Audio Version Of The Blog – 5/9/21
Posted on May 9th, 2021
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Question: How can I win the heart of the other person?
Answer: Through love. By doing things that the other one likes if he is worth it.
Question: That is, I need to evaluate the person, then invest as much as possible in him with the intention of love. What are the characteristics of this love? How can you describe it?
Answer: It is bestowal. Love means that you feel the desires and needs of another person and do everything to fulfill them.
Question: Can you call this a spiritual phenomenon?
Answer: No, not necessarily. After all, if this is done to fulfill the egoistic desires of another person, it is called corporeal love.
Question: Can there be a higher, spiritual love between a man and a woman?
Answer: In this case, there is no longer a man and woman relationship between them, but a relationship between a giver and a receiver.
[281850]
From KabTV’s “Kabbalah Express” 4/12/21
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Baal HaSulam, Shamati 3: May we merit receiving His light and following the ways of the Creator, and to serve Him not in order to receive reward but to give contentment to the Creator…. Whose desire should it be: ours, the Creator’s, or the common desire of both together?
The desire of the upper force determines what we want. And we raise the prayer from below at our own desire, in order to awaken the desire from above. And so we begin to connect through our desires, so that from the state of separation we can both mutually return to the connection, to the revelation.
So when it says: “Let there be desire” means not only that we lack the desire to cling to the Creator, but also that we need to awaken the desire of the upper to act on us.
It is said, “Make your desire as His desire.” That is, we need to awaken a great desire among us to reveal the Creator, to come closer and merge with Him. And then, by turning to Him, we awaken the desire from above.
Therefore, if the desire from above is awakened, it means that our desire is correct and ready to connect with the Creator. And if I am not yet able to connect with the Creator because I do not have a special upper light that contributes to connection shining on me, then my desire does not yet sufficiently awaken the desire of the Creator.
The Creator awakens our desire a little and wants us to awaken Him in return. So we say that He is hiding and wants us to run after Him, to pursue Him. The Creator is like a deer that runs away from a person, and he constantly looks back, checking whether the one who is chasing him has not fallen behind.
Therefore, if the desire to approach the Creator is awakened in a person, then it is obvious that the Creator was the first to awaken. It was not we who awakened the Creator, but He who awoke before us. And if we suffer because we have not yet united with Him, it means that He has suffered even before us and many times more to the extent that His all-encompassing height is higher than our private, broken degree.
Therefore, you should always pray: “And let there be a desire that we may be honored to receive His light and walk in the ways of the Creator, and raise the Shechina from the dust, that is, to awaken all souls and to be honored to merge with the Creator, so that the Creator may reveal Himself to His creations.” We want the Creator to be revealed to all souls as they unite all together and bring Him contentment.
[281936]
From the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 5/5/21, “Chasing the Shechina“
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Wherever you look around the world, antisemitism is on the rise. In Argentina, the police prevented a deadly attack on a synagogue that was planned for a Saturday when synagogues are packed. In France, the Court of Cassation absolved the 2017 murderer of a Jewish woman, Sarah Halimi, of criminal responsibility because he took cannabis before he brutally beat her and threw her out the 3rd floor window yelling in Arabic, Allahu akbar [God is great]. According to the Anti Defamation League, in 2020, there were more than 2,000 antisemitic incidents in the US. Similarly, the German Federal Criminal Police Office reported that the number of antisemitic crimes across the country was 2,351. Even the news about the Mt. Meron disaster, where 45 Orthodox Jews died in a stampede, including quite a few children and youths, was met with vitriol on social media. The many responders audaciously wrote such comments as “God send Your wrath on the Jews” and “Thank God, they’ll continue their festival of fire in Hell.”
If we look into the reason that our sages and the world place the responsibility for our woes in our laps, we will find that both refer to our internal division as the cause. While the nations blame us for sowing division among them, our sages point to our hatred of each other, which prevents us from spreading love of others to the world.
