What Is Recognition Of Evil?

Question: The inability to move toward connection—is this recognition of evil?

Answer: The inability to connect, to understand what love is, is the recognition of evil. What love is, we only learn from its opposite. Therefore, the Creator created egoism as absolutely opposite to His property so that we, realizing our natural egoism, gradually move to the opposite of it.

Question: Recognition of evil is understandable. But why do you always use such a negative word as “hatred”?

Answer: What else can you oppose to love? Love and hatred are two properties that are opposite to each other.

Question: Hatred of one’s own evil or one’s neighbor?

Answer: Hatred of my own evil, of the fact that I cannot imagine any connection with others, a dissolution in which my “I” disappears. This is impossible for me.

But this is what was created by the Creator. And therefore, it turns out that the search for connection leads to rejection, and rejection leads to a feeling of true love.
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From KabTV’s “Fundamentals of Kabbalah,” 12/29/19

The Group Absorbs Your Descent

Question: If a person during the descent starts to imagine that he is in an ascent, does this help him?

Answer: Yes. If he himself begins to imagine the ascent, then it pulls him out of the descent.

We always have a sawtooth curve of ups and downs, when we go up, then we go down a little lower, go up even higher, go down even lower, etc. The amplitude becomes higher, and so we move toward the goal.

Such an amplitude, i.e., the difference between plus and minus, is an indicator of our spiritual level. Therefore, moving forward you should know that you will have big descents and then big ascents.

Only the right environment, the group, can compensate you for this. The group serves as a damper, an absorber of your descents. After all, in an ascent you work as a capacitor, transfer your power to the group, and in the descent you take the group’s power together with your descent and make the ascent.

This is how the oscillatory circuit between the coil and capacitor works. Thus, this is how the transfer of energy occurs.
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From KabTV’s “Fundamentals of Kabbalah,” 3/27/19

Wandering Period, Part 5

What did the exiled Jews pass on to other nations?

Comment: There is various evidence of the significance of the psychological mixing of Jews with other nations. Winston Churchill wrote: “We owe the Jews…a system of ethics, which, even if it is completely separated from the supernatural, is undeniably the most valuable asset of mankind.”

That is, the Jews somehow passed on the method of connection to others.

My Response: Many famous people write about this. Naturally, without Jewish philosophy, psychology, without Kabbalah, without what they gave to humanity through religion, the world, of course, would have been different.

Question: Our contemporary Rav Kook writes: “After leaving Egypt, the sons of Israel gained their freedom, that is, they achieved their own perfection. However, the general perfection of the human race will be achieved during the time of the Messiah and precisely because of their previous scattering, because through this scattering the Creator began to reveal Himself to the world.”

What did the Jews pass on to other nations in exile if by that time they had lost the ability to unite?

Answer: It does not matter. Reshimot, the remnants of the former union and connection with the Creator, remain in people, and therefore, the Jews stand out from other peoples. They generally cannot disappear because after several generations this Reshimo, an informational record or a spiritual gene, will still appear.

They have nowhere to go. They are obliged to transfer the methodology of connection to other nations. This is their mission, both bonded, because they don’t even know how this happens, why and what for, and conscious, meaning purposeful. In our time, the passing on of knowledge should already be taking place purposefully.
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From KabTV’s “Systematic Analysis of the Development of the People of Israel, Part 5,” 7/15/19

“A Virus As A Crown In The Kingdom Of Anti-Semites” (Times Of Israel)

Posted on April 5th, 2020 at 12:09 pm

The Times of Israel published my new article “A Virus as a Crown in the Kingdom of Anti-Semites”

Besides COVID-19, there is another kind of ruthless contagion around the planet: anti-Semitism.

Conspiracy theories and blood libels against Jews are the new, and yet old, epidemic as a result of the coronavirus outbreak. The fact that Israel is working around the clock to develop a new vaccine against the deadly virus—which should be a reason for complements in a normal world—is surprisingly fueling hatred against Jews, accused of intentionally creating and spreading the virus to profit from its cure.

And when anti-Semites take aim to extensively spread their vicious agenda, tentacles of the far-right and the far-left intertwine forces to fight their common enemy: the Jews. Voices in Turkey and Iran, among other countries, blame Israel for what they call a pandemic that “serves Zionist’s interests.” BDS (the boycott movement against Israel, IfNotNow [left-wing Jewish activists], and White Supremacist groups have contributed their own share of bigotry and hatred to fuel the flames of a new wave of anti-Semitism, pointing their fingers at Jews for the Black Death plague that killed almost 50 million people worldwide, wiping out over half of Europe’s residents, a blood libel that was revived again in 1918 when the Spanish Flu pandemic ravaged the planet.

Same Hatred, A New Flare-Up

The current anti-Semitic wave indicates that the dark days when Jewish people were described as conniving and abusing elements of society are not over. The days in which we were accused of being responsible for all of the world’s problems are not behind us, quite the contrary. The wisdom of Kabbalah explains that there is one way anti-Semitism can be totally erased. Until certain measures are taken, anti-Semitism will not disappear since it is embedded in the very foundation of the world. It will continue to resurface, particularly in times of peril, with swift vengeance.

