Good News! It’s OK to Talk about Anti-Semitism in America @haaretzcom antisemitism
[#203827]
From Twitter, 3/19/17
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Question: What is the taste of spiritual pleasure?
Answer: The taste of the spiritual pleasure is, first of all, rising above your nature, when you do not feel yourself limited by the boundaries within which you exist.
We live as if in an iron cage, rushing about and bumping against its corners and edges. But when we exit it, we begin to feel our existence in the Creator—an unlimited mutual adhesion. He is inside us, and we are inside Him.
Our world has specific boundaries: right, left, inside, and outside. But there are no edges in the spiritual senses and that is why they are inexpressible. First and foremost, it is the taste of freedom.
Question: But why are we speaking about so much about unity and integration?
Answer: Because it is the means to attain the quality of bestowal, infinity, and freedom when you can exit yourself.
Question: Does a Kabbalist feel the taste of earthly food, cold, and heat?
Answer: A Kabbalist feels much more than others.
There were times when my wife cooked food for my teacher Rabash, and he wrote notes to her about exactly what to add to the food, which spices.
Question: Have all the tastes of spirituality been previously recorded?
Answer: Of course. Tastes are the spreading of the Upper Light into our desires.
[203572]
From the Kabbalah Lesson in Russian 11/20/16
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Question: Is the direct revelation of the Creator to a man possible without the means of sense organs?
Answer: I do not know what a “revelation” is. At times certain sensations of the world, as if it exists outside of him, awaken in a man. But in fact, the world is inside a man anyway. In other words, we sometimes experience such states, but they come and go.
As a rule, they arise in a person at the initial stages of his Kabbalah studies during the first two to three years of studies.
And then they practically disappear because a person begins to approach the state when through his own actions, his own efforts, he must receive the sensation of the upper world by himself to the extent of his likeness to it. One doesn’t receive it as a small gift, but earns it oneself.
[203576]
From the Kabbalah Lesson in Russian 11/27/16
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Question: I really want to have a teacher. Does the teacher arrive when the student is ready? How can I find him?
Answer: It will gradually be revealed to you.
I advise anyone who wants to develop spiritually to start studying regularly on the Internet. We have a serious well-organized system. Study, simply start and you will advance. And after come to our convention.
[202350]
From the Kabbalah Lesson in Russian 10/30/16
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The division of the people of Israel into the twelve tribes is not artificial, rather it comes from the depths of nature itself. This nation is built in similarity to the upper force and therefore, precisely by keeping all the differences between all the tribes and through their correct connection, they reach the state called Shechina, which is the collective desire of the entire nation, which is able to reveal within itself the upper force, the Creator.
Therefore twelve characteristic differences in their nature are very important and had to be preserved in the most pedantic way.
Each group and each person includes in itself four different layers of egoism. The smallest egoism is the inanimate level, the vegetative level is a higher egoism, the animate level is even higher, and human has the biggest egoism. The four letter name of the Creator or HaVaYaH is defined by these four levels.
Question: Egoism is a negative quality, so how can it define the Creator’s name?
Answer: Egoism is a negative quality when it is used egoistically. However, if we use egoism in the opposite form and connect with others above our egoism, it turns into a place of our connection. Without egoism, stubbornness, rejection, and strong desires we are worth nothing. That’s why it is written, “the bigger is the person, the bigger is his egoism.”
Thus, we can’t say that egoism is a negative quality. It is negative only to the extent that it separates us from each other. However, if we use it correctly, it becomes our “helper against itself.”
Question: Why people divide into groups exactly by the qualities of their egoism?
Answer: The will to receive is our entire nature, our substance, we have nothing else. The correct use of our substance enables us to work with it.
Initially all of man’s qualities are negative and therefore it is said that the Creator created the evil inclination. However, if we can work with these qualities in a positive form, we turn the evil inclination into a good one.
There is no good inclination within us from nature. It appears only when we can work with the egoistic qualities in a positive form. The biggest egoist has an opportunity to be either the biggest villain or the greatest saint.
However, the tribes of the people of Israel differ not only by the quantitative measure of egoism (big or small), but also by its quality and character. All the tribes are very different, therefore it is very important to use each of them according to its source and only to the extent of their synchronous growth, keeping the balance between them on each degree.
This is the correct definition for the development of the people of Israel. If we kept it from the moment we arrived on this land and developed here, everything would have been fine. However, the fact is that we achieved the correct connection between us during the period of the First Temple and then had to connect with the entire world. This was the reason for the fall and the breaking, for the so-called “destruction of the Temple,” meaning of the correct connection between us.
