Talks about the Steps of the Ladder, Part 154
How Can We Exert Effort If We Know We Cannot Attain the Creator?
In Kabbalah, we learn that we are entirely a will to receive, that we want only to enjoy. By our very structure, we already know from the outset what we want to enjoy. So how can we change our nature? We cannot change it. How can we desire something that does not exist in us? We cannot.
It follows that we have no power to change anything. We can only discern what we want, feel, and long for. This is the advantage of the human over the animal: We can examine our desires, but we cannot replace, change, or even want to change them.
We see how much effort and time it takes to change habits in this world. For example, a person with diabetes who needs to stop consuming sugar reads extensively on the subject, hears advice from others, and watches videos about the severe effects of diabetes until they convince themselves to stop consuming sugar and build a system against their craving for sweets.
This shows what people do, what an entire industry has been built for, and how much persuasion people must undergo just to see the evil on the animate level and understand that something is bad for them. In other words, we must restrain our desire and balance it with intellect and reason. The intellect tells us sugar is bad, but the desire signals that sweetness is good.
Sometimes an entire lifetime passes before we improve something in ourselves. This concerns improvement on the animate level where it is clear that it is for our own good, that is, where we are in the presence of examples and where we see the negative and positive outcomes with our own eyes, yet we still cannot change. This shows how strong desire is, since it is our nature. Despite the myriad intellectual systems we build and all the self-persuasion, it is hard to resist desire.
We only refrain after we see, before our very eyes, the bitterness and the punishment alongside the desire and the sweetness. In other words, we only refrain when intellect and desire stand face to face. Even then, we calculate according to the measure of suffering, just as we are willing to suffer working all day in order to have something to eat in the evening. However, in such a case, the calculation is revealed.
Therefore, Baal HaSulam says in the Introduction to The Study of the Ten Sefirot that if the Creator were revealed, and His entire system and His attitude toward us were revealed, the whole world would be completely righteous. Everyone would see what brings good and evil. There would be disclosure of reward and punishment, and we would have no choice but to choose the good. Even if we wanted to follow our desire, we would see the blow that we would receive and that it would not be worthwhile.
Even in our current state, we restrain many impulses so as not to suffer, be ashamed, imprisoned, or beaten. This tendency exists in everyone.
But how do we convince ourselves that spirituality is a necessity? We read in books that there is reward for certain actions, for various uses of desire, and punishment for the opposite, but since we do not immediately see reward and punishment, since they are not revealed, this does not help us become convinced.
How can we build an auxiliary system through which we relate to them as though they were revealed?
RABASH says that we must learn from our friends on the spiritual path, listen to their words, observe their actions, learn how they yearn, and thus receive strength to cope with natural desires, and present an image of correct effort and work and yearning for the correct result to those friends.
We cannot decide in advance that our strength is gone and that we must cry out to the Creator. Even in the face of visible punishment, we need to persuade the desire to let go so as not to activate it. Certainly, when we say that all of our desires are worthless, that everything we see in this world is of no importance, which includes the spirituality we long to attain through desires operating in that direction, from this alone we cannot arrive at a plea to the Creator.
We need to let go of all these desires, set aside their nature, and then turn to the Creator, precisely when we have no drive to do so, no connection with Him, since He is concealed.
Can we leap over the concealment and create an alternative channel through which to feel the Creator and then turn to Him? Can we relinquish all actions that will lead to disappointment, which in turn will lead to turning to the Creator? This could take many years. Is it possible to turn to the Creator even before becoming disappointed in working with our desires?
Where can we draw the disappointment destined to come in ten years and bring it into the present moment? Is it possible to accelerate the process?
We can try to mingle with depressed people or ask society to provide feelings of life’s insignificance, the worthlessness of our work and ourselves, and our lack of strength for anything. Perhaps people will gladly supply this, but will it impress us enough to ask the Creator for help?
Apparently not, because turning to the Creator is above nature. We turn to the Creator to change our nature, rather than simply crying out, “Help me profit!” or placing a note in the Western Wall. It is a request for an inversion within ourselves, for a change of one’s very nature.
Therefore, we need to act according to our nature and, time and again, see how our own nature obstructs us from reaching the true thing, so that we see that we cannot attain it, and only then can we ask for our nature to be changed.
Still, we must accelerate time. We need to shorten the duration of the process. What does “shortening the duration” mean? It means realizing all possible actions and desires one after another, and then quickly becoming disappointed. That is, the more vigorously we go through all the possibilities available in our egoistic nature, trying every action, desire, and approach that we think might bring us to the goal, the faster we see failure.
There are people who study slowly, act lazily, and say to themselves, “It’s all right, another ten or fifteen years.” There are also those who invest themselves completely, and after only a few months feel countless descents and disappointments, and already grasp something. The others, still happy and good-hearted, will wait a long time before they understand.
Indeed, we should rejoice in states of disappointment. Disappointment from what? From our own powers, that is, from realizing that we cannot attain the goal by our own strength. The point is not to rejoice in other kinds of things, unless we are connected to the goal.
Only disappointments carry us from one discernment to another until we determine that we are incapable. Only through this experience do more and more facts accumulate, proving our helplessness to us, until a true urge builds within us to turn to the Creator.
There is no choice. The more we become disappointed, the more we will exert at attaining the goal. The goal becomes increasingly important as we are disappointed in our own strength. In the end, we desire the goal so intensely and ascertain that we cannot attain it; this is called revolving all day around that pole “until it does not let one sleep.” This is like someone with an enormous craving who cannot fulfill it, until they cry out to the Creator.
Related Material:
Talks about the Steps of the Ladder, Part 153
Talks about the Steps of the Ladder, Part 152
Talks about the Steps of the Ladder, Part 151
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When the Creator said to Abraham to circumcise himself, Abraham consulted with his friends (Rabash, “And the Lord Appeared to Him at the Oaks of Mamre”).
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