A question I received: Each of our material life events is followed by emotions and feelings. Sometimes the same feelings can follow rather different events. Does it matter what the event is, which causes us to have feelings, regarding the root and branch connection? Does each material life event have only one root, or can one root come into action as branch through different events depending on the person?

My Answer: Every object, time, event or act has its own spiritual root. An Upper Force that descends to our world cannot produce more than one action. Each object or act has its own force, or its own angel.

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Our entire life comes down to trying to fulfill our desires, or anticipating the moment when our desire will meet the pleasure, such as the first sip of water you take when your are dying of thirst. But we only feel the pleasure at that first moment of contact between the desire and the pleasure. As soon as the pleasure enters the desire, it immediately begins to nullify the desire, and consequently, the pleasure.

Even sexual pleasure, which is so powerful that it is considered the root of all pleasures, lasts for just an instant. Then the person must think of other ways to fulfill himself. Thus, we are always compelled to chase after something, because this encounter between the desire and the pleasure is what we call life.

Without this constant chase of trying to bring pleasure into one’s desire, a person cannot be considered alive, for he has nothing to live for. In fact, if a person cannot fulfill his desire, he will be willing to take his own life. Yet, humanity is bound to reach a point where people will feel this way, but they won’t even be able to take their lives and bring an end to their horrid state for lack of strength. So what are we to do?

Baal HaSulam says that there is only one solution: “Instead of egoistic reception, we must reach bestowal. Fill yourself with bestowal, because you will never be able to fulfill yourself by receiving. You have tested it and seen it for yourself. But I will tell you a secret: there is a method that can give you the ability to feel perfect, unlimited pleasure. It will give you fulfillment which includes everything, even that which lies beyond the boundaries of this life. But you must know that this fulfillment does not happen through egoistic reception, but through bestowal. It is because everything that pertains to your human qualities exists outside of you – in the desires or souls of others.”

This is what Baal HaSulam means when he says: “Taste and see that the Creator is good.” Try and see for yourself that bestowal (the Creator) is fulfillment, goodness, and perfection. And then you will feel an infinite desire and infinite fulfillment.

The sole purpose of the science of Kabbalah is to bring a person to this state.

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It is very difficult to explain how to enter spirituality to someone. To do it, one must understand that it pays to be a giver. A person is willing to do anything, to pay any price, including his corporeal life, in order to attain eternal life. And we do see people paying for this with their lives. A person is willing to invest all of himself, to sacrifice everything he has, in order for everyone to know about him and to remember how great he was. He thinks, “I will show them all!”

We feel this way because our egoism is an imprint of the spiritual world. This is why we sense eternity inside our egoism. But when you tell a person to revoke his egoism – his entire foundation, without getting anything in return (in this world or the world to come), then he feels that he will have nothing left. It’s because he was hoping to receive a reward inside his egoism. Therefore, it seems absurd to him to nullify it. He reasons, “If I start bestowing to others, I will disappear. Where will I be then, and what will happen to me?”

The transition point from this world into the spiritual world “the world to come” is the most sensitive, significant, and crucial point in all of reality. It is the point of transition between the two worlds, a switch from reception to bestowal.

In order to draw people closer to it, even a little bit, we have to disseminate the wisdom of Kabbalah in a broad sense. We have to explain these concepts clearly and very professionally. And slowly but surely, we are getting there.

As a result, we will save people many years of suffering. We are thereby speeding up time, giving the world the chance to take a leap and perform the necessary corrections. Instead of going through terrible physical suffering and learning from it (which may drag on for decades), you are giving people knowledge and understanding, so they won’t have to go through the suffering physically, in the corporeal world. The explanation should be given to them with love, out of the realization that it’s necessary, while seeing the whole system and understanding that it is good in the Creator’s eyes. This is how you can do something good for the world.

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A question I received: In Kabbalah, “to come out of exile” or to want to come out of exile means to want to rise above one’s egoism. But why would people want to come out of it? A person feels that his egoism is him. Why would he want to come out of himself?