Antisemitism has always been ubiquitous and has always led to violence against Jews, but never was it so pervasive all at the same time. On the personal and social levels, individual Jews and Jewish communities around the world are facing a spike that has many of them looking for alternative places to live, but there aren’t many options. On the international level, institutional antisemitism cloaked as anti-Zionism expresses itself through coordinated attacks on Israel in the UN and other international organizations.
Additionally, America’s support of Israel is fading; its focus has shifted to renewing the accord with Iran, whose explicit goal is to obliterate the State of Israel. Europe, too, whose anti-Israel stance has long been a challenge for the Jewish state, supports Shi’ite, Iran backed Muslim organizations which the EU itself has defined as terrorist organizations.
Why does the world blame Jews and Israel for its every woe? Why do people accuse us, for example, of creating the Covid-19 virus, and before that the HIV virus? Why did it accuse us of wanting to destroy the world and take control over it during the 2008 Great Recession? Why do many people feel that Israel is an ally of Al Qaeda? In short, why do people feel that, as actor Mel Gibson fumed, “The Jews are responsible for all the wars in the world,” or as retired General William Boykin blustered, “The Jews are the problem; the Jews are the cause of all the problems in the world”?
Interestingly, our sages seem to be somewhat in agreement with antisemites that the world’s troubles are somehow our fault. The sages of the Talmud wrote, “No calamity comes to the world but for Israel” (Yevamot, 63a). Rabbi Shimon also writes in The Book of Zohar that Israel’s wrongful actions “bring about the existence of poverty, ruin, and robbery, looting, killing, and destructions in the world” (Tikkuney Zohar, Tikkun No. 30). In the early 20th century, Rabbi Yehuda Leib Arie Altar, the ADMOR of Gur, wrote in his principal composition Sefat Emet: “The children of Israel became responsible for the correction of the entire world … And it is to that that they replied, ‘That which the Lord has said, we shall do’—correct the whole of Creation. …In truth,” he concludes, “everything depends on the children of Israel.”
If we look into the reason that our sages and the world place the responsibility for our woes in our laps, we will find that both refer to our internal division as the cause. While the nations blame us for sowing division among them, our sages point to our hatred of each other, which prevents us from spreading love of others to the world.
Accordingly, in his composition The Book of a Few, Rabbi Hillel Tzeitlin writes that “If Israel is the one true redeemer of the entire world, it must be fit for that redemption. Israel must first redeem its own soul, the sanctity of its soul.” And how does Tzeitlin propose that we will achieve this? “For this purpose, I wish to establish with this book the ‘unity of Israel’ … If founded, the unification of individuals will be for the purpose of … corrections for all the ills of the nation and the world.”
Similarly, the great 20th century kabbalist Rabbi Yehuda Ashlag wrote in his essay “Mutual Guarantee”: “It is upon the Israeli nation to qualify itself and all the people of the world … to develop until they take upon themselves that sublime work of the love of others, which is the ladder to the purpose of Creation.”
So, when you look at the world and see the enmity among people and nations spreading like brushfire, and there is no water around to put it out, you realize that we have our hands on the valve, and we are the ones keeping it shut. Consciously or not, people evidently feel that the Jews are responsible for their troubles, but they don’t understand in what way. They cannot see that we are responsible for their troubles through our internal division and mutual hatred, which prevents them from achieving unity among themselves. Indeed, this lesson is for us to learn, and for us to execute. Because at the end of the day, as the great Rav Kook points out in his book Orot, “In Israel lies the secret to the unity of the world.”
For more on this topic, refer to the books The Jewish Choice: Unity or Anti-Semitism, Historical facts on anti-Semitism as a reflection of Jewish social discord, and Like a Bundle of Reeds: Why unity and mutual guarantee are today’s call of the hour.
