Audio Version Of The Blog – 03.12.18

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My Thoughts On Twitter, 3/12/18

Dr Michael Laitman Twitter

#Reality_ML
#Kabbalah is no more and no less than the order of upper roots descending one by one according to permanent, absolute laws, pursuing, uniting and attaining the one upper goal, “To reveal the Creator to the creatures in this world.”
Baal HaSulam #consciousliving

#Reality_ML
The #commandments of the #Torah are laws and rules of the upper world, which are, in turn, roots of the laws of our world. Therefore, the laws of Torah are always and in every way similar to the laws of our world.
Baal HaSulam

#Kabbalist’s_advice
It is pointless to conceal the chasms between us—they are necessary in order to engage the equivalent, positive force of unity and love.
#MotivationMonday #success

Events in the world will change if #humanity changes. All options of development are in front of us at every given moment:
– slightly toward good—the world becomes kinder
– slightly toward evil—crueler.
Everything depends on #man’s free choice.
#society

Trump demonstrates a business-like pragmatism, aiming for the results he believes are good for America, while caring a lot less about what spectators understand when he positions himself to make a deal.
Read my full article on @newsmax #trump #NorthKorea

From Twitter, 3/12/18

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Breaking Israel News: “What Can Israel Do About Its ‘Brain Drain’ Problem“

The largest portal Breaking Israel News published my new article “What Can Israel Do About Its ‘Brain Drain’ Problem”

“More than all that you guard, guard your mind, For it is the source of life.” (Proverbs 4:23)

Israel isn’t losing its best and brightest because of greener pastures or higher standards of living abroad. It is losing because it is turning its back on its true identity. To solve the brain drain, the Israeli heart must be replenished first.

I understand what lies at the heart of scientists, academics and other great minds who are making the decision to leave Israel.

In 1974, I emigrated from Lithuania to Israel and stopped in Vienna for a temporary transit. All the cars were full of Jews who chose to emigrate to the United States, Canada or Western European countries. My family and another Georgian family were the only ones “crazy enough” to immigrate to Israel. As a young ambitious scientist, I could not imagine that forty-four years later, in 2018, I would be witnessing a different kind of Israel.

In today’s Israel, both great and average minds alike can be easily tempted by dubious organizations to abandon their homeland. The reason is simple: the pursuit of material profit. Many times, these offers come from sources with an interest in weakening Israel, and unfortunately, Israel’s leaders are busy trying to divide and conquer whatever’s left of the pie, rather than making the pie bigger together.

What’s worse, a fertile soil has been created here for people in positions of power to join hands in certain directions. There’s no real way to monitor the various ties being forged between government, military, police, courts and the media. Checks and balances are eroding and separation of powers is not always there. The successful players and brilliant minds who stay here are those who make the most profit.

Our Spiritual Potential Is Our Most Valuable Asset

Had I been warned about this situation forty-four years ago, I would have taken my family to the land of unlimited possibilities and urged the Georgian family to come with me, or at the very least retrace my steps.

What keeps me here in Israel? Only the spiritual potential that lies within our people. We carry a spark of unity that comes from our very foundation as a Jewish people, and if we rekindle it here on the land of Israel, we will rediscover our spiritual mission to be “a light unto nations.”

Being a shining example of unity is our vocation as a people and that is why, deep down, all nations are expecting something to come from us. When we fail to provide that example, the nations are driven to apply pressure on us in various ways, urging us to come together. But if we deliver, we can inspire the whole of humanity towards unity.

Israel has to recognize that the “heart drain” is what causes the “brain drain.” In other words, Israelis have lost touch with that spark of unity that ties them together and has no passion to serve as a beacon of unity for the world. They feel motivated to stick together only when they are under the gun; hence, material profit becomes the only calculation they make.

Abraham Planted the Seed of Love for All People

The first thing Israel should do is a massive campaign reviving the little-known birth story of the Jewish people, which took place in Babylon 3,800 years ago. Surely, everyone can point to Abraham the patriarch as the father of Israel, but very few can recount why and how Abraham brought us together.

The book of Noam Elimelech writes that “Abraham planted the seed of love for all people,” and Maimonides explains that “he went from city to city, kingdom to kingdom, until thousands and tens of thousands joined him, and they are the people of the house of Abraham… and they became a nation” (Yad HaChazakah).

So Abraham toured all of Babylon, and the representatives from all nations who followed him and practiced the tenet of “love thy neighbor as thyself” above all differences, later became the people of Israel.

Therefore, global unity is the foundation of our nationhood. To put it another way, the people of Israel were a mini-model of a united humanity. And this is why if we don’t maintain our bond of unity above all differences, there’s no real reason for us to stay together on the same land.

