Question: What is a prayer?

Answer: A prayer is called work in the heart. But why is it work? Don’t I know what I want? No. I don’t know what I want, and I don’t know what to want—this is all our work—to stabilize ourselves correctly.

But if this is a deficiency, what can I do? A baby cries not knowing the reason why, he simply feels bad. A person who has revealed different Reshimot (reminiscences), has felt the taste of receiving and bestowal and already knows what makes him feel bad and what makes him feel good, so he can point at a specific deficiency. It isn’t just a deficiency, not in form, but a deficiency in which there are different depictions and discernments.

So what do we have to do? Not just to cry out like a baby, but to find out what it is exactly that you want. Suppose I want to love a friend whom I don’t love. I have to feel a deficiency for that. It says: “Make your desire like his.” But how can I do that if I don’t have any desire for it?

Perform different actions and by them you will see to what extent you don’t want it. But by performing these actions, you have invested your powers and these powers bring you sorrow that you don’t want the things you should actually want.

I want to buy a house, for example, but in order to do that I have to exert myself, to go to work, and to trouble myself. I have no power to do that and no desire, but I do want to buy a house. This is wrong. A person should process his desire so that the desire will be connected to the goal.

So what is a prayer? A prayer is not just a request that I have now, it is a series of actions in which I stabilize the request I will later live by. Each time I process and correct my deficiency to a greater degree so that my prayer will be processed as correctly as possible, more accurately and more sharply.

A prayer is called Malchut, a deficiency, and I must constantly worry about it. There is nothing else I should worry about, but the right deficiency. So it says: “If only he prayed all day long.” It isn’t the same prayer as a person who falls to the ground or reads from the Siddur (prayer book). No. A prayer is when I clarify internally, as it says about Malchut: “I am a prayer.” This means that a person says, “This is my prayer, this is my deficiency!” And it isn’t that it is written somewhere or something that I have heard or have been taught.

So “I am a prayer” means to cleanse myself of different external impressions and to clarify internally my true deficiency, my “self.” This is Malchut. To such a prayer, a person receives an answer from Above, since it is a clarified deficiency.
[93411]
From the 2^nd part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 11/19/12, The Zohar

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Question: How can the correction that I receive from The Book of Zohar be measured? We have been reading The Book of Zohar for two years now, but I find that I am attracted to the same desires and pleasures.

Answer: Until it is not filled with the necessary measure of effort, it will seem that it’s the same each time, as if you enter the King’s treasury and even if you take away something from there, it is spilled and you have nothing left.

There is nothing left but sorrow until it all accumulates to great sorrow, and by that you raise an increasingly greater prayer, MAN, until it reaches the right request with the right intensity and then everything is revealed: You receive everything you have collected for these two years, and even more than that, in all your small sorties, all at once.
[93300]
From the 2^nd part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 11/18/12, The Zohar

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Question: Can The Book of Zohar help me recognize evil?

Answer: The Zohar, more than any other source, can help a person feel the evil. We advance on the way to the Light, to the Creator, to the force of bestowal, which is the only one who rules and who operates in reality since the desire to receive doesn’t move if the force of bestowal, the force of the Light, doesn’t impress it.

So it turns out that without Kabbalah books, and especially without The Book of Zohar, we wouldn’t discover the source of our movement, but would just wander in this world. It is the Light that impresses us in the form of circles if we evoke it to get closer to us equally on all sides, and then everything is immersed in different troubles and problems.

But what are troubles and problems? It is the feeling of our oppositeness from that Light. We don’t know what the Light is, but we feel bad, not knowing what it is.

If a small child feels cold, for example, he is shivering and crying and doesn’t know what to do. Next to him there is a door to a warm room, but he doesn’t know that he should go in there. So he continues to cry and to scream, but is not able to tie his bad feeling with the cold. He doesn’t understand that he feels bad because of the cold and doesn’t know that if he goes through the next door he will feel good and warm. He attains this only according to the actual phenomenon, but he doesn’t know where it stems from. He only reacts simply to his inner state, without a cause and with no results. This is how the simple desire to receive responds.

But if this desire begins to build a head for itself, then he already understands where things come from and why and how he can be saved, and what actions he should take in order to escape the bad situation—this is already a head. But how is it created? By the Light that by different actions builds in him this mechanism, which doesn’t exist in the desire to receive at all.

Thus we gradually advance to the good. There are people on such a level of development who simply cry out when they feel bad. There are others who try to escape in different directions, but don’t know the right direction. There are also those who manage to escape. There are those who understand that there is no need to escape, and that if we perceive the Light that comes to us and it makes us feel bad, here in our place, we will turn it to good, and there is nowhere to run at all. So they overcome their state, transcend it, and discover the Light in the same place. It all depends on our development.
[93297]
From the 2^nd part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 11/18/12, The Zohar

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Preparation to the Lesson

 Introduction to the Study of the Ten Sefirot, Item 23, Lesson 8

The Book of Zohar – Selected Excerpt, Parashat “Emor,” Item 134, Lesson 11

Talmud Eser Sefirot, Vol 3, Part 8, Item 59, Lesson 37

“The Essence of the Wisdom of Kabbalah,” “The Law of Root and Branch by Which the Worlds Are Related,” Lesson 6

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While reading The Zohar during this special time for Israel, we think about corrections so that they will occur in a special way, meaning in accordance with the needs of the current times in which we live. This is so that they will affect us in a way that will bring us to perfection, which will lead to peace.

