“Buy Yourself A Friend”

Question: There are certain principles in Kabbalah: “Make for yourself a rav” (find a teacher), “buy yourself a friend,” and “judge every person favorably.” What do they mean, and how are these principles interconnected?

Answer: The concept of “Rav” (great) is identical to the concept of the Creator.

Once you accept the Creator as your guiding star that you want to constantly aim toward, you must choose a group of companions; this is called “buy yourself a friend.” You must exert great efforts so that your friends truly become your companions.

And then, together with the Creator and the group, you begin to work on attaining the system, bringing the whole world to the scale of merit, i.e., judging every person favorably.

Question: What kind of a friend is this that can be bought and sold?

Answer: Everything in life is for sale. And here it is the same, but in a different way than in our world.

For example, in order for you to become my friend, I have to exert efforts to show you how important you are to me, that I am willing to sacrifice myself to have you with me, that I am willing to buy any gifts in order to bring you closer to me. We work with our egoism, and the ego doesn’t understand anything else. Do not try to make philosophers out of yourselves, removed from earthly matters.

Therefore, everything is “bought and sold” only at the expense of our efforts. We have to show each other that we are ready for anything in order to become close friends, that the great goal can only be achieved together, between us. This is called “to buy.”

Question: And what if you are unable to buy a friend?

Answer: That is your problem. But if you do not “buy” him, you will not be able to advance with him, you will not achieve the right level of connection.

The Creator can be revealed only in the union between you. The Creator cannot be revealed inside an individual, but only in the connection between us! What used to be egoism becomes a sandwich: hatred on the bottom, love on the top, and in that connection the Creator is revealed.

Therefore, a person doesn’t have to correct anything other than his connections with other people.

Question: So first, I need to achieve the state where the Creator (the force of bestowal) is most important for me. Then I have to buy friends, meaning to take care of their spirituality, and then I will be able to enter spirituality myself. And only after this will we be able to justify everything that is happening in the world?

Answer: Yes, because the world is the system of connections between us in which the Creator is revealed.
[226321]
From the Kabbalah Lesson in Russian 12/3/17