Rediscovering this common bond is the only way for Israel to create a renewed sense of patriotism, and reawaken the passion to contribute to our homeland, to a point that it’s more important for us than material profit offered abroad.

Along with this line, Israel should honor and cherish successful researchers and other brilliant minds who choose to stay in the country and thus strengthen the spirit of unity. This could be done regularly through presidential acknowledgment and broad media coverage of their unique contributions.

When we replenish the Israeli heart, the Israeli brain will work even better.
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JPost: “How The Purim Story Is Playing Out Right Now”

The Jerusalem Post published my new article: “How the Purim Story Is Playing Out Right Now

Purim has one of the most suspenseful stories ever written. From the panic, doubt and fear in the face of utter destruction to the elation, euphoria and high spirits after everything works out for the best, the story and meaning of Purim encompasses one of the greatest ever resolution of opposites.

Any exceptional drama-thriller has its climax, when the tension of a situation that seems impossible to get out of flips into a miraculous solution. Undoubtedly, the peak of the Purim story is when the decision to kill the Jews gets overturned.

Purim’s plot has many places that escalate toward its climax. If we neglect the importance of these places, we will skip its main idea, and remain with nothing more than an impressive narrative. One such place, for instance is when Queen Esther relays to Mordechai: “You want me to go to the king and beg for your lives? Don’t just sit there at the king’s gate; go, gather the Jews!”

Mordechai is the story’s representative of good. The catch of the story is that, as much as Mordechai wants to bring good, he’s powerless to do so by himself. In order to do so, he needs to gather the Jews. By gathering the Jews, Mordechai invalidates the claim of Haman, the story’s representative of bad, which is to eradicate the Jews. “There is a certain people, scattered and dispersed,” Haman says to King Ahasuerus, contending that the Jews were failing to uphold the king’s laws, which discredited their existence in the king’s eyes.

At this point, a question arises: Why did Haman connect the Jews’ dispersion to their disobeying the king’s laws? Cunning and intelligent as he was, Haman understood that the law by which the Jewish nation emerged is a law of unity. The Jews became ratified as a nation when they agreed to unite “as one man with one heart.” Their dispersion meant their disunity, which meant that they failed to live up to what established them as a nation to begin with. That is what Haman emphasized to King Ahasuerus.

While dispersed, Queen Esther could be of no service to the Jews because they were breaching the king’s law. When they united, however, they re-established themselves as a nation, exactly as King Ahasuerus commanded, making Haman’s claim fall short.

The significance of this Purim message penetrates sharply into our current era. “Hamanism,” or antisemitism, is rampant today, comparable to how it was in the Purim story’s setting of Shushan. Likewise, we Jews are in the same loop of brushing off the brunt of what a sudden rise in antisemitism worldwide could lead to.

The disastrous events in the middle of last century clearly exemplify what an escalation of Jewish hatred coupled with Jewish denial of that hatred and failure to do anything about it could lead to. Purim, however, provides us with the opposite, happy-ending example: where the Jewish people understand their role and purpose, and take responsibility to realize the king’s law, uniting above their differences and thereby securing their survival and bringing about great joy and happiness.

We Jews hold the keys to both scenarios: the choice to unite, which brings about the elated state Purim symbolizes, or the choice to remain disunited, which has devastating consequences.

What is this unity we need to reach? It does not mean that we need to physically gather in Israel or anywhere else. Uniting means that we mentally and emotionally support each other in seeking that common point of agreement, “as one man with one heart,” to be there for each other above any seeming differences between us. Moreover, uniting also means that by our efforts to find our common unifying point, we will become conduits of unity to the rest of humanity, as is written, to become “a light unto nations.” In other words, our dispersion and disunity spreads dispersion and disunity, and our unification spreads unification. Unity is an unfulfilled expectation that humanity currently has toward the Jews. Neither non-Jews nor Jews can pinpoint nor verbalize this feeling, but it lurks behind all antisemitic sentiment.

“In such a generation, all the destructors among the nations of the world raise their heads and wish primarily to destroy and to kill the people of Israel, as it is written (Yevamot 63), ‘No calamity comes to the world but for Israel.’ This means … that they cause poverty, ruin, robbery, killing, and destruction in the whole world.

“And through our many faults … the judgment struck the very best of us, as our sages said (Baba Kama 60), ‘And it starts with the righteous first.’ And of all the glory Israel had in the countries of Poland and Lithuania, etc., there remains but the relics in our holy land. Now it is upon us, relics, to correct that dreadful wrong. Each of us remainders should take upon himself, heart and soul, to henceforth intensify the internality of the Torah [i.e. focusing on the unifying essence of what the Torah instructs, to ‘love your friend as yourself’], and give it its rightful place, according to its merit over the externality of the Torah [i.e. where unity is not the main goal, but intellectual progress or performing physical actions with no intention to unite].