My Answer: Because it’s inevitable! The Creator is the Light that created our desire. Sometimes He shines on a person with the Light a lot, and sometimes not so much. He uses these changes to build new desires in us. However, He does not fill these desires; He simply awakens them and causes them to grow.

This is why, with every passing day, we feel worse in every aspect of our lives. This is also why we want change, since we want changes to happen in order to feel good in our desire to receive pleasure.

And then one day, a small spark appears inside our desire, which comes to us from the Creator Himself. It’s a spark of Light, the property of bestowal, and from this spark or desire, we start to yearn for bestowal.

At first we don’t understand what it is we want. We only feel that what we want must come from a different world. All of a sudden, a person starts feeling that it is useless to receive, that there is no end to reception, and that it doesn’t have any meaning. He wants something different.

Thus, instead of the question, “How can I have meaning in life by receiving pleasure?” a new question arises in a person: “How can I have meaning in life by giving pleasure to someone else?” This question originates from a desire called the point in the heart.

Gradually, a person continues to grow and reaches Lo Lishma, a spiritual search for one’s own sake, and from there he reaches Lishma – for the sake of bestowal.

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A question I received: When you say that a person has to learn to receive pleasure from bestowal, and when you speak about the principle of “love for your neighbor,” these things seem very far-fetched and unrealistic. Why?

My Answer: Our problem is that we don’t even understand how unrealistic they are. A person must first reach a state of seeing that it’s impossible for him to have the quality of bestowal. Then, he will be able to “scream out” to the Creator, and the Creator will endow him with this quality.

It is not within man’s power to change himself, and moreover, it takes many long years of inner work to realize this. Yet, at the same time, a person has to understand that there is no other way to go, and he has no choice. He must advance toward bestowal, because this is the only option Nature gives him: either the desire to enjoy will try to receive pleasure egoistically, and will remain empty, plunging into crises and misfortunes, or it will be transformed into bestowal. The catch is that it is impossible to transform it to bestowal!

So what are we to do? If a person reaches a breaking point where he sees that there is no way out, then he screams out to the Creator. And the Creator, the Upper Force or the Light, then influences and changes him.

But when a person simply says that this is unrealistic, his words are meaningless. When a person truly feels this way, then he is standing at the threshold of the spiritual world, the Machsom, and is at the end of the period of concealment. And then, he comes out of the exile.

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In the “Introduction to Talmud Eser Sefirot,” Baal HaSulam writes about a person’s desire to clearly understand the meaning of his life. He says, “Yet the question, ‘What is the meaning of my life?’ stands as bitterly and as vehemently as ever. Sometimes it meets us uninvited, pecks at our minds and humiliates us to the ground before we find the famous ploy to flow mindlessly in the currents of life as yesterday.”

People will small desires are like small children: they want order. They set limits for themselves and live within confines that help them to feel safe. In addition, these people want their relationships with others to follow a hierarchy. They want to know, “This person is higher than me, and that one is lower. This one I have to fear and that one I have to respect.”

Many politicians, psychologists and sociologists use this to their advantage, and religion is also based on this. Throughout history, people have feared the forces of nature, believing that they are more powerful than they. They tried to smooth things over by treating these forces with respect, and thus, people built special systems by which they expressed their attitude to the forces of nature.

This is how religion was created. And religion was good for the people because it gave them a clear understanding of what was required of them. This institution was satisfactory to all, because people were able to shield themselves with religion.

Today, however, we are living in an entirely different era. Now the will to receive pleasure has outgrown all limitations. Whether people are secular or religious, they can no longer contain themselves within the previously set limits. They can no longer flow “within the currents of life as yesterday.”

In the past, people simply carried out predetermined actions without much analysis or debate. People acted in certain ways, and were contented by this because they knew that they were living their lives correctly. Today, however, people can no longer be satisfied by this lifestyle, because none of these actions give them the answer to the question, “What do I live for?”

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A question I received: What is faith in Kabbalah?

