Answer: As we approach the Creator, we must constantly aim ourselves to this unique creative force — “There is none else besides Him” — and only with it to solidarize and attribute everything to it.

If we do this, we will eventually be able to actually begin to perceive everything around us as the outcome of the one unique force, which means to perceive Him through all of its different opposite outcomes.

As a result of the infinite revelations of the Creator, we will begin to feel Him as the force behind everything. This means that the attainment of the Creator as the one and unique happens thanks to the fact that we perceive Him as present in all the different attributes, forces, and opposite actions.

Question: And at the same time the one who perceives remains?

Answer: Of course. A person does not disappear in any way, and this is its uniqueness: it was created this way, so that when one attains the Creator he will become equivalent to Him. This is the reason that he does not disappear in any way, and does not destroy or annul himself. To the extent that he can increase the Creator and see His uniqueness in all the opposite revelations of nature and of ourselves, a person can become similar to, equivalent to the Creator.
From Rav Dr. Michael Laitman KabTV’s “Fundamentals of Kabbalah” 1/27/19

Seeing and sensing the Creator through the intention to bestow

There are moments when we want to feel the Creator so badly that the silence itself begins to hurt. Someone we love is in pain. We have said the words we know, and afterward the room is just as quiet. We still have to sit beside the person we love, answer their questions, and face our own fear. What would it mean for the Creator to become real to us in that very room, in the life we are already living?

What it means to see the Creator

To see the Creator is to recognize one acting force in the whole of a state. The thoughts that come to us, the desires that move us, and the circumstances we experience as coming from outside can all be felt as belonging to one source. The One who brought the state into being acts within it and has brought it to its present form. The words “I am the first and I am the last” reach into the present in this way. The same One can be discovered in what is happening now.

Under concealment, we feel a different world. My fear seems to be mine alone. The person in front of me seems to hold my happiness in their hands. A thought keeps returning and seems to have a life of its own. We receive through vessels, the desires in which reality is felt, and what we perceive depends on their condition. As those vessels are corrected, the source of what we receive becomes clearer. Seeing in this sense is a change in what the heart and mind can recognize together.

The higher image we return to

Imagination gives this work a direction. We can picture how this same moment would appear if the whole of it belonged to one source. We include the event, the people around us, the wish to escape it, and even the thought that says we have been left alone. The higher image is a more unified way of perceiving the actual state. We imagine a relation in which the Creator is One, Unique, and Unified.

The distance between that image and what we feel tells us where the work lies. We may be able to connect one part of the state and find another part almost unbearable to include. The next moment may reveal a desire we had never noticed. Returning to the higher image means including what has now come to light and asking how this, too, could belong to the One. The picture guides our effort. Spiritual sight is the recognition that eventually becomes possible in the corrected vessel.

Sensing the Creator within

The experience of closeness or distance takes many forms. Hunger, cold, pain, a harsh voice, and the sudden warmth of being welcomed can all be felt through the vessel. In Kabbalistic language, what the vessel senses is a greater or lesser measure of light. The variation is felt in our capacity to receive and relate to what comes. The light of Ein Sof is described as being at absolute rest. As our attitude is corrected, the same source can be recognized through experiences that once seemed to have nothing in common.

This helps explain why repeating “There Is None Else Besides Him” can leave us feeling untouched. We can hear ourselves say it and still be frightened or angry. The words can direct our attention to the actual desire in which we feel the separation. What do I want now? What seems to have power over me? Can I turn toward the Creator from inside this feeling? A real answer may begin with the painful recognition that I cannot yet do so.

The place where closeness is felt

Baal HaSulam in his letters describes the person, the Creator, and the state coming together. In a particular desire, this means bringing the desire itself, our attitude within it, and our understanding of the Creator into one relation. The experience is called adhesion. The Creator is sensed within the very desire in which we had felt only ourselves.

The same work can be discerned through “world, year, soul.” World includes the surrounding conditions and our relation to other souls. Year names the condition proper to the spiritual degree. Soul names the inner degree of the one who experiences it. Each desire has its own configuration of the three. We discern the Creator as the cause in each, then bring them together as a single experience. Since the whole state is felt within the soul, we may speak of being included in Him, of sensing Him within us, or of being together. Each expression points to the same adhesion.

This takes time. Before the Machsom, the threshold of spiritual attainment, we can examine our confusion and the places where we feel remote. Our errors leave impressions of where connection was beyond us. After the threshold, the degree of closeness is measured by equivalence of form, the extent to which our intention corresponds to the Creator and we can actually unite with Him.

Giving contentment to the Creator

When a gift reaches us at the right moment, there can be an instant when its meaning changes. We still feel what we have received, and suddenly the giver matters to us within the pleasure itself. That change in what matters gives us a way to approach the intention to give contentment to the Creator. The desire to receive is still there. Its use becomes an act of bestowal when we receive with the intention of turning the pleasure toward the Giver and uniting with Him.

Consider a blessing over coffee. Before the first sip, there is already a desire and the anticipation of its filling. The blessing brings the vessel and the pleasure into relation with the Giver. In the language of Kabbalah, the screen and Reflected Light make that relation an inner action. The screen enables the person to govern the use of the desire by an intention to bestow. Through Reflected Light the pleasure can be received in that relation. The ordinary act becomes a place where unification is revealed.

This is the inner meaning of a Mitzva, or commandment. The desire is the material, and its spiritual quality follows the intention with which we use it. To give contentment to the Creator is to let that intention govern what we do with what we are given. It may begin in something as small as a sip of coffee. It reaches into a far more demanding place when the desire at hand is to be right, to be admired, or to see someone else humbled. We can feel how hard it is to want the Giver within a desire that seems to have room only for ourselves.

Turning toward the Creator now

“If I am not for myself, who is for me?” The physician has permission to heal. Where the Creator’s unity is concealed, the work includes taking responsibility for what is in our hands. We can make the call, bring the glass of water, or sit beside someone until they fall asleep. Within that action, we can also examine the attitude with which we act and seek the One who brought us into the state. The effort has a place even while our heart feels far from Him.

Pain and pleasure both give us somewhere to turn. In pain we may feel wholly at the mercy of what happened. In pleasure we may hardly think of its source. When a painful state is connected to the Creator, the change in how we receive it is called sweetening. We can do our part in the circumstances and bring the reaction they awaken into the same work. Where we cannot make the connection, we can ask for the strength to do so.

In study we seek the Light that Reforms for this purpose. The Torah is said to heal the whole body. What needs healing is the sense of an independent “I” that fills our perception so completely that the Creator’s action is hidden. The higher image directs our request toward the part of the state we still experience as separate. We can picture the unity we long for, notice the point at which we lose it, and bring that point to the work. The correction itself is given from Above.

The room may still be quiet. The person beside us may still be afraid, and we may feel afraid with them. We can stay beside them. We can ask to recognize the Creator in the love that keeps us there, in the fear that rises in us, and in the desire to give what little we can. Perhaps the first opening is simply that we want Him to be felt in this moment. And when that relation becomes real within the desire, the One we were seeking is felt within the very life we had thought we were living alone.

Answer: How could it be otherwise? Everything comes from the Creator. That is stated at the beginning of our prayer: “I am the First, and I am the Last,” and “There is none else besides Me.” By this, we strengthen ourselves and place ourselves in the position that the Creator has affirmed as our true state.

Question: And if we miss this moment, are we essentially missing the connection with Him?

Answer: Of course.
From Rav Dr. Michael Laitman from the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 9/6/24, Writings of Rabash “He Who Prays for His Friend”

Exertion and the choice of the path of Torah

According to the sages, the Creator expressed, “I am the first and I am the last.” A person can take comfort in those words and still wake before dawn wondering what they should have done differently. The mind returns to the same conversation. It rehearses a future it cannot secure. And somewhere in that exhausted effort a quieter question arises. If the Creator is already at the beginning and the end, what is being asked of me now?

The work that belongs to us

The beginning and the end are sealed, both for the whole of creation and for each particular state. The spiritual records, or Reshimot, set the point from which we start and the next degree we are to reach. Our choice lies in the passage between them. We can go through the state by the path of Torah or by the path of suffering. The difference lies in the attitude we establish toward what is already unfolding.

