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: How can people determine what is a necessity today?

My Answer: The level of necessity of today is a medium level of well-being in the place where a person is living. There are many methods of verifying the actual mean level. Baal HaSulam covers that in detail in the article The Future Generation. He refers to creation of all kinds of committees that would check the actual needs of every person, and fulfill them.

All of that is measured according to the needs of an average person. Let’s say that each family must have a room for each of its members. Each person must have a job. The family must have a car to get to and from work and for other needs. All of that is determined in accordance with changes that occur in the world. Notwithstanding, a family must have everything it needs to exit normally.

As a matter of fact, the problem is not what you have, but your attitude towards it. After all, the Creator doesn’t want you to suffer. The purpose of creation is to delight the creatures. Therefore, you confine your earthly life to the needs of your physical body – no more and no less.

You have to fill your desires for food, sex, family, wealth, honor, power and knowledge. You should feel no lack in those desires, and they should be filled to the measure that is an essential necessity for the life of your animal body. Anything that is beyond a necessity should be used to bestow to your fellow man.

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To be in the egoistic desire is to lack the instrument to turn this quality of egoism into the quality of the Creator. The Upper Light, the very quality of the Creator, is that special force that reforms us.

But it only does so in conjunction with our desire to change our qualities from egoistic to altruistic. It must be a true desire, i.e. it must come from the heart, and not by way of words or tears.

To reach such a genuine desire to change constitutes our entire work on ourselves in this life. Those who have undergone this process of transformation of their egoistic desire into the desire to bestow tell us about it in their books.

Just as in our world, parents provide all the necessary conditions for babies and their development, so have the Kabbalists prepared for us all that is necessary for our spiritual development. They have already united into one great soul over the course of centuries and have prepared our future world – and they are waiting there for us.

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A person never knows what desires will awaken inside him a moment later. He is also unable to determine the direction of his desires. A person is ignorant of his future state.

Humanity has always been interested in knowing its future state, but has never been able to satisfy its interest. All of our speculation is rooted in the fact that the future is unknown to us.

Why is it so? The reason is our ignorance of the system in which we exist. Actually, it’s quite a simple system of mutual connections between all of us. We are the ones who determine these mutual relationships. I shape your condition with my thoughts, and you do the same to me with yours.

My subsequent desire is a result of the desires of other people who are within the system, since we are absolutely mutually interdependent. If I  think good thoughts that will make you think similarly. If what I have is bad thoughts, you will have bad thoughts too. It’s similar to the situation, where a victim causes the appearance of a murderer, as if both of them determine and seek one another.

You are placed inside a network. The sum total of everyone’s state  determines your state, the way you feel, think, want and react.

You act unconsciously; you don’t have your own free will! Besides that universal mutual interdependence, there’s a plan at work, a program that leads all the souls to a pre-determined goal which is total harmony and absolute connection between them.

The process of our development is a process of purification, awareness and understanding of how each individual can consciously take part in it.

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In the news (from The Daily Mail): A psychologist has come up with a formula based on friendships, weather and holidays… Dr Cliff Arnall said the joys of spending time with friends and loved ones, appreciating nature in the sunshine and looking forward to the weekend and time off work combine to be at their strongest today… Dr Arnall said. “The most important things in our lives are our relationships – and no amount of money can buy that,” he added… According to his complicated algebraic formula, happiness equals O + (N x S) + Cpm/T + He.
O means being outdoors, N is nature and S stands for social interaction. Memories of childhood summers are represented by Cpm, temperature by T and excitement about holidays by He.

My Comment: This is only the case if I am an animal. But if I desire more, if my egoism grows at a faster rate than when I was a child, and I cannot satiate it no matter what I do – then the happiness formula won’t work. Both millionaires and paupers will remain miserable. The doctor’s prescription won’t work!

Happiness is when a desire is being fulfilled. But if my desire grows and demands fulfillment which is greater than the sum of the formula, then what am I to do, doc?

In fact, man’s desire does outgrow this world – and it can only be fulfilled with the sensation of the purpose of life, its eternal harmony. This desire is being revealed in us as we speak! We were programmed this way! While the true remedy lies in revealing eternal life, all that doctors can do is hand out sedatives and anti-depressants.

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A question I received: You always say that man is not free and obeys his genes, instincts, and influence of society. At the age of 20 he is fully formed, like a freshly minted coin, and all his actions are predefined in advance. So is it possible to be a free man, and what does it mean – to be free?

My Answer: To be free means to feel that you are 100% dependent upon the Creator, but “of your own free will,” meaning that it is your decision to be so.

Man feels free when he decides, on his own, that he wants to remain under the influence and authority of the Creator, instead of being slave to his egoism.

We can’t imagine what freedom means, because we think of it as the absence of any influence. However, that is an impossibility, as there is no such thing as an empty void free from any influence whatsoever.