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I should feel sorrow that I cannot give the Creator the place to reveal Himself to the created beings and give them pleasure. As much as I consider the upper force more important than myself, my egoism, and care about it more than about myself, this determines the measure of my sorrow that I do not do my work.
I must feel that I am a representative of all the created beings, and so do each of us. After all, everyone has a special connection with the Creator from his unique root of the soul in which no one can replace him. Therefore, I must think about how I can bring contentment to the Creator, how I can connect the Creator with all the created beings through myself, first with the ten, and after the ten with the entire common soul, with the Shechina, so that the Creator will reveal Himself in all the souls and enjoy.
This is the work of each person, which no one can do for him. If he is sorry for the suffering he is causing the Shechina, then he can share its joy later.
[281940]
From the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 5/5/21, “Chasing the Shechina“
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How can we advance from our state in which we are disconnected from the upper spiritual world, from the true reality? After all, we live in a kind of a capsule, trapped inside our egoistic desire and see nothing but that, like a worm living inside a rotten apple.
But any state that is less than the revelation of the Creator who fills all reality is given to us in order to rise from it to the state of full revelation of the upper force within us and around us.
Therefore, the exile is a call for redemption. The Creator deliberately gives us such states where we do not feel anything good, but we feel them as dark, unpleasant, incomprehensible, confusing, that is, negative. And all this in order to advance us or we would not move.
After all, we are at the animate level, and when the beast feels good, it does not require anything more. The beast is not able to desire anything beyond its limits because this whole world revolves around food, sex, family, money, honor, and knowledge. All these desires belong to the animate level because at the human level a person dreams of becoming like the Creator.
Therefore, we need to gather strength to rise above the animate level. And if a person feels the taste of exile in his work, that is, if he feels that he is separated from the Creator, wants to attain Him, and know Him but cannot, then he wants to get out of this exile. And then he must believe that in any place where he is, the Shechina is with him, that is, the Creator is near.
It is the Shechina that gives me the taste of exile. Right now when I feel myself falling and far away from the Creator, the Creator seems to be saying to me: “Look where you are! You can come closer to Me.” The Creator gives the taste of exile to the one He wants to bring closer to Him.
Therefore, one should not treat the feeling of exile with neglect and be angry with the Creator for such states. On the contrary, we should thank the Creator for awakening us now and showing us the distance that separates us from Him.
It is necessary to taste the exile before liberation. Before the Creator appears, there must be a sense of His lack. Every moment of your life should be directed to the search for the upper force: “Where is the Creator in the concealment that I now feel? Where can He reveal Himself in my life, in my world?” After all, the Creator is close to me, but only the posterior side is turned to me.
It turns out that there are no ups and downs and all this is the game of the Creator. This is what we do with babies when we teach them to walk, we put them on the floor in front of us and take a step back. And the baby cries in fear until he takes a step forward. But then we pull back again, and he cries even more. It seems to him that he is about to fall into our arms and we are again moving away. And he thinks we are cruel and have abandoned him.
This is how we teach him to take his first steps until he learns to walk and happily runs to meet us. The same thing happens to us with the Creator, according to the same example.
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From the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 5/3/21, “Chasing the Shechina“
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We are all fragments from the shattering of the common soul. Do not look at the bodies; look at the desires that are inside. Inside each of us is a part of the desire of Adam HaRishon, of the single complete vessel. In order to restore this vessel, we need to connect our desires: mine, yours, his, of all of us, of all of humanity.
Do we want this? Of course not. However, it is important to understand that without this, we will not get out of trouble. The pandemic will not end, humanity will face very big problems that will not leave us until we understand that we need to correct the connection between us.
Problems will strike in such a direction that we will understand that only our good connection can correct everything. But we will not want this connection, and then the war of Gog and Magog will break out between our egoism, which does not want any connection, and the fact is that we must connect or we will have nothing good, no success in anything, not even in simply surviving.
