Audio Version Of The Blog – 12.31.16

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The Jerusalem Post: “Israel’s Best Response To The UN Resolution”

In my regular column in the Jerusalem Post, my new article: “Israel’s best response to the UN resolution

Predictably, Obama is using his last weeks in office to accomplish his anti-Israel goals. But how should Israel respond?

Even as Israel rightfully decries the UN resolution, it must also see that this unanimous vote of hate and anger against it bears a strong message. The world is expecting Israel to lead the way to a solution, and fast. But it is up to Israel to figure out what that solution must be.

What the World Doesn’t Know

As I wrote in my last column, the resolution is but the culmination of Obama’s eight years of efforts to force his destructive neoliberal policies upon the world. I have already written of the error inherent to liberalism, that its high and lofty aims may be correct, but it lacks the path to achieve them.

At the end of this year of terror, which world leaders have not known how to prevent, and as the world witnesses Europe suffering the deadly results of its neoliberal open border approach towards Muslim immigrants, these leaders have the audacity to try and force the same liberal mistakes upon Israel without the least concern of the security implications it would have on such a tiny state. For what actual solution to the conflict is the UN offering? How can Obama, European leaders, and the leaders of countries such as crime torn Venezuela teach Israel anything about resolving the core issues that divide Israelis and Palestinians?

Just as world leaders recklessly thought that simply letting in millions of people of completely different cultures into their land, with no prior preparation for this assimilation on the human, psychological level, would magically result in a peaceful heaven, they are now pushing for an artificial two-state solution that may bear the title of mutual “independence”, and calm the liberal conscience, but will do nothing to achieve peaceful coexistence between the two nations.

Israel has learned from its mistakes. The withdrawal from the Gaza Strip ended in the further escalation of violence toward Israel. The agricultural lands of Jewish settlers were turned into rocket launching platforms with underground terror tunnels beneath them, inciting an inevitable war that brought about so many casualties, especially on the Palestinian side. Nothing can assure us that the same will not happen with a withdrawal to all other pre-1967 borders.

What the World Does Know

However ineffective the efforts, there is good reason that world leaders push to see this conflict resolved. The amount of pressure and attention that this conflict has received along the way is not only indicative of the huge bias against Israel. Outgoing UN secretary-general Ban Ki Moon himself admitted the bias, with 223 UN resolutions passed in the last decade condemning Israel, but only 6 condemning Syria–the location for the past six years of the most horrifying humanitarian crisis since WWII. It is also indicative of how the world somehow feels that THIS crisis is the source of all others, that solving this conflict will model for the world the remedy for all its other ills.

The enigma of this attitude towards Israel is rooted deep in Israel’s past and future. At present it is clear to see that subconsciously, the world expects Israel to solve its problems; it just doesn’t understand how.

Above Right and Left

It is up to Israel to find the answers. However, though Israel is right to refuse to repeat the mistakes of the past, which will endanger its safety, it does not mean that it is heading in the right direction. As Israel tightens its security measures and avoids contact with the other side, the problem is not actually treated, assuring that war and strife will continue.

New solutions are needed that go beyond what has been tried so far. The typical leftist approach calls for conciliations that irresponsibly overlook the culture gaps, hatred, and religious ideologies; while the typical approach of the political Right is the maintenance of security and furthering Israel’s goals, living forever upon our sword, without taking real steps to achieve the coexistence that will bring the conflict to its solution. Neither approach on its own can yield the desired results. What I believe CAN work is something completely different.

Israel Holds the Key

What must first be acknowledged is that coexistence when such deeply rooted hate is present is not born of decisions made on paper or by swapping land, but from true change of relations and attitudes between the two sides. Without such a change in the reality of the animosity between the nations, they will continue to fight each other in a zero sum war until one side is completely erased.

