For Whose Sake Should We Demand Unity?

Question: For whose sake should I demand unity now? For the group or for the whole world?

Answer: The common soul divides into many parts, and the order of their awakening divides into many phases. Meanwhile, we are going through two processes:

1. Being a part that received an awakening from Above, we are obligated to actualize it and become corrected. Only after being awakened in this way does a person ask the question about the meaning of life and find the answer by revealing the Creator. This task is incumbent on us first and foremost.

This might seem like a super egoistic endeavor. However, revealing the Creator means revealing the quality of bestowal, love for the neighbor, and realizing it through unity with others. Bestowal is self-rejection, self-nullification. You come out of yourself towards others and there you find your soul.

Therefore, the first impression is deceptive. You are endeavoring to find your soul and to fulfill it with eternal pleasure. The Creator Himself has given you this opportunity and endowed you with an impulse to achieve this. Any way you say it, it sounds extremely egocentric, but the real content, the inner essence is above egoism.

That's because we actualize all of this together by means of bestowal, love, unity, and mutual help. We do it by aspiring to come out of ourselves, instead of absorbing everything inside.

In the past Kabbalists did not have the opportunity to disseminate the science of Kabbalah throughout the world, to study it publicly, and to teach others. Yet, back then the particular correction of their souls in small groups was also aimed at the benefit of the whole world. That's because they acquired a great force of bestowal which operated among all the souls in the world, even though the world did not feel it.

2. Today we have to act in one more direction. We not only correct ourselves and acquire a greater inner force of bestowal in our groups, but also disseminate the Kabbalistic knowledge all over the world.

These are the two parallel vectors of our efforts, and they are both necessary.

From the 1^st part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 12/06/10, The Zohar

My Signature On The Bestowal Declaration

Question: What should we do about friends who don't awaken? Should we be patient with them just as with the outside world?

Answer: No. In the group we have signed a mutual agreement just as in the past Kabbalistic groups demanded newcomers to sign a statute. Do you want to be a friend? "A friend" is a person who puts forth all his energy working to unite. After all, the only way we will attain the goal is by means of uniting.

We do not have the ability to accept every person who is not yet ready for it as he will simply "water down" our forces, or might even confuse us and lead us astray. Baal HaSulam writes in the article "The Peace" that a person might understand that he cannot steal, yet not see anything wrong with not carrying out bestowal.

In spirituality, if you do not give the group everything you have to give it, it means you are stealing from it. Therefore, people who desire to enter the group have to know that they are signing the "bestowal declaration." They are taking on the obligation to put in their contribution, to give all of their energy for the sake of unity.

Otherwise a person has no place in the group. So let him sit home in front of the television set.

This has to be understood and the group has to demand it from everyone and from each person. We will not attain anything without unity.

From the 1^st part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 12/06/10, The Zohar