My new article on Linkedin “A Maximum Plan and a Minimum Plan for the Government”

As we evidently see, the State of Israel is unlike any other country. We’re trying to conduct ourselves like the rest of the world, but we’re not; this is why we have been in a political limbo for the past several years. The problem is that we don’t know what we should be like, so we look for role models in the world around us. However, they are not right for us, and we are seeing the results.

Therefore, I think our government needs to conduct itself in two parallel routes, one that follows a maximum plan, and one that follows a minimum plan. The maximum plan is the nation in its ideal state of solidarity and union; the minimum plan is sustaining ourselves until we get there.

The minimum plan has two primary objectives: defense and life. Defense means securing Israel’s borders and addressing military threats to its population. Life means seeing that the economy as a whole is functioning, including the job market, industry and agriculture, and housing, and to maintain the healthcare and welfare systems. As stated, the overall objective of the minimum plan is to sustain us until we realize the maximum plan.

The maximum plan relates to the ultimate goal of the State of Israel, namely to bring the people of Israel to complete unity and solidarity, to the point of realizing the motto of the Jewish people: “Love your neighbor as yourself.” To achieve this, the government must establish an educational system that pertains to all ages—from kindergarten through school, higher education, work, and even retirement homes.

Currently, the nation is in dire need of unity. Its factions are divided and hate each other’s guts. They undermine one another and in the process, they weaken the entire country. Therefore, our survival as a sovereign state depends on our solidarity and unity. If we generate them, we will thrive and prosper. If we do not, we will be overrun by our multiple enemies from without and from within.

Moreover, the nature of our people does not permit us to acknowledge that someone else is right and we are wrong. It is with good reason that the Torah refers to the Jews as a “stiff-necked people” (Ex 32:9), and it is not about to change. Therefore, any plan to generate unity must take into consideration that it must build this accord atop existing, persisting, and even increasing discord. While this is clearly a formidable challenge, the other option is the dissolution of the State of Israel.

In light of all this, the maximum plan will detail and implement the steps toward establishing initial unity, based on the understanding that we are dependent on each other, and either we all succeed or we all fail. Subsequently, the plan will outline the stages of enhancing and solidifying that unity using instances of discord and disputes as incentives for enhancing our unity.

To succeed, the entire nation must commit to the process. If only some of us seek to establish unity, and the rest of us do not, the process will fail. In his essay “Mutual Responsibility,” the great 20th century kabbalist and thinker Yehuda Ashlag, aka Baal HaSulam, offered a poignant analogy from The Book of Zohar pertaining to our mutual responsibility: “If a part of the nation does not want to keep the mutual responsibility … they cause the rest of the nation to remain immersed in their filth and lowliness [of self-interest] without finding a way out of their filth. Therefore, Rabbi Shimon Bar Yochai [author of The Zohar] described mutual responsibility as two people sailing in a boat, when one of them begins to drill a hole in the boat. His friend says, ‘Why are you drilling?’ The other replies, ‘Why should you care? I am drilling under me, not under you!’ So the friend replies, ‘You fool! We will both drown together in the boat!’”

Right now, we’re sinking. We’re drilling holes in our boat out of vindictiveness, and we don’t realize, or don’t care that in the process, we are drowning ourselves, as well. Still, we haven’t sunk. If we pull together, we will cruise ashore. If we stay apart, we’ll sink for sure. This is why I believe that the government must run the maximum plan and the minimum plan concurrently, with the goal of bringing the people of Israel to the finish line of mutual responsibility and love of others as soon as it possibly can.

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Michael Laitman, On Quora: “Will we ever have world peace?“

World peace seems like a far-fetched utopian concept when we look at today’s world.

To start with, what is peace? Is it simply the opposite of war? When we look into the word “peace” from the perspective of the wisdom of Kabbalah, we find a different definition to how the term is commonly conceived, and we also receive a method on how to achieve it.

Peace is commonly considered a state of no war. Humanity has created several peace treaties, ceasefires and armistices after tough conflicts, wars, and much suffering, and it is always a question of how long they will last until the next outburst.

The term “peace” in Hebrew (“Shalom”) equates to “completion” or “perfection” (“Shalem”). Is it enough that we have an absence of war in order to experience perfection? Of course not. If we look deeper into the word “peace,” we arrive at the common root of our nature, before we divided into different genders, races, species and diverse nations.