This gives us somewhere to put the effort that fear spends on the future and regret spends on the past. Lot’s wife looks back and becomes salt. We can feel something of that stillness when we keep asking why we were made with these qualities or why our life began as it did. The present offers a particular thought, desire, or decision in which we can begin to recognize the Creator’s action. It may be the very thought we have been trying to escape.

Where the Creator’s unity remains concealed, we still have to act. “The physician has been given permission to heal.” The hand that can help has work to do, even while the heart struggles to see who governs the state. “If I am not for myself, who is for me?” expresses the responsibility of someone who has yet to attain unity. A person can know the words “There Is None Else Besides Him” and still have to discover their truth in the vessels, the desires through which reality is felt. This takes place in the actual decisions and encounters of a life.

We gather what feels scattered. We bring the desire that moved us, the thought that justified it, and the circumstances that seemed to stand apart into the same inquiry. In which of these do I still feel a separate power? Where do I insist that everything depends on me? The distance between the unity we can picture and what we actually feel shows us where the work begins.

The choice of the path of Torah

A blow can leave us with one consuming wish. We want what happened to be undone. When something good arrives, our first impulse may be to hold it close and congratulate ourselves for having secured it. Both states give us work. We can begin to relate the pain and the pleasure, and our reaction to each, to the same source. When that connection becomes real, a blow is “sweetened” in the way we experience it. The facts of the event can stay exactly as they were. What changes is the way we receive it as we come to feel the One who brought us through it.

On the path of suffering, blows expose the limits of our sense of control. Failures, mistakes, and deliberate wrongs can press us to see the separation in which we are living. The path of Torah begins in the same material, with a willingness to examine what a state is revealing now. In study we seek the Light that Reforms. We bring it the part of us that feels alone, self-sufficient, or ruled by other forces, and ask for the strength to establish a different relation to what is happening. Sometimes the honest beginning of that request is simply the admission that we have no strength to make the connection.

“Everything will be clarified in the intention.” We may say inwardly that the state comes from the Creator and feel the words fall flat. That distance shows how much of our attitude still needs correction. The choice is renewed in the effort to turn toward the Creator from within the desire we actually have. We come to a decision about what we want, ask for the strength to carry it out, and receive the force of correction from Above. Everyone will ultimately return. Our willingness to do this work shapes the pace and manner of our passage.

When we try to make the world answer

The same struggle appears on the scale of human life. We can devote immense ingenuity to rearranging our surroundings and still be inwardly at the mercy of what happens. Imagine providing for the ordinary necessities of life and giving the rest of our effort to the relation in which we receive it. The light of Ein Sof is said to be at absolute rest. When our attitude has been corrected toward every state that can come from the Creator, that stillness can be perceived. The effort that once went into securing a different world becomes the work of meeting this one in unity.

What a commandment asks of a desire

A Mitzva, or commandment, is the correct use of a particular desire so that it is united with the Creator. The desire is the material of the work. Its spiritual quality depends on the intention governing its use, on whether we can use it in order to bestow. Think of the moment after a hurtful exchange when the desire to be vindicated seems to take up all the room inside us. The work begins within that desire, where we can discover what governs it and what it would mean to turn toward the Creator from there.

This gives failure a place in understanding a commandment. A person may have to encounter the full force of a desire and feel its opposition to the Creator before knowing what its correction requires. “Wicked” and “righteous” name states a person passes through. In separation, we can feel so far from the Creator that we lack even the wish to connect what is happening to Him.

Through successive states we gather impressions of where we felt divided and what moved us to ask for correction. The same vessel in which we experienced that distance can become the place of revelation. That revelation is the reward. The ten Sefirot that conveyed influences from Keter to Malchut also served as coverings through which Malchut could experience separation. Each covering becomes a particular revelation, and all those revelations enter the name “the Good Who Does Good.”

The screen and the strength of desire

Annulment takes place amid real desire, even when pride, envy, hatred, or the hunger for honor and pleasure are strong. The screen makes it possible to work actively with that strength and direct the use of the desire toward bestowal.

The inner struggle between receiving and bestowing can be felt sharply. The means to work with it come from Above, and what opens to us is a portion we can actually work with. We may be shown ten kilos of desire, be able to restrict all ten, and be able to unite two with the Creator. The remaining revealed portion is held under restriction until it can be used. In the language of the Partzuf, it remains in the Sof. Where a desire can be used in unification, Direct Light clothed in Reflected Light is felt as Inner Light, in other words, the sensation and attainment of the Creator within the person.

The blessing over coffee

Even a cup of coffee gives this work a concrete form. There is the desire, the pleasure it is about to receive, and the Giver. In the blessing, the screen and Reflected Light unite the vessel and its filling with the Giver. An ordinary pleasure can become the place where unity is revealed. The act is as specific as the desire itself. It gives substance to a principle we might otherwise say without feeling.

How we establish an attitude

Baal HaSulam describes a person, the Creator, and the state the person is in coming together. From within a particular desire, we bring together the desire itself, our attitude within it, and our perception of the Creator. To unify the state is to discover that the Creator brought it into being, acts within it, and brought it to its present form. This recognition reaches into our relationship with ourselves and with everyone who appears in our world.

The same work unfolds through three dimensions, “world, year, soul.” We recognize the Creator as the cause in each dimension and then bring them together in one perception. The image of the high priest on Yom Kippur makes the precision of this work tangible. The high priest names the degree of the soul. Yom Kippur names the corresponding condition of year. The Temple and the Holy of Holies belong to the surrounding conditions of world, including our relation to the other souls. These conditions become clear gradually. We bring the vessel into relation with the Creator, and the correction is given by Him.

When the distance itself becomes visible

Before the Machsom, the threshold of spiritual attainment, we can examine how remote, confused, and unable to unify we feel. Even our errors can leave precise impressions of where we could find no connection. Beyond that threshold, spiritual degrees express equivalence of form, the extent to which our intention comes into correspondence with the Creator and we can actually unite with Him. What felt like distance can become the very place in which closeness is felt.

There may still be a night when we go over everything we said and wonder how we will face the morning. There may still be a call to make, an apology to offer, someone whose pain we can ease. We can do what is in our hands and turn toward the Creator from within the desire that is moving us. Perhaps all we can bring at first is the wish to recognize Him in this one state. That wish is ours to bring. The first and the last already belong to Him. The middle is where we can come to feel it.

Answer: The soul is a property of similarity to the Creator. If I begin to strive to bestow, to fulfill, and to be kind to others, that is, if I will try to somehow manifest in myself all the properties of the Creator that I know in relation to others, then I will increasingly feel myself approaching the Creator until I begin to feel Him more and more clearly.

It is this aspiration to discover an inclination for bestowal and love for other people in myself, that will be called the soul inside me.

Question: But why is it so? It is not clear.

Answer: There is nothing else besides this.

Comment: It is love and unity again.

My Response: This is the property of the Creator. It is His manifestation in relation to us, and in us this property is manifested as opposite to the Creator.

Question: Could they not have come up with something else?

Answer: You do not like it because it is too far away from you, opposite to you. That is why it was created this way, so that you could attain the Creator from the opposite state.
From Rav Dr. Michael Laitman from KabTV’s “The Study of the Ten Sefirot (TES)” 10/16/22

There are moments when we feel a hollow place within us and reach, almost without thinking, for something to fill it. We want the ache to pass. Yet sometimes, even when we receive what we thought we wanted, the ache remains. Then a more intimate question becomes possible. What is this emptiness asking of me? The question changes the meaning of the ache. A longing we were ready to silence may become the first place where the soul begins to act for itself.

The Long Descent Toward a Choice

The Creator brings the desire to receive into being as existence from absence. Something entirely new appears, a desire capable of receiving from the Giver. At its origin, it remains entirely within the Creator’s domain. Its existence has been given to it, and an independent response is still beyond it. The desire must pass through many stages and descend all the way to this world before it can begin the work for which it was created.

The distance is difficult to bear once we feel it. Yet in that distance the desire acquires the conditions and discernments that make a response possible. It can begin to tell the difference between what moves it and the quality of the One who gives. It can discover where it stands in relation to Him and determine its own attitude to that difference. From the root of the soul, a creature gradually emerges with the capacity to stand before its Creator and respond.