Why is this so? It is because, instinctively, people feel that Jews hold the keys to solve the world’s problems. By attacking Jews, they in fact raise the Jewish nation to the highest pedestal, holding them both responsible for the problems and, at the same time, acknowledging them as those who repair a broken planet.

A Gradual Development toward a New World

The wisdom of Kabbalah delineates the phenomenon of anti-Semitism, which will increasingly unfold until a new reality is created, in four developmental stages that are similar in many ways to the progression of a pandemic like the coronavirus.

During the first stage, the present one, we identify the appearance of a crisis, we recognize a disruption in the communication between us and our way of life. This realization provides a new perception of our situation and what is required of us. We want to rid ourselves of the problem that halts our lives, but we understand that we cannot escape it easily.

At the second stage, we begin to appreciate the seriousness of the situation and begin to ask deep questions about how to live side by side with the “virus,” the disruption: How should we manage society, the country, the changing economy, employment, family and education?

At the third stage, we understand that there is a need to make changes in society. Although it is still early to describe exactly how, the problematic disruption, just like the coronavirus, moves us toward social change, toward a more egalitarian society. The target of the trajectory of change is a society where everyone earns and receives what is essential for each person, the basic needs for their existence, while the rest of society’s energy and power is invested in the collective benefit. Such change does not happen overnight, but is a continuous process and one that will cause a lot of opposition. However, gradually positive changes will expand to all institutions and systems in society.

The fourth and last stage will be marked by the realization that we can gain tremendously from these changes, particularly in the area of new human communication of a higher and more spiritual type, and its importance will push us even further. At last, looking back at our journey in retrospect, we will be able to appreciate the fact that all the former stages, as difficult as they were, through which we passed, were precisely and only for our benefit.

How Can Jews Cure an Ill World

One might ask, what is the role of Jews in this equation? It is precisely the role of the Jewish nation, founded upon the tenet of “love your neighbor as yourself,” to lead the way to the attainment of unity and toward recovery of the balance in nature that has been lost as a result of our unruly, egoistic and self-centered human relations. Jews were the first people to identify and understand the laws of nature, the need to live in a society based on mutual responsibility.

The first time that a portion of humanity experienced itself as a society based on the principle of mutual sharing was in ancient Babylon some 3500 years ago with Abraham the Patriarch. He discovered a method for rising above the human ego to unite and discover the single force of nature through the process of unification. Abraham called for people to rise above their conflicts to unite and made his teachings available to whoever wanted to join in this process. Those who followed him were called by Abraham, “Israel,” which translates to “Yashar Kel” (“straight to God”). Since that time, the uniqueness of the Jewish people is their capacity to connect directly to the upper force in nature which controls and manages all reality. Only with this force, explain the Kabbalists, is there the possibility for the world to exchange its ruinous direction for a positive one.

Therefore, as soon as Jews begin to learn and implement this method of connection—the wisdom of Kabbalah to attain unity and begin to deliver it to the rest of the world, feelings of family and community will prevail between Jews and the rest of humanity. This accomplishment will produce a sensation like that of a protective and secure womb that will neutralize all of the person’s harmful preoccupations and eliminate uncertainty about the future. In this new reality, Jews will be appreciated as the promoters of warm relations based on love, bonds that provide calm and tranquility for the whole world.

“COVID-19: Is Nature Fighting Back…More Precisely Was Such An Outbreak Inevitable As A Response To A Disrupted Earth System?” (Quora)

Michael Laitman, On Quora: “COVID-19: is nature fighting back…more precisely was such an outbreak inevitable as a response to a disrupted Earth system?“
Due to commenting frequently on the coronavirus outbreak as nature’s response to the egoistic and exploitative way we as a human society had been relating to each other leading up to the pandemic, I was asked by one of my students:

How could a virus on a biological level come about as a result of people becoming increasingly egoistic and exploitative? It is clear, for instance, if one country wants to retaliate against another country that was exploiting it, but how are nature and viruses related to negative person-to-person attitudes?

To the naked human eye, it indeed seems as if the biological level and the level of human relationships are separate.

Everything in nature began from a single particle. That particle started connecting with another one, and then another one, and so on and so forth. At some point, this process generated atoms, and with further such development, molecules came about.

Life emerged when energy and information became transmitted between the various particles. This process then further developed into more and more complex forms of life.

In other words, everything in nature has been created such that even its tiniest parts are intrinsically connected with the whole universe.

Within this completely integral system, the human is the most complex and qualitatively highest level of all, and human thoughts, attitudes and relationships hold the most powerful influence over nature’s other levels.

Due to the capacity of human thoughts to impact other levels of nature, there is a Kabbalistic saying that states, “Everything is clarified in thought.”

