Talks about the Steps of the Ladder, Part 6

Do the Discernments Come All at Once or One After Another, in a Series of Discernments?

Both. Every state includes ten Sefirot. Malchut feels the Creator’s image through the first nine Sefirot. We feel the Creator’s attitude to us according to the vessel that we possess. For example, if we have nine channels in our vessel, we receive the Creator through these nine conduits, which concludes in Malchut. This is called the “image of the Creator,” which, at every moment, defines our feelings, our world, and our reality.

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Talks about the Steps of the Ladder, Part 5

Why Are There So Many Distinctions in One Heart, One Feeling, and One Source?

At every level, we correct more and more of our sensory tools, through which we feel the Creator and our relationship with Him. Our prayer then becomes more genuine.

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Talks about the Steps of the Ladder, Part 4

Why Is an Attitude to the Creator Called Prayer?

All feelings that we feel in our heart originate from the Creator, and thus the feeling in the heart is not called “prayer.” Prayer is our appeal to the Creator. The Hebrew word for “prayer” (“Lehitpalel“) comes from the word, “to judge” (“Lehaflil“), i.e., it is self-judgment, an evaluation of the connection that we have with the source of our feelings—the Creator.

Since the source of our feelings is good and benevolent, our prayer expresses the difference between our feelings and such goodness and benevolence. We discover the extent of the flaw in our heart. Prayer is the feeling of the difference between a person and the Creator.

In other words, if we were to measure the difference between what the Creator fills our heart with and what our heart feels and how we respond, we would see the extent of our flaw. Likewise, if we were fully corrected, we would feel fully good and benevolent. The more opposite our sensation, the greater the indication of our flaw.

Not only does it indicate the level of our flaw, but also our spiritual location. Since the Creator gives a force of goodness and benevolence through all 620 channels, we can know the channels we feel more or less, where we feel good or bad.

If we have a complete picture of the soul, we perceive and sense everything, we know where we are at every level, and we possess a clear picture of our corrected state compared to our current state. All aspects by which we evaluate our attitude to the Creator are collectively called “prayer.”

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Talks about the Steps of the Ladder, Part 3

What Is Prayer?

Prayer is an attitude to the Creator. It is what we feel in our present moment toward the upper force that governs us. Whether we want to or not, we relate to the Creator out of our innermost point in our heart. Even if we do not feel it, the heart of every created being receives its feelings from the source, which means that we always feel the Creator.

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Talks about the Steps of the Ladder, Part 2

What in Prayer Is Under a Person’s Control?

It is written: “I have labored and found.” The effort is under a person’s control, but the outcome is not. Why? It is because we are working on our soul without knowing its structure or its paths of development. We only need to try, to apply effort, both in quantity and quality; we do not need to worry about the results, the path, or the events that we might encounter. We should not worry about the pace of our progress or our ultimate form. This is because we not only do not know our final form, but in every new state, we have no idea where we will arrive. Even a great Kabbalist like Rabbi Shimon Bar-Yochai knew that he was ascending to the level of the final correction (Gmar Tikkun) only because he recognized its posterior side. If he had not seen its posterior, he would not have known what level he was about to reach. A new state awakens at every moment. It is born out of an internal memory called a “Reshimo” (record).

People think that a Kabbalist knows and sees everything from the beginning until the end of the world. A Kabbalist, however, only knows what they have traversed on their spiritual path. They know what they have attained up to their current level, and not what they have not yet experienced. Therefore, spiritual levels are referred to as “ascents” and “discoveries,” discoveries of what was previously unknown.

In a spiritual ascent, the effort should thus be aimed above our current understanding, against the understanding and thoughts in our present state. This is always the relationship of the lower level to the higher level because the posterior side of a higher level is darker and less corrected than the lower level.

Effort itself holds no indication of the result. It has no direct correlation to the greatness of the goal. A person labors on a certain matter and receives a result that they never expected because each time a new part of their soul becomes revealed that was previously hidden from them.

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Talks about the Steps of the Ladder, Part 1

Chapter 1. Prayer from the Depth of the Heart

Since it is written “half,” we understand that more than half is not demanded of us; our half is called “prayer.” Prayer bursts forth from our heart as a result of our emotions. It must break through from the depth of the heart before we start critiquing the feeling in our heart with our intellect, before we start thinking about it or understanding it. The feeling hidden in the heart before we try to control it is called “prayer.”

If prayer precedes our control over it, why are we told that we must pray and reach a prayer, as if prayer depends on our efforts or free choice?

The answer is that we must reach the desire called “prayer” through various actions and means that help bring us to the correct desire. Prayer is a summary; it is the result of our preparations. Accordingly, each time we pray, we feel a certain kind of connection to the Creator in our heart and our prayer to the Creator is always new.

A person can open an ordinary prayer book, written two thousand years ago by the Men of the Great Assembly, and by saying the same words every day, feel something new each day. The interpretation changes so much that the words spoken yesterday no longer fit today. In such a prayer, we feel that we had never said the words that we spoke today.

What words should we aim for in our prayer? Primarily they should be words that speak of the Creator’s glory. Why? It is because in the Creator’s glory, we do not speak of His essence—who He is, or what He is—but we discuss His qualities of bestowal and how we appreciate such qualities. The extent to which we value the Creator’s qualities of bestowal is the extent to which we measure the strength of our connection, closeness, and alignment with the Creator.

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