How Independence Grows Through Adhesion

On the ascent from this world toward the End of Correction, deeper layers of the desire to receive are revealed. This growing depth or coarseness is called Aviut. At each degree, more of the desire becomes available to the creature, and with it comes the work of giving that desire an intention to bestow. Each new depth reveals how distinct the creature is in its very substance. Each act of bestowal brings it closer to the Creator in the way it acts.

This is the intimacy of adhesion. The creature draws near through likeness of action while feeling ever more distinctly the desire from which it acts. Imagine the tenderness of discovering that the very place in us that has always asked to be filled can take part in giving. We have something real from which to turn toward the Giver. As our desire deepens, so does the possibility of making that turning our own.

The Question Inside the Emptiness

The point in the heart begins to awaken as a deficiency, an inner lack. We may feel the hollow before we can say what belongs there. Even when the longing grows stronger, its strength alone tells us very little about its purpose. At every degree, the creature must look again at the particular lack now stirring in it and ask what this opening is for. What am I asking to receive? What could this longing make possible between me and the Creator?

Only in relation to the Creator can the creature make that examination. It brings its longing face to face with the quality of bestowal and feels the difference between the two. There is honesty in standing there with the desire we actually have. Some part of us may still want every answer for ourselves. To see that clearly, and to remain before the Giver with that knowledge, is already to take our longing seriously.

The Diminishing of the Moon

The relationship between Zeir Anpin and Malchut, together called ZON, gives this inner work a spiritual form. Zeir Anpin is the giving side and represents what is above. Malchut is the receiving side. The image of the moon’s complaint marks the point from which Malchut can begin to exercise her own independence. Through her self-diminishment, she makes room to take on the way of acting she sees in Zeir Anpin. The form she receives from above can then become the form of her own action.

What is called reason in Zeir Anpin can be realised by Malchut above reason. The Written Torah in Zeir Anpin has its counterpart in the Oral Torah in Malchut. What appears as judgment above takes the form of law in her. In each instance Malchut has to realise, from her own side, the form she receives. Her independence and adhesion must be equal in measure. She uses her powers only to the extent that she can bring her independent desire into conformity with the Giver. There is a quiet dignity in this self-diminishment. Through it, she determines how much of her own desire she can bring into an act of bestowal.

What We Do With the Qualities We Receive

The creature begins as a point of desire. To discover what form that desire can take, it depends on the first nine Sefirot incorporated within Malchut. These carry the qualities of the Emanator. Every example available to the creature comes from the Creator. Even an inward, self-serving use of those qualities draws on the same forms. The difference lies in the direction the creature gives them.

The first nine can be directed into Malchut for her own reception. They can also be used from Malchut outward in an act of bestowal, the direction called Reflected Light. The whole work is in discerning and changing that use. We can recognise a trace of this in the way we respond to a kindness. It can end with the relief or pleasure it has brought us, or it can stir in us the desire to answer the person who gave it. Here the spiritual question goes all the way to the intention within the desire. What reaches me from the Giver can become the very means by which I turn toward Him.

How the General Becomes Personal

Zeir Anpin is called the general, and Malchut the particular. Malchut becomes particular as she discovers, absorbs and realises the forms in the general. Her particularity is her independence. Each form of bestowal that she takes upon herself becomes hers in the act of realising it. The fuller her participation in the general, the more fully she can stand in her own place.

Malchut is also called the Assembly of Israel, for she incorporates the souls. The actions of the Giver pass through her and reach them. Through the particular form she has established, each soul can come into likeness with the general. What comes from one Giver thus reaches each soul in a way that allows it to take part through its own desire and its own act.

What Becomes Our Own

A person’s spiritual private property is the general that the person acquires. The qualities come from the Creator, and they become ours to the extent that we realise them in our own desire. There is something deeply moving in this. We begin with a desire we did not bring into being. We pass through a distance we can scarcely understand. We feel a lack we may spend years trying to quiet. And from within that very lack, we can begin to answer.

One day we may recognise the old ache and find a new question in it. Can I use even this to give? To the degree that the answer becomes an action, something of the Giver’s way of being has become ours. The desire in which we once knew only how much we needed can now bear the form of the One to whom we long to draw near.

Answer: Basically these are very close actions.

Question: And yet, do we receive in order to bestow within reason or above reason?

Answer: Above reason. That is, our intention is for the sake of bestowal, and the action is reception. It turns out that the action is the opposite of itself.

Question: Do we also need to rise above the reason acquired for the sake of bestowal in order to reveal a new level of reason? Or is this the final action?

Answer: No, it is not final; these are degrees. Such work takes place at each degree. That is, the reason that we acquire for the sake of bestowal becomes insufficient at some point. It is correct, but insufficient.
From Rav Dr. Michael Laitman from the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 1/3/24, Writings of Baal HaSulam “Receiving in order to Bestow”

There comes a moment on the authentic spiritual path when all we know about giving cannot make us give. We can see the right thing to do and still feel our whole heart pulling in another direction. We want the reassurance that we will be understood, that our effort will matter, that something will come back to us. What becomes of our wish to give when none of that is certain? Faith above reason begins to take shape in that opening. It is the strength to place the desire to give above the demands of what we can already feel, understand and receive.

When the Gift Reveals the Giver

At first, the creature knows the pleasure of being filled. Then, within the pleasure, it begins to sense the Creator as the One who gives. What touches it now is the generosity behind what it receives. Something new wakes in it, a wish to be like the Giver. This awakening is the root of faith. The creature receives from the Creator the very quality by which it can turn toward Him.

There is a difference between the first, wholehearted wish to give and the giving of a creature that has come to own its desire to receive. At first, it can turn entirely toward giving because the desire to receive has yet to become its own independent choice. Later, it wants what the Creator gives with a longing it can call its own. When it senses the Giver again, it feels both desires in their full force. It wants to receive, and it wants to resemble Him. Faith gives it the strength to bring that very hunger into an act of giving. It can receive with the intention of bringing joy to the One who gives.

What Reason Can Know

Reason, in this inner work, is what we have actually attained. It is the clarity of something we have tasted and come to know from within. What we have attained at our present degree has become part of us. Yet when we stand before a higher degree, our present understanding can only tell us what we already know how to receive. The next degree calls for a greater capacity to give.

The receiving side of the creature must make the Giver’s way of acting its own. It does so above reason, by taking the quality of giving as its guide before it can experience the higher degree as knowledge. Its independence is expressed in how much of its own desire it can bring into likeness with the Creator. We remain the ones who long to receive, even as our actions take on the form of the One who gives.

Faith Opens the Way to Knowledge

Spiritual knowledge has its place within reason, where it can be experienced, understood and examined. Faith remains above reason as the strength and intention that make such knowledge possible. The order matters. When we want to possess the experience first, we bring the same grasping desire to the very place where we hope to encounter the Giver. To attain more of Him is to become capable of giving more.

Imagine that our present degree holds fifty measures of faith and fifty measures of understanding. At the next degree, our work is to make room for sixty measures of faith. The corresponding understanding can then be revealed. The Creator’s light is already present and at rest. Our effort is to enlarge the capacity to give through which we can receive it. What once lay beyond our understanding can become something we know from within. At the next step, faith again goes first.

When We Can No Longer Rely on Our Own Strength

We may sincerely want to draw close to the Creator and still expect Him to follow our plan. We are sure we know how the work should unfold, how soon it should bear fruit and what it should feel like when it does. Only when life presses against those certainties do we discover how fiercely we hold to them. The struggle makes our reliance on our own strength visible. After enough failed attempts to bend everything to our will, we may at last be ready to receive strength and guidance from the One we have been trying to draw near to.

Even surrender has to ripen into desire. A person can be exhausted and still long only to have things go their way. The wish to serve the Creator becomes genuine through many examinations, disappointments and choices. Gradually a person can come to feel, among all the possibilities, that this is what they most deeply want. The willingness to serve comes first. A relationship like that of a child, and later a partner, can follow. Each degree has to be wanted from within. We can hasten that ripening by making an effort wherever the opportunity presents itself, even when we cannot see which effort will open the heart.

The Shame That Asks for Correction

Sometimes, in our dealings with friends, we see for a moment how much resentment, envy or cruelty can live alongside our good intentions. We are shown only as much as we can bear, and even that can make us want to look away. Before the Creator the difference can feel immeasurably greater. To sense the distance between His giving and what is moving in us is a kind of shame that burns.

