The passage explains "playing" in Kabbalah as the conscious effort to picture and prepare for a higher spiritual state before attaining it. Just as a child grows through play, a person grows spiritually by imagining greater connection with the friends and the Creator and acting toward that future state.

A central part of this process is repeatedly experiencing disconnection, confusion, and loss of spiritual orientation. These states are not considered bad. They provide an opportunity to rebuild one's relationship with reality from the beginning. The essential anchor is the ten. By reconnecting with the ten, a person renews the connection with the Creator, the purpose of creation, and ultimately the whole world.

Therefore, spiritual advancement consists of repeated cycles of disconnection and renewed connection. The group must provide a stable environment that a person can hold onto during states of confusion, like a child holding a familiar toy. Each return to the ten becomes a new and deeper connection with the Creator.

We see that in the wisdom of Kabbalah there are definitions that are not quite the same as the ones we use in this world. Playing is essentially a transition. It is truly a game. It is like a cat that wants to jump: it looks, checks itself, considers how it is going to jump, and then jumps. So all this preparation, everything it imagines, everything it does, is all a game. It is playing out what it is about to do.

Playing is how we picture the next state. Therefore, our entire life should actually be a game in which we aspire to connection between us, and within that connection to reveal the Creator, to reach the purpose of our existence, eternal and complete life. All of this is attained through playing. Just as in this life we play when we are children and thereby grow, so it is in our spiritual life. Only there, we have to take this game into our own hands, understand what is happening, and learn how to participate in the game in partnership with the Creator. Without playing, we cannot draw closer to Him and become His partners. And to the extent that we picture ourselves drawing closer to the Creator, we begin to understand what playing actually is.

It follows that we must constantly play: a person with himself, a person with the group, a person with the Creator. And the Creator also plays with Leviathan, meaning with the whole of creation, as it is written, "This Leviathan You have created to play with." In this way, through playing, we reach a state called the "Feast of Leviathan," where all of us, all of humanity, sit together around the great table together with the Creator, and we are at the Feast of Leviathan. We eat it, the Leviathan that we played with, meaning that we used it in order to advance and become more and more Adam, human, similar to the Creator. And when we become similar to the Creator, we and He become truly incorporated as one, and the whole Leviathan, the whole of creation, is used by us correctly. This is called the Feast of Leviathan, the end of correction.

Therefore, each time we only need to picture the matter more and more correctly. The main thing in correctly picturing our world and our life is that we constantly find ourselves in confusion, and we see how the world itself is confused. From being in such a state, we repeatedly begin from zero, from a form of confusion in which we have nothing left. If I want to be connected to the source of creation, to the purpose of creation, to hold onto an anchor, a rope, or something that can save me along the way, it is possible only if I am connected with the group. Because through the group I have a connection with the Creator.

Therefore, when I wake up in the morning, for example, I sometimes receive questions such as: What should I do when I wake up confused, wanting nothing, wanting to leave everything, wanting to continue sleeping, and so on? This is the correct state. This is exactly how it should be, and it will not become habitual. If it becomes habitual that I jump up and run toward some spiritual work, then it is not me, but someone awakening me from Above. I always value those states in which I can barely get up, I am foggy, I do not know who I am or what I am, where I am, or what I need to do.

From such states, from the fog and disconnection, I slowly begin to think, as in that story of the Baal Shem Tov, who asked his attendant, his student: If you do not know what to say, say "Aleph, Bet." And through this, little by little, from afar, he begins to awaken, recover, and arrive at adhesion.

This is how it is with us. Every morning we have to awaken as though from death, from complete disconnection, and renew everything. Therefore, when I wake up and have no connection with anything in life, like an animal, barely even able to picture myself as an animal, I am very happy that I am in such a state, because everything I had before has truly been taken away from me: my connection with the Creator, the study, everything. And I begin only by remembering that I need to discover who I am, what I am, what my life is, where I am directed, and with whom I need to be connected.

Then I remember that all these things depend on some Creator, but the Creator is far away. Who is He at all? What is He? I have no feeling toward Him and no direction of thought toward Him. But then I remember that He is found in the center of the ten. Then, what is the ten? Who is the ten? And in this way I begin to feel my way and seemingly gather them before me, to picture them, until I arrive at this kind of work first in the mind and afterward in the feeling: that ultimately, all I need is to find a connection with them, and through them I am connected with the Creator and with the world.

Therefore, all my effort, my entire "I," is measured by the extent to which I am in the ten, rely on them, and afterward even by how I bestow upon them, and through them upon the Creator, and through Him upon this entire world. Then the whole picture awakens before me: how I exist in reality, where I am, and how I influence all of reality through the ten, through the Creator, and through the world. All of this is realized in the ten, in my small group.

Therefore, this disconnection that I receive from the moment I wake up, when I see myself completely disconnected from everything, truly less than an animal, is for my benefit. In this way I renew my attitude toward creation, toward the Creator, and most importantly toward the ten.

This is how we should try to see these states. Therefore, there is no bad state and no good state in a person. It is always a new state. The main thing is that there should be a certain atmosphere in the group that will not allow a person to fall completely. He may feel disconnected, abandoned, as though he is being carried by some current that takes him away from everything, from life itself and so on. It is fine for all this to exist and influence us, but we must nevertheless prepare in advance some connection with the ten, with the group, so that I feel myself returning to it.

Through it, the small system of Adam HaRishon, in the lowest form, in the corporeal form that has been given to me, I have something to hold onto. It is like a baby holding onto a beloved toy. He clings to it, and we know that he calms down when he has it in his hand. For months he grows in this way, unable to let it go. This is also how we advance, because only through this do we find our direction and awaken correctly to life each time.

This may happen when we literally wake up from sleep, or it may happen in the middle of the day when we lose our connection with spirituality because of various external influences, at work, in the street, in the family, and afterward we return to it. Therefore, when we discover ourselves confused and disconnected from the essence of life and from the purpose of life, it is in order for us to establish a new connection in the group and through it with the Creator.

It is good to have as many such disconnections and reconnections as possible. As the Baal Shem Tov related, this happened to him many times.