And now, after the nation of Israel has incorporated within itself all the nations of the world, we must rise together. During this ascent each person will discover their in the nation, their tribe. Although we all have many mixed qualities, they are just material ones for we didn’t work in the spiritual sense, we fell from the spiritual world. And mixing with all the nations of the world on the material level isn’t so important.
[202810]
From KabTV’s “New Life” 12/1/16
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Question: Can the ego be positive? I mean, if you do good to yourself, do you also do good to those around you? Can I totally fulfill the law of “love thy friend as thyself” if I don’t love myself?
Answer: This law works according to a totally different principle. I don’t need to love myself in order to love others. After all, this is an egoistic trick! In fact, nothing works this way.
The ego can work properly only if it is controlled by altruism. This is a very high level: the second half of the spiritual ladder.
The rule “love thy friend as thyself” is fulfilled when a person’s egoistic attributes begin to work with the intention of in order to bestow. This is the second part of the ascent up the spiritual ladder.
The first part, “don’t do unto others what is hateful to you,” exists when you don’t use your ego at all.
[200175]
From the Kabbalah Lesson in Russian 7/3/16
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Question: Can receiving of the spiritual soul reflect on a physical body, for example, heal it?
Answer: Hardly ever. The person becomes inspired, empowered, and energized, he has great creative energy, drive, and aspirations. But this does not apply to the body, in particular, to his health.
Question: How does the revelation and attainment of the soul help me in this world, for example, in business, family life, etc.?
Answer: Only in that a person begins to understand the purpose of his existence and therefore, he no longer gets distracted by nonsense, but rather sticks to his guns. Only in this case, studying the wisdom of Kabbalah stabilizes his life in this world.
However, the revelation of the soul does not in any way help a person to succeed in the corporal world: to earn more money, to become healthier and happier.
The study of the wisdom of Kabbalah directs a person’s life toward attainment of the higher purpose of existence, and therefore the material component doesn’t concern him much. He must provide for himself and for his family, but no more than that. And he devotes all of his other forces only to the revelatation and formation of the soul.
[203507]
From the lesson in Russian, 11/6/2017
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Question: What should we expect in 2017? Can you foresee anything?
Answer: No. Whatever you want is what will happen. What is the point in living or doing anything if you know what is going to happen in advance? According to the wisdom of Kabbalah, this deprives us of our freewill. Our path is unknown to anyone.
Question: Does the Creator know?
Answer: No. The Creator sends us signals, and the way we respond to them is how we build our future. We know the ultimate goal, but we don’t know how we will reach it. Nowhere does it say anything about it in advance.
Everything depends on a person, on his connection with other people and with the whole society.
[202107]
From the Kabbalah Lesson in Russian 1/1/17
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A person is created as an absolute egoist and his task is to acquire a quality of bestowal and love that is opposite to egoism. This is what the Torah is for, as it is written, “I created egoism and gave the Torah for its correction.”
Since the light of the Torah corrects and returns to the correct state, we should use it as an instrument to achieve equivalence with the Creator.
Here the problem arises: does a person use the Torah for its intended purpose? Unfortunately, we see that its true purpose is absolutely forgotten.
The correct attitude to the Torah didn’t exist for long, only when the people travelled through the desert and performed correction up to the level of mutual bestowal. Then began their correction on the level of mutual reception in order to bestow, which is symbolized by the entrance to the land of Israel.
This is when they built the First Temple—the state of the full mutual completion. The system of integral connection was utilized, which means to be as one man with one heart. In it, they revealed the Creator in all His glory.
However, as soon as they reached the correct highest state between themselves, they immediately began to fall because the next level of egoism rose within them, which no longer depended on them. This egoism was in the nations of the world and outside the circle created between the Jews called the Temple.
They didn’t have the strength to resist, correct, join, and absorb it in the connection between them. After all, it belonged to those nations of the world who didn’t leave Babylon with them, didn’t go through the path of suffering in the Egyptian exile, and didn’t do the correction that people of Israel performed during 40 years of crossing the desert.
The Jews were not ready to pass the method to the nations of the world and absorb their egoism within themselves because there was no interface and no mutual inclusion of the different desires into each other. Thus, the people of Israel began to fall from the high level of mutual love in order to prepare the correction of the nations of the world.
It turns out that this almost completely corrected part of humanity had to be broken, just as the system called “Adam” was broken in its time, to dissolve in the nations of the world.
So the mutual mixing and absorption of different qualities occurred. Part of the qualities (the egoism of the nations of the world) entered the corrected qualities of the people of Israel, and Israel’s qualities of bestowal and love fell into the egoistic qualities of the nations of the world.
