them; this is what a person feels. Preparation for this is the preparation of one’s senses, one’s Kelim.

For example, I do not hear well, so I have to buy a hearing aid. I cannot see well, so I need to buy glasses. If I cannot distinguish taste, maybe I should rinse my mouth. To taste sour, I need to rinse away the taste of sweet.

We need to sharpen our senses somehow. If I feel sleepy, maybe I should have a cup of coffee to perk myself up. I want to be sensitive and expand my range of sensations.

It may be worth listening to a certain melody. Sometimes you shed tears before me, but I laugh at you, and sometimes I cry from what I hear from you. It all depends on the preparation of one’s feelings.

We are in the highest corrected state, the final correction. But due to the blurriness of our Kelim, we feel only a small part of this state, even its opposite, and curse our lives. All we need is to correct our sensory organs. This is our work.
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From the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 7/3/26, Rabash, “What Is, ‘There Is None as Holy as the Lord, for There Is None Besides You,’ in the Work?”

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The Creator, the upper force that plans to bring creation to a good state, intends to elevate it to His own degree, to the very best, highest level, that is, to make the created being into a Creator.

The difference between them lies in the awareness of one’s state. A person is required to become consciously aware of the state in which he or she exists, and to rise from a complete lack of awareness of spirituality, which is entirely concealed from us.

What does it mean that it is concealed? At present, we think that spirituality probably exists, but we simply do not perceive it, and this seems to mean that we are in a kind of unconscious state.

However, we do not even perceive that yet because one can feel unconscious only when one knows what it means to be conscious. We do not yet have that awareness, but somehow we are beginning to sense that something like this does exist.

A person must independently reveal this deficiency, what is missing between themselves and the Creator. If they reveal it on their own, it means that they have built their own Kli and understand what it means to exist on the Creator’s degree instead of remaining on our animate degree, which in spirituality is called “below existence.” There is the Machsom (barrier), and what is below the Machsom is considered as though it does not exist at all.

Therefore a person has been given every kind of force (both for and against) and free choice that is solely for advancing in this one direction. If you knew all the qualities of your soul, all the laws of nature surrounding you, who you truly are, and what true reality is, you would see that you are an absolute robot. There is nothing you can determine for yourself except one thing: to advance toward becoming similar to the Creator.

Apart from this, everything else has been planned and predetermined in advance; there is no choice involved, nothing left to chance; everything operates like clockwork. But advancing in order to become similar to the Creator is precisely where free choice exists—only there. If you deviate even slightly toward connection with anything else, there is no free choice anymore. It exists only for this purpose.
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From the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 7/6/26, Rabash, “When Should One Use Pride in the Work?”

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Question: Do I examine my attitude toward the Creator each time I make a scrutiny?

Answer: Only the attitude. It is easy for me to imagine that I exist. And my desire for spirituality is also not much of a problem, despite the fact that this desire constantly slips away and vanishes.

To catch the Creator? I catch some kind of “inner image of the Creator,” and I am guided by this inner image. It does not matter that it is constantly undergoing changes.

We do not know how we will sense the Creator at the end of correction, but I can already somehow establish two sensory points: me and Him. These two points are present in every one of my states.

The problem in any state is to determine and verify how much the attitude is directed at me, and how to make it so that it is directed at the Creator. As soon as I complete the next verification and scrutiny, I am given the following state.
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From the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 7/3/26, Rabash, “What Is, “There Is None as Holy as the Lord, for There Is None besides You,’ in the Work?”

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We learn that all our present and future states, including the final correction (Gmar Tikkun) and even the states that follow, already exist, and we are already in them.

We only have to move from state to state.  We can go through each of them only through a driving force called “the light,” which corrects and fills us at every stage of spiritual ascent. This is how we move up the spiritual ladder.

The light affects us without our intervention, and the request for the light to come and correct us forms as a unique request within us; we cannot form it ourselves. After all, we do not know what this light is all about, what it is, what to strive for, or what we will achieve.

All a person needs to do is pay attention to what is happening to him, reveal what the Creator wants from them, and what actions the Creator performs on them in this state.

