How Can I Project Love to Others if I Don’t Feel Loved Myself?

In order to attain a higher quality of love than what we feel in our day-to-day lives, we need to play a game. Why a game? It is because in a game, we do not play who we are now, but who we would like to be.

Humanity in general would not progress without games. As children, we often perceived games as absolute truths, and by playing them, we developed in myriad ways. If we were to immerse ourselves in playing a game like kids do, then we would not be able to stop; we would live in that game more and more, becoming better and better at it.

In the method of Kabbalah, the game of acting out positive, loving and caring connections — the connections that exist in our higher, eternal and perfect state — is a key practical tool in attaining the goal of Kabbalah studies: the revelation of the Creator, the upper force of love, bestowal and connection.

Kabbalists advise us to love others, even if only pretending to love them as much as we can invest in doing so, and within that love, we will start feeling the Creator.

It is a central reason why Kabbalists have always studied in small groups, which are called “tens.” They provide a place where we can exercise love of others in practice, where each member pretends to love the others, and together they aim to create an atmosphere that encourages the opening of hearts to one another. In such an atmosphere, each member eventually “dissolves” in a common field of love that starts filling the connection they build.

Such a process requires pretending to love until loving others becomes a second nature. By acting out love of others again and again, returning to it several times each day, we then incorporate in this loving tendency to such an extent that we eventually melt in it. We then become suitable for the attainment of the Creator’s revelation.

Incorporating in love means incorporating in the Creator. We pretend to love until it ceases to be a game and becomes the game of our lives. We first play it artificially, pretending that we love others without feeling any special desire to love them. This is a stage where we need to convince ourselves why we carry out such efforts without any special feelings, i.e., where we connect such efforts to the higher goal we aim to reach.

At a certain stage, a warm feeling suddenly awakens within us. If we study in a Kabbalistic group, then the efforts to love that the others in this group apply shows us a positive example. Seeing their dedication to the love of others can then awaken a feeling in us that we cannot return the same love to them. We then review our attitude to others and to life in general, and we again gain the strength to try and exit ourselves in order to love others.

This ongoing calibration of our attitude leads to a point where the corporeal reality fades in importance, and only the sublime and true sensation of love remains.

When this genuine love reveals, our egoistic self becomes replaced with the force of love itself, the Creator. Such a revelation can happen precisely if we pretend to love others throughout myriad states of feeling no natural motivation to do so. Those efforts serve to minimize the importance of relating to our natural, self-centered demands, and form a place that can then become filled with a new quality: the force of love, bestowal and connection itself, the quality of the Creator.