Naturally, nothing good came out of it, except of the mutual mixing. Therefore, it is written that the people of Israel left the exile only to attach to themselves the souls of all the rest of the people, all of Babylon who had scattered around the world and covered the surface of Earth.
This became the cause of destruction of the First Temple, which symbolized love. Then the destruction had to continue according to the same system as in the world of Nikkudim, in the system of Adam and in the destruction of the Second Temple.
After the destruction of the First Temple, there was no love left between the people, but the vestiges of the quality of bestowal remained and they were expressed in the mutual agreement and laws of the correct community. However, after destruction of the Second Temple, they also disappeared.
As it is written, “The people of Israel fell from the level of love to the level of unfounded hatred.” At the same time, they became completely identical to the nations of the world and even worse than them because the nations of the world didn’t have the rise and fall, where all the previous rises inversely transform into corresponding falls: the higher the ascent, the lower the fall.
Therefore, after the final collapse of the Second Temple, the people of Israel found themselves in a spiritual state most remote from the Creator. From this state, they must begin the path of elevation.
Thus, the first move was directed to the completion of mutual penetration, the diffusion of the qualities of the nations of the world with the qualities of the people of Israel and vice versa, so that no difference would remain between them.
This condition, on the one hand, was achieved through the creation of religions (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam) with the help of various wars, raids, massacres, and expulsions from country to country, and on the other hand, by creation of science and culture, the discovery of continents, the great assimilation and so on by Jews.
All this was in order for the final dissolution to happen and for the various qualities to enter each other. Moreover, it is not about physical qualities and material contacts between people since the Jews always lived in isolation, but about the internal, spiritual interpenetration of the qualities. Perhaps, it was expressed externally through various physical actions that are completely incompatible with the spiritual ones.
The final diffusion of the qualities of the people of Israel with the nations of the world ended approximately in the 16th century when the great Kabbalist the Ari described the method of correction of the world and the system of the correct condition of the universe. Therefore, he is considered Mashiach (Messiah) Ben-Yosef among the Kabbalists, which is the predecessor of Mashiach Ben-David (Messiah)
[202009]
From KabTV’s “Secrets of the Eternal Book” 9/14/16
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The Jerusalem Post published my new article “UN Turns Starvation Into A Cash Cow“
UN Coordinator for Humanitarian Affairs: “More than 20 million people face starvation and famine” Where has he been until now? Gorging with the rest of his lot at their expense.
Less than a week ago, Stephen O’Brien, the United Nations Coordinator for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief stated, “More than 20 million people across four countries face starvation and famine. Without collective and coordinated global efforts, people will simply starve to death. Many more will suffer and die from disease.” Mr. O’Brien also said “$4.4bn was needed by July to avert disaster.”
Here is what I’d like to know: Mr. O’Brien has been in office for nearly two years now. What has he been doing all this time? What has the UN been doing? Starvation of twenty million people does not happen overnight. Why has the UN not sounded the alarm before? All of a sudden, the Internet and newsfeeds are inundated with harrowing images of emaciated children. Could the UN not tell the world about this when only five or ten million people were starving? Apparently, someone in that defunct institution calculated that it requires no less than twenty million starving people to redeem a ransom of $4.4 bn by July.
The billions of dollars the organization already receives could have cured the world’s hunger problems several times over. They could have shipped a few million of the 1.3 billion tons of excess food trashed each year and solved this crisis, but they have no interest in doing so. Starving children bring in donations. Feeding them would dry up the flow of money and kill this cash cow.
More than anything, Mr. O’Brien’s declaration is an admission that the UN is rotten to the core. The sole interests of the politicians and diplomats who serve in it are their paychecks and promoting their careers. For example, consider this piece of information coming from the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF). On its Frequently Asked Questions page, UNICEF USA refutes the “vicious” and unsubstantiated rumor that Caryl M. Stern, President and CEO of the U.S. Fund for UNICEF, “earns more than $1 million.” In truth, the organization proclaims, Mrs. Stern “earns $521,820.” Indeed, a CEO who is a role model of austerity.
The Root Cause of Our Problems
The growing decadence of the UN should not surprise us. It goes hand in hand with humanity’s exponential growth of self-absorption and narcissism. To find a real alternative to the nations’ governing body, we need to start by addressing the root cause of all the problems.
In 1964, Nobel Prize laureate in physics Dennis Gabor wrote, “Till now man has been up against Nature; from now on he will be up against his own nature.” In fact, we have been up against our own nature since Biblical times, when we learned that all of our problems are because “The inclination of a man’s heart is evil from his youth” (Gen 8:21). Still, until recently, when we began to realize the great harm that excessive selfishness inflicts on the world, we obstinately tried to circumvent the problem rather than solve it.