In today’s world, where we find ourselves among a rapidly rising global population of billions of people, we perceive ourselves as separate from each other, and often not at peace. Moreover, our lack of knowledge on how to reach peace is our main problem.

The wisdom of Kabbalah describes how nature develops us toward a state of total world peace. Approaching peace, however, requires recognizing that nature is an interconnected and interdependent system, and that we humans are the only disrupters of the sensitive balance in nature. More specifically, the human ego, which is a desire to enjoy at the expense of others, harms us, the world and nature.

Interestingly, as far back as 1930, in his article, “Peace in the World,” Kabbalist Yehuda Ashlag (Baal HaSulam) recognized the interconnected state of the world:

“Do not be surprised if I mix together the well-being of a particular collective with the well-being of the whole world, because indeed, we have already come to such a degree that the whole world is considered one collective and one society.”

How, then, do we achieve world peace?

Achieving world peace requires a long-term comprehensive social form of education that aims to raise us to discover a state of completion and perfection, and this is where the wisdom of Kabbalah, which describes nature’s causes, plan and functionality, can be of assistance. Kabbalah describes how we can impact self-transformation to change our egoistic nature to an altruistic one—a necessary change in order to reach a state of peace. As part of this transformation, we learn how to rise above our divisive drives that bring about separation between people and nations. Similar to a couple that makes up after an argument, uniting above division is what strengthens our connection.

Rabbi Nachman of Breslov explained, “The essence of peace is to try to make peace between two opposites” (Likutei Etzot, “Peace”). Also, it is written in Proverbs (10:12) that “Love will cover all transgressions.” Nature also contains a plethora of opposites working harmoniously as a single common system: light and darkness, heat and cold, sweet and bitter, and so on.

A process that leads to world peace thus depends on the development of an inclusion between opposites up to a point where a new feeling of the world emerges. Instead of feeling “them and us,” we come to feel a common whole in which we are all important parts.

Moreover, the wisdom of Kabbalah explains that we are all headed to a state of world peace, and Kabbalah is a method that lets us achieve this state faster, more enjoyable and with growing wisdom, knowledge and consciousness of the nature we all share.

Written/edited by students of Kabbalist Dr. Michael Laitman

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Love is the greatest measure of connection there can possibly be between two opposite things. We are constantly growing, each one in their egoism, and we must make corrections upon it in order to reach connection in spite of our egoism.

It turns out that within me I am becoming more and more egoistic and as if distancing myself from others. But at the same time, I must build such an attitude that brings me closer to everyone, so that all my egoism turns into bestowal.

Within me, I become an increasingly crude egoist, but on the outside, I add restriction, screen, and reflected light, and the forces of unification to such a degree of connection that I come to love. The fire of hate burns inside, and the flame of love burns outside. This is called the depth of desire—restriction, screen, and reflected light—which are leading to connection and adhesion.

This is how it inverts from the inside out. And a person feels the difference between all these states, attains from this the depth of creation, the matter of creation, and the Creator who created this entire process, this system from outside inward and in a person from within outward.

We should try to see the Creator behind every friend who is concealed behind him. After all, the Creator conceals Himself in such a way; He has no image, no opportunity to reveal Himself. This is why He builds such a special envelope and projects Himself through it, through humanity, through the universe, through all the phenomena of this world.
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From the 1^st part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 6/15/21, “Advance By Overcoming”

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Question: In the first chapter of the Book of Joshua, it is said that the Creator says to Joshua, son of Nun: “Just be strong and very courageous to observe and do in accordance with all of the Torah that Moses My servant has commanded you. Do not stray there from right or left, in order that you succeed wherever you go.”

The people add: “Only be strong and have courage, only that the Lord your God be with you as He was with Moses.” What does this mean?

Answer: Moses led the people of Israel to the Jordan River, but he remained on the other side of the river.

Everything that is written in Kabbalistic sources must be perceived allegorically, in a spiritual form. Crossing the Jordan River means crossing the border into the land of Israel. The land of Israel is the feeling of the Creator in an explicit and brief form.

After crossing the border, the people are led forward by Joshua, not Moses. Joshua is a warrior. Moses is a teacher who spent the main period of preparation with the people.

He took the people who were in the slavery of egoism, led them through the desert, the detachment from the ego, tore them away from it, raised them above egoism, and gave them the opportunity to continue the path of exaltation further and further, higher and higher.
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From KabTV’s “Secrets of the Eternal Book” 6/11/21

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When we first start studying Kabbalah we feel confident, masters of our lives who know what to do. But after studying for a while, we suddenly lose this confidence. And this is given to us on purpose, not as a direct consequence of studying Kabbalah, but as a result of a new, more serious attitude of the Creator toward us.