Then people will realize what an abyss of egoism they are in because I would rather die than connect with the other. I hate this man so much that I cannot take the life-saving medicine from him. He gives me medicine, but he is my enemy. So I turn my back to him without taking the cure and I die.
Yet, I have a choice: to overcome my hatred and approach him with love and the recognition that he wants to help me, I take his medicine and get well. When we are connected, we can go together with him to a third person, then to the fourth, and thus convince everyone to receive this potion of life.
However, this will be extremely difficult to do. The pride that rises in every person kills him and he cannot cope with it. Only after falling to the ground, as Rabbi Hiya pleaded in The Book of Zohar: “Dust, dust, how obstinate you are,” and annulling yourself to a complete zero, can you gradually get out of trouble. There is no other way. We need corrections!
All this is opposite to our nature, and therefore, it is impossible to do it alone but only by working in the ten. Then each of us is under the influence of the friends, and this allows us to rise above personal calculations and establish a common attitude.
It will be easy to make this choice if you constantly come back to it and not remember it only once a week. If I keep thinking that I should do it no matter how disgusting and hateful it is, I get used to this idea, to these conversations. Habit becomes a second nature; it all depends on how we try to bring ourselves back to the right thought.
Even if this thought is unpleasant and undesirable to me, there is no choice I try again and again. Then suddenly I notice that by constantly returning to the state that I did not want to hear about, I begin to perceive it in the opposite way. How can this be? I used to hate him terribly, I completely rejected him, and now I do not.
The enemy becomes a part of my life. I hated him, I pushed him away, I did not want to see or hear him, he just infuriated me. And suddenly, he becomes an integral part of the picture. He is still against me, but without him, the picture will be incomplete.
Then I discover that I really need this part. This is how we learn to work with both hatred and love, with opposite forces, and we see that there is a place for everything.
This is opposite to the ways in our world where every country tries to defeat and destroy its neighbor. They do not understand that they will never succeed because our development is not going in this direction but rather in ensuring that everyone has a place.
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From the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 5/2/21, “Chasing the Shechina”
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My grandfather, back in Belarus, was a very religious man. When I was a child, he would often tell me about Jerusalem. Even though I was only five or six years old then, I vividly remember the emotion in his words. He longed to feel Jerusalem, to unite with it. Simply speaking about it made his eyes shine.
The reason that Israel now governs Jerusalem is that the people of Israel have the onus of being “a light unto nations,” of bringing unity and peace to the world. The fundamental rule of the Torah is “Love your neighbor as yourself.” Israel must practice it and set an example to the rest of the world. Only when Israel does this will the rest of the world follow.
My grandfather was born in exile and died in exile. But when I came to Israel and went up to Jerusalem, I remembered his stories, and as soon as we started the climb into the mountains of Jerusalem, I felt his spirit with me; I was realizing my grandfather’s dream. It moved me deeply.
Regrettably, Jerusalem today is very far from the Jerusalem in my grandfather’s dreams. The Hebrew word for Jerusalem, “Yerushalaim“, is a combination of two words: “Ir” [city] “Shlema” [whole/complete], meaning “a city of wholeness” or “a city of completeness.” Also, the word “Shalom” [peace] comes from the world “Shlemut” [wholeness] or “Hashlama” [complementation]. This is why Jerusalem is also regarded as Ir Shalom [a city of peace].
Evidently, there is no wholeness in Jerusalem, no complementation, and certainly no peace. There is plenty of the opposite: division, conflict, and hate. King David, who wrote in Psalm 122 that Jerusalem was built as a city that was joined together, would not be happy if he saw that Jerusalem has become a symbol of conflict, a hub of religious fanaticism and bloodshed.
Despite the intolerance, the city will become what it was meant to be—a center of peace and wholeness, a center of healing for a tormented world. The Book of Zohar writes about Jerusalem (Pinhas, 152): “Jerusalem among the rest of the countries [is] like the heart among the organs. Hence, it is in the middle of the whole world, like the heart, which is in the middle of the organs.”
