Audio Version Of The Blog – 5/4/22
Posted on May 4th, 2022
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Question: What does Holocaust Remembrance Day mean to you personally?
Answer: It is the fact that we still need to remember the Holocaust of European Jewry in addition to all the huge tragedies that the Jewish people have experienced in their long history. This was a mass extermination of Jews in the modern world, in the modern era. No one anticipated that this was possible. Even today it is somehow hard to believe that this could have happened.
Yet it is what happened, and I have no doubt that it could happen today too. It could happen exactly as it did 70 years ago.
Question: This sounds quite scary. Didn’t history teach us anything?
Answer: No, nothing has changed. People have absolutely not changed. And they will quickly build all those concentration camps.
Question: Why have we evoked and still evoke hatred upon us?
Answer: This is a question. Because this is what we are. Because we do not want to change ourselves and thus do not want to change history. Until we change, the world will not change.
Comment: But the world did not say: “You have to change.” The world simply destroyed Jews and hate them.
My Response: Man appeared in this world in order to change and to accordingly force the world to change. If man does not change, the world practically remains the same. That is, it changes, but it changes at a very slow pace.
Man is born to change, to become an altruist, to be closer to others, to unite, and to show others that this is the way to live.
If Jews do not do it despite the fact that they are obligated to, then the entire world does not do it with them. Then we have a completely new picture of the world. That is, instead of moving forward at a certain speed, the world is slowing down. This slowing down causes such excesses.
Question: Are you saying that the world implicitly, subconsciously feels the guilt of the Jews for the world not changing, not getting happier, and that the Jews are to blame for this?
Answer: The Jews are to blame for this, and all the nations of the world feel it.
Question: What does “feel” mean? They “feel” sounds very mystical. After all, they do not say: “You have to change.”
Answer: Why don’t they say it? Ask people! Ask regular, educated people of our time: Europeans, Americans, they will tell you. It is because they are in contact with Jews.
Comment: Most of the time people say something like this about Jews: “They are bankers, they own all the capital of the world, they run the world. This is why we do not like them, why we hate them,” and so on. “They are the chosen ones;” the chosen ones imply that they are special. This is what they say about Jews.
How did it then pass over to ordinary Jews who are not such leaders of the world? 6,000,000 Jews were exterminated; this did not simply happen! 6.000,000! Children and women.
My Response: Hatred of Jews is absolutely in everyone. It is inside people subconsciously because there is a root in these people aimed at changing the world.
This root is anti-egoistic. It forces people to change, so Jews are slightly different. An ordinary person who has special intuition feels in a person if he is a Jew or not a Jew.
Question: Is it because, as you say, there is some special point in a Jew?
Answer: A special point that encourages him to change nature.
Question: Does humanity need this, precisely this, point?
Answer: Yes.
Question: Is this point contagious? Can it pass on to others?
Answer: Yes.
Comment: So, we were born with this point and are forced to travel the world.
My Response: You cannot get away from it, you must implement it.
Question: Does it mean that the closer the world comes to a dead end with all the hatred, with wars, the more it will turn to Jews and with even more anti-Semitism? Will it be even bigger than it was during the Second World War?
Answer: Of course! It will hate them to the measure that is necessary to change the world, but the world will not be changing.
Comment: I have been to Auschwitz and Dachau, I have traveled through these concentration camps, shot many movies there. I had a feeling that humanity would never come to this again. Never!
My Response: Easy! Any person can be persuaded in a second and be made such an anti-Semite that he himself will be the first to kill.
We have a responsibility to figure out why this is so and the responsibility to reveal to the world the reason for it hating us and not to dismiss it as all fiction. It actually exists, it is in nature, and that is why it will not disappear, and it does not depend on education or on intellect or on anything else.
On the contrary, the more intelligent a person is, the more educated he is, the more willing he is to reveal this reason: what is the difference between him and a Jew. In principle, once he understands this, he is very dissatisfied with it and is ready to really remove them all and remove them from the world altogether!
Once we come to a state that the world discovers that we are obligated to change from egoism to altruism, from hatred to love, which is very difficult to do, then can you imagine what kind of attitude will arise toward Jews? It is better not to talk about it in advance.
Now we are beginning to enter this transition period. And we want to start revealing it right now.
