We Need A New Beginning!

Holidays and special days described in Kabbalah are not dates on the regular calendar, but the attainment of one’s own, special, personal state where a person makes a fundamental inner calculation with himself. If a person reaches this calculation, it means he really has a new beginning, called the new year, Rosh HaShana. And accordingly, he attains the holiday prayer.

Every holiday is a spiritual calculation and a prayer because there is nothing besides the correction of our desires. But the beginning of the new year is special because it comes after many discernments. It comes only once a person has checked himself completely, discerning all of the desires that become revealed to him, because every higher level includes all of the previous ones as a tiny part of it.

However, when a person makes a calculation with all of his actions and thoughts, he sees that he did not attain success, that he does not advance because he wasn’t created for spiritual ascension at all. He is then overcome by burdensome thoughts about spirituality and by doubt and envy toward others. He wants to be above them and thinks, “Why them and not me?”

After many calculations like this, having become completely lost in them, he finally feels that he needs a new beginning. There is no way out because all of these calculations, discernments, criticism, envy, and hatred do not change for years. And the only thing left for him is prayer, a cry for help because only the upper force can help. This inner cry is called the prayer of Rosh HaShana, the new beginning.

Before this happens, a person seems himself as completely lost. He sees that the whole world disagrees with what he is doing and he himself also does not understand what it happening to him or what this path is. All of this criticism comes from his egoism.

That is why the prayer talks about reminders, the need to analyze all of one’s desires and actions, and about blowing into the horn (Shofar) because we have to elevate our spiritual path regardless of anything (in Aramaic, Shufra means beauty). That is when one has to turn to the primary sources in order to advance.

There are many opinions and people in the world influencing a person and imbuing him with their thoughts, pulling him in different directions. Yet one has to place a strict judge above himself and constantly verify himself with the primary sources to the extent one understands what is written there. In spite of one’s ego, one’s desire to rise, profit, and become higher than others, one should strive for the opposite, wishing to acquire only the force of bestowal and to dissolve in the nation within which the Creator dwells.
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From the 1st part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 9/26/11, Writings of Rabash