Audio Version Of The Blog – 7/21/22
Posted on July 21st, 2022
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My new article on Linkedin “Normalization Is Politics, Not Peace”
After opening the sky for Israeli airlines to fly over Saudi Arabia, some people are talking about normalization. Yet, Mohammed bin Salman, the Saudi crown prince, who is leading his country’s reforms and modernization, stressed that normalization with Israel will come only after Israel and the Palestinians reach a peace agreement that creates two states: Israel and Palestine. I think we should make a clear distinction between normalization and peace. The former is an economic issue and depends on the will of governments. The latter is something that the people of Israel must first achieve internally, which therefore depends only on us.
I realize this begs explaining. The relations Israel has with its neighbors depend on their feelings toward us. With Egypt, for example, we have good relations. However, we have had good relations with them for a long time because despite the wars, the last of which was in 1973, the Egyptian people were never really hostile toward us.
The same can be said about the Saudis. We have never had any problems with them. I myself used to send packages by mail to a student of mine in Saudi Arabia, and they always reached their destination without any problem. Moreover, he often came to Israel and went back there, and there were no problems at all. Now that the Saudi government is becoming more moderate on Islamic issues, too, it really leaves no cause for problems with them, so I am confident that relations with the Saudis will be good.
The opposite can be said about Gazans. Even if you encounter people from Gaza on a trip abroad, the hostility is palpable. Therefore, the existence or nonexistence of an agreement is less important. What counts most is the relation of the people toward each other.
Normalization, therefore, is the capitalization on a situation that can yield economic benefits to both sides. It is a political arrangement and nothing more.
Religious extremism, by the way, is also a political decision that stems primarily from power struggles and not from genuine division between Islam and Judaism. As far as religion goes, Judaism and Islam are not contradictory. They are not the same religion, of course, but they are not entirely contradictory.
But as I said, normalization is not peace. Peace, in Hebrew, means wholeness. It is a state where two contradictory sides create a bond between them that engenders a new whole that is sustained and evolves through both sides equally. In the same way that day and night, heat and cold, spring and fall are completely opposite yet complement each other, peace between people can happen only when they are contradictory, yet both commit to building a bond between them that creates something new, which requires both of them for its persistence and development.
In Israel’s current situation, division is rife and deep, but there is no motivation to transcend it in any constructive manner. We are still in the phase of trying to impose our worldviews on the entire country, believing that only our way is correct. We still do not understand that only unity is correct, and division is wrong regardless of one’s opinion.
In such a state of division, no country will make peace with us. There is no nation with whom to make peace; there are only factions and camps that demonize one another in the eyes of the world and intensify its hatred toward Israel. To make peace with our neighbors, we must first make peace with each other within Israel. This is why I wrote above that peace with our neighbors, as opposed to normalization, depends entirely on us.
I do not blame our neighbors for hating us when we hate each other so vehemently and vilify each other in the eyes of the nations. They watch us and follow our example.
When we stop maligning one another and realize that our differences are there precisely so we will unite above them, and not so as to eradicate each other, we will create something new that the world will admire. Then the nations will make true peace with us, to learn from our example of making peace, meaning creating something new and whole above division.
Until we do this, some countries will have good relations with us, and some will not, depending on their political and economic interests. We may call it normalization, but we should not think of it as peace.
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Michael Laitman, On The Times of Israel: ‘Israel’s Price Hikes Expose Its Many “Inner Countries”’
Over the past several months, there have been price hikes in almost every product and service in Israel. The price of gasoline is already almost double that of the US, the price of electricity has jumped 9.6 percent, water by nearly 8 percent, cars, appliances, and now even staple foods are jumping, in some cases up to 36 percent. Anywhere else, this would have sent millions into the streets to protest. In Israel, not a peep, as if nothing has changed but the headlines in the papers and the bottom line of the bill. It is not that the government cannot mitigate the spike, but it, too, does nothing, a matter of priorities. Will these hikes change anyone’s mind in light of the upcoming general election? Probably not. The people absorb in silence.
What is stranger still is the fact that many people are completely unaffected by the hikes. For many societies in Israel, government decisions make very little difference in their personal lives. They live in large communities that conduct their own lives as if they were a country within a country. Bnei Brak, the orthodox city where I lived for many years, is just such a bubble, as are the residents of Jerusalem, and as is the Arab population in Israel.