We, our organization, want to start revealing it now so that we can show everyone that it is possible. It is difficult, but it is possible to move into a completely different state of matter, one might say, from hatred to love.
Question: So are you saying that if the world starts to slowly understand this, then the pressure on the Jews will increase even more and more?
Answer: Yes.
Question: Are we thereby now directing the world toward the Jews?
Answer: Of course. We are saying: “Let’s help.” Because we all have to come to this stage of rising above egoism.
This stage of rising above egoism is now beginning to grow in the world. We must help it grow, like we grow crops in the field by watering, fertilizing, weeding, and so on.
We must help the entire world! This is called “to be a light upon the nations.”
The world will thereby come closer to this. However, when it gets closer to this, the world will have questions: what for, why, and how? That is, we will have to be able to explain it to the world.
Then we will have to draw the nations of the world after us to this state, to change from egoism to altruism. They will not go through the same states of ascents and descents as we do.
However, they will have to get tied to us and move forward with us. This is where the main moment of leaving Egypt is displayed, when we are in the form of Moses who goes ahead and all the nations of the world behind him. Here all the nations of the world rise from the egoistic level to the altruistic one.
This is called the time of the building of the Third Temple.
Comment: It sounds offensive to the nations of the world that we, Moses, we are leading.
My Response: Let them take this problem from us. I am ready to follow them.
Question: As long as they would lead to the right place? Will we then not be waiting for the next Holocaust that may happen? Are we then already bypassing it?
Answer: Yes. Here again everything depends on us.
Comment: How much responsibility is piled on us! There is no chance to live peacefully.
My response: There is nothing scary here if we agree to do everything so that the Creator would do everything through us. Does He need representatives in this world? Let him do it through me, I agree. That is all.
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From KabTV’s “News with Dr. Michael Laitman” 4/25/22
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From My Facebook Page Michael Laitman 5/4/22
Envy has a terrible reputation. It has been blamed for so many crimes and atrocities that we have learned to dread it. When it emerges within us, it is a burning feeling that is difficult to control and difficult to contain. What’s more, it makes us want things we would never otherwise think of, let alone crave. Because of these discomforts and precarious ambitions that envy evokes within us, humanity has been seeking ways to overcome it for many centuries.
However, I do not think we should overcome it. Suppressing it or annihilating it (assuming we could) would be tantamount to saying that there are things in the world that are redundant or inherently and incorrigibly harmful, and we should get rid of them. Baal HaSulam, my teacher’s father and the greatest kabbalist of the 20th century, ridiculed this approach; he cynically referred to people who advocated it as “world reformers.”
In his essay “Peace in the World,” Baal HaSulam wrote that if we were to let world reformers have their way, “they would certainly have by now cleansed man entirely, leaving in him only what is good and useful,” in their eyes. One of the filths they would certainly cleanse would be envy, and that would be an unforgivable mistake.
Just as we do not stop using electricity although it can kill us, we should not suppress envy. Just as we have learned to utilize electricity to our benefit, we should learn to utilize envy to our benefit.
In part, we already do it. Mothers often turn their children’s attention to the success of other children in order to push them to try harder. By doing so, they use the child’s natural envy. When children see that their mother appreciates someone else, it makes them envy that other person and drives them to improve in order to gain their mother’s appreciation, too.
Envy is not a pleasant feeling, but pleasant feelings do not make us grow. Need is also not a pleasant feeling, yet need is the mother of invention. Likewise, although envy isn’t pleasant, it is the engine of development and progress. To put it bluntly, were it not for envy, we’d still be in the stone-age.
Like electricity, if used correctly, envy builds us and does not destroy others. When we use it in this way, seeing other people’s success makes us grateful to them as it is thanks to their success that we, too, are improving.
Therefore, we should develop a mature approach to envy, and thank the people whose success makes us succeed, as well. If we can achieve this, we will find that after some time, we will learn to appreciate them so much that we will begin to love them for the gift that they have given us through envy.
My new article on Linkedin “We Need a New World”
A student wrote me saying that today, many people believe we need a new world. He asked, “If you had a chance to build the world from scratch, where would you start?” I answered him that I would begin with one country, one self-sufficient country. Then I would ask for some time to develop people, to develop the society.
