Daily Kabbalah Tip

Advice in the daily Kabbalah lesson is recommended, practical tasks for advancing spiritually

Only The Light Can Help

We need to scrutinize the desires, to make our best efforts, and reach a state where only the Light can help.

Worldly desires like the desire for money and desire for honor do not need to be corrected. I need to correct my desires that are against the connection with the group. During the reading I must make efforts to feel where these desires are. Like a baby who wants to grow, the most important thing is to make efforts.

A person needs to examine his actions. "You shall make you gatekeepers and guards in all your gates." This means you need to place markers in every corner where you are likely to return to that desire, to make some kind of ‘obstacles' that will prevent you from returning to it. What helps here is humility toward the friends, so it is worthwhile to play with it─me toward the group, me toward myself.

Eventually nothing will help, but in order to reach a state where only the Light can help, you first need to go through this.

 -from the 1^st part of the daily Kabbalah lesson (minutes 44-69)

Daily Kabbalah Definition

Definitions in the daily Kabbalah lesson guide a precise, spiritual approach to terms, & disqualify materialized corporeal definitions

"Hands," "Hand Washing," And "Eyes" In Spirituality

What is the spiritual interpretation of the terms "hands" and "eyes" and what is the matter of "hand washing" in spirituality?

"Hands" mean a person's greatest vessels of reception; with hands we receive and give, in lifting hands we bless. It is written that when a person "woke from bed" (awoke to spirituality and already "became sanctified" somewhat), he must perform "hand washing"─this is a unique spiritual action which one must perform in order to "become sanctified," to prepare his receptive vessels for use.

In "hand washing" one identifies through Ohr Hassadim (Light of Mercy) which of his desires may belong to Bina (intelligence) to the "upper vessel" from which "upper water" (Ohr Hassadim) gets poured into one's "hands," and which desires he needs to remove from use (from his "home") along with the "murky waters" which accumulate in the "vessel below," the "filthy water" in the desires to receive.

And once a person "sanctified his hands" through "hand washing" he can already "touch the eyes," meaning to begin scrutinizing his vessels through Ohr Hochma (Light of Wisdom), because the "eyes" mean vessels for receiving Ohr Hochma.

-from the 1st part of the daily Kabbalah lesson (minutes 21 - 28) 

Daily Kabbalah Reality Check

Examples in the daily Kabbalah lesson elucidate spiritual concepts through explanations of situations in this world

I Exerted Effort And I Found

What's the similarity between a positive balance in the bank, and spiritual earnings?

In The Book of Zohar it is written, "The tree of knowledge good and evil, won good, didn't win bad." What is this win?

The wisdom of Kabbalah talks of the word "win" as in purity in the meaning of purification, in other words to describe the degree of purity of a person, his degree of closeness to the Creator. What is this similar to?

As a man works and deposits his gains in the bank, he can check and see that at the end of the month he accumulated a balance of let's say $2000. Similar to that, is the spiritual advancement of a person, in which a man's gains are dependent on the amount of effort he exerted.

In fact Kabbalists say that all of reality is built from two opposing properties: the property of bestowal of the Creator and the property of reception of the creature. The more a person discovers how much the property of self reception controls him, he can demand the opposite property, the property of bestowal, and thus get closer to the Creator.

Through his demand, he acquires a new "instrument" called a "Masach" (screen) and it enables him to receive pleasure not with the intention to fill himself, but rather with the intention to give pleasure to others. The stronger the Masach is, the higher the person's positive balance is, and he can be concentrated on the desires of others above his own. By this, he gains a spiritual pleasure which is derived from filling desires outside him. In the bank example, you could say that his work brings him the ability to receive $2000 not to fill his self desire.

Similar to the physical earnings, the spiritual earnings depend on the person's effort, in the clarification of where his desires are aimed and in a demand to change them. However, unlike the earnings in this world, the spiritual earnings cannot be correctly described during the work, because in the course of doing the work, the person changes himself and acquires a new property. The more a person acquires degrees of bestowal, he exits the binding to his corporeal vessels, gets closer to the Creator, and experiences a wider and more whole reality. His work itself becomes his earning, and the renewals in it are perceived in him as a "find" and a great "win."