The Creator wants me to connect my whole life only with Him, that is, to go through life holding on to two forces. One force is the knowledge of this world, that is, the ability to organize your material life normally as it should be. But at the same time, I must go with the force of faith, which is spiritual.

All your attitude should be divided into two distinct parts: the attitude to spiritual life and to material life. With regard to material existence, I must try to be as calm as possible so as not to transfer the tension and dissatisfaction that I feel from my spiritual progress.

This is our work, and if a person knows how to put everything in its place correctly, he will very quickly advance in the spiritual. We need to understand that material life is given to us not only to provide for our daily bread, but as an integral addition to spiritual advancement. We are obliged to develop in the material plane as well as in the spiritual plane, and in the end try to connect the two worlds together.

You will see how well everything fits together. My teacher Rabash worked at a construction site as a reinforcement fitter, a concrete worker, then a shoemaker, and an office worker. He took any job he could get because it wasn’t easy to get a job in those days. A person must work, be married, support a family, and try to balance everything. It is with the right balance of all areas of life that a person can optimally advance.

But in any case, it will take years because being in from this lowest, worst world, we gradually build ourselves a ladder to reach the summit of all creation. And you have already climbed this ladder a little, but these steps are still unconscious, like a baby who lives, but does not understand his life, where he lives, what for, and why. To understand this, he still needs to keep growing. But one day we will definitely grow up to it.
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From the 1^st part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 6/15/21, “Advance By Overcoming”

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Michael Laitman, On Quora: “What are the main reasons for increased divorce rates?“

The enveloping reason for increased divorce rates is due to natural human evolution. Our times are characterized by exiting the animal level of development and rising to the human level. In other words, nature is urging us to connect as a single global interdependent framework of humanity.

Since there is a growing need to connect as a single global system, we find our personal connections breaking more and more. Nature wants us to look beyond the family framework in order for us to later return to it on a different level, i.e. where we feel humanity as a single family.

In our individual lives, we experience a feeling of being in love, where we are overtaken by powerful emotions, excitement, inspiration, and a seeming perfection that was worth striving for in order to be together and upon which we could build a family. However, over time, we lost this feeling. Why, then, do we naturally fall in love if later that feeling dissipates?

What we need to understand is that we are in a system that nature runs. In this system, nature wants us to discover true eternal love, i.e. as love exists in nature itself. In the process, it wants us to detach from the conceptions and feelings of being in love that we experience temporarily in our current reality. We thus need to change our instinctive attraction to the other sex, which is fueled by natural passion and hormones, to a more goal-oriented connection.

We form the connections we currently know because we live for our children or our shared household. Moreover, being together is convenient because it lets us support each other as we grow older. Today, however, we need to find a new deeper kind of connection. We thus see more and more cases of divorce because we are in this transitional era where we already start feeling an increasing lack in the traditional frameworks that once held us together, that there is an additional and more sublime drive that we need in order to sustain and grow a happy family in our times.

If we can tap into this drive, which we have yet to accurately identify, we can set ourselves off on a path to discover a completely new feeling that emerges in a more goal-oriented connection to each other. We can then springboard from our increasing distaste toward our current frameworks to seek connections on a whole other level: a much stronger and warmer family-like connection among all humanity. If we enter such a sensation, then we discover a fulfillment that we have never felt before. It is as if we float freely, becoming very light and feeling an eternal thrush of life permeate us.

While we have the opportunity and the ability to determine these new goal-oriented connections through connection-enriching education, we see how these explanations go largely unnoticed. Nature thus prods us from behind by means of pain and suffering, and we find all kinds of connections that we once held shattering, with divorce being a key indicator of our broken connections in relation to the family. The purpose of this increasing feeling of detachment we feel, including the increasing divorce rates, is in order for us to get sick of our separation and develop a sincere new desire to connect on a whole other level. Eventually, we will make motions to connect in this new way, since we will find that otherwise we will be cornered. When we start connecting as nature requires us to, we will then discover the beauty in such connection.

Therefore, together with the increasing irreconcilable hatred and disagreements that break up more and more families, there surfaces a new sincere need for love. If we all understand the sublime fulfillment that true love brings, then we will want to have these feelings in our families. We will then return to the family after we learn how to love the entirety of humanity, and we will then wish to share a deeper and more uniquely personal and internal version of this connection with a spouse.

