Turn Your Face To The Wall—Discover Bestowal Really Exists

“And Hezekiah turned his face to the wall and prayed to the Lord.” This describes the state of a person who has worked for many years on his correction, performing all the necessary actions in order to eventually discover that he was doing it all for the sake of his egoism and that he has no possibility to act differently. This realization comes to him after he has accumulated a measure of suffering and disappointments and he continues despite everything. As the saying goes: “Anything but leave.”

He then begins to feel that such a thing as bestowal really exists, which is outside of him, outside of his will to receive. If he works with this new desire for bestowal, revealed within him, he feels that unlimited possibilities are hiding in it.

Before that, it is impossible to understand what bestowal is, why it is needed, and why it gives unlimited possibilities in comparison to egoistic reception, which is limited, meager, and narrow. It is impossible to receive for my own sake anything more than a faint illumination, “a tiny candle.” But by developing the desire to bestow through the work on the greatness of the Creator, we reveal this ability up to the size of the Creator. We can then be in unlimited bestowal, and the Creator connects with this desire and reveals Himself in it.

For many years a person works and acts, but it turns out that all this is inside egoism. One’s frustration and confusion accumulate until a person suddenly reveals in subsequent blows what it means to exit oneself and become a bestower. One feels that there is nothing but constant annulment and subjugation. You just have to bow your head, accept whatever happens, and nothing else is required.

This cannot be done in advance. But when an illumination comes in response to a person’s efforts, one reaches the degree of Hezekiah: finally, he turns his face to the wall, knowing how to pray, ask, annul himself before the Shechina. He sees that the group, the society, the wall, and the Shechina are all the same.

This is a transition from the will to receive in which we exist by nature, to the recognition that subjugation and annulment are what’s most important. “To turn to the wall” means to leave no partition between the Shechina and one’s heart, no shell around the heart.

To pray, turning to the wall, is to open one’s heart to the Shechina, the force of bestowal. Both a person and the Creator act with the force of bestowal, and they both want to remove all the partitions between them.

By peeling the shell from the heart, that is, removing the egoistic intention from all desires, we reveal the desire to bestow. Everything already exists: both the Creator and the person’s heart, and one only needs to remove the armor, the shell from around it. This is what we need to pray for.¹

The transition is that initially I was entirely in egoism, but did not realize it. I then discovered that I acted only for my own pleasure, but I wanted to be in bestowal, to remove the egoistic armor. It is like a boiled egg from which the shell is already easily peeled. If a person has matured, he begins to peel off his shell and feels more and more that he needs help.

Help comes in response to prayer, and the prayer cannot be for myself, but only for the ten, for the whole world. The Shechina is in the dust and we pray to raise it from the dust, to raise its importance in our eyes. Otherwise, we will not have the opportunity to bestow to it because we do only what we consider as important.

So we ask that the Shechina, that is, the force of bestowal, be important to us, and then we will be able to bestow. If bestowal is important to me, I will engage with it, and if it is unimportant, I will forget about it. Therefore, we ask the upper one to give us the feeling of the importance of bestowal so that we can do the work. Without such importance, nothing will happen, we will be unable to do anything.

Of course, any fool can work for the sake of something important. However, it is necessary to be very wise in order to do such a stupid thing and to ask for the importance of the quality of bestowal. This is what we are fighting for: to make bestowal important in order to be able to bestow. It is impossible to explain to the will to receive why this is necessary—only the point in the heart can understand this.²
From the 1^st part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 8/10/19, “And Hezekiah Turned His Face to the Wall”