Over the eons, humanity has tried every conceivable form of governance in search of the ideal way to balance our need for social connections with our inherent self-centeredness. Slavery, feudalism, capitalism, liberalism, fascism, communism, and Nazism have all been part of the trail of blood and suffering we call “the annals of human history.” Still, we have not found a single form of governance that is both sustainable and guarantees the well-being of all people. And the reason we have not found one is that, not only are we narcissistic and selfish to the core, but are also growing incrementally more so exponentially! Now we are at a tipping point. We have become so apathetic to each other that if we do not find a remedy for the ills of human nature, media outlets will soon regard twenty million starving people as not newsworthy.
To truly help ourselves, we must address two issues. The first is provision of sustenance. In a world where so much food gets lost or wasted, it is unacceptable that human beings should starve. The food already exists. All we need is to collect and ship it where it’s needed.
The second issue to address concerns prevention. This entails a long-term program that will ultimately change the way we think and feel about the world—from the current exploitative mindset to a more balanced and sustainable approach.
The Secret of Our Nation
In a TED talk given in May 2010, acclaimed American sociologist and physician Nicholas Christakis stated that human beings form a kind of superorganism. Approximately eighty years prior, acclaimed commentator on The Book of Zohar Rav Yehuda Ashlag wrote, “We have already come to such a degree that the whole world is considered one collective and one society. …In our generation, when each person is aided for his happiness by all the countries in the world … the possibility of leading a good, happy, and peaceful life in one country is inconceivable when it is not so in all the countries in the world.” To this, Ashlag added, “People have not yet grasped this,” but stressed that it is only because “the act comes before the understanding, and only actions will prove and push humanity forward.” In other words, we will not feel that we are a single superorganism (as Christakis put it) until we begin to act the part.
This begs the question: How could such a deeply divided world operate as one superorganism? Consider this curious fact: The only nation to have survived since antiquity is the Jewish nation. The Babylonian, Egyptian, Greek, and Roman nations have all vanished, and only Judaism remains. Scholars, philosophers, philo-Semites and anti-Semites throughout the ages have pondered, “What is the secret of his immortality?” as Mark Twain asked about the Jew.
The answer lies in a fundamental difference between the Jews and all other nations. The secret to our endurance is the adhesive of unity. The early Jews came from different tribes and cultures. The only thing that held them together was an idea that Abraham had taught them: Mercy and love are the foundation stones upon which to build society. Whenever the ego erupts, do not fight or part ways, but cover it with love instead. The wisest of all men, King Solomon, succinctly summarized Abraham’s principle: “Hate stirs strife, and love covers all crimes” (Proverbs 10:12).
Living by this approach has held the Jews together through crises and wars for approximately 1,500 years—from Abraham’s time until the ruin of the Second Temple some two millennia ago. Moreover, history has proven that the “cement” of unity that covers egoism is so strong that it not only sustained the Jewish people longer than any other nation, but also kept them intact through countless attempts to destroy and disperse them. Although today’s Jews have lost that special unity that had sustained them for centuries, the persistent strength of that adhesive is still strong enough to keep our nation in existence.
Successful Proof of Concept
The historic fact of our unique survival is the key to solving the world’s problems. Unity over egoism is the one mode of governance the world has not yet tried. Faced with the risk of another world war, mass starvation, accelerated global warming, and pollution of natural resources, I think we simply must give this approach a serious consideration. Of all unlikely people, it was notorious anti-Semite Henry Ford who wrote, “Modern reformers, who are constructing model social systems, would do well to look into the social system under which the early Jews were organized.” On this point, he could not be more right.
As Ashlag said, “the act comes before the understanding.” Today, we are implementing Abraham’s principle of unity above enmity de facto. After numerous successful unity events throughout the world, including in conflict zones such as Israel, with Arabs and Jews, we are certain that we can reinstate our forefathers’ method on a large scale (Example 1, Example 2, Example 3 [the latter is in Hebrew, switch on the Subtitles option]).
In my view, until we deal with the heart of the problem—the egoism in human nature—and do so specifically in the way that Abraham bequeathed to his disciples, by bonding atop their animosity, we will find no relief to our woes. The notion that we need not suppress our unruly egos, but simply exert to unite above them may be a novel idea to some, but in my view, we have run out of options. The implementation of Abraham’s method is the only way to spare humanity many more years of needless torment.
[203720]
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