The problem is that we are like little children who expect the world to work the way we want it to work simply because we want it. It doesn’t work this way. For things to work the way we want them to, we need to learn how to make them happen, how to do it properly.
By learning, I do not mean that we should learn about the world, but about ourselves. We need to change ourselves so we can build a world where we will accomplish what we want without polluting the air, ground, and water, eliminating entire species of plants and animals, and eventually destroying ourselves.
The change we need to make in ourselves concerns our relation to society, the importance we attribute not to ourselves, but to the society we live in. In other words, the connections between us should be our main focus, as opposed to our current disposition to focus on ourselves.
Only once we change ourselves, the products we create will be contributory to the world as a whole. As our mindset will change from narcissism to mutual consideration, everything we do will aim to serve everyone rather than only ourselves.
This does not mean that we will not have personal items or that we will not need personal things, but the way we make and use them will inherently incorporate the thought about the common good. As a result, we will not need to worry about making sustainable products or environmentally friendly production processes because it will be our nature to work with everyone’s benefit in mind.
In other words, the degree to which we elevate humankind is the degree to which society will rise. The success of a country does not depend on technological advancement, mode of governance, or educational paradigms.
The success of a country depends on the extent to which people keep the common good in mind. Social cohesion and mutual responsibility are the sole factors that determine the fate of a nation.
Once we have built one such country as a role model for humanity, it will be possible to emulate it throughout the world. This was my reply to the student who asked how to build a new world.
Michael Laitman, On Quora: “Why hasn’t COVID-19 ended yet?“
COVID-19 has not ended yet because we still have not responded properly to the virus.
How were we supposed to respond? We were supposed to connect with each other, i.e., to come closer together and become a bit more humane and courteous toward one another. If we would have done so, then we would have weakened the virus.
We have to understand that COVID-19 is no ordinary virus. It is a virus that demands of us to change our attitudes toward each other for the better.
It might seem outlandish that the virus would know about how we relate to each other, but it indeed knows and includes everything. First of all, it is a living particle. It is not on the still or even vegetative levels of nature, but it is on the animate living level—just like us. It has intellect and emotion, and it perceives and influences the environment. It connects with other particles, enters the human body and takes control over it.
In short, the virus is much smarter than we think, and only when we make a significantly positive shift in our attitudes to each other will it go away for good.
If we wanted to check this in practice, then we could take one country or state—say, for instance, the State of Israel where I am living—and we could decide that we treat each other courteously, that we help the needy, the elderly and children—we think about others and try doing good. We should alleviate the situation where we become approached with questions such as, “Why didn’t you do this or that?” but we each make an attitude shift: we seek out where we could add in our positive attitude toward others, to show them that we truly wish to benefit them. If we do so for even one month, then afterward we could check what happened with the virus. Would it still be around or not? We could then also review other phenomena in our society, for instance, the amount of deaths by car accidents and other such problems in our society. It is very easy to review such results. Everything is in our hands to impact a positive change in the world.
Based on the video “Why Hasn’t COVID-19 Ended Yet?” with Kabbalist Dr. Michael Laitman and Oren Levi. Written/edited by students of Kabbalist Dr. Michael Laitman.
Photo by Martin Sanchez on Unsplash.
Michael Laitman, On The Times of Israel: “Fighting for Independence”
Two days from today, Israeli Jews will celebrate Israel’s Independence Day. On that day, in 1948, while still repelling the charge of six Arab armies and immediately following the departure of the forces of the British Mandate, the leadership of the Jewish settlement in Israel declared the establishment of the State of Israel. Since that fateful day, we have not been independent. Moreover, we have yet to learn the meaning of the word, in its true and deepest sense.
In order to be independent, we need to learn what independence means and what denies us independence. According to Webster’s Dictionary, being independent means that you are a) “not subject to control by others,” b) “not requiring or relying on something else,” c) “not requiring or relying on others (as for care or livelihood),” and other, less significant definitions.
These definitions leave the most important aspect of our freedom untouched. Worse yet, in today’s world, Webster’s definitions of independence are impossible to carry out; we are all dependent on each other, living in an interconnected and interdependent world.
We could try going to the woods to live there independently. Some people do it, but for their perceived freedom, they give up every bit of amenity that civilization grants us, but even then, they are not really free. Besides, is it worth relinquishing the comforts of civilization for the sake of declaring yourself free? Clearly, most people do not think it is worthwhile.