“And then, each and every one of us will be rewarded with intensifying his own internality, meaning the Israel within us, which is the needs of the soul over our own externality, which is the nations of the world within us, that is, the needs of the body. That force will come to the whole of Israel, until the nations of the world within us recognize and acknowledge the merit of the great sages of Israel…”

– Rabbi Yehuda Ashlag (Baal HaSulam), “Introduction to The Book of Zohar,” item 71.

The Purim story, in addition to being an epic tale, symbolizes what life can be like when we unite. Also, as it is in the Purim story, so it is today: the Jews hold the key. We were given the law “Love your friend as yourself” before any other nation, and likewise today, we need to implement this law among each other in order for it to be able to spread to humanity as a whole. Until we do, antisemitism will continue rising in order to corner us into making that fateful decision. It is my hope that the antisemitic atmosphere will not have to grow to the likes of what we experienced in the middle of last century in order for us to wake up to our role. We have the wisdom and tools today to realize it much sooner and reach the perfection that Purim stands for even on this very day if we wanted to.
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Rise To The Level Of The Creator

Laitman_177.06We must reach the first spiritual degree called “an embryo,” which is when a person completely annuls himself, wants to be at the mercy of the Creator, and wants to reveal the truth, the first degree of his existence, the first truth of nature. By revealing this, he enters into the first contact with the Creator.

Following the entrance into the Creator’s omnipresence, he begins to work with his egoism, understanding that his egoism is a very precious, valuable acquisition. Thanks to egoism, he feels resistance to the Creator and begins constructing himself in equivalence to Him, overcoming this resistance.

In any mechanism, whether inanimate, vegetative, animate, human, or an artificial system created by us, there is always an action and counteraction, plus and minus, between which various relationships and the construction of various systems are possible. It is the same with the Creator.

On one hand, He completely controls us, and on the other hand, we disallow ourselves from agreeing with this, and desire to reach equivalence with Him.

“Do you control me? Alright, but I make the first restriction (Tzimtzum). I place a barrier between us and say, ‘I will do everything that comes from You, but only to the extent that I agree with how You control me.’”

There is an interesting solution to the problem: The Creator gives us an opportunity to first understand whether He is right, perfect, and omnipotent. He gives us a chance to explore Him. To the extent that I make a decision to be like Him, I let Him rule over me. However, this is not Him, but it is as if I do it, that is, I create the Creator out of myself.

This is not a simple methodology, but it elevates us to the level of absolute equivalence with the Creator.
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From the Kabbalah Lesson in Russian 11/12/17

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Ecology Of Human Relations

Laitman_707Six months ago in Mexico there was a devastating earthquake and another one recently. In times of such disasters, people become very sensitive and seek unity. A good connection between people can create a better atmosphere in society and thus affect nature.

Nature in general consists of four levels: inanimate, vegetative, animate, and people who are on the top of this pyramid. If people achieve even a small amount of positive connection, it has a very powerful effect on all of nature’s lower layers, especially on the inanimate level where earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, tsunamis, and typhoons occur.

We just need to correct ourselves a little—our attitude toward each other to bring peace and harmony to human society, and this will have a huge impact on inanimate nature, the environment and the Earth we live on. We can soothe all the lower layers of nature under humanity.

Human society has a very strong influence on nature in general. Presently we speak a lot about the fact that we have destroyed the ecology so much that the changes are irreversible and that life on Earth will soon become impossible. Indeed, we will be unable to live on Earth and this will force us to change the relationships between us. Then, nature will return to the corrected state.

Nothing disappears without a trace; it is possible to bring nature back to life from almost zero: disappearing species of animals and plants, melting glaciers. Nature in its entirety will return to equilibrium as soon as we balance our relationships.
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From the Kabbalah Lesson “Questions And Answers”, 2/18/18

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New Life 946 – The Power Of Women

New Life 946 – The Power Of Women
Dr. Michael Laitman in conversation with Oren Levi and Yael Leshed-Harel

The wisdom of Kabbalah relates to the power of women as the foundation of nature; it is up to them to advance the world toward a good place. Men are managed by women. A woman needs to awaken her man and direct him in life like a mother. Women must require a stable world from men and it is in their nature-given powers to demand this from men. Women are ready to connect to fight for a common goal, but otherwise each woman is alone.
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From KabTV’s “New Life 946 – The Power Of Women,” 1/14/18

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Daily Kabbalah Lesson – 3/12/18

Preparation for the Lesson

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Writings of Rabash, Vol. 2, Article 15  

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Talmud Eser Sefirot, Part 1, “Histaklut Pnimit,” Chapter 6, Item 25  

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Shamati #159 “And It Came to Pass in the Course of Those Many Days”

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