Let this cloud, this “Cloud pillar” become the clouds of glory. The difference between the two is that it isn’t the cloud that comes over us and conceals the upper force from us, but we ourselves conceal it with our screen, with our constriction, with the reflected light, and thereby elevate above the clouds.
[93303]
From the 2^nd part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 11/18/12, The Zohar

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The Book of Zohar is the source of the upper Light that illuminates from the top of the world of Atzilut. It’s a system of the upper Providence and leadership that operates on us, so that when we study The Book of Zohar we actually connect with this upper mechanism. The closer we want to get to the upper leadership while reading The Book of Zohar, the more strongly it influences us. But what does it mean to get closer to the Lights, to relate to the system of leadership and Providence correctly?

It means to be like it. It’s total love and bestowal and its law is the law of love. How can we check that? We do so according to the principle of “from the love of the created beings to the love of the Creator.” The Creator is nature, the essence of the upper system. So the word “God  –  ים-אלה” is the same as the word “nature – הטבע” in Gematria.

So if we want the upper force to connect us, to bring us connection and correction, it matches its plan. On our part there can’t be any other intention or inclination, according to this system with the upper Light. That is why it is called the Light that Reforms: When we want to connect mutually in “love thy friend as thyself,” which is the great rule of the Torah, that is Light, then it comes and corrects and fills us. Actually this is the only action in nature and this is the only thing that can help, save, correct, and bring good to us and to the world.

The current global crisis is meant to show us that only the action of connection can save humanity. Accordingly, the current “small war” in Gaza is meant to evoke us to the same inner action that is aimed at connection. So let’s try to connect all our inclinations in mutual guarantee and understand that we have to become “as one man in one heart.” In fact this is all our work.

We hope that the Light that comes while reading The Book of Zohar will fulfill the connection among us. Then there will be no enemies and there will be no wars. By trying to connect above the situation, we drive away the negative force. If in the past the leadership operated on us through the posterior of the Light because we were opposite to it, now it reveals its face. Let’s try and focus so that it will all happen this way.
[93206]
From the 2^nd part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 11/16/12, The Zohar

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Preparation to the Lesson

Introduction to the Study of the Ten Sefirot, Item 18, Lesson 7

The Book of Zohar – Selected Excerpt, Parashat “Emor,” Item 128, Lesson 10

Talmud Eser Sefirot, Vol 3, Part 8, Item 57, Lesson 36

“The Essence of the Wisdom of Kabbalah“

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Now we are reading The Book of Zohar. How can I tie this text with the Light that Reforms, with the changes I have to feel that I go through, and by them to reach the goal of creation? How can I feel that? What do I have to do when I read or listen to The Zohar?

Actually I am required to find an inner expression to what the authors of The Zohar say. In what desires, in what feelings, in what internal states or changes do I see the fulfillment of what I read about in the book? A person is a small world. All the worlds are in a person. All these states, all these patterns are already inside me. I only need to reveal them; I want to see them. I want to reveal in me what we read about in The Zohar.

Question: Does it mean that I must always look inside myself and try to find the inner reactions to what we read about? But we always try to incorporate in others and to feel them.

Answer: Of course, everyone is in you, and you also see us inside you. The same system by which you reveal everything, including the Creator is in you.

Question: I can understand it in my mind…

Answer: No, it has to be in your feelings. Gradually you will feel that everything is inside you; there is nothing on the outside. All this resistance, all the conflicts between me and what is on the outside is gradually erased, this disparity, this distance is emotional. It disappears.

The more we speak about the fact that what is external to me is increasingly more important for me, all the way to “love thy friend as thyself,” when your friend who is external to you becomes more important to you than yourself, the more you erase the distance and you advance towards the state in which what is external and what is internal become the same for you or close to that. You begin to perceive reality in a more realistic way and that it is inside you.

Where does this perception come from? From the fact that what is on the outside becomes emotionally closer to what is inside. This is where the feeling that all of reality is internal comes from. This is how a mother feels her child inside her, although he is actually on the outside. Therefore, first he is in her womb and then he comes out.

These are the phases of our development. But it doesn’t mean that he is getting further from her. On the contrary, a person grows, gives birth to children, and what is external seems to exist internally too. In fact there is no internality and externality, everything becomes one whole.

Here we have to overcome an emotional barrier, so that I will feel that what is on the outside is equal to what is on the inside. Then I will discover that all of reality is inside me. It isn’t in our mind but in our feelings. The mind is already a result of this correction.
[92907]
From the 2^nd part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 11/14/12, The Zohar

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Preparation to the Lesson

Introduction to the Study of the Ten Sefirot, Item 16, Lesson 6

The Book of Zohar – Selected Excerpt, Parashat “Emor,” Item 112, Lesson 9

Talmud Eser Sefirot, Vol 3, Part 8, Item 54, Lesson 35

“The Essence of the Wisdom of Kabbalah“

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Preparation to the Lesson

Writings of Rabash, “Article 28”

The Book of Zohar – Selected Excerpt, Parashat “Emor,” Item 105, Lesson 8

“Peace in the World,” “Rewarded-I Will Hasten It, Not Rewarded-In It’s Time”

Writings of Baal HaSulam “The Nation“

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