So what does it mean to be independent if we are forced to be dependent on every thing and every one, and have no choice in the matter? Being independent means redeeming ourselves from the sneakiest, yet most powerful enslavement: to our own egos.
Like it or not, we cannot resist our ego. If it tells us to do something, we will do it. If we decide to go against it, it will be our own ego pretending to go against itself, manipulating us into doing what it wants.
Therefore, independence means liberation from our ego. How can we achieve this? If we think of others rather than ourselves, we will have become liberated from our egos.
Think of a mother who loves her child. She does not think about what she needs unless she needs it in order to enable her to keep tending to her child. She is not free from her ego because in her perception, her child is a part of her. Nevertheless, if we were to feel like this toward people who are unrelated to us, and toward whom we have no ulterior motive, that would be liberation from our ego, and then we would see how difficult it is to truly be free.
The State of Israel, returning to our subject, will win its independence only when Israelis are an example of independence from the ego. The Jewish people became a nation when they rose above their egos and united “as one man with one heart” at the foot of Mt. Sinai 3,800 years ago. Immediately after, they were given the task to set an example for the rest of the world.
Until the establishment of the Israeli nation, there was no precedent of a large collective of individuals from vying tribes and nations uniting above their differences for the sake of forming a new nation whose supreme value is love of others. But the people of Israel achieved it and therefore became indebted to the world to lead it toward independence from the shackles of the ego.
I think it would be wise to contemplate this idea this coming Independence Day. If we regain our independence from the ego, we will regain our respect from the world and the acceptance of the nations. We cannot be freed from our obligation to humanity to set an example of liberation from the ego. As long as we display division and self-absorption, we will be regarded as pariahs. But if we are true to our vocation, we will love each other and the world will love us, because we will show the way for them to love each other.
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Question: If a person asks God to change His attitude toward him, is that also idolatry?
Answer: Yes, this is a wrong idea about the Creator that He is supposedly acting badly now, but if I ask Him, everything will be alright.
Comment: But we all ask in this way.
My Response: Here is the problem. What are we asking for? Am I asking the Creator to change or for Him to change me?
Comment: Usually the scheme is simple. There are problems and a person turns to the Creator so that He would change His attitude toward him and remove the problems.
My Response: That is, now He is bad, and when I ask He will become good. Or should I ask that I change and see that His attitude toward me is excellent? After all, if He changes me, then I will stop seeing problems. Therefore, I must ask not for them to be removed, but for me to be corrected.
How can this be? I see myself from morning till night surrounded by negative forces affecting me and I must ask to see these actions as positive. For that, I must change.
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From KabTV’s “Spiritual States” 4/5/22
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Comment: Michael writes to you: “In a quiet, peaceful time I could agree with you that it is necessary to embrace your enemy and that love is above everything. This is what I used to do by the way. But now I see how impossible it is. Man cannot do that. You will never embrace a murderer or a rapist in your life. You will not hug them! So why are you talking about it?”
My Response: I am not saying that you must physically hug him. Even internally you cannot hug him. But you should try to imagine that you have descended to his level, because if he is a murderer and a rapist, then he is below you. Yet, you descend in order to somehow get in touch with him, to understand him in some way.
Question: So, in fact, contact is impossible, right?
Answer: No? Then you will not do anything. You must understand that man was programmed this way from above. After all, we are talking about Kabbalah, about Kabbalistic correction.
We must understand that a person was simply directed in this way. With all his egoism and inclinations, it is not his fault. The Creator arranged it all for him, the kind, almighty, and loving Creator. Therefore, we still have a great deal to correct in our understanding.
Only when you descend to his level and realize that everything that is in him comes from the Creator and this is depicted before you and within you so that you correct your attitude to what is happening and to the Creator, then you will be able to somehow come closer to him. You will not be able to hug him yet, but you can come closer to him and start correcting this condition together with him so that in the end you would be able to understand him, because it does not depend on him.
This is all the fault of the Creator who did it and did it in order to correct you so that together you can rise to the level of mutual understanding and then to mutual love between you for all of humanity, for the entire universe, and thus to correct everything.