In that burning, we may want only for the feeling to stop. We can also begin to want a deeper change. Let me become someone who gives, even before I feel better about myself. Seeing what is selfish in us gives us a place to begin. The positive form of giving still has to be revealed. This is why the work with friends matters. A real relationship brings our intentions into view and gives us somewhere to turn the wish for correction into an act.

Holding On to the Purpose While Looking Within

An empty place in us can demand immediate filling. It can also become a place where we ask what our longing could serve. The deeper we work with our desire and with what arises among friends, the more room there is for discernment from above. We can look closely at the feeling, however uncomfortable, and ask what it reveals about our relationship with others and how it might bring us closer to the Creator.

We need enough strength from the purpose before we examine what hurts. We go only as deeply into criticism and self-examination as we can while still holding on to why we are there. Otherwise the pain takes up the whole field of vision. Even a joyful feeling calls for the same attention. What am I feeling this for? What can I learn from it? How can I use it to give? Reason helps us read what we feel. What endures from one inner state to another is the impression experience has left in us, even when the explanation we once had for it fades.

The Small Act We Can Still Give

There are days when the heart feels blank and there is scarcely anything to examine. On such a day, there may be dishes to wash, a repair to make or a friend who could use a hand. We can begin with what our hands are able to do. An outward act of giving can reach inward and help awaken a heart that feels closed. When feeling is alive and the purpose is near, we can give more attention to the quieter work of discerning what is moving within us.

We may long for a great experience to assure us that we are drawing closer. Yet faith may first become real in an ordinary act whose value we cannot feel while doing it. A friend finds the work already done. We have given something while our heart was still waiting for an answer. In that small place, the wish to resemble the Creator has begun to find a form of its own.

It is not important that the desire of the other is materialistic, but since he was originally a stranger to me, and my ego and hatred separated between us, therefore to leap above my ego and to fulfill the desire of the other is called working with an intention in order to bestow. I receive this fulfillment for him from above and convey it to him, meaning receiving in order to bestow.

Question: But all the time, when I finally check myself, I discover that I worked in order to benefit myself somehow!

Answer: So you are still in this world and not in the spiritual world. This is about the desire of the other that I truly absorb, putting it above my ego that rejects him. I ask the Upper Light to make your desire like my desire, and then I work on your desire as if it were my desire.

This means that I receive an opportunity from above to feel your desire “as my own.” But it isn’t mine, rather it is “like mine,” meaning above my ego. We don’t understand this important distinction.

It follows that I work on your desire and fulfill it because I want to connect with you, and in this connection to give contentment to the Creator. This is because we give Him contentment through all of the connections of the parts of the shattered vessel.”
From Rav Dr. Michael Laitman from the Preparation to the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 3/24/14

At first there is only the pleasure of receiving. Then something more intimate comes into view. We sense the One who wanted us to have what we received. The gift may be exactly the same, yet our whole experience of it changes. Something in us wants to answer the kindness we have felt. That is where the desire to resemble the Creator begins. And it is only the beginning, because eventually the creature must discover what it means to give while carrying a desire to receive that it can truly call its own.

Receiving Before We Know the Giver

In the first phase, the Creator gives the creature both the desire to receive and the pleasure that fills it. The creature welcomes what comes because it was made with the capacity to enjoy it. Its pleasure is real, but it has yet to choose the desire by which it receives. The Giver has prepared both the hunger and its satisfaction.

Then the creature begins to sense something within the pleasure itself. It feels the Creator as the One who gives. There is a difference between the warmth of what we receive and the moment we realise that someone wanted us to be warm. In that moment, the heart turns toward the giver. For the creature, the beauty of the Creator’s giving awakens a longing it could never have discovered in pleasure alone.

Wanting to Give

In the second phase, the creature wants to give as the Creator gives. The wish arises from the impression the Giver has made upon it. We can recognise something of that movement when another person’s kindness leaves us with a sudden wish to be kinder ourselves. We feel how beautiful it is to give, and for a moment giving seems the most natural thing in the world.

At this stage, the first desire to receive still lies within the creature, but it has yet to become a desire the creature has chosen for itself. The creature can therefore turn wholly toward giving. This first movement is precious. It lets the creature feel what it wants to resemble. Later, when its own hunger comes fully into view, that resemblance will have to take a more demanding form.

Discovering That Receiving Can Also Give

In the third phase, the desire turns toward receiving again. This time it takes in a measure of pleasure with the wish to please the One who gives it. The creature begins to discover how the act of receiving can serve the desire to give.

Think of someone who has prepared a meal for you with great care. You taste it and genuinely enjoy it. In accepting it gladly, you also give the person the pleasure of seeing their care received. The taste and your delight are real. So is your wish to give something back through the way you receive. Here the creature begins to discover that receiving can express care for the Giver.

Owning the Desire to Receive

In the fourth phase, the creature reaches a more decisive point. It discovers in itself a desire for the fullness of what the Creator gives. It can now say, I want to receive. Those words carry a weight they could never have had at the beginning. The creature now actively wants what it once received through a desire given to it. That deeper desire has become its own.

When the creature feels the Giver again, the wish to be like Him awakens within it. Now it must reckon with the full strength of its own longing. It remembers the simplicity of wanting only to give, yet it can no longer set its hunger aside in the same way. The desire to receive belongs to its very nature. The question it now faces is more intimate. What can I do with this desire that is truly mine?

Becoming Like the Creator Through What We Receive

The creature can give its own desire a new intention. It can welcome what the Creator gives and receive it for the sake of giving Him pleasure. Its enjoyment remains real. What changes is whom that enjoyment is meant to serve. The creature expresses its likeness to the Creator through the very capacity that makes it distinct from Him.

There is a tenderness in this last phase that the first awakening could only hint at. In the beginning, the creature received because the Creator made it able to receive. Then it wanted to give because it felt the beauty of His giving. Now it can stand before Him with the whole truth of its desire. I want what You give me. And I want the way I receive it to bring You joy.

In that act, the creature has an answer of its own. The Creator’s generosity has awakened a response that can come only from the creature, from its own longing and its own choice about how to use it. The desire that once knew only the pleasure of being filled has learned the pleasure of giving something back.

Answer: If everything is forgotten to the extent that I look at my friends and practically do not even recognize them, it means that true renewal is taking place.

This happens at every level in spirituality. That is why it is very strange to even see people as if you do not know them.

It happens. You will get used to it. Life becomes more interesting, though.
From Rav Dr. Michael Laitman from the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 2/24/20, “Preparation for the Convention”

There are moments on the spiritual path when we are sure we will remember forever. Something opens in us and, for a little while, we understand why we have struggled so long. We can put it into words. Perhaps we even say them to a friend. Then the state passes, and the words that once seemed to hold the whole truth lie in front of us like a letter we can read but can no longer hear in the voice of the person who wrote it. We may wonder whether anything of that moment is still alive in us.

Kabbalah as a Science of Feeling

Kabbalah is a science of feeling because the place of spiritual experience is the desire itself. Feeling is where we encounter what happens to us, where we discover how we respond, and where any real change must take hold. There is a kind of understanding that becomes possible only after the desire has felt something from within. We can speak beautifully about giving for years and still be astonished, the first time we give without inwardly waiting to be repaid, by what such an act feels like.

Even something as plain as two times two equals four can leave an impression in us. We can recall the answer with ease, yet the number can still carry the feeling of familiarity or the little pleasure of recognition. In spiritual work, the feeling is more intimate still. It is where we discover what it means for us, in this particular moment, to want to receive, to want to give, or to sense the Creator in relation to that desire.

The Work of the Intellect

The intellect helps us decipher what enters through feeling. We can ask where a feeling comes from, what brought it into view and what it has to do with our relationships. We can name it, distinguish it from another feeling and begin to see what we might do with it. It is as though the mind writes a label beside the place where the experience entered. The label helps us find our bearings while the experience is alive.

Imagine hearing a friend speak and feeling your whole body tighten before you know why. With attention, you may discover that what felt like anger began as a fear of being overlooked. That recognition can change the next words you speak. Knowledge, memory and understanding all have a place here. They help us see what the feeling is asking of us and how we might use it. The question reaches further when we bring it before the Creator. What can this feeling show me about the way I receive, and about the way I might learn to give?