Freedom is a balance of forces, achieved through one’s conscious choice and effort.

We can only become free if we rise above our egoistic desire.  This does not mean that we involuntarily and completely fall under the dominion of the Creator and the desire to bestow.  Instead, it is a choice we make to be governed by the desire to bestow instead of the ego.  It is then that we can reside in the balance between the attributes of reception and bestowal. Such a state is called freedom (Klipat Noga).

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A question I received: What does it mean to reveal Nature?

My Answer: To reveal Nature means to reveal the general law of Nature in which we are included and to reveal ourselves at a different stage.  In other words, it means to reveal reality in its true form, as opposed to its perception in our five corporeal senses. In that sense, we are no different that animals.

What makes us different from animals today is our egoistic desire to use all of Nature for our own benefit, the petty and narrow profit. But we have to learn to rise above this egoistic force that is within us all.

If we turn this egoistic force into a force of bestowal and love of our  neighbor, we will rise above our nature, attain bestowal, and become similar to the Creator, which is the general and the Upper Force of Nature. It is called “to reveal the Creator” in everyone. By that, one reveals the Upper Quality of bestowal in oneself and reaches an eternal and perfect life, as the Creator and as all of Nature.

Even when one loses his material animate body, he does not feel that he lacks for something, because this corporeal life is the smallest, worst and most insignificant form of life.

Rabash used an example of cutting the hair or nails.  Because the hair and nails represent the vegetative part on the animate part of the body, a person does not feel pain when he cuts them because the vegetative part is one level below the animate.

In the same way, when we rise above the animate level of Nature to the level of the Creator, we will stop perceiving the loss of our material life as an important and meaningful event.  But, until we have risen to this higher degree, we will continue to attach importance to it.

Once we rise to this next higher degree, we will realize that the only reason for us to remain in this life will be for the necessity of disseminating the knowledge of Kabbalah and the need for bestowal, in which case this opportunity will still exist. If this was not necessary and our corporeal body was to die, we would feel its death no more than what we feel when we cut our nails or hair.

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A question I received: We know that the path of spiritual development isn’t easy, and an individual is constantly thrown to the left and the right on it. When all of humanity begins to rise spiritually, how will it go through this process, given that it is not a very smooth path?

My Answer: First of all, those who engage in spiritual development are not the only people thrown in different directions in life. However, when all of humanity embarks on the path of ascending spiritually, it will not be thrown from state to state, but will instead rise calmly and orderly.

The fact of the matter is that the whole world will begin to rise as one man, a huge mass that will have a better appreciation of Nature. This will cause people’s thoughts to change, and little by little their desires will change in the direction of drawing closer to one another.

Humanity as a whole will not experience spiritual rises and falls and will not feel the inner resistance of the force of bestowal against the force of reception, where a person either adheres to his attributes of bestowal or to the egoistic desires of his heart.  The resistance of forces is what causes the experience of ascents and descents.

Conversely, all of humanity as a whole will have just one common desire, and it will join with Nature, merging with it more and more, tuning into Nature and rejecting itself before the common Nature. This will be a beautiful and smooth advancement and revelation – a wonderful path!

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A question I received: One who does not feel emptiness will not be able to reveal anything. The approaching blows will give people this emptiness. Is there another way?

My Answer: Of course, there is. We know that the appetite is stimulated during a meal or by watching others eat.

Why is this? First of all, you are influenced by society’s opinion. Second of all, Kabbalah explains that desire appears from within (from the Reshimot and Aviut from the Kli) or that desire (appetite) is roused in a person from outside (from the environment, the Aviut from the Light).

If we receive the desire from the Light (“the Light that reforms”), we will come to the goal by the most correct path.

Therefore, if we reveal the cause of even the smallest of blows to the world, it is by understanding their cause that we reveal the Light that comes to us from the corrected state. We then see this corrected state and how wonderful and immense it is compared to our current state. This entices us to move ahead toward the goal, and we will no longer need to be pushed ahead through suffering!

There are two paths: the path of Light and the path of suffering. This is why it is necessary to give the world the explanation of the suffering!

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Because our egoistic desire constantly develops, we also perceive the world as becoming more developed, as the world is our internal, subjective perception. As our desire grows, we feel that we become more developed, yet we also feel emptier.

As each individual egoistic desire (each person) develops, it starts to feel its dependence on the other egoistic desires (other people). At the same time, it perceives them as alien and strange to it. This kind of perception was created inside us on purpose, so we would collect all the other desires and make them our own.

It is in order to make us do this that the circumstances make each of us feel our dependence on the environment, whether our country or town, our relatives, the world, or all humanity. We later discover that our connection to the world is not simply necessary for our existence in this life, but in order to create the Upper World and our future existence.

This is why a new law is being revealed to us in this world: the law of mutual participation, or the law of mutual guarantee, altruism, and unity.

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