Secondly, complete separation is not possible. Evacuating Jews from all settlements and creating a “Jew free zone” will not cure the hate and the danger to Israel, with Hamas’ charter stating its intent to destroy it, and children being educated to murder every Jew. Moreover, Israel is not “Muslim free”; it is a society embedded with many religions and cultures. Thus, achieving a breakthrough in the quality of the relationships between Israelis and Palestinians is crucial for all.

Some might say it is impossible to achieve such unity, but they must know that it is not so. For millennia Jews have been unknowingly carrying within them the one method that can connect people above all differences.

Abraham’s Discovery

Thousands of years ago Abraham, the father of all Abrahamic religions and the common father of Jews and Palestinians, discovered the secret of the oneness of all life. He taught his disciples the method of achieving harmony between human beings. This deep wisdom which the world has come to know of, ever so superficially, by the precepts of “love thy neighbor as thyself” and “do not do to others what you hate”- was forgotten by most. But it was not lost. It was carried onwards for generations and elaborated by Jewish sages of Kabbalah in many texts such as the Book of Zohar and more recently, the writings of Baal Hasulam. Today, as it receives modern day practical forms, it is succeeding in bringing together Jews and Muslims in every opportunity that it is applied to the task.

The method of Abraham comes from the root of both nations and so it is the only way to move towards the healing of this ancient family strife. Rabbi Kook wrote of the future of these relations that “the brotherly love of Esau and Jacob, of Isaac and Ishmael, will raise them above all calamity, caused by evil, and turn them into light and mercy” (Igrot Haraia 1, 142).

I have had the privilege and responsibility to carry forward this wisdom and pass it on to my many students, who already implement it in discussion circles throughout Israel.

They have succeeded greatly in bringing together Jews and Arabs as you can see here, time and time again. This success can be replicated and must be the basis for any peace process; because peace begins with the people, with education, with changing mindsets and predispositions. Only by carefully constructing such peace in our societies can we expect the decisions made by leaders to last and bring good results into our lives.
We mustn’t give away the land or compromise security without first making sure that a process of education towards peace has actually changed the landscape of people’s hearts and minds. Those should be the settlements we fight for- the establishments of love and friendship between us, the building of bridges between our hearts. Only then will we be able to live our lives in happiness and security. Yes, Israel must defend itself, but also strive for this sort of change to take place.

Forecast For 2017

I predict that the world will continue to blindly pressure Israel to take the initiative. Though Trump may make things easier for Israel, it mustn’t think that it may rest on its laurels. It must continue to strive to create the coexistence between Jews and Arabs that only Israel can achieve, that will give the desperately needed example to the world of how to create peace in conflicted societies.

If Israel manages to pressure itself into finding this root solution to the conflict, it will gain immensely. Ultimately, a united Israel will bring an end to the war and to the great hatred the nations share toward it, as it finally assumes its destined position as the spiritual leader of the world, paving the way towards lasting peace. To the nations I say, pressure Israel to unite, not to withdraw. To Jews I say, don’t be tempted to take sides; unite above your differences. Only when you realize you hold the key, and find the way to create peace within you, will this conflict and all others be healed.
[199556]
  Jerusalem Post 12/29/16

Altruistic Actions

Laitman_632_4Question: How is it possible to know if actions are altruistic or not?

Answer: As soon as an altruistic action appears in a person, the Creator is revealed.  If an intention to bestow appears in a person, it immediately reveals the Creator according to the principle of equivalence of form according to the intensity of this intention.
[198301]
From the Kabbalah Lesson in Russian 9/18/16

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Who Can See The True Reality?

laitman_928Question: If there are three people in the same room, which of them can see the true reality?

Answer: Perhaps none of them. Each sees through their egoism, and it is already the wrong reality. It is a person’s internal reality, but it is revealed in an incorrect, distorted form.

We can more or less see the same reality because we have the same senses: sight, hearing, smell, taste, and touch.
But our perception of reality is limited by natural boundaries. For example, we don’t need to see this whole world from a certain perspective in order to enter the next world.