When the Understanding Is Erased

We may enter a new state and find that the understanding of the previous one has slipped away. In spiritual development this can happen again and again. The intellect of one degree cannot simply be carried into the next, because the understanding belonged to what we were able to feel there. We can still remember an ordinary fact, such as a multiplication table. We may even remember the exact words we used to describe an inner discovery. To know that discovery as we once knew it, we would have to taste it again.

There is grief in losing access to something that once felt so clear. We may read our own words and ache at how far away the person who wrote them seems. There is room to let those words rest. Spiritual work does not depend on keeping every explanation in reach. What passes from state to state is the imprint left by the experience. If something from the earlier state comes alive again, it can do so because it was engraved in feeling.

What the Imprint Leaves in Us

We may have forgotten exactly how we once understood a friend’s pain, and still find ourselves listening a little longer the next time someone struggles to speak. Perhaps we cannot say when we learned to leave that silence open. The impression of having felt another person’s need can remain even after the reasoning and the story around it have faded. A former state can leave something in the way we meet the present one.

This is the wisdom of the experienced. A person has lived through disappointments, moments of tenderness and painful discoveries about their own intentions. The wisdom ripens through what they have been able to discern within those feelings. Having endured something is one part of experience. Coming to feel what it reveals, and allowing it to change how we respond, is how that experience enters us.

Bringing Feeling Back to the Purpose

A strong feeling, whether painful or joyful, gives us something to work with. We can ask what we are feeling it for, what it shows us about our desire and how it can bring us closer to the Creator. We look only as deeply into a difficult feeling as we can while keeping that purpose in view. When the pain fills our whole attention, even an honest examination can turn into going over the same hurt again and again. The purpose gives our attention somewhere to go.

Some days there is scarcely a feeling to examine. We may have the strength to wash the dishes, peel potatoes for a shared meal or help a friend finish a repair. Our hands can begin the act of giving while the heart is still quiet. Sometimes that simple outward work makes feeling possible again. When something is already burning within us, there is room for a finer examination. We can stay with it long enough to hear what it is telling us and ask what we are going to do with what we have felt.

We cannot keep every moment of clarity. But there may come an evening when a friend falters in the middle of a sentence, and we find ourselves able to wait with them. The explanation is gone. The care with which we listen may be the most faithful thing left of it.

Answer: You will not be able to convince yourself. We must do what is said, and we will see how the right and left lines connect with each other. Then, in the middle line, which combines them, we will attain the Creator — the truth.

Question: In the left line I cannot justify the Creator; in the right line I justify Him in faith above reason. But everything is solved in the middle line. How do I get to it?

Answer: To begin with it is necessary to aim to justify what is happening to you. This will be the real right line. And the middle line will be formed gradually.

Building a middle line is the work of both the Creator and the creation. They both create it.
From Rav Dr. Michael Laitman from the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 2/7/24, Writings of Baal HaSulam “Clean and Righteous Do Not Kill

We can spend an entire day trying to do good and still come home with a heart full of accusation. We remember the work we carried, the patience we offered, the moment someone passed over us without a word. A small disappointment becomes a private trial. We present the evidence, explain our intentions, and reach the same verdict again: we deserved something better.

Then, perhaps while remembering a face we refused to look at, another question enters. What was I hoping to receive? The question hurts because it reaches beneath the event. We wanted to give, but we also wanted to be seen giving. We wanted connection, provided it did not ask us to surrender the place we believed was ours.

There is something precious in the moment we become able to see this. We have begun to distinguish between the desire moving through us and the purpose by which we wish to live. A little room opens within a reaction that had seemed to fill our whole being. In that room, the work of the middle line can begin.

The middle line is the human form we gradually build between our receiving nature and the Creator’s quality of bestowal. On one side, we discover what we actually want. On the other, we turn toward the possibility of giving beyond the calculation of personal benefit. Our task is to bring these into a conscious relationship, so that the life within us can acquire the direction of bestowal.

This work asks for unusual honesty. We have to remain present when the picture of ourselves becomes difficult to bear. We also need a goal dear enough to draw us forward after we have seen that picture.

When the heart judges its own case

Our desire is capable of defending itself with extraordinary intelligence. Hurt can speak in the language of justice. Pride can present itself as responsibility. Even withdrawal can sound like concern for everyone’s peace. The mind supplies reasons for what the heart has already decided it needs.

This is why understanding our reactions intellectually changes so little by itself. We may describe our selfishness with precision and continue obeying it. We may know that we are seeking approval and still feel unable to act when approval disappears. Knowledge has entered the mind, while the desire remains in charge of what matters.

An inner judge begins to develop when we want a measure beyond immediate sweetness and bitterness. We can ask whether a response brings us closer to the quality we seek, even while the response we prefer is making a passionate argument for itself. The question becomes more exact: what will this action serve?

Such judgment requires independence from the reward the desire is offering. In the language of spiritual work, this independence belongs to Bina, the quality of bestowal. From that freedom, the illumination called Hochma can give clarity to what is being examined. The order is important. A desire that is secretly buying the verdict cannot become impartial merely by collecting more evidence.

We approach this independence through a restriction on the intention to use everything for ourselves. A sharp answer rises, and we allow a moment before speaking it. A chance to claim importance appears, and we examine why it feels so necessary. The receiving desire is still there. We are learning to see it in relation to something higher than its own demand.

At first, the space is small. It may last only long enough to hear the sentence we were about to say. But within that brief interval we can begin to feel the difference between being carried by a force and taking responsibility for our relationship to it.

Learning to see both lines

The right and left lines become discernible through each other. The quality of bestowal gives us a measure by which to recognize our receiving intention. The receiving intention, once revealed, shows us where bestowal has yet to become our nature. Each makes the other more distinct.

When we are fully immersed in one nature, it seems to be the whole of reality. We call its thoughts our thoughts and its urgencies our decisions. Only through contact with another quality do we begin to recognize the boundaries of the world in which we have been living.

This can be a painful discovery. We may have thought we were already generous because giving sometimes brought us joy. Now we encounter a situation in which giving costs us the pleasure of being right, appreciated, or indispensable. The resistance reveals a condition we had never noticed. Our apparent willingness had a border.

The right gives us the importance of bestowal, something worthy of our devotion. The left allows an honest encounter with the desire as it stands. Through their relationship, we can seek a response that uses the revealed material in the direction of the goal. The middle line takes form through this work of discernment and implementation.

We remain responsible within it. Turning toward the Creator does not require us to become an absence within our own life. We have to know, as truthfully as we can, where we stand and toward what we wish to move. A conscious “I” holds the goal while approaching both sides.

There is tenderness in this responsibility. We can admit how far we are from the quality we love without pretending that our longing has no value. The distance has become visible because something beyond our present nature has begun to matter. We now have material for a more truthful step.

The strength we receive from one another

The wish to change can bring us to a threshold where our own resources seem exhausted. We understand the next action. We can explain why it matters. Yet the desire will not follow. It asks again for the comfort, recognition, or certainty that the action seems to take away.

Here the environment becomes decisive. We learn what is worth wanting from the people whose values we allow to reach us. When friends value the Creator and the purpose of bestowal, their shared concern can awaken a desire that our private reasoning could never produce.

Receiving this influence asks us to lower our self-importance. We have to become willing to be affected by someone we might otherwise dismiss. A friend’s sincere effort may be clumsy. Their words may be simple. Yet if we give their longing weight, we can receive from it according to the depth of our participation.

We may see someone return to a difficult responsibility after being disappointed. We may notice a friend listening carefully when there is no praise to be earned. Their act enters us. Later, when our own desire urges us to withdraw, we remember that such a response is possible. What we have seen acquires importance within our own struggle.

This connection grows deeper when we enter the friends’ concerns. Their sorrow ceases to be a distant fact. Their effort becomes something we carry with them. In spiritual terms, we begin to participate in their vessels, the desires and capacities through which life is received. By gathering these broken vessels together with our own, we build a greater capacity for revelation.

An unexpected moment of inspiration can give us strength, but its warmth may pass. The work of connecting asks something of us and enlarges what we can hold. We acquire a share in another person’s striving through the effort to belong to it.

