A question I received from an attendee of the Israel Kabbalah Congress: The Kabbalah Congress in Israel was a great success in uniting so many people from so many different backgrounds, but after going back to our respective countries, why are we letting distance separate us so much?

My Answer: Because we are weaklings! Where’s that Boy Nipper Pipper who would give us wimps a good smacking, and make us furiously run into battle?

“Hey, get up everyone! Or are we boys only good for playing sticks and skipping rope?” (A. Gaidar, A Tale about a War Secret, about the Boy Nipper Pipper, and his Word of Honor). To guide us into this battle, Kabbalists have given us “The Ten Rules of Spiritual Work.” Three of these rules can be learned from an infant and seven of them can be learned from a thief:

The infant:
1. is happy for no reason,
2. does not rest even for a minute,
3. demands what he wants with all his might.

The thief:
1. works at night,
2. attempts to gain this night what has not been gained the previous night,
3. is loyal to his friends,
4. risks his life to gain even the most insignificant things,
5. does not value that which was stolen, and sells it for pennies,
6. is beaten, but does not turn from his path,
7. sees the advantages of his occupation and does not wish to change it.

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“And that is how I made another crucial discovery: our entire planet is only as big as a house!” (Antoine de Saint Exupéry, The Little Prince)

From a Cnet Blog Post: Proof of Six Degrees of Separation
“In a research paper from June 2007, titled ‘Worldwide Buzz: Planetary-Scale Views on an Instant-Messaging Network (PDF),’ Eric Horvitz of Microsoft Research and Jure Leskovec of Carnegie Mellon University analyzed 30 billion conversations among 240 million people using Microsoft Instant Messenger in June 2006. It turned out that the average path length, or degree of separation, among the anonymized users probed was 6.6.

Six degrees of separation posits that a person is a step away from people they know and two steps distant from people known by the people they know – thus the magic number six.”

My Comment: This research simply shows how we’re externally connected to each other. Soon, however, we will start discovering how internally connected we are, where we will see each other as living not in the bodies we see today, but in each other’s hearts.

Today, we lack the understanding of how the world becomes disclosed to us. For instance, our senses perceive something to the extent that this “something” is disclosed to them, and beforehand, it is as if this “something” had never existed. In other words, something we perceive is born in the same moment we discover it. Just take a look at the laws of nature we know about today: until we discovered them, it was as if they had never existed. Obviously, they had always existed, but we simply couldn’t perceive them: they existed in potential, instead of in action, with regard to us.

Baal HaSulam explains that the world is divided into a revealed and a concealed (secret) part. Therefore, the time we will discover the true connection among people (souls), we will know (with Mocha – mind) and feel (with Liba – heart), simultaneously, that everyone in the world is solely dependent on everyone else’s goodwill: People’s attitudes of love or hate will determine whether or not they will bring life or death upon others.

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The 13th issue of the Kabbalah Today publication is now available.

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Editor’s Note
More Real than Reality TV, More Connected than the Internet
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Anything but Survival
The game show, Survivor, is an excellent example of how not to behave in order to survive in our world. But are we – people of the world, stranded on planet Earth – really that different from the contestants on Survivor?
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To Be or Not to Be?
Death is one of the most unsettling, yet fascinating, phenomena we all face. At one point or another, it touches the lives of each of us, forcing us to ask profound, seemingly unanswerable questions.
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Facebook – What’s All the Fuss?
The obsession with Facebook expresses a deep rooted desire within each of us—to feel connected with everyone. But does the largest virtual community really deliver the new and improved social world we seek?
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Tom, Jerry and Our Children
Today, even Tom can’t help us teach good values to our children. Not to mention Jerry…
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Extras – Why Does Love Always Hurt?
Love always hurts us, because in our world, love is based on the needs of the ego. Whether we are aware of it or not, our love always comes with the calculation: “Is it worthwhile for me or not?”
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“Light” – the Kabbalistic Meaning
The word “Light” brings all kinds of positive associations to mind. But in Kabbalah, Light is higher than anything we can imagine – it is, in fact, a quality of the Creator Himself.
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Living the Spiritual Dream World
We all begin our lives perceiving and living in this corporeal world, until one day we discover a unique desire for something new and different, mostly called “spirituality.”
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Kabbalah: User Manual
What’s it All About?
Although we often feel like isolated individuals and see a world of schisms, Kabbalists say that we are all interconnected and interdependent.
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Cellular memory is an interesting phenomenon: a recipient of an implanted organ acquires certain characteristics and habits of the organ’s previous possessor. People with implanted organs assert that their preferences, behavior, and social manners have changed. Some people suddenly develop interests in arts, those that feared heights become mountain-climbers, and so on…

Kabbalah says that our entire body is a complete, sole mechanism and it is impossible to implant something foreign into it, without having the entire organism incorporated into this change. This is because each cell has its own brains, memory and modus operandi; it perceives the entire body and participates in the body’s full operation. The work of the cell in sustaining the life of the body stems from taking part in the operation of the entire organism.

In light of this, we can only guess how tightly we are all connected within that whole organism of our earthy civilization – and how we share our properties with one another.

As both our individual and collective egoism continues to grow, the interdependence and interconnection among all people will become more apparent. Thus arises the opportunity for us to establish completely new principles of upbringing and education. These principles will be based on our influence on one another and the interconnection of all people within a single, common organism.

That brings us to the method of attaining a common, harmonious society – similar to a healthy organism – based on the principles of complementing one another, and keeping the balance between the two forces of creation: reception and bestowal.