The volatile economy, it turns out, not only harms the disadvantaged defenseless who have no “country within a country” to protect them, but exposes yet another aspect of the social division within Israel. This division both harms Israel’s position in the world, and harms the Israeli people’s bargaining position against their own government.
With the world being in an economic storm, I cannot see how Israel can avoid being unaffected altogether. However, the country’s economy is very strong, and the government has plenty of leverage to play with. It can decide what and whom to support, and what and whom to allow to fail. Currently, because the people are divided among themselves, they are nearly powerless against decisions that take anyone’s interest into account but theirs.
Again, if we are not united, we cannot achieve anything. As with all our troubles, the inflation is here to show us that if we want to succeed, we must act in concord, in unison, and this requires unity.
If we had solidarity, we could bring the prices down to very affordable levels, especially when it comes to such basic needs as food. But since we have no solidarity, even eating becomes an uncertainty for some people in Israel in 2022.
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Question: In the article “The Last Generation,” Baal HaSulam writes that a person should work for the benefit of people to the best of his ability and if necessary, beyond that, until hunger and thirst disappear from the world.
In the future society, how much can a person give to it?
Answer: Society must reach a state where a person will have no desire other than to fulfill others. And this is possible because there are such forces in nature that can change us people to turn egoists into altruists. This is the most important thing.
Question: After this change to someone, will it actually be a different person altogether?
Answer: This will be man, since Adam (man) from the word “domeh” means similar to the upper force, the quality of bestowal and love, which fills the whole space, everything that exists around us. But we do not feel it because so far we are opposite to it.
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From KabTV’s “Kabbalah Express” 6/24/22
Related Material:
Love Is The Fulfillment Of Others’ Desires
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Filling The Desires Of Others As If They Were My Own
Behold that before the emanations were emanated and the creatures were created,
The Upper Simple Light had filled the whole existence.
And there was no vacancy, such as an empty air, a hollow,
But all was filled with that Simple, Boundless Light
(Ari, The Tree of Life)
We are talking about the fact that the upper force created an empty space where the light appeared and filled it with itself.
Space is desire. If a person has a desire, he feels that there is some kind of emptiness inside him that he wants to fill. This empty space that wants to be filled is the place of creation.
Question: How can we consider all this? Like something that was before me or inside me?
Answer: Best of all, for now—outside of me. There is nothing, no time, no place, no movement. The maximum is that there is a sequence of events.
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From KabTV’s “Spiritual States” 7/5/22
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Tree of Life —The Book About the Creation of the Worlds
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The Fruit Of The Tree Of Knowledge
Question: It is written that the Creator has no thoughts about Himself. How can we understand this and who can affirm it?
Answer: The Creator has no ego. And the basis of egoism is the thought of oneself. The most egoistic question is: “Do I exist?”
Everything that is outside of me is what I aspire to, love, and f ill. Therefore, we can study the Creator as an upper force that created egoism outside of itself in order to bring it to correction, to altruism, to similarity to Him so that in this form egoism would manifest itself as close, dear, and like the Creator.
And then, being fundamentally opposite, but having achieved similarity, convergence, closeness, and complete merging, we would be able to come to a state that does not exist in nature where the Creator and His creations unite.
The point is that a person who perceives society, himself, inanimate, vegetative, and animate nature relates to all of this as to the work of the Creator. Then it turns out that his attitude toward the surrounding nature reflects how he relates to the Creator.
The Creator is not hiding. He does not exist at all. And a person who wants to reveal the Creator is looking for how he can still break through the picture of the world in which he is and behind the canvas of this world reveal its artist.
This is what the science of Kabbalah teaches. Therefore, it teaches about how to receive and to reveal the Creator to a person who is in this world in the corporeal state.
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From KabTV’s “Spiritual states” 5/21/22
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The Creator And The Creation: A Hand And A Glove
Ein Sof (Infinity)—The Attitude Of The Creator To The Created Beings
Forming Qualities Like The Creator’s
Comment: They say that we cannot escape from the constant ticking of the clock in our head. That is, we are in a hurry, we are constantly running out of time, and this causes stress and all sorts of problems.
And then, a traveler went somewhere in the North Atlantic on his yacht and started observing himself. He says the first thing he did was to throw away his watch.