The purpose must stay clear. The friends help us receive the greatness of the Creator and the importance of bestowal. Each person still has to make the inner discernment and carry it into action. Our closeness becomes fruitful when it keeps directing us toward that shared purpose.

The ache between knowing and doing

Few experiences expose us as deeply as the failure to live by a decision we sincerely made. We resolved to listen, then interrupted. We meant to give another person room, then took the responsibility back. We saw what would protect the connection and felt ourselves choosing the familiar reward instead.

The gap between a decision in the mind and its execution in desire reveals brokenness. Something within us can recognize a higher direction while another part remains unable to follow. The discovery can leave us ashamed. We had hoped that understanding would be enough.

Spiritual correction begins with the revelation of a deficiency. The desires that come before us for correction already carry the condition that needs repair. Their resistance becomes visible through our effort to move toward bestowal. Confusion and failure can therefore uncover the very material on which the next step depends.

There is no need to turn this into a flattering story about ourselves. A wound to a relationship still asks for care. A promise left unfulfilled still leaves work to be done. Honest recognition has value when it helps us return to the person, the responsibility, or the connection we abandoned.

The inner judge clarifies what is needed. The inner officer carries that clarification into practice and guards its direction. We can write the message we avoided. We can finish the task after the enthusiasm has faded. We can listen again, this time with attention to what the other person is trying to say. The correction takes shape through a response.

A real movement toward correction is already an advance, however small it feels. We may still experience darkness or loss of confidence. Yet something has changed when the revealed deficiency leads us to a more precise effort. We are beginning to use what we have discovered.

This is where hope becomes more durable. We no longer need to maintain an image of ourselves as people who never fail. We need the willingness to bring what has failed back into the work of connection.

The desire that slowly changes its question

Our first search for meaning is often full of concern for ourselves. We want relief from emptiness. We want a future that feels worth entering. We fear spending our lives pursuing things that leave us hungry again. Even our longing for the spiritual can carry the hope of finally finding a lasting reward.

This beginning is called Lo Lishma, work still directed toward personal benefit. It is a real starting point. We begin with the desire we have, and through sustained effort and illumination, its orientation can gradually change.

At first, we may ask how the Creator will fill our life. As bestowal becomes important, another concern begins to appear: what is our relationship to Him, and how can our action approach His quality? The center of attention slowly moves. We become troubled by our inability to give, even when giving would bring no reassurance about ourselves.

This shift cannot be produced by demanding that the heart speak a more elevated language. A beautiful declaration can leave the underlying calculation untouched. Change needs the repeated meeting between our actual desire, the importance we receive from the friends, and the action we are trying to carry out.

Three points then begin to align: the person as they are, the action before them, and the Creator as the direction of resemblance. We clarify our present capacity and try to move toward a higher quality through a concrete act. The importance of the goal gives us strength to relinquish something the receiving intention wanted to keep.

What is relinquished may seem small from outside. Perhaps it is the last word in a disagreement, the pleasure of displaying our sacrifice, or the demand that someone change before we offer them attention. Inside, it can feel like giving up the only protection we know. The friends’ example and the greatness of the goal help us remain with the effort long enough to make a different response possible.

Carrying the middle line into an ordinary day

Every changing circumstance becomes a gate at which discernment and action are needed. An inconvenient request, an unwanted delay, an unexpected success: each reveals something about what rules us and gives us an opportunity to establish a relationship to it.

Accepting that the conditions come from the Creator gives the work its setting. Our response still has to be formed. We cannot wait for the succession of events to make us loving, or assume that enough disappointments will eventually make us wise. We participate by bringing the present state into relation with the goal.

In practice, this means remembering ourselves and the purpose before entering the argument within the heart. We notice the demand that has become urgent. We turn again toward bestowal. From the strength we can receive through connection, we seek an action that brings these into a more conscious relationship.

At first we forget for hours. We remember only after the words have been spoken or the opportunity has passed. Even then, we can return. We examine what happened, recognize the benefit that captured us, and prepare to meet a similar gate with greater awareness. Gradually, the interval between being swept away and remembering the goal can become shorter.

The aspiration is a continuous inner orientation: carrying the relationship to the Creator through work, responsibility, conversation, and rest. It develops through many returns. Each return gives the purpose another place in the life we actually live.

Perhaps tomorrow someone will again fail to acknowledge what we have done. The old coldness may rise with the same force. We may feel the familiar case assembling itself in the heart. This time, alongside it, we may also remember why the connection matters.

We can stay present long enough to hear the other person. We can see the part of ourselves that wants repayment and seek strength to act toward the quality we have chosen. The feeling may take time to change. The act gives our longing a place in the world.

Through such moments, the middle line becomes a lived relationship. The desire we were given is brought, step by step, toward the form of bestowal. What once passed through us as an unquestioned reaction becomes material for conscious care. Within that work, the human being begins to take shape.

Answer: To do this you need to step out of yourself, make yourself neutral, tune into the desire of the friend, be impressed by this desire, and turn to the Creator. It is as if you are asking for the friend without including your own inner desires.

Question: Is the quality of each individual’s deficiency (Hisaron) important for reaching a unified request? How can it be cultivated?

Answer: We cannot measure the deficiency of each individual and the collective integral deficiency. The only thing we can do is ask the Creator to unite us in such a way that all our vessels become one collective vessel (Kli).
From Rav Dr. Michael Laitman from the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 4/1/24, Writings of Rabash “Anyone Who Sanctifies the Seventh — 2”

There are mornings when I remember how much I once wanted to draw close to the Creator, and the memory hurts. The longing was so clear that I thought I would carry it for the rest of my life. Now I can say the same words and feel almost nothing. I wait for something to move in me. And the longer I wait, the easier it becomes to spend a whole day without reaching for anyone.

When the Heart Goes Quiet

Sometimes I make a quiet bargain with myself. When I feel the longing again, I’ll call a friend. When I feel something in prayer, I’ll stay with it a little longer. I can keep that bargain for weeks, waiting for the very desire that my isolation is helping to put to sleep.

The spiritual environment is the circle of friends with whom I share the aim of drawing close to the Creator. On a morning when I can hardly feel that aim, the friends can still speak of it as something real. I can go to them with the heart I have that day. It may be all I can do to sit down and ask what makes the goal matter to them. Even that question asks me to give up the comfort of being left alone with what I already know.

What We Receive from the Friends

A friend speaks about someone who disappointed him. He tells me how quickly he stopped caring what happened to that person, and how badly he wants to learn to give anyway. My first impulse is to say something sensible. When I let him finish, I hear how much that wish costs him. On my way home I find myself thinking of someone I’ve been avoiding. Until that evening, I had wished only to feel less hurt. Now I find myself wishing I could care for that person while I’m still hurt.

In spiritual work, a vessel is a desire that can feel a lack and receive what answers it. I acquire an additional vessel when something a friend longs for becomes a real need in me. His words may stay in my memory for a day. The desire goes deeper. It changes what I feel is missing, what I ask the Creator for, and what I’m willing to do the next time I meet the person I’ve avoided.

My friend may never know what I received from him. He may have only just begun to speak about these things. The depth of what I can receive depends on how willing I am to enter into his concern and share in it. A few sincere words can reach a place in me that years of thinking by myself have left untouched.

Giving the Friends Importance

There is a certain embarrassment in admitting how much I need the friends. I like to arrive with something to offer. It is harder to come knowing I have spent the whole day thinking about myself and to ask another person to remind me why the Creator matters. Giving the friends importance means letting their concern carry weight even when my own judgment tells me I have heard it all before.

I can ask a friend when the desire to give felt real to him that week. I can let the answer take its time. If he tells me he’s struggling, I can stay with his struggle long enough to feel what he’s asking for. And on a day when I do feel some warmth toward the goal, I can tell the friends what stirred it. What comes easily to me that morning may be exactly what someone else has been unable to find.

This is one way the environment gives us a sense of the greatness of the Creator. I begin to see, in the choices the friends are trying to make, why becoming more like the Creator in giving is worth the effort. The aim comes close enough to affect what I do with the next person who needs something from me.

Bringing the Broken Vessels Together

It can hurt to find out what happens when someone actually needs me. I may have spent the morning thinking about giving, then resent the first friend who asks me to change my plans. I hear myself answering him impatiently. Hours later I can still remember the pause on his end of the phone.