Every individual comes into this world in order to perform a mission, and a Kabbalist does not aim at feeling all the people; there is no need to do so. It is enough for a Kabbalist to feel his small group in order to receive the Upper Light of correction through it and then to convey the Light of correction through him to all of mankind, to the whole system called one soul.

According to The Book of Zohar the whole world is inside a person. This doesn’t mean that people have to connect through their physical bodies; they have to connect through their desires. Desires are not people; they the network inside us which ties all of us together and where we all exist together undivided.

A Kabbalist influences the desire in which all seven billion people are integrally and mutually connected inseparably as one common general system.
[198292]
From the Kabbalah Lesson in Russian 9/18/16

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New Life 793 – The Remedy For Human Society

New Life 793 – The Remedy For Human Society
Dr. Michael Laitman in conversation with Oren Levi and Tal Mandelbaum ben Moshe

Human desire has grown, and as a result, everyone has his own opinion and more factions are created in society. This trend is indicative of human development, but with it, there is a lack of connection between everyone like there is between the various parts of the body.

In the past, the people of Israel consisted of 12 tribes, according to this it is possible to understand that we also require connection and separation.

Today we are like nuts in a sack, and without external enemies we would become completely separated from each other. We need to learn to build a connection above everyone’s ego; without this, we cannot sustain a family, society, and the world.

Human development is expressed by our ability to connect even with people whose opinions are different from ours. The wisdom of Kabbalah teaches how to connect above differences. In order to sustain a good life, we must learn to connect so that no one will exploit others, but will complement them. We lack a positive force for doing this because we naturally only have a negative force, the ego.

We must not destroy the side that is against us; we need to learn to live with it in connection, like plus and minus. The system that connects between two opposing sides is called the middle line.

This method of connection is not only relevant to politics, but to every system of relationship, including couples.
[197861]
From KabTV’s “New Life 793 – The Remedy For Human Society,” 11/24/16

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Audio Version Of The Blog – 12.30.16

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Haaretz: “Obama’s Hypocrisy Reveals The World’s Honest Opinion“

In my regular column in Haaretz, my new article: “Obama’s Hypocrisy Reveals the World’s Honest Opinion

The UNSC unanimous decision indicates that had a vote on establishing a Jewish State been made today, Israel wouldn’t exist.
Just over two weeks ago, UK Premier Theresa May declared, “I couldn’t be clearer: The Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement is wrong, it is unacceptable, and this party and this government will have no truck with those who subscribe to it.” Less than two weeks later, the UK government made a U-turn and voted in favor of a US initiated UN Security Council (UNSC) resolution that opens the door to indiscriminate sanctions and boycotts against Israel.

Since his inauguration in 2009, Barack Obama has placed more and more “light” between the US and Israel, as he termed his policy of distancing the US from Israel. His latest, poorly covered maneuver to expose Israel to sanctions by the UNSC, is probably not the last we’ve seen of him, not if he can help it.

Yet, Obama is not Israel’s biggest problem. Surprisingly, Israel’s worst, and only true problem is Israel itself. The unanimous decision at the UNSC indicates that the entire world, almost every single one of the 193 member states of the UN, has a negative view of Israel. No other country, not even Iran, Iraq, Syria, Saudi Arabia, or any other despot-governed country has managed such a “remarkable feat”—to unite the entire world against it. Had the vote on the establishment of the Jewish state been made today, Israel would never have come into existence.

Moreover, if a vote to revoke the establishment of the state of Israel were brought before the UN General Assembly today, it would be approved by the same majority that approved the recent UNSC resolution, and to the sound of the same cheers by the member states.

Why the Hatred?

