Inspiring Change Weekly

Dear Students,

Last week in London I shared a concept from the Moroccan Kabbalist Rabbi Chaim Yosef David Azulai that I believe will be very useful to you in this month. Below is the transcript. I hope you connect to it because it can teach you how to remove the source of all lack from your life and help you create an amazing New Year.

Blessings & Light,
Michael

Rav Ashlag, in The Introduction to Ten Luminous Emanations, speaks about an interesting concept, which is that whatever negative things we have done in our lives, the month of Elul, what the Kabbalists call the month of tshuva (return), is the month when we can correct what we have done.

When most of us think about correction, we think about a mistake we made that we want to try and make better. We try to heal the wounds, we try to fix whatever harm we’ve done, we try to clean up whatever darkness we’ve manifested. But do we think we can really correct the mistake?

When we pour wine on our shirt and we send it to the dry cleaners to make it like new, does it come back like new? It’s never as good as it was before. So how can we undo the past?

According to Rav Ashlag, we can come to a point where our most negative actions, which are called in kabbalistic terms zedonot, can become great Light. This is an important concept because it’s one most of us don’t think about.

We think, if I can just correct my negativity, correct any negative actions I’ve done, I’ll just be even. Right?

Let’s say that earlier today I yelled at somebody, I’ve said things I shouldn’t have said. What is correction? What is tshuva? I can clean that up; it’s as if it never happened. But it’s better than that, and it’s an amazing idea that we can not only correct anything that we’ve done of a negative nature, but we can actually transform that negativity into Light. So at the end of the day, we’re not just even, as if we didn’t yell at that person, as if we didn’t treat that person negatively, but we’re actually at a point where we are better off for having done the negative action and then perfected it.

This is one of the great gifts of this month, and we have to understand how to do it. We don’t simply want to look back at the year and see what we’ve done of a negative nature and correct it to remove that stain of negativity, but we want to do something much greater than that. We want to be able to take any negativity we have manifested and transform it into Light.

Let’s understand on a basic level what I mean by ‘negative action.’ Imagine I yell at somebody, I do an action that harms another person, I hurt somebody I love, I hurt myself. I’m using energy to do that. Yelling takes energy. Hurting another person takes energy. Doing negative actions takes energy.

We know, both in physics as in Kabbalah, energy never dissipates. So what do we have to do to not only remove that energy but to be able to transform it into Light? How do we achieve this level of correction of not again cleaning the past but transforming?

That’s the purpose of this month. In addition to looking through the year and seeing where we might have fallen, whom we might have hurt and make amends, we desire to come to a place where we are able to take that darkness and make it into Light.

How do you do that?

There’s a great Moroccan Kabbalist, Rabbi Chaim Yosef David Azulai, who teaches that the one tool we need to use in this month in order to really reveal the potential blessings is to go through a process called maavir al midotav. Loosely translated, it means, if somebody hurts me, rather than my natural reaction to lash back or hold a grudge or be upset or disappointed about it, I am able to accept it.

This person hurt me today, but I know this was necessary for my tikkun, correction. I might not know exactly how, I might not know the details, but I know this is necessary for me to make my correction. So I take a negative action from one person towards me, and I make it even, meaning that I understand that I need it.

There’s two levels to this, right? There’s the primary reaction of I’m not really happy, but I won’t lash out because in some way I know this is what I needed. Then there’s the learned secondary reaction of coming to love the opportunity. Can you imagine?

The kabbalist teaches if a person comes up and slaps you in the face, it’s because your soul may have been waiting a thousand years to go through this moment of pain or shame or disappointment or hurt in order to correct your soul.

Can we rate ourselves on this scale of acceptance?

Can we accept the difficulties that happen to us?

Can we even be happy about them?

This is the difference between cleaning and transforming this month, that is, if somebody does an action towards you, especially now, the kabbalists teach that it becomes a tool which power cannot even be measured.

This month, when somebody does a negative action towards you — and there will be, as we all know, many times people will hurt us — and your ego wants to stand up and lash out, allow yourself to be maavir al midotav, that is, don’t lash back at the person, understand that this is something good.

Be happy this person said or did this thing to you because you know with certainty that you need this for your correction. You need this pain, you need this disappointment for your correction, and you are happy about it.

When you transform another person’s actions towards you, the Light of the Creator transforms your negative actions towards others into Light. As the teaching of the great 18th century Kabbalist Baal Shem Tov goes, “As you behave toward others, so the Creator behaves towards you.”

And when you are able to take people’s negative actions towards you and transform them in your own consciousness into Light, then you are able to transform negative actions that you have done into Light.

Imagine the opportunities you’re going to have this month! Again, I’m talking to those of you who are serious about your spiritual growth, serious about your transformation. You know that throughout this year there have been actions that you’ve done towards other people, towards yourself, that have not revealed Light, that have caused pain, that have caused harm.

How do you correct that?

By taking that same energy and transforming it into Light. This is how you do it. When I read these words in their beautiful original Hebrew, the kabbalist writes that this is a tool whose power we cannot even appreciate. Every single one of us is going to have in this month 100, 200, 300 opportunities of this kind, where there is someone or a situation that we don’t want.

How we view that, how we react to that is going to influence how all of the negativity that we’ve done throughout this year becomes transformed.

Just imagine, for the sake of this understanding, in this year we’ve done 300 actions of negativity. We’ve hurt another person, we’ve spoken ill of another person, or we’ve done 300 negative actions. In this month, we’re going to have exactly 300 instances, great or small, where another person is going to do something to us or something in life is going to happen to us that objectively looks negative.

When we understand that, specifically in this month, the opportunity of that moment is not to react but to come to a place where we accept and even be happy that this action is what we need, the Light of the Creator behaves like this towards us.

He goes into our bag of negativity and takes one action we have done this year where we took energy and we revealed it in a negative place, and He transforms it into Light. And it will be exact. Again, some of us did 200 actions, so we’ll have 200 opportunities. Others of us did 500 actions, so we’ll have 500 opportunities.

This is one of the greatest tools you can use this month. Understand the power of this. No matter what you’ve done in the past 11 months, if you grab the opportunity this month, you will end the year with more perfection than when you began because you’ve cleansed your negativity and taken all that energy and made it into more Light, therefore, allowing more Light and blessings into your life.

Remember, any lack that you have in your life today, any pain that you have in your life, comes from one place. It comes from that bag. It comes from the negative actions that you’ve done this year, this life, past lives.

The opportunities you are going to be given this month will transform all that darkness into Light, and when you do that, you remove the sources of pain, you remove the sources of lack, you remove the sources — all sources — of negativity in your life.

This is an opportunity available only in this month. Therefore, the second gift to appreciate and open yourself up to this month is the transforming, not just the cleaning, but the transforming of darkness into Light.

When you are able to view other’s negative actions towards you as Light . . .

When you are able to see the things that occur in your life not as disappointments but as opportunities that you appreciate . . .

When you don’t see the logic of it . . .

When you know it’s coming from the Light of the Creator because it’s what your soul needs for correction . . .

When you behave in this way, you transform your negativity into Light and, therefore, remove all sources of lack from your life!

Again, I’ll repeat — I know, probably for the third or fourth time — what the Moroccan Kabbalist Rabbi Chaim Yosef David Azulai says about this tool in this month, that we cannot even appreciate its power.

I trust we will all use it this month and benefit from it.