Jerusalem, being the central place for Judaism and Christianity, and an important center for Islam, reflects the relationships among the faiths. Since there is no peace among them, the center, where the three religions meet, becomes the focal point of the frictions among them, and therefore the center of hostilities. Over the centuries, the city has been governed by all three vying religions, but the governance has always been achieved by war. Jerusalem will become a city of wholeness and peace, but the question is how long it will take us to make of it what it is meant to be, and how much we will suffer in the process.
The reason that Israel now governs Jerusalem is that the people of Israel have the onus of being “a light unto nations,” of bringing unity and peace to the world. The fundamental rule of the Torah is “Love your neighbor as yourself.” Israel must practice it and set an example to the rest of the world. Only when Israel does this will the rest of the world follow.
For a short while in antiquity, Israel did just that. During the 3rd century BC, there was relative calm in the nation. Three times a year Jews would march up to Jerusalem to celebrate the festivals of pilgrimage: Sukkot, Passover, and Shavuot (Feast of Weeks). The pilgrimages were intended primarily for uniting the hearts of the people. In his book The Antiquities of the Jews, Flavius Josephus writes that the pilgrims would make “acquaintance … maintained by conversing together and by seeing and talking with one another, and so renewing the recollections of this union.”
Once they entered Jerusalem, the pilgrims were greeted with open arms. The townsfolk let them into their homes and treated them as family. The Mishnah (Bikurim 3) lauds this rare camaraderie: “All the craftsmen in Jerusalem would stand before them and ask about their well-being: ‘Our brothers, men of so and so place, have you come in peace?’ and the flute would play before them until they arrived at Temple Mount.” The book Avot de Rabbi Natan writes that every material need of every person who came to Jerusalem was met in full. “One did not say to one’s friend, ‘I could not find an oven on which to roast offerings in Jerusalem’ … or ‘I could not find a bed to sleep in, in Jerusalem.’”
While they lasted, those festivals of bonding had made Israel “a light unto nations.” The book Sifrey Devarim (Item 354) details how people from other nations would “go up to Jerusalem and see Israel … and say, ‘It is becoming to cling only to this nation.’”
Moreover, when Ptolemy II Philadelphus, King of Egypt, heard of the unity of the Jews, he wanted to learn their wisdom. Ptolemy invited seventy sages from Jerusalem to his palace in Alexandria to translate their books into Greek. But before he sent them off to create what is now known as the Septuagint, the first translation of the Old Testament into Greek, Ptolemy asked them about their wisdom, and mainly how he could benefit from it as a ruler. In The Antiquities of the Jews (Book XII), Josephus writes that Ptolemy had sat with the Hebrew sages for twelve straight days asking them “rather political questions, tending to the good … government of mankind.” Ptolemy was “delighted with hearing the laws read to him, and was astonished at the deep meaning and wisdom of the legislator,” writes Josephus.
Finally, “When they had explained all the problems that had been proposed by the king about every point, he was well-pleased with their answers,” concludes Josephus. Moreover, the historian writes that Ptolemy testified that “he had gained very great advantages by their coming, for he had received this profit from them, that he had learned how he ought to rule his subjects.”
Regrettably, Israel’s unity did not last. Internal division and conflicts destroyed the land, and the people were exiled because of their hatred for each other. Now that we are back in Israel, the burden of proof is once again on our shoulders to show that we are worthy of being “a light unto nations,” the center of unity whose heart is Jerusalem.
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Michael Laitman, On Quora: “Why do some people suffer so much in this life, especially the children and the innocent?“
The world is full of suffering and we cannot justify murder, theft or any kind of affliction of pain on innocent people, especially children.
However, when we start feeling that suffering in our corporeal lives can lead us to some correction—to the acceptance of justice and sensations of happiness and healing—then we start justifying the suffering that we endure here.