First, it must be clearly stated that the US government’s initiative to stymie Israel’s building in the West Bank does not stem from the efforts of the Obama-Kerry duo to promote peace in the region. It is part of the current administration’s effort to eliminate the Jewish state. The Palestinians, as Obama knows perfectly well, have never been partners for peace because they have never aspired for it. Since the 1921 Jaffa Riots, they have launched periodic waves of murderous attacks against Jews in Israel and around the world, and have formed alliances with anyone who promised to help them exterminate or drive the Jews from Israel, including an alliance with Nazi Germany. When the “primogenitor” of Arab terrorism—the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO)—was founded in 1964, there were no “occupied territories” to return; they were only taken three years later in the 1967 Six Day War. Even more, the captured territory never belonged to the Palestinians; it was Jordanian territory.

The current US administration knows all this, as do more than 100 states that recognize the PLO as the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people. Simply put, the vast majority of countries agree with the Arab position that Israel should not exist. The Obama administration has set out to begin to put this position into practice, and will do everything it can to realize its agenda in the time remaining until the inauguration of Donald Trump, and even beyond. I previously warned that the UNESCO resolution denying the Jewish history on Temple Mount was only the canary in the mine. Now that Obama is untroubled by election results, we are seeing the realization of the threat to end the existence of the State of Israel.

In 2013, I published the book, Like a Bundle of Reeds: Why Unity and Mutual Guarantee Are Today’s Call of the Hour. I warned that the catastrophes of the Holocaust and the Spanish Inquisition were not isolated events, but part of a process that must be completed. Now we are seeing the beginning of the unfolding of the next stage in the process. However, as I wrote in “Why Do People Hate Jews,” we have control over the current stage. This does not have to be a traumatic process. If we focus on why we are hated and what we need to do about it, rather than bemoaning the fact that the world hates us, we will go through this stage quickly and pleasantly, and in the process eliminate the hatred toward Israel and eradicate anti-Semitism.

Israel—the Jew among the Nations

Abraham Foxman, former national director of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), said that Israel has become “the Jew among the nations.” How very true. There is no fundamental difference between the accusations that Israel is facing, and the allegations that Jews have faced throughout history. The difference is that now there is a target—the State of Israel—the Jew among the nations. Now everyone can target their hatred toward a clear entity and make up blood libels and false accusations just as they had previously done toward Jews. But as we often see in BDS demonstrations, the anger at Israel is merely a thinly veiled pretext for venting anti-Semitism.

When trying to understand the roots of the deepest, most lasting hatred in the history of humankind, we have to go back to our roots, since this is where it all began. We Jews are unlike any other nation. We are the only nation in the history of humankind to be given the task to save the world by setting an example for it. We are the only nation whose birth was declared by God, but not before we met the condition of uniting “as one man with one heart.”

We were declared as chosen by the God that all three Abrahamic religions worship, and that God tasked us with being “a light unto nations.” It does not matter what people say; it is a fact that the darker the world becomes, the more it points the blaming finger at us.

The Talmud writes (Masechet Shabbat, 31a) that when a gentile came to Hillel and asked him to explain Jewish law to him, Hillel replied, “That which you hate, do not do unto your neighbor. This is the whole of the Torah.” This law was supposed to be the light to the nations, but if the progenitors of the law, its intended harbingers, do not implement it among themselves and do not set an example that others can follow, how can we blame the world for hating us? How can we not understand the world when it says that we are to blame for all the wars, when we are not making the slightest effort to overcome our mutual hatred and unite?

The most fundamental law of our ancient society was mutual responsibility. How is this implemented among us today? In what way are we responsible for one another? We have adopted the competitive and egocentric Hellenistic culture, the very culture to which we were intended to offer an alternative, yet we are offended when the world tells us we are redundant.

The Windsor Star quoted the first Prime Minister of Israel, David Ben Gurion, as saying, “It matters not what the nations say, but what the Jews do.” This is true. The nations’ hatred stems from our inaction toward unity, toward mutual responsibility, toward rekindling the bond that had made us a nation in the first place. Without our example, the nations will not be able to make peace among themselves, and they will blame us for it. The process that I mentioned earlier is one of development from disconnection to connection, from separation to mutual concern. Yet, without our lighting the way for the nations by setting an example, they will not be able to achieve connection and will therefore have no need for us.