My Answer: In Kabbalah, faith is bestowal. It’s when one is able to bestow despite his will to receive. This is called, “faith above reason.”

A person’s nature is the will to receive, and faith is the property of bestowal that’s opposite to our nature. The only way for us to acquire the property of bestowal is with the help of the Upper Light, because it gives us the ability to rise above ourselves and to act out of a different desire: for the sake of others, or for the sake of the Creator. One then acts out of this desire, instead of one’s own, natural desire. And because of this, one becomes dependent on the Upper Level (one becomes “the Creator’s slave”) rather than on oneself (a “slave to oneself”).

Therefore, if you have faith in me, it means that you act for my sake with all of your abilities. Actually, you become like me. That is because normally, every person is completely opposite to another. But if someone has faith in me, it means he has neutralized his desires in regard to me, and through these desires, he and I are one.

The opposite of faith is knowledge, which is when we act for the sake of our own desires. Faith, however, is when we act for the sake of fulfilling the desires of others. When a person has this quality, he is able to sense things outside of himself, through the desires of others. And what one senses through these desires is the higher, spiritual world. This is why faith is closely related to love (love for another person), because love is the ability to replace one’s own desire with the desire of another person, and to fulfill that desire.

As you can see, in Kabbalah, faith is when a person masters the quality of bestowal – a higher quality. Clearly, this bears no relation to faith as it is understood in our world: believing in what someone else says and accepting it as a fact. With this kind of faith, I may accept another person’s mistake or false belief as a fact, and then use it as a foundation for all my actions and my entire life.

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A question I received from my student: Is it correct to say that the Surrounding Light is our thoughts and desires, which influence us?

My Answer: Not entirely. The Surrounding Light is not simply our thoughts and desires, but it is our corrected thoughts and desires. It is the fulfillment that awaits us ahead, and which we have to receive. The Surrounding Light is, in fact, our corrected, good, proper thoughts and desires; it is the heartfelt connection among us that influences us. And the sum total of our corrected thoughts and desires is called “the Creator.” This is why in Hebrew, the Creator is called Bo-re, which means “Come and See.”

The positive energy of bestowal and love that exist in one’s future state, influences a person and his present state. This energy is called the Surrounding Light. Thus, we affect our uncorrected, present state with our corrected future state.

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A question I received: If the world reaches a point where everyone will have the average living standard and no one will live beyond this standard, then what will drive people to develop further? What will cause people to move forward in their development?

My Answer: If a person feels pleasure from bestowing to others, if he feels that by uniting with others they create a single vessel, inside of which he senses the Upper Force (the Creator), then the ever-increasing attainment of the Creator that he feels will be his goal and reward. When a person builds the “human” level within by bestowing to others, he corrects his attitude toward them, and this makes him similar to the Creator. Thus, he ascends along 125 spiritual steps to the Final Correction.

When he ascends spiritually, he feels satisfaction and fulfillment, and thus comes closer to the Creator. The fulfillment he feels from this is perfect. It is not temporary and transient, but eternal. It fulfills a person completely, leaving no voids. Moreover, one continuously gains new possibilities for even greater types of fulfillment.

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A question I received: How can we explain in simple terms the technology of the Light that ”brings us back to the Source?”

My Answer: There is a general force in reality, which is a force of bestowal. We perceive it as goodness and as a creator of goodness.

We call this bestowing, kind and goodness-creating force – the Creator or general Nature. It lies in the unification of all the parts of the created Nature, which exist in harmony and absolute interconnection and which possess similar qualities to the force that created them – the quality of bestowal.

We feel bad because we sense that we have left this integral system. If we wish to feel well, we should try to return to this system, which is called perfection. By trying to return to this system by various different means, we awaken a force that influences us from there. This is called the drawing of the Light that reforms, the force that returns us to the general system.

This force acts in accordance with the intensity and the level of our desire – that is, to the extent that we are able to appeal, ask, and demand of the system. This is very much the same way that an infant, a small child, and a grown-up person act differently in our world. The most important thing is that this demand is in accordance with one’s level of development.

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