Building Divinity

A spiritual vessel is not just a sum of all the hearts, but a new entity that we have to build from our shared aspirations, effort, and work with respect to some new quality that did not exist before.

This is what we call the center of the group: the sum of all the efforts, “Divinity” (Shechina), the place where all the eyes meet and all the intentions are aimed. This is the area that we develop; we increase it all the time taking care of it as something precious to us.

This particular area Divinity (Shechina) does not exist until we join all our intentions into one. Only then will such a place be created, born, and the Creator revealed in it. And until then, the Shechina will remain in exile.

These concepts the “Shechina in Exile” and the “Holy Shechina” are two degrees that are completely unrelated to each other. That is why we only have to see the center of the group in every action, the unification of all our expectations, and the intention to build the Holy Shechina from this. Everyone strives to bestow to others, and when all these intentions come together, then they form this special area.

If we have no intention to bestow to others but a completely different goal, to use them for our own pleasure, then each of us is drowning in self-love, in egoism. In this case there is no Shechina in exile, no Shechina at all; this place does not even exist. It begins to form only when a few people who can think “outside of themselves” come together.

If many weak people with unstable intentions that come and go or a smaller number of strong people with more qualitative intentions get together, then it is possible to talk about building the Shechina. We add our intention to mutual bestowal and from this we can bestow to the Creator.

We are preparing a place for His revelation not for our pleasure but because we want Him to be revealed so that He receives pleasure from it according to the principle “Israel, the Torah, and the Creator are one.” From this mutual concern, “each man shall help his friend,” we can feel day after day how we build this corrected vessel called the Shechina.

The Shechina is built from Malchut, which is corrected by the properties of Bina. Malchutis the desire to enjoy; the property of Bina is the intention to bestow. The Shechina is created when we all unite above our personal desires, aspire to mutual bestowal, to our goal, and to the Creator through it because we connect only in order to bestow to Him.

In integral education groups, the desired goal is to unite, and that’s all. But in a Kabbalistic group, we have to go to the very end, as it is written, “Return, Israel to its Creator,” and advance towards the goal with this intention.

We can reach it only on the condition that we raise the goal so much that it shines on us and seems important to us. Either we worry about it, about some critical moment which decides our fate, or we will appreciate it so much that it will beckon us to come. Both of these work for the same goal.

We constantly need to check whether each day we feel an increasing attraction to the goal, and use this to measure ourselves. We have no other screening criteria. Do we care about our connection in mutual bestowal in order to build a system of bestowal aimed at the Creator, to allow Him to be revealed and  to please Him by our efforts?

The system of our bestowal is called Shechina. The upper force called the Creator is revealed in our altruistic intentions if we meet the first minimum condition of His revelation, that is, if we reach the degree of “Nefesh de Nefesh de Nefesh.” Thus, we enter the first spiritual degree: “Embryo (Ibur)” and begin to exist in the upper world.
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From the Preparation for the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 12/6/13