When the nations switch from words against Jews to actions, as they have done so many times in history, it will be too late for us to do what we must. We must unite before words become actions. Now is the time to act.

When discussing the fierce disputes among Jews, Baal HaSulam wrote back in the 1930s: “I know that even if we tie them together in one basket, one will not surrender to the other even a little, and no danger will interrupt anyone from carrying out his ambition.” He was trying to warn us about the impending Holocaust.

I am trying to do the same. I don’t enjoy being the wet blanket in the party celebrating the victory of Donald Trump, whom I had hoped would win. Yet, if we do not unite above our differences soon, our future will be bleak. The world is already taking concerted action against us; we must not wait, or it will be too late.

Our forefathers, the Maccabees, succeeded in overcoming the separation among them, thereby defeating the forces of separation. Through their unity, they drove the enemy out from the land of Israel, though they were few against many. Let us learn from their example what unity can achieve if we truly aim for it.
[199546]
From Ynet article 12/29/16

The Truth About Jews And Gentiles

Laitman_049_01Question: The word “anti-Semitism” is composed of “anti” – against and “Semite,” which is a person (Shem, a son of Noah). Why would someone be opposed to this. Is someone entitled to be against this?

Jewish books contain text without “humanity” regarding the gentiles, so it is understandable why they are against us.

Answer: Everything written about “gentiles” refers to our egoism, which is called “gentile,” from the word of the people. The word “Jew – Yehudi” is derived from the word “union – Yichud,” unity among the people that must be attained by everyone. There is no connection in these words to the words “gentile” or “Jew” in the sense that is familiar to us, but it is only a differentiation within a person into “gentile,” an egoist, and “Jew,” an altruist, regardless of nationality or race.
[198419]

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The Connection Between Letters And Digits

laitman_526Question: What is the connection between letters and digits?

Answer: All the letters in the Hebrew alphabet have a numerical value. “Aleph,” “Bet,” “Gimel,” “Dalet,” “Hey,’ “Vav”, “Zayin,” “Het,” “Tet, “and “Yod,” for example, are the first ten.

theconnectionbetweenlettersanddigits

Every number can be expressed both by a letter or a digit. Since the digits arrived after the letters, all the numbers were first denoted by letters.

The number “26,” for example was indicated by the letters “Kaf Vav” because the sum of these letters equals 26 (Kaf is 20 and Vav is 6).

The letters express certain attributes of the spiritual force: either of Hochma, or Bina, the Light of Hassadim, or the Light of Hochma, etc.

Today it is more convenient to use numbers because it is a more specific form of expression. But the letters, in fact, express the same thing.

Question: How is numerology related to the wisdom of Kabbalah? Are they related?

Answer: The wisdom of Kabbalah is not related to anything. As for numerology, prophecy according to digits doesn’t mean anything.

Question: And what is gematria?

Answer: Gematria is the numerical expression of any word and any command. It indicates the specific intensity of a specific word or order, the specific Light and level one is on.

But if there are no such levels in a person, he cannot manage them. When he hears or sees a certain word in a book, some gematria, it is an empty phrase for him. We can only clarify and understand this according to our spiritual attainment.

It is only through unity that we can attain the secret of the numbers and the words!
[197635]
From the Kabbalah Lesson in Russian 7/17/16

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A Question About The Meaning Of Life

laitman_532Question: How can we tell if a person has a question about the meaning of life?

Answer: A person has to answer this question: “Can I live without looking for the meaning of life or not?” If he can replace this question with some kind of hobby and not think about it anymore, it means that he doesn’t have this desire yet, although nature pushes us toward it.

We see what is happening in the world, so we are nearing a point when masses of people will despair from this world and finding fulfillment in it and will eventually reach needing to discover the plan of creation.
[198289]
From the Kabbalah Lesson in Russian 9/18/16

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