One must be sensitive to the contact with the divine because as soon as they feel a certain state, it is replaced by a new one. A person senses, grasps, and absorbs this state (takes it upon oneself), and it becomes theirs. Immediately, however, one must again sharpen all one’s senses in order to achieve similarity of form and thus experience the next state.

Yet the Creator’s work is present in this action as well. Only one thing depends on the person: strengthening their focused desire for spirituality. I would say realizing the desire for spirituality given to us by the Creator, or to realize that one receives their desire for spirituality from above.

We study that the states of Ibur, Yenika, and Mochin are produced by the upper. A person’s entire preparation consists of being sensitive to these states and being ready for the actions that the Creator performs on us. This is what is meant by the principle that “opposite the holiness from above, a person must prepare their holiness from below.”
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From the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 7/3/26, Rabash, “What Is, ‘There Is None as Holy as the Lord, for There Is None besides You,’ in the Work?”

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Question: If we speak about the Kli that needs correction in the feminine gender, does it mean women should primarily be the ones to engage with Kabbalah rather than men?

Answer: Why not seat the women in front of the books instead of us, while we go home to watch a football match?

A woman is the desire for spirituality (Hisaron). The feminine in Hebrew is Nekeva, from the word “Nekev” (a hole, an empty space). One who feels a Hisaron for the divine, specifically for the Creator, and wishes to become similar to Him in qualities, is called “Nekeva.”

Nekeva is a Kli that must be corrected and receive the filling of the light. These Kelim, as we previously discussed regarding our forefather Abraham, are passed on to his descendants. And this inheritance is transmitted specifically through the male line. It is the men, and not the women, who receive the Kelim.

Here too there are two degrees. A woman is more connected with reality, with nature. It is precisely this factor that determines a woman’s function in our world and her desires. It is difficult for her to rise above her nature.

Whereas it is much easier for a man to disconnect from reality. He is not as connected with nature, and therefore makes mistakes in this world far more frequently than women. Women behave much more rationally than men. They are realists by nature, more resilient and stable. We see this in everyday life.

But the desire for spirituality has no connection with one’s biological sex. It depends directly on a person’s ability to rise above their nature and aspire to the divine. Women, according to their nature, are not capable of this in the same way as men. In accordance with their qualities, men have far greater potential to rise above their nature.

Therefore the Hisaron (lack or yearning) for spirituality does not come according to one’s biological sex, but according to the extent to which a person is more worthy of rising above nature, and aspiring to divinity.

Thus, it is specifically the man who is obligated to study the inner part of the Torah, to engage in spiritual work. A woman, however, is not obligated. Only to the extent that a genuine need for spirituality appears in her does she also need to undergo the process of correcting the Kelim. But how many women have a true desire for spirituality?

Therefore she needs to examine how genuine her desire for spirituality is. If she has the basic things corresponding to her nature—a home, a husband, a family, children—and after that she continues to aspire to the divine, then her desire is genuine, and she has the “correct spark.” But if she seems to aspire to spirituality while lacking these basic things, then it can be said that she is simply seeking fulfillment as compensation for her unfulfilled material desires.

Why don’t we examine a man in the same way? Because a man does not have the same intense need for a family, a home, a wife, and children as a woman does. He is detached from these animal desires, and therefore such a test is unnecessary. Of course, we do examine men. He should be married, have a family, be connected with his home, and be obligated to work.

A woman is not obligated to work. The home is the place of her work according to the female nature. Do you understand how different her orientation is from that of a man? According to the laws of every state, a man is obligated to provide for the family and a woman to manage the household. Such is the attitude toward them even now in the twenty-first century. And this is not subject to change; it is a law of nature. Therefore women and men are evaluated differently in accordance with their inner structure.
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From the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 7/3/26, Rabash, “What Is, ‘There Is None as Holy as the Lord, for There Is None besides You,’ in the Work?”

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When a person connects with others in physical work and invests their efforts in a fellow student, they achieve a state where their own yearning for the Creator is supplemented by that of their friend, effectively doubling it. If the friend shares the same desire for the Creator, then the person’s own strength is doubled.

You double the power of your positive desires and strivings, despite the many obstacles that exist. One can give the example of a rocket that, while maintaining the same weight, gains what is essentially double the propulsive force. With the same “weight,” with the same will to receive, a person’s strength doubles, thereby cutting their path to the Creator in half. For example, instead of ten years he will need only five.