I understand that we are unable to notice the extent of our thoughts’, attitudes’ and relationships’ influence on nature, and thus when a seemingly negative phenomenon strikes us, such as the coronavirus we now endure, we look like children who point at a broken glass that they accidentally hit while playing around, saying that it fell by itself.

However, the way that the coronavirus has forced us all into a common global situation, with many millions of people under stay-at-home orders, should serve to wake us up to our thoughts, attitudes and relationships to each other as being what ultimately connects us into a single network.

Moreover, we would be wise to reach the conclusion that our thoughts, attitudes and relationships to each other are the most important network that determines how nature responds to us.

If we create balance in such a network, we will then see how other levels of life become balanced. The gates to heaven on earth—a world of absolute perfection—will then open up before our very eyes.

“How Will Society Change Post-Coronavirus Crisis?” (Quora)

Michael Laitman, On Quora: “How will society change post-coronavirus crisis?“
I think that we will not rush to malls like we used to, and that we will see the manufacturing-buying-disposal chain as a thing of the past.

After having a period to calm down from the consumeristic rat race we were running, we now—while we’re in the stay-at-home conditions of the coronavirus era—have time to contemplate on how a lifestyle where we each set out to benefit ourselves on account of others brought about great imbalance between us and nature.

Now, while isolated from each other in our homes, there is a lot of information being shared around that acknowledges how our pre-coronavirus life was leading us to a dead end, and how our current prolonged period of social distancing gives us a new space to revise the way we live our lives.

It is thus my hope that together with the recognition of our past competitive-egoistic paradigm falling short in the satisfaction and joy that it permitted us, we will also learn that true happiness will come if we enter into balance with nature. That is, as nature is an integral system, and as nature increasingly shows us how interconnected and interdependent we are globally—as exemplified by the current coronavirus crisis—then we would be wise to learn how to adjust our attitudes to each other to match the level of interconnectedness and interdependence that nature is developing our awareness toward.

We would then exit the coronavirus era by replacing our egoistic paradigm with a new altruistic one, inverting an era that was amounting more and more negative phenomena, such as exploitation, abuse, depression, stress, loneliness, anxiety and neglect, into its opposite positive form, where we would reveal mutual consideration, responsibility, support, encouragement, happiness, peace, unification and love.

And what would we do with the piles of plastic excess that we built much of our old economy on? What would happen to all the buildings and towers we built, all the malls and shopping centers, when we wake up with an upgraded human consciousness in the post-coronavirus world?

We would turn them into museums. We would wander around all these stores, gazing at all the unnecessary and unimportant objects we filled our lives with, thinking “How could we have thought that making, buying, selling and disposing of all this garbage would have brought us any kind of enjoyment? What were we thinking?”

The post-coronavirus era museums would act to signify our new state of upgraded consciousness: that by feeling a common atmosphere of support, consideration and encouragement, we would look upon our pre-coronavirus materialistic culture as an extinct era, and these museums would remind us that we would not want to return to such a failed attempt at happiness. It is as Kabbalist Yehuda Ashlag (Baal HaSulam) writes in his article, “Introduction to the Book, Panim Meirot uMasbirot”: “Man was not created for acquiring fortunes or for building buildings. Hence, one should seek everything that will bring one to love.”

For Sublime Souls

Question: There are private descents of a person and a general fall of a group. What is a general descent? What is it expressed in? Has there ever been such a thing?

Answer: Yes, there has been. Even Baal Shem Tov describes how he experienced a descent along with his servant. At that moment, he shouted to the servant: “Start reading something, say something!”

He could not do anything either because he had lost his spiritual level. Then Baal Shem Tov asked him: “Say at least what you remember!” The servant replied: “I only remember the alphabet.” Baal Shem Tov asked: “Say the letters of the alphabet!”

Can you imagine a descent of such great sages where they even forgot the alphabet? This is a complete shutdown.

Question: Now I understand why all these years people were not allowed to engage in Kabbalah. But, in my opinion, this should not happen today?

Answer: No, today it is generally unrealistic. Such special conditions were given only to very sublime souls. This is aerobatics, like a loop-de-loop for a pilot.
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From Kab TV “Fundamentals of Kabbalah,” 3/27/19

The Light Could Harm Or Heal

Question: Does the effect of the light on us hurt?

Answer: If you are ready for it, then it is very pleasant, but if you are not, then it could be very painful. The light can beat and burn like a beam or it can heal.

Question: What does readiness to receive the light mean?

Answer: Readiness to receive the light is only the willingness to unite.

According to how close we are to each other, to that same extent we become ready to receive the light and equalize ourselves to it. If we, under the given conditions, make no effort to come closer, the light still affects us, but it feels bad to us.

All the suffering in life comes from the abundance of light that pushes us forward when we are unprepared for it.

We must understand that only closeness between us will position us correctly toward the light, and then we will be able to progress in a positive manner.
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From KabTV’s “Fundamentals of Kabbalah,” 2/9/20