Educating A Man!

Question: Education is mainly coercion in one way or another. In spirituality there is no coercion. How do the two go together?

Answer: Indeed, there is no coercion in spirituality. But our world is not spirituality. We take the “beast” and turn it into a man.

The Torah says that you have to educate your child. And all the rules regarding education are very specific, including coercion and even physical punishment because you are dealing with a “small evil beast.” We know that about ourselves, and so if necessary, we need to educate a child to reach happiness with a “stick.”

But according to the Kabbalistic approach we can create such conditions for our children that there is actually no need for coercion because the environment forces a person to behave properly by providing examples without any pressure. A child is ready to imitate any environment and we use this principle.

Question: Is this the wisdom of love? “A small evil beast” that is called a child? “To reach happiness with a “stick”?” Is this called love?

Answer: Unfortunately, with corporeal love you raise a terrible “monster.” If you are convinced that you have to treat your child with unlimited love, you turn him into a miserable creature that doesn’t have any limits and thinks that he is entitled to everything.

We need to understand how to approach people, and especially children. We all need to be educated.

Education is not only about reading a certain number of books, getting an education in music, or learning good manners and knowing how to behave in society. Education is about enabling a person to properly be part of human society.

Education refers to the ability to properly fit into the human community, when everyone understands what kind of a world he is living in, how human society is built, how it is divided, how its parts interact with each other, what all develops, and the reciprocal relations between men and women, grownups, children, elderly people, and youth.

We have to be completely familiar with the nature of human society and how we can make it into a good and right system. Then everything will be much better. If we say that it is impossible to educate people this way, we will end up with what we have today: with each passing year, the generation becomes more lost. 

We see that humanity is in regression. We have passed the peak of our evolution and have reached the most egoistic state, and now we have begun to regress.

In order to break this vicious cycle, we have to implement the method of education called the wisdom of Kabbalah. It explains how to do this. A person who begins to study it gradually changes and can actually teach others.

Since a small child is a small egoistic beast, we have to learn how to educate it, which means to show a child how he can cope with and control himself properly so that he will be able to properly unite with everyone else.
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From the Kabbalah Lesson in Russian 1/8/17