The month of Aries, or Nissan, is considered to be the first of all the months. The kabbalists say that the Creator taught Moses a concept relating to the beginning of the month of Aries called Kiddush Hachodesh, which means “sanctification of the month,” or making the month holy. As the kabbalists teach, holiness is a word that connotes elevating; as such, in this case, it means elevating the month. But what does it mean to elevate the month?
All of us were born with a certain nature. Our nature is what often pushes us to do either selfish things, things of Desire to Receive for the Self Alone, or to do positive things. And it's important to understand that even those of us who are involved in spiritual study and work live most of our lives within the confines of this nature. Our nature is something that has control over 99% of everything that we do and think, both good and bad.
It's very dangerous to continue to live within the confines of our nature, even the good nature, because one of the most important kabbalistic principles is that we came to this world to move away from our nature. We have to take everything that falls under the realm of our nature and put that aside when we try to look at and understand the purpose of our lives. To accomplish the purpose for which we came into this world, we have to break away from that nature, both in limiting the actions of selfishness, and more importantly in pushing ourselves to change.
In fact, a soul that is not pushing away from the nature in which it was born is unhappy. Any type of unhappiness or sadness that we feel comes from the fact that our soul, even when we are acting in ways that are spiritual and doing actions of sharing within the confines of the nature, is unhappy. The unhappiness of a soul comes from living within the confines of our nature, even the good nature. So, how do we break away from that nature? First, we have to know and desire that we don’t want to live a life confined to that nature, even the good nature, and that we want to break away from it; and one of the purposes for the month of Nissan is to give us the ability to break away from that nature.
Therefore, the kabbalists teach that when we talk about Kiddush Hachodesh, making the month holy, elevating the month, it means to break it away from the confines of our nature. We should be clear that at the New Moon we can plant the seeds for our month to come. Our month is set up, our lives are set up on a trajectory based on nature. What we have to desire is to break away from that nature, to elevate the month. Make it a different month than it would have been otherwise… because we know that living within our nature is not why we're in this world and is not what will bring satisfaction to our soul.