Suddenly he felt that the body easily adapts to existence in sync with nature. “It felt like I am a part of it,” he writes. “It was easy to understand what time of day it was. It was harder to return to the world later. The feeling that I am a part of nature slowly went away.” He says he wants to go back there all the time. To throw away the watch and go back, but something always stops him.
Is it possible, without going on a yacht, to break free from this running, from time, from the ticking of the clock, the dial, all of it? Is it possible to do this in our world? Me, the stars, and nothing else.
My Response: That is good. Romantic.
Question: When you talk about rising above egoism, above this world, are you actually talking about rising above time?
Answer: Above time as well, but this is a completely different ascent.
One cannot express it. It is when your senses disconnect from the earthly ones, and you rise in these feelings to their common root—inanimate, vegetative, and animate—and connect with the Creator. You begin to feel the common root of the inanimate, vegetative, and animate nature.
Question: Does it mean that I am rising above my animalistic nature?
Answer: If you set this goal, then you must rise above the inanimate, vegetative and animate nature in you. This way you begin to feel that, in principle, you belong to the upper governing force called the Creator.
To the extent that you get included into the upper force, you lose the sensation of time and space, everything that is an attribute of our world. There is only one single force that fills everything.
Question: Is this the path of humanity—to adhere to this force?
Answer: Yes, but, of course, not in such a way that we have to go somewhere in North America.
We must somehow give up our world a little by not obeying it in something and look for the way we can obey the upper force of nature instead. Then we will succeed.
Question: Are we inside this upper force?
Answer: Yes, we are not exiting anywhere beyond it. We cannot exit, there is nothing else.
Question: Does it mean that our entire work is to start existing in accordance with it? Is this understanding called slowly leaving this time?
Answer: Of course.
Comment: Then he did well. He had gained some experience after all.
My Response: But what is next? He got rid of some restrictions of our world. And what did he get? Nothing. Emptiness.
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From KabTV’s “News with Dr. Michael Laitman” 4/7/22
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Question: Let’s say a person who is not predisposed to spirituality stumbles upon material on Kabbalah and it impresses him. As time passes, he continues to live as he lived. Is such a shallow contact enough?
Answer: It will still affect him subconsciously, but, in general, it will not give anything in particular.
The question arises, is he moving specifically toward connection with other people, even on a simple earthly level? Did this information push him forward or not?
The most important thing is still connection. All his other thoughts, the fact that he gained some material, began to consider himself wise, great, and he can speak beautifully mean nothing. There must be a particular implementation.
But the implementation is only in connection with others. Or he works at the level of ordinary people, but still does it in order to bring all of humanity together. And this is a very important job. Or works at the level of Kabbalists. There is nothing else.
And if he just came and left, well, as he left… He will come again soon. How soon? In 100 – 150 years.
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From KabTV’s “I Got a Call. Get Hooked on a Spiritual Needle” 11/3/09
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In general, the greater the understanding, the greater the delusion; the more intelligent, the less sane (George Orwell, 1984).
Question: In principle, intelligent, mentally developed people who have achieved certain heights in the human hierarchy are at the helm of human development. What do smart people lack to make everything good?
Answer: Love. The mind can only be balanced by love. If there is no love for other people, then this mind brings destruction.
Question: How can I add love? Where to snatch it?
Answer: This is an enormous task. This is the only thing we lack in our life. Everyone needs to work on this. The most important task is for people to start approaching each other with a smile, with love. It is very difficult.
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From KabTV’s “Kabbalah Express” 6/24/22
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Michael Laitman, On Quora: “Where do dreams come from?“
Dreams are impressions of the material world or other various wandering currents in our subconscious that we see in our mind.
The wandering streams or currents of information, and the cell restructuring of the brain that takes place, bring about dreams. It is important to mention here that dreams relate solely to the physiology of our animal body, and have nothing to do with spirituality.
The dreams described in Kabbalistic sources, such as those of Pharaoh or Jacob, refer to a partial attainment of the spiritual world. Moreover, these dreams have nothing to do with showing us signs of the future. The wisdom of Kabbalah does not deal with such concepts. Likewise, dreams cannot be used for spiritual development, which requires clarity and absoluteness of efforts to connect with other people in a way that is balanced with nature.
Based on the video “Spiritual States” with Kabbalist Dr. Michael Laitman and Michael Sanilevich on June 28, 2022. Written/edited by students of Kabbalist Dr. Michael Laitman.
Photo by Wolf Zimmermann on Unsplash.
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