Comment: What an impossibly difficult science we are engaged in!
My Response: This is not science. This is nature! Otherwise, we will not do anything!
Comment: It requires turning the guts inside out, washing the entire heart, and clearing the entire mind.
My Response: When you do it constantly for a long time, you reach it. People will go through these wars. These will be internal wars, wars of the Messiah. And everything will work out.
Comment: You understand, don’t you, that we are talking about a loved one, about someone dear who is no longer with us.
My Response: All relatives and friends will suddenly manifest in such a way that you will not see anyone who would be more distant from you than the closest one. And the most distant ones will turn out to be the closest.
Everyone will turn out to be absolutely close and absolutely ugly. And suddenly, you will have to love them and just adore them. There are real wars ahead; they are called “the wars of the Messiah,” the wars of liberation from our egoism.
Messiah (Mashiach)—from the word “Limshoch,” to pull out— is the one who pulls us out of our egoism. We stop looking at the world egoistically, we stop blaming people for it. We must relate this to the Creator and correct our attitude to Him from absolute hatred to absolute love.
Comment: Can you imagine! You say: “He is to blame for everything, He did everything, He is the main enemy of man.”
My Response: If this is how I perceive the world, then yes.
Question: What if it is the other way around?
Answer: If it is the other way around, then I must turn myself upside-down again; in the end, I must correct myself and there is no evil and harm in the world except for myself, my egoism. I have to correct it into the quality of absolute love where I see everyone as my enemies and haters and correct them into everyone I see loving and loved.
Question: Does it mean that I correct myself and they become loving and loved?
Answer: Yes.
Comment: That is, everything is aimed at making me sort myself out.
My Response: Yes. There are still things to do ahead of us.
Question: You say that there are serious wars ahead. In any case, are we being prepared for them, or will we be thrown unprepared into this scorcher?
Answer: No! Who is there to throw? It is like throwing a baby into a real fight.
Question: Are we being led to them one way or another and we will come to this already wanting these wars?
Answer: Yes. We will understand their necessity.
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From KabTV’s “News with Dr. Michael Laitman” 3/17/22
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Question: How can Pharaoh, the negative force in us, bring people, who want to attain the Creator, closer to His revelation?
Answer: The Pharaoh’s force only seems negative to us. In fact, it kind of teases us and brings us closer to the Creator.
It awakens egoism in us and draws us forward, ostensibly for egoistic fillings. When we get closer, it suddenly turns out that we cannot reveal anything and anyone with the help of egoism. We remain as if with a broken trough.
This means that we come to attain the Creator through the realization of the evil of our nature.
Question: Pharaoh means working within reason when a person wants to understand the whole process with his mind. What is wrong with that?
Answer: That is not the point. There is neither good nor bad in this. But it is impossible to understand this process with your mind, just as it is impossible to see the spiritual world with our eyes. We understand that our vision perceives only a certain amount of information at a certain frequency and nothing else. Proper tuning is necessary here, and it is achieved through diligence.
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From KabTV’s “Spiritual states” 4/14/22
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Comment: Kabbalah explains all the sections of the structure of desire and you see how it works.
Why can’t people understand and accept that you just need to reconsider many things and rebuild your life? It is more pleasant for them to live in some kind of abstract mass, that there is a big world, that there are prospects beyond the horizon. It could be an adult, maybe even an elderly person who has lived his life, but still thinks like a child.
My Response: There are no prospects today, I do not see people who still live with them because the world knocks them out of all prospects. Everything changes so unpredictably quickly, everything closes and opens so that a person cannot plan anything, and therefore lives case by case, so to speak. In addition, the new generation is very special, it has completely different views and approaches to the world.
Question: What does this click, this transition to a new understanding, depend on?
Answer: It depends on the recognition of the need for this transition, the recognition of evil, when I can no longer live like this, in the present state.
After all, a person comes to our community because he believes that without attaining the cause, the purpose of the world, he has nothing to do in it, there is no point in existing, “I must understand, I must realize, I must figure out why I live at all, why everything exists, what meaning each of my actions and each of my days has; I cannot just live like that, I need meaning, purpose, fulfillment, otherwise I do not have the energy for movement.”
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From KabTV’s “I Got a Call. Forecast for the next hundred years” 12/10/09
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