Faith: A Reward For Work

From the article “The Reason for the Difficulty of Annulling Oneself for the Creator” (Shamati): It therefore follows that the essence of one’s work is only to come to the sensation of the existence of the Creator, meaning to feel the existence of the Creator, that “the whole earth is full of His glory.” … He should not think of anything, meaning that the only reward that he wants for his work should be to be rewarded with faith in the Creator.

Many words have a double meaning. After all, their original meaning in Hebrew goes back to Adam, the first man, and Abraham, who gathered a group in ancient Babylon and taught them how to reveal the Creator. Originally, the word indicated the spiritual root and had a spiritual meaning. But today, in our material world, these words could have completely opposite meanings.

For example, the famous phrase from Ecclesiastes “Vanity of vanities, all is vanity (Avel Avalim)” means that everything is built from the Reflected Light (Avel), the results of human work in bestowal. And in our world today, the phrase acquired an absolutely different meaning, as something which has no value.

The same thing happened with the word “faith.” When the people of Israel became detached from the spiritual feeling, this word started to mean something hidden, that we don’t know whether it exists or not. We take for granted that it exists, although we do not have any evidence for this. That is, the word “faith” has lost its true meaning, the sensation of the Creator.

This happened with many other words. And that is why we do not understand what is written in the Kabbalistic texts because they describe spiritual states.

The difficulty of spiritual work is that we have no faith in the Creator, that is, we do not feel Him. And once a person begins to feel the Creator, he has another problem: how to rise above this feeling and through his free choice prefer bestowal upon the Creator. After all, this bestowal should not be forced under the influence of the revelation of the Creator, but it should rise above this revelation due to its highest value. Otherwise, it will be only the result of a small person worshiping the great Creator, and there would be no work in this.

In the meantime, the difficulty of our work is that we do not feel the upper force—the only thing that controls this world. In the moment a person reveals this feeling, he surrenders and agrees to anything. Therefore, our only goal in the work is to reveal the Creator, and we need to concentrate all our efforts to reveal Him according to the similarity of properties, which can be realized within the group through connection and mutual guarantee.
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From the Preparation to the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 8/1/12