We cannot understand the suffering afflicted on innocent people, such as children, who have done nothing wrong in life. The purpose of such suffering is solely in order to make us seek its meaning and purpose.
The problem is that we neither feel nor understand why we suffer, and some pains might be very severe.
There is an incredible amount of suffering sweeping through the world, and it all eventually connects to one overall desire that prods us to become wiser and start waking up to the reason for our being here.
As hard as it is to fathom, feelings of injustice, meaninglessness, purposelessness, emptiness, suffering, and not understanding why all kinds of negative phenomena take place in our lives, awaken questions about the cause of the suffering, and ultimately, the meaning of our lives.
The more suffering humanity sustains, the more a question mark forms that makes us want to seek the reason for suffering and the meaning of life.
Based on the Virtual Kabbalah Lesson on January 3, 2016.
Written/edited by students of Kabbalist Dr. Michael Laitman.
Comment: Oleg writes: “After watching your clip about the way to relate to evil, I do not know what to think. What does it mean to destroy evil? In this case, could you please comment on the words of a famous song [translated from Russian]: ‘We will destroy the whole world of violence to the ground and then we will build our new world, who was nobody —he will become everything!'”
Answer: This is wrong. We do not need to destroy anything; we need to add, to build, over the past: love will cover all crimes. Over all problems and deformities of the past world, we just need to cover them with a kind attitude and love.
If we destroy, we make it twice as bad. This is exactly what we have now.
Question: How do you do that? How do you cover with love?
Answer: We must never touch evil! We must not try to increase or decrease it. We must only build goodness over it. Connect with each other in goodness. And evil, it exists to lead us to this. That is, we will suddenly begin to discover that evil forces us to do good.
Question: So, the world of violence will remain?
Answer: No, it will not remain. After all, we are already engaged with something else. We are already building goodness! But over the former evil. We will create the world of goodness above the world of violence. Otherwise, we will be just destroying.
Remark: What about the next phrase: “Who was nobody —he will become everything!”
Answer: The one who was nothing really becomes seemingly everything. But inside, he remains nothing. This is first.
And second, what kind of world will you build if you do not take into account the past egoistic world that you destroyed? You need to take it and build a new world out of it, over it, in spite of it.
Question: What about the one who was nothing and that is how he felt, that he was nothing, so depressed and desperate, who does he become if he can really rise above this state of his? Can he become everything?
Answer: He can become everything. This depends only on his evaluation of his actions.
Question: How should he evaluate them?
Answer: That he builds, he makes, he creates. This does not mean that he becomes the head of state and begins to destroy everyone and everything. This suggests that serious, intelligent people such as Professor Preobrazhensky from the “Heart of a Dog” should understand what they are doing and realize what kind of world they are building.
Comment: If a person feels like nothing, how can he become everything?
My Response: By his attitude to the world, his attitude to his deeds. If he builds, then he becomes everything. It does not depend on how many people he kills, dispossesses, and deports along the way. The new world is not built by preparing execution lists. You cannot build anything by this.
As a result, you build a system that will be a curse for centuries to come. You break people, you break the system, you break the country, half the world, you plant your egoistic values everywhere. You think they are unshakable.
Question: Does everything have to start from education?
Answer: Of course.
Question: What should this education include? That a person understands what he is like?
Answer: A person understands that nothing needs to be destroyed but to be built. The new is always built upon the old. This new thing created from the old grows out of the old. It already manifests itself as an addition to the old. Or even if the old is denied but the new grows out of it correctly, it does not destroy anything.
Question: Many called the great Kabbalist Baal HaSulam a communist. What did he mean by communism?
Answer: Connection of all without any distinction. This was the first sign of communism for him. Then, of course, taking care of everyone without exception: providing work, housing, everything that a person needs.
The most important thing is the correct, fair connection of people with each other on equal terms.
[281153]
From KabTV’s “News with Dr. Michael Laitman” 2/18/21
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