Question: Are there different feelings of evil with respect to the Creator and with respect to the friend?
Answer: For our will to receive it makes no difference whether it is dealing with the Creator or with a friend. There is no distinction because it always forms its attitude from its own uncorrected vessels.
If a person directs his attention to something outside his will to receive, whether it is the Creator or the friend, the measure of correction and the magnitude and quality of the will to receive, determine his attitude toward that object. There is no difference.
Therefore, we can use the group and according to our reaction to it and according to our mutual relations with it, examine and critically analyze our will to receive, demand correction, and carry them out. After all, if something has a direction aimed outside the will to receive and stands beyond it, then it is the same with respect to the group and with respect to the Creator.
However, when it concerns my attitude toward myself, then of course it matters whether we are speaking about the group or about the Creator. What pleasures can the group give me compared to the Creator?
Everything depends on the degree on which I stand. It may be that I perform a restriction with respect to the Creator and say, “What is the Creator to me? What matters to me is the respect of the group.” Or, on the contrary, I may already restrict my attitude toward the group: “What do I need the group for? I want the divine.” But it is me who wants.
When a person tries to work without turning to himself at all, he discovers that if it is not for himself, but outside himself, then it does not matter to him for whose sake it is done or to whom exactly it will bring benefit. If it is outside of me, if neither at the beginning, nor during the action, nor afterward do I receive any response within myself, then what difference does it make which of a thousand possible factors I am now bestowing to if the results remain there and do not return to me?
What difference does it make what these factors are? From the perspective of the will to receive, I cannot analyze them; I have no connection with them. It turns out as though I throw something out of myself into space, and that is all.
But how do I evaluate my bestowal? Is it great or small? Of high quality? The fact is that I measure only the extent to which it is detached from me. As Rabash writes, there is an awareness of the greatness of the Creator before a person disconnects from himself, and there is an awareness of the greatness of the Creator after he disconnects from himself.
In the second case, I work in a state where I do not feel my acts of bestowal at all. I detach them from my “I” as though casting them into space.
Why do I do this? Because society gives me the sense of the importance of such actions. In other words, I acquire a feeling of the importance of something that is outside my will to receive, a Kli, an unfulfilled desire, and suddenly I feel that I must fill it by bestowing outward from myself. Thus, a certain desire outside of me becomes filled.
If a person works on this, he gradually passes into a state in which he can truly touch what it means to act not for himself, above reason. And this comes gradually.
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From the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 2/26/26, Rabash, “What Is, ‘The Saboteur Was in the Flood, and Was Putting to Death,’ in the Work?”
Question: For strengthening the group, what is more important, disseminating Kabbalah or our inner work?