Here is how Kabbalah explains it:
1. In the upper part of one’s soul there is a lower part of a higher soul,
2. The lower part of one’s soul is in the upper part of a lower soul.

This means that everyone’s soul is completely connected with both its upper and lower soul, and therefore lacks its own free space. Realizing that will bring humanity to absolute integration.

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It seems to us that nature is governed by the law of survival of the fittest. But in fact, this couldn’t be farther from the truth, because the interconnection among all species forces them to care about each other’s survival. Zoologists, for instance, know that the fierce fights between animals always end with peace, and never lead to death or even injury, because they fight only to establish the hierarchy within the pack.

An outside view on a living organism might suggest that it’s completely controlled by blind nature: it seems that hostile forces surround it as it struggles for survival. However, scientists are discovering that everything is dynamically balanced, and survival is based not on struggle, but on the mutual cooperation among all species, where both support and struggle complement and balance one another, thus creating equilibrium.

Even the roots of different plants coalesce and create a unified system, as plants with less developed roots receive additional support from stronger ones. When one species of plants is being replaced by another, it isn’t a struggle for territory, but a developmental process of the circle of life.

The interaction between plants and insects is no secret either: flowers give insects food (nectar), while the insects transport pollen, thus ensuring fructification. Even the size of insects corresponds to the shape of the flowers in a way that helps them with the selection of pollen. The interdependency among plants and animals is so strong that the extinction of certain types of plants leads to the disappearance of certain animals. And that, in turn, leads to the extinction of another type of plants and animals, because everything is interconnected within nature’s all-inclusive system.

As it happens, in addition to a struggle for survival, there is also cooperation in nature, both within the species and between them. And the reason for this is not anyone’s direct, self benefit, but simply because everyone’s survival is possible only through the interconnection with all the others.

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I was just interviewed by Fatma Dervish, a reporter for a Cairo weekly publication, Alyoum El Sabaa (The Seventh Day):

Fatma is quite familiar with Bnei Baruch through our English and Arabic sites. In addition to her work in the media, Fatma is writing a doctoral thesis at Cairo University on Bnei Baruch.

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A question I received from Chanah, in response to the post Why Kabbalah Disgusts Us: I thought that existence in egoism is only a shadow of a far removed reflection of the Creator – so the Creator is not actually “making misery” … it’s our inability to sense correctly, right? What I sense as struggle is the fact that I cannot rely on most of my perceptions to navigate to the truth, yet I’m required to move forward.

My Answer: If we would continue progressing egoistically, remaining in our inborn egoistic nature, we would navigate ourselves with whatever we know in our familiar egoistic understanding of the world. However, if we want to progress toward spirituality, we need to exit our egoistic nature and enter into an opposite, unknown nature. As such, we need to progress “in the dark,” so to speak, in qualities and feelings that we don’t yet perceive, and continue progressing like this until we master these new qualities and learn to live in them.

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My article on the ego being the reason behind the global economic crisis was featured today (in Hebrew) on the Ynetnews site. Here’s its translation into English:

A Kabbalistic Interpretation of the Economic Crisis

The ego driving us to increase profits at each other’s expense is in complete contradiction to the balance between nature’s elements, which is vital to nature’s harmonious existence.

The events surrounding the American and global economy prove that this time it’s serious – the global economy is in a deep crisis. What is causing this crazy turbulence and how can the erosion be curbed? Kabbalah provides an explanation along with suggestions for solving the crisis.

Just as with any social system, interdependency is the name of the game. Crises where one element “infects” others and brings the market to the verge of collapse, are part of the signs of economic globalization. This is why we are seeing credit and real estate bubbles in the U.S. bursting and bringing about an infectious collapse of the stock exchange, in banks, companies and hedge funds all over the world.

Having said that, trying to solve economic crises using known models is destined to fail. It turns out that the economic system cannot be controlled or accurately predicted, and that one move in one place of the world causes serious repercussions in other places.

The wisdom of Kabbalah claims that if we understand the laws working on nature and abide by them, we can fortify our understanding of what the future holds, and possibly prevent the next crash. [Read more →]

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A question I received: Although Baal HaSulam writes that a spiritual person leaves for himself only what he needs to survive and gives the rest to society, for some reason you don’t advise anyone to act this way. Don’t you agree with Baal HaSulam? Or are you afraid that this will scare people off? For instance, even though I myself am in need of money, I’m still scared of this!

My Answer: All our actions must correspond to Nature’s law. Should that be the case, we would feel ourselves as Nature’s integral parts – in the World of Infinity, that is, in the state of eternity and perfection, just like Nature (the Creator) itself.

Kabbalah – the science of the whole of Nature – helps us reach this state not through blows and suffering, but through conscious development. [Read more →]

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A question I received: How do Kabbalists feel about humor? Are there any Kabbalistic jokes?

My Answer: In the first year out of the 12 I’ve spent next to Rabash (Kabbalist Baruch Ashlag), I was quite surprised to see how much he loved humor, jokes, wittiness, discoveries, unexpected situations, and unconventional points of view.

Such things are easy for a Kabbalist to relate to, because he always remains young! Why? Because the soul is constantly growing, and a Kabbalist’s spiritual growth makes him feel like a child. Regardless of how it might appear on the outside, a Kabbalist does not become full of himself, but actually becomes simpler than others in this world.

While maintaining a youthful soul, it’s also characteristic for a Kabbalist to undergo a perpetual inner revolution – searching, disagreeing with himself, analyzing, and making decisions above his own self or reason. [Read more →]

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