That gap between what I sincerely wanted and what I was able to do shows me where the vessel is broken. The work can begin right there. I can call back. I can ask how he is and stay on the line long enough to hear him. When I discover how quickly my concern gives way to convenience, I have something precise to bring to prayer. I need the strength to stay with him when there is a cost to staying.

We gather the broken vessels when we bring these incomplete desires into connection. A friend’s wish to give can enter the very place where I have seen my own inability to give. My effort to take his need to heart joins something of his desire with mine. Each time we do this, we make a little more room between us to discover the Creator.

Awakening from Above and from Below

An awakening from above can come with a tenderness I could never have summoned. For a while the Creator feels near, and prayer is as simple as speaking to someone I love. Then the feeling passes. I can remember exactly where I was when it came, even what the room looked like, and still find myself unable to want what I wanted then. The memory of an open heart can be painfully vivid.

Awakening from below begins with an effort I can make inside that very dryness. I turn to the friends, ask them to help me feel the importance of the goal, and let their desire change my own. The relationship between these two awakenings becomes clear in the work itself. An awakening from above can lend me strength. Through connection with the friends, I acquire the vessels in which that strength can be put to use. The longing they help me form gives me something to act on even on a day when nothing feels close.

Turning What We Receive into Action

The friends can help me see what matters, and the next choice is mine. Before I make it, I can ask myself what I am seeking from this encounter. I may want reassurance, or I may want to be thought well of. If I notice that honestly, I can choose one action that points toward the Creator. Sometimes that means letting a friend finish a difficult thought. Sometimes it means making time for him after the conversation is over, when nobody else will know.

In prayer I can bring the friend with me. His struggle has given my request a shape it never had when all I could ask for was to feel alive again. I can ask for the ability to care when I feel indifferent, to bear a little of what he carries, and to become closer to the Creator through the way I give. The effort is small enough to make today. The need behind it can deepen each time we meet.

Tomorrow I may wake up and feel that same silence. Somewhere a friend may be sitting with it too, convinced he has nothing to bring. I can call him while my own heart still feels closed. If I ask how he is and wait for the real answer, I may find that my prayer has already begun.

Answer: Yes, of course. It is said that for this purpose you engage in Torah and commandments, meaning you do everything you can: gather, speak, and feel how egoistic you are in relation to each other and to the whole world. Gradually, this leads to the revelation of evil within you.

When it reaches a certain level, you will inevitably want to turn to the Creator for correction. From that moment on, you begin to ascend the ladder of your corrected qualities.

Question: Does correction occur when we reach a specific point, or is it enough to ask?

Answer: It is enough to ask, but you cannot ask yet. The request must be genuine when you feel how egoistic you are and beg the Creator to rid you of your egoism.”

From Rav Dr. Michael Laitman from the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 8/30/24, Writings of Rabash “A Cure before the Blow”

There is a painful moment when we realize that we have been waiting to be loved by the very people we set out to love. We have given our time, kept our promises, and carried work that nobody wanted. Then someone else is thanked, and something in us goes cold. We can still smile. We can even insist that recognition means nothing to us. But if we listen closely, we may hear the condition we placed on our giving all along. We were willing to give as long as some part of the gift came back to us.

The revelation of the evil inclination begins when we can bear to see that condition. The desire for our own benefit has learned to speak in the language of care, duty, and even devotion. We can spend years believing it. The method of spiritual work asks us to invest ourselves deeply and daily in an environment devoted to mutual care. There, in the effort to serve real people and to learn from how they serve one another, we begin to see what our good intentions alone could never show us.

When Self Interest Speaks in the Language of Good

The evil inclination is easiest to recognize when its demand is crude. Its more persuasive voice sounds reasonable and generous. It says that once we have secured a little more money, influence, or freedom, we will finally be able to give ourselves to what matters. It offers a future good so vivid that we barely notice what we are giving up in the present. A compromise that would have troubled us yesterday can feel like a duty today.

This is the difference between judging by bitter and sweet and judging by truth and falsehood. Being appreciated feels sweet, and being overlooked feels bitter. Neither feeling tells us what governs our action. We may take on exhausting work because we enjoy being indispensable. We may also find it bitter to accept help because it costs us the pleasure of being the one who knows. The question is what our choice serves. Can we still do what will help the friends when the part we wanted for ourselves disappears?

Experience sharpens that question. An old disappointment may have taught us how easily we trade the goal for a reward. Put a larger reward before us and the old bargain suddenly looks like a new opportunity. We learn to take our certainty less seriously. We begin to understand why we need friends whose actions can remind us of the goal at the very moment our own reasoning is busy defending the detour.

Why the Work Requires So Much of Us

As long as connection remains an ideal we admire, we can imagine ourselves capable of it. Daily investment brings that belief into contact with other people’s needs, judgments, and pace. Someone takes longer than we think they should. A decision goes against us. The work we offered to do turns out to be tedious. In the small interval between seeing what would help and deciding whether to do it, a whole inner calculation can become visible.

This is why occasional enthusiasm takes us only so far. When we contribute only while we feel inspired, we rarely meet the part of ourselves that wants to withdraw as soon as the reward fades. A steady commitment keeps bringing us back to that point. We prepare a meal, make time for a friend, take a share of the common work, or do a task from far away with the group in mind. Through repetition, we discover the terms on which we have been willing to belong. We can see, sometimes with real grief, how much of what we called love depended on having our way.

Much of this work happens without a visible result. We may give ourselves wholeheartedly to something that falls apart. The disappointment can reveal how much we needed the outcome to assure us that our effort mattered. There is dignity in returning to the friends afterward and taking up the next piece of work. We can answer for the care we put into it. The result has a life beyond our hands.

What the Right Environment Gives Us

Every environment shapes what feels worth wanting. Where status is admired, we learn to notice who has it and how to get it. Among friends who openly value acts of care, something else begins to catch our attention. We see someone make room for the quietest person in the group. We see a friend return after a disagreement and listen with care. A gesture we might once have dismissed stays with us. Later, when the same choice is ours, we can imagine doing what we saw.

A right environment makes devotion visible in ordinary deeds. A friend may feel impatient and still sit down beside someone who needs company. The feeling can take time to catch up with the deed. Meanwhile, the act gives the rest of us something we can follow. When we make our own care visible in the same way, we give others a chance to draw strength from it. The example passes from person to person until a form of giving that once seemed foreign begins to feel possible and even dear.

We receive more from the friends as we invest more of ourselves in them. When we share responsibility for something, another person’s struggle can reach us with a force it never had when we were watching from the sidelines. Their perseverance enters our experience. Their disappointment may help us recognize a promise our own self-interest has been making to us. Some of the understanding we would have gained only through a long series of private failures becomes available through the life we share.

The Sorrow of Being Unable to Love

There is a difference between the pain of losing what we wanted and the pain of seeing that we cannot give what we wish to give. We may once have left a disagreement thinking about how badly we were treated. After working with the friends for some time, we may still feel the sting, yet find that something else hurts more. We saw the other person close up. We knew a gentle word might have helped. At the time, winning mattered more.

That second sorrow is sometimes called the suffering of love. We suffer over the distance between us and the care we have come to value. The environment gives this sorrow a place to arise because there is now a bond we want to protect. A failed attempt to connect can teach us something precise about the hold of pride, control, or indifference. We learn to feel the injury those tendencies do to the relationship, and our desire to be free of their rule grows more serious.

It takes courage to return after seeing this in ourselves. We may want to explain our motives until we feel innocent again, or disappear into the conviction that we are hopeless. The next act of care brings us back to the work at hand. We can listen to the person we interrupted. We can give someone else room to carry the responsibility we wanted to keep. As we try again, we learn how deep the resistance goes and how much the connection has come to mean to us.

When Effort Becomes a Prayer

Imagine a weight across the only path you can take. You put your shoulder against it and discover that it will barely move. You try again because what lies beyond it matters. Spiritual exertion comes into focus at that point. We have done what we can to serve and connect, yet we find that we cannot command the heart to give freely. The weight matters because it stands between us and the people we want to love.

The right environment helps us stay with both sides of that discovery. The friends keep the goal alive when we are tempted to settle for less, and daily effort shows us the limit of our own power. Faith above reason takes on a practical meaning here. We keep acting for the connection even when our familiar calculations tell us it makes no sense to give. Over time, our need for help becomes as real as the obstacle itself.

