It Is Always Darkest Before The Dawn

There are different materials, for example dough, clay or marble, and there is what we make of it. In “Safra Detzniuta” there is an example of a farmer who comes to town and is surprised to see in the market rolls, pretzels, cookies, and other baked goods made from the same flour he produces.

According to evolution, the contact with the upper Light brings about many different forms, but the material that takes on these forms stays the same, and that is the desire to receive. So there are never any restrictions on the desire itself. We don’t do anything at all with it; our actions are only with regard to the forms.

Now our desire has an egotistic form that is aimed against the goal of creation. So we have to restrict this form, but not the desire. Only in this way will it receive a new correct form and we will be able to use it as we please.

Another problem is that we have to agree with the fact that we receive bad and corrupt forms. It is written, “a man’s heart is evil from his youth.” The Creator on his part, created the evil inclination, and we have to demand to advance to goodness.

Thus we have to show great restraint, to be tolerant toward all the forms through which the correction is performed. Some forms are even worse than the previous ones, but that doesn’t mean anything.

Impatience, outbursts, negative feelings, hate—can reveal things we’ve never encountered before on our way to the goal. Baal HaSulam brings the example of a fruit, which as it ripens goes through stages that are opposite from its final form. It becomes more sour, more bitter, less attractive, and only in the last stage does it begin to take its final form. A month before it ripens it can be poisonous. This is just as the darkness becomes thicker before dawn.

So we have to be very patient with the intermediate forms; they serve the development, although they may seem awful. We appreciate a person for his efforts, whether he does as much as he can do or not. The main point is that he shouldn’t be harmful and critical and as for the rest we can wait.

All our studying, all our advancement, all the understanding and the feeling do not appear in the material, but in its forms. This is what we study all the time. The desire is irrelevant. I look at the forms and at the differences between them.

These forms come to us from the Creator, from the Light, but they can appear in us as positive or negative. We are between the two contrasting forms: the angel of life and the angel of death. These two angels are the first nine Sefirot, and the material of our desire is Malchut. We receive the positive forms from them in our desire and the negative ones out of necessity and so we advance.

One cannot exist without the other. Every form should include the two forces that operate on the neutral matter of the desire to receive, meaning the two opposite changes that influence the data.

The desire was created as “something from nothing,” and we study everything that is in it, everything it goes through by the principle of formal education, of knowing the forms that come from the Creator, from the Light. We never study and explore the Light itself, but the forms of the Light on the material, on the desire; just as we don’t feel electricity by itself, but what it brings about, which can be measured and studied.

Eventually, we never attain the phenomenon itself, and we don’t know what the desire to receive is in itself. We only attain its reactions to the Light, and thus learn about the influence of the Light on the desire, when we deduce one from the other.
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From the 4^th part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 12/29/11, “The Freedom”