In An External Wrapping And Without It

Question: I increase my sensitivity in the group in order to feel my friends more and more. Do I have to do the same in the outside world?

Answer: No, under no circumstances! You have to connect with the outside world through a kind of a partition and to show that you are also coarse and insensitive and indifferent like everyone else. Otherwise people would think that you are an eccentric, a person not from this world.

You will be mocked and used. At work, your colleagues will not understand you. That is why I emphasize that you should consist of two layers and your exterior clothes should be identical to the outside world. You have to learn how to do that!

Rabash used to give a very good example. He used to work in paving roads from Jerusalem and Hebron. The workers worked from sunrise to sunset and in the evening when everyone used to sit down to eat and have tea they started long talks about politics and other matters until midnight and then went to sleep.

But when everyone fell asleep, he used to get up and study the wisdom of Kabbalah. If they came complaining to him: “Are you our friend or not?!”, he would answer that he had nothing to talk them about; that is, he showed some indifference and then they would leave him alone.

Even on the bus when someone sat next to Rabash and tried to speak to him, he would pretend to be asleep. But he behaved exactly like everyone else in every other sense.

Therefore, we should constantly put on this external shirt so as not to differ from others.

Question: But how can we feel the people more when we go out to disseminate? How do we attain this sensitivity? By increasing it among us and then feeling the public more?

Answer: This is a totally different matter. When you go out to disseminate, you meet people who are ready to be in contact with you. In that case you can use your spiritual figure in order to connect to them, in order to give them some spiritual filling, to fulfill the contact and the inner connection. This isn’t the external world anymore but people who are advancing towards an internal connection with you.

It is for them that you create different external faces by adapting yourselves to them, like working with children, for example. How do you usually speak to kids, how do you give them examples, how do you play with them? You constantly try to be like them by coming down to their age and to their level of understanding a little. It is the same here, but by that you begin to open up. This is the natural way of every teacher.
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From the Convention in Sochi, Lesson 2