Then a prayer can rise from a place in us that had never needed to speak before. We ask the Creator for the power to give without quietly reclaiming the gift. Our words carry the memory of all those moments when we wanted to love and found ourselves bargaining. The plea is born through what we have tried, what we have seen, and what we still refuse to give up.

Returning to the Friends

The revelation of evil changes what we ask of the day. We still have work to do and people to whom we have made promises. Now an ordinary act can carry the whole purpose of the method. We can show up for a friend when there is nothing to be gained from being seen. We can let another person’s example move us. When resentment rises, we can notice the demand beneath it and remember what brought us together.

Sometimes all we can do is take our place beside the friends again and offer the little we can give today. Someone else’s patience may steady us. Our returning may, in turn, help someone who has been standing at the edge of the group, wondering whether it is worth trying again. This is why we invest so much in one another. The desire to love has to become precious enough that we can bear to see what stands in its way. And when we finally feel the full weight of that obstacle, we have friends beside us and a reason, from the depths of the heart, to ask for help.

Answer: It is not about the suffering of the ego when a person, looking back on the life he has lived, feels bad about missed opportunities: “There I missed the opportunity to get rich, here to make love, and here to take a break!” and so on, so that in his old age he would be reproaching and chewing at himself. This is a terrible state!

Spiritually, there is no such thing, since we discern where in my life I was unable to exert extra effort for the sake of connection with others, for the sake of their and my correction, for the sake of rising over our egoism onto a higher level, the human degree.

But this isn’t suffering because to the extent that I am experiencing it right now, I immediately correct it.

Question: Then what do the righteous mean by “suffering”?

Answer: They worry about missed opportunities and instantly fulfill them.

After all, they still experience desires. Conversely, they sort of pick up where they left some “unfinished business” in life. For example, at present I wish to see my students in a perfect state. This is my greatest wish, and it is already implementing the rest.”

From Rav Dr. Michael Laitman from KabTV’s “Foundations of the Integral Society” 3/11/12

A friend tells us, quietly, that we hurt them. Before they have finished speaking, we have an answer ready. We can explain the pressure we were under, correct a detail, and remind them of all the good we meant to do. We can leave the conversation with our account of ourselves intact. Or we can let them finish and stay long enough to hear what our actions cost them. In that moment, listening may require more of us than a whole day of work.

Whenever the spiritual path asks something of us and comfort offers a way around it, we have to turn toward the harder work. Each time we do, we learn what our own strength can accomplish and where it ends. Given enough honest effort, we can come to a certainty that shakes us. The change is as necessary as life itself, and we cannot make it happen. Only the Creator can give us the power we lack. True exertion is the work that brings us all the way to that certainty and into the prayer that follows.

Choosing the Harder Work

The easier option often comes with a convincing explanation. We will speak tomorrow, when everyone is calmer. We will take responsibility when the others are willing to do the same. We will give more of ourselves when we feel the warmth that once made giving easy. Each reason may contain some truth. The question is whether we are attending to a real need or bargaining for permission to keep our comfort.

The harder option asks us to give up the reward that makes the work agreeable to us. We may prefer to stay late doing a task everyone will see because it feels easier than spending ten minutes with a friend whose disappointment we would have to hear. An impressive undertaking can shelter us from a quiet obligation. To recognize which choice requires more exertion, we have to ask what each choice allows us to keep. Sometimes the thing we are guarding is our reputation. Sometimes it is the right to feel wronged.

The goal tells us which difficulty to take on. Imagine walking a narrow path with a boulder across it. Its weight concerns us because this is the way we need to go. A heavier boulder in a field nearby can occupy us for years while the path stays blocked. In our work with the friends, the obstacle might be the need to yield a decision, take responsibility for a hurt, or do something useful that no one will remember. Whenever the choice comes back to us, we turn toward the demand that the goal makes on us, however little our pride can get from answering it.

Discovering the Limit of Our Strength

There is work that takes everything we have and still lies within our power. We can prepare the room before others arrive, make the difficult phone call, or return to a conversation we would rather forget. We may finish exhausted. This work matters because it brings us close enough to see where effort can take us. Until we actually try, we can easily mistake reluctance for inability. We can also imagine that the heart will change as soon as we decide it should.

Then a day comes when we do everything we know how to do. We apologize and mean it. We keep listening when it would be easier to leave. Yet somewhere inside, we are waiting for the other person to admit that we were right. We want to care freely, and we watch ourselves turn care into a negotiation again. We can stop ourselves from speaking a harsh word. The power to release our inward claim is of another order.

This is the encounter with something that would take superhuman strength. The first weight was heavy, and we learned to lift it. Now we meet a weight we cannot shift by drawing harder on the same reserves. We discover how far we can go through discipline and how deeply the will to receive for ourselves still governs us. The discovery hurts because it comes after real effort. We can remember moments when we sincerely wanted to give, and we can see how quickly the old demand returned when we had something to lose.

When the Need Becomes a Matter of Life and Death

The words I cannot can bring a strange relief. If the task is beyond us, perhaps we can set it down and go on as before. True exertion reaches a more painful place. We become certain that this change is ours to face. We become equally certain that we cannot bring it about. Both facts stand before us at once, and neither will yield.

It takes time for connection to become that necessary. We have to give ourselves to it long enough to feel what it means when a bond is lost. We see a friend begin to speak freely again after a period of silence and realize how much we missed hearing their voice. We remember all the evenings when we went home satisfied that we had won an argument while the distance between us grew. Little by little, the cost of remaining as we are becomes harder to bear than the cost of facing what must change.

This is what gives the need its life-or-death urgency in the inner work. The life we seek is a life in which we can give and love beyond the narrow calculation of our own gain. We have reached the place where that life depends on crossing, and our own strength cannot carry us across. The certainty may come in a quiet moment. We may be sitting alone after the others have gone, with nothing left to argue. We know what stands in the way. We know what it costs to leave it there. We know we have reached the end of what we can do to move it.

The Friends Who Help Us Stay

It is hard to remain before such an obstacle alone. We may lower the goal until it asks only what we already know how to give. Among friends who keep choosing to care for one another, we see the goal embodied. Someone gives us their full attention on a day when we have little to offer. Someone makes room for us after we have made things difficult. Their actions help us remember what we are asking to become capable of.

We still have our own share of the work. We can arrive, listen, help, and repair what is within our reach. We can let the friends see our care in acts they can receive. Their support helps us return after a setback and examine what happened with greater honesty. As the work goes deeper, we discover where even the best example and the most faithful practice leave us in need of a power beyond our own.

The Prayer Only the Creator Can Answer

At first we may ask the Creator to make the work easier or to let the obstacle disappear. When the need has become clear, the request changes. We ask for the very capacity we discovered we lack. We want to be able to hear the friend whose words threaten our pride. We want to rejoice in what is good for them even when it brings us nothing. We want the freedom to give with a whole heart.

Only the Creator can answer this need at its root. We come to that recognition through our own attempts, through each time we found that the obstacle was still there, and through the growing certainty that we have to pass it. What we once said because we believed it becomes something we know from within. If the Creator gives us the power to make this movement, we will be able to make it. Everything we have done brings us to the point of asking for that power with our whole being.

This is exertion above reason. Our experience tells us exactly what our present nature can do. We honor that knowledge and still turn toward the Creator for a strength our experience cannot supply. The prayer may be as simple as the need itself. Creator, I must learn to love here. I have tried with all the strength I know. Give me the strength to do what I cannot do alone.

Taking the Next Step

The answer may become visible in a moment so small we could have missed it. A friend tells us something painful, and for once we hear the hurt before we hear the accusation. We have room inside to let them speak. The same words that would have sent us rushing to defend ourselves now reach a place in us that can receive them. We recognize the gift because we remember how many times we stood in that same place and could find no way through.

The path will ask for exertion again. We will meet another choice between protecting what feels safe and doing what the connection requires. We can take the harder step with the memory of what happened when we reached the end of our strength and asked for help. One day we may hear that old, familiar defense rise in us as a friend begins to speak. We can stay in the room. We can give them our attention. And inwardly, with all the need we have learned to feel, we can ask the Creator to help us hear.