Who Created Religion?

Question From Facebook: Buddha did not create religion; Jesus did not create religion. If that is true, who created it and for what purpose?

Answer: Three religions exist in the world: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.

Buddhism and all of the rest of the Eastern doctrines are not religions, but currents and methods. They exist without any pretense about anything and without imposing anything on others.

Religions were created as egoistic copies of the wisdom of Kabbalah and come to us instead of the Kabbalistic principle: “You shall love your neighbor as yourself” (Leviticus 19:18). The wisdom of Kabbalah teaches only how to achieve love of others. It is called the inner true Judaism.

When they began to carry out the principle “Love your neighbor as yourself” between a small number of people, they discovered that, as soon as they applied it, they came across difficult problems that tore the people to pieces.

The principle “Love your neighbor as yourself” arouses intense egoistic desires and drives within a person. These are described as the “Wars of the Jews” according to history. Beginning from the tenth century BCE, for a thousand years, terrible things happened among the Jewish people. There was constant, internal civil war.

Even though people struggled to hold onto the level of “Love your neighbor as yourself,” they discovered that they could not. Therefore, the Kabbalists who managed the nation during the period of King David, King Solomon, and the rest of the kings gradually began to loosen up the higher level so as not to approach people with demands that were too high to implement this general rule.

People could not tolerate this general rule, for according to the thought of creation, the law of nature, it was necessary to reduce a person to the lowest egoistic level. So, immediately after they attained the highest level of altruism called the “First Temple,” they began to fall from this level. According to the program of creation, this was necessary.

The people had to maintain this level, but people did not succeed. The sages of the Sanhedrin that stood as their head understood that they would not succeed in holding the people to a level like this, for the people were not prepared to survive physically or spiritually.

So everything gradually deteriorated to a level where the people began to carry out ordinary physical actions instead of spiritual laws. For example, to show love, they would express this with a material gift. If they wanted to create a partnership, it was created externally, not internally. Instead of correcting oneself, a person began to immerse in a Mikveh (ritual bath), etc.

In this way people moved from the inner implementation of the law “Love your neighbor as yourself,” meaning rising above the ego, to the performance of external actions called Mitzvot (commandments).

Beginning from this period until our day, religious tradition became a copy of the spiritual actions that a person performs in his heart. The books of Kabbalah say that one must write a Torah on the walls of one’s heart. It is specifically this which is required of a person.

For this reason, the wisdom of Kabbalah is called the interior of the Torah, while religion, which teaches and maintains the Mitzvot until today, is called the exterior of the Torah and doesn’t require a person to yearn for love of others, but only to study and perform physical actions mechanically.

In our day, the period of the implementation of the external part only has finished. According to the law of nature, we must begin to ascend to the next level, meaning from the external implementation of the Mitzvot of the Torah to the interior implementation. The stipulation of “You shall love your neighbor as yourself” must remain our principle, our idea, until we discover that there is an inner meaning to all of our actions.

Question: In the past, people could not hold onto this level. Can they do so today?

Answer: Today, we no longer have a choice. We have done the preparatory work for beginning to apply this principle gradually by connecting in small groups, in groups of ten. That is how Moses united the people after they left Egypt.

We try to apply the law of “Love your neighbor as yourself” in our groups and try to show and teach it to all of humanity.
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From KabTV’s “News with Michael Laitman” 12/21/16