If a person chooses a group of friends and is confident that they are true like‑minded companions who provide the additional forces needed to advance, then there is nothing better.

But if, after constantly checking the connection, they become convinced that there is nothing more to add, they can of course stop there. However, if it is possible to “press on the gas” or switch from  a “dirt road” to a “wide highway,” then they should look for the means to do so.

Possibly, by improving their connection with his friends or by changing groups, they will be able to advance further. This is precisely what is meant by choosing the right environment.
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From the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 7/15/26, Rabash, “What Is ‘Do Not Slight the Blessing of a Layperson’ in the Work?”

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Question: How can a person determine that he is standing before a choice?

Answer: A person does not know that he is in a state of choice. He must have faith and constantly remind themselves.

Therefore it is necessary to develop the habit of creating various reminders, notes, and marks inside and around myself that will help me constantly remember what, and in which direction, I can now add from myself. And then, within three to five years, one can attain what the Kabbalists write about.

However, the system must accompany me in such a way that I can constantly awaken, and strive toward the goal. Now this system is becoming denser; time is compressing. For although the Kabbalists wrote long ago, in the times of the Gemara, they had our days in mind.

It is said that everything that has been written is intended for the last generation, for living in the days of the Mashiach because for the previous generations it made no sense to write anything. In the past generations only a few individuals rose to the spiritual, and the Torah they had was different; they were drawn from above. But all the holy books, including those written by Moses, are intended for our generation.

It seems to me that for beginners time is indeed greatly shortened. Today people come who grasp the material very quickly. After two or three years I still did not perceive what today they feel and understand after a month of study.

Comment: With such receptivity one can remain for ten years without advancing at all.

My Response: I am speaking about one specific parameter. That a person can sit here another twenty years, and remain the same as today is true; it all depends on him. And yet for now, his understanding, perception, and connection with the material are such as mine were two years after I began to study Kabbalah. This is a miracle; I am amazed by it.
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From the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 7/20/26, Rabash, “The Creator and Israel Went into Exile”

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Question: How can a person ask the Creator for help and wish only to bestow without receiving anything for oneself?

Answer: That is exactly what we ask for. I ask the Creator to give me the ability to bestow. To bestow upon the Creator means to bestow upon the group, as it is written: “I dwell among My people.” It is one and the same.

There is no other Creator. “I dwell among My people” means that He is revealed within the group. The collective force of the group is called “The Creator.” To bestow upon the group as a whole is to bestow upon the Creator.

We tend to think about this in ordinary, earthly terms, and so it seems to us. “What is so special about the group? What can I possibly give them? This is nonsense!” But if you were truly able to come out of yourself and bestow upon others, you would reveal the higher reality rather than this world. We simply have not yet attained it.

One might ask: “Haven’t many philosophical movements also promoted devotion to society? Have they not claimed that the voice of the people is the voice of God?” But that is not the same because they did not use the reforming light, the inner force contained within the collective.

So what does the wisdom of Kabbalah ultimately say? You have nothing but desire. Within that desire lies a unique force called “the Creator” concealed there from the outset. You can awaken this force within the group if you genuinely wish to advance toward it by bestowing upon the group. There, within the group, you resolve all your relationships—with yourself, with the group, and with the Creator. Everything takes place within the group, in the bestowal that you acquire outside yourself.

There is no difference between bestowing upon the group, and bestowing upon the Creator. Bestowing upon the group refers more to bestowing upon the vessels (Kelim), the desires of others. Bestowing upon the Creator means becoming more integrated into the general force of bestowal that reigns within those desires.

We must free ourselves from religious concepts, from the lingering belief that there is some Creator ruling somewhere in the heavens and influencing us from there. Notice how deeply rooted this stereotype still is within us! But there is no higher force outside of us! That force exists within the group, in the connection between us. There is nothing beyond that reality that you reveal. Outside of reality, there is nothing.

As you delve more deeply into these concepts, you begin to understand that this is, in fact, a very materialistic approach.
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From the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 3/21/11, on The Book of Zohar, Yitro (Jethro)

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