Based on New Life episode 19 on February 2, 2012 with Kabbalist Dr. Michael Laitman, Oren Levi and Tal Mandelbaum Moshe.
Written/edited by students of Kabbalist Dr. Michael Laitman. Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash.

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We should try to see the Creator behind every friend, who is concealed behind him. After all, the Creator conceals Himself in such a way; He has no image, no opportunity to reveal Himself. This is why He builds such a special envelope and projects Himself through it, through humanity, through the universe, through all the phenomena of this world, through inanimate nature, plants, animals, and people.

The Creator is behind all of them, and therefore, through our attitude to the inanimate, vegetative, and animate world, and humanity, we can come closer to the Creator. We just need to correctly treat the inanimate, vegetative, and animate degrees, that is, to use them only to the extent necessary for our existence.

And to humanity we must relate in love your neighbor as yourself, through which we come to the love for the Creator. As it is written, “Love your neighbor as yourself, I am the Lord.” That is, the Creator as if signs it as His order to each person to reach love. Through it, we correct our soul, finish with the corporeal reality that we now see before us, and begin to ascend to the upper world.
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From the 1^st part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 6/15/21, “Advance By Overcoming”

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Question: On Purim traditionally sweet cakes are eaten shaped to resemble Haman’s pockets. What is it about this symbol?

Answer: In our world, there is a connection between the root and the branch. Therefore, we must somehow display all this in the branches. The people should be attached to such things.

Question: Isn’t it primitive that in the 21st century we are following these traditions?

Answer: I believe that our century is the most primitive of all previous centuries. The more we develop, the more our egoism grows. Therefore, we suddenly begin to feel like some kind of greatness and criticize previous centuries, scientists, and everyone else. But they understood much better than we did about the structure of the worlds, the forces of creation.

They knew these roots, saw them, guessed them, and understood what they were dealing with, not in order to make some kind of historical story out of this, but to include in the system of correction so that each generation makes its own correction and gradually we would come to complete correction, which is called “Purim.”

Question: Is that why they introduced the tradition of eating sweets shaped like Haman’s pockets to the people?

Answer: Of course. All this was done by the great Kabbalists. There are innumerable allusions to spiritual properties and actions that we must perform.

Question: It is customary to give gifts on Purim. In honor of what? In honor of joy?

Answer: Yes, because when we connect with each other, we fulfill each other: I am you, you are me. And each individual cannot fulfill himself.

Purim is the final correction. The Creator created egoism, an evil inclination that is completely corrected.
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From KabTV’s “Spiritual States”

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Question: Are the fragments of the common soul that has been shattered placed in almost every one of us?

Answer: Yes, there is only one common soul, one common desire, that the Creator created. There’s nothing else but Him. Everything that we perceive as existing around us and in us happens only in this desire.

As we grow closer together, the common desire will manifest itself more and more until we begin to feel like one person with one heart, one thought, and one intention.

And then we will really come to feel like one structure that is completely dependent on each other, perfectly understands and coordinates itself with others.

Question: Where is the place for the Torah here?

Answer: We see in our lives that when a person is born, he does not need any Torah, guidance, instructions, nothing. He lives like a small animal. This is how we develop our young children.

And then the child manifests more and more as an independent, individual person, and we have to treat him accordingly, as it is said: “Bring up the boy in his ways.” In the same way, gradually, the correction of the initially broken common soul manifests itself.

Now we are at the very last stage when all the previous four stages have already been more or less passed and are ready for the final correction. In general, it all depends on the last stage.

At this stage, we must properly understand ourselves, our origin, our history, our purpose, and realize all this.
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From KabTV’s “Secrets of the Eternal Book” 5/19/21

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Question: According to what you say the Creator does not exist in our world. So who pushes us from behind to reveal Him?

Answer: You can say anything you like about that. For example, who is it that makes the sun go round? Who creates all the laws of nature and provides the energy for everything to exist? Where does it all stem from?

Our world is very small and it exists only in our imagination. If we did not look at our world, it would not exist. Kabbalists spoke about that ages ago, and scientists are beginning to find this out only now.

Our world exists only subjectively in our imagination and not more than that. If we want to transcend our limits, we need to hold on to the group and together create a new system of perception. Thus, we will begin to feel the real existence, the true system of providence of the world.
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From KabTV’s “Fundamentals of Kabbalah” 3/17/19

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