Audio Version Of The Blog – 11/22/22
Posted on November 22nd, 2022
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Michael Laitman, On The Times of Israel: “Who’s a Beauty Queen?”
For the first time since 1950, there will be no Miss Israel beauty pageant in Israel, and Israel will not send a contestant to the Miss Universe contest that will take place in the United States in January. According to i24 News, the decision “aroused many reactions, some deploring the event’s end while others rejoiced. In recent years,” the story continues, “the pageant has been criticized on the grounds that women are only judged on their physical appearance.”
I sympathize with the critics. I do not think that the length of a woman’s legs is a yardstick for her beauty. Besides, how can anyone decide who is the most beautiful woman in the world when every race and ethnicity has its own characteristic look? How can we compare the Japanese standard of beauty to the European standard beauty, and who can say which is more beautiful?
To pretend as if these girls are treated as anything but objects, the judges ask the contestants silly questions, which no one even expects them to answer sincerely. If we were to believe them, we would think that all the girls wished for world peace, and they are all deeply troubled by climate change.
A student of mine told me that the contest is losing popularity and asked why I thought this was happening. I was happy to hear about this; I think it could be a sign that we are maturing, and we are beginning to look beyond the physical.
It is time to start looking for inner beauty because at the end of the day, this is what makes people happy. When you search for a woman’s inner beauty, you will find that you cannot measure it. This is true not only of women, but of all people. When you search for their beauty, it is always hidden.
A person’s beauty evolves over time. It is defined by one’s connections with other people and with the environment. Beautiful people are caring people, people who sympathize with the sorrows and hardships of others, and want to help them feel better.
Such feelings are a gift, but we can also develop them. Once we recognize how self-centered we are, we can learn to change.
It is not a process that one can do on one’s own, but if we, as a society, decide that we have had enough of the Me! Me! Me! culture, we will be able to teach ourselves to think more in terms of We! and less in terms of Me! This will do a world of good for everyone. It is certainly a better way to promote world peace than conducting Miss Universe beauty pageants.
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Michael Laitman, On The Times of Israel: “The Meaning of Being Jewish”
I received an email from a man who converted to Judaism in a Reform synagogue in Arizona, U.S. To his dismay, he discovered that his conversion was not recognized by Conservative and Orthodox denominations. As a result, he started looking into the meaning of being Jewish and asked me what the wisdom of Kabbalah and The Book of Zohar say about it.
To begin with, the wisdom of Kabbalah does not relate to a person’s body or to one’s material actions whatsoever. It speaks of and relates only to the desires in one’s heart, and how to help us unite with each other and with the power of unity, the Creator. As a result, the wisdom of Kabbalah does not relate to one’s formal religion, but only to one’s spiritual state. In other words, a person can be Jewish and a member of the Israeli nation at one moment, and a gentile (non-Jew) the next. At the same time, one can be born into a different religion altogether, yet be regarded as a member of the people of Israel in the spiritual sense. I hope my explanation below will clarify what I mean by these statements, which I know will surprise many people.
The Hebrew word for “Jewish” is Yehudi, from the word yechudi [unique or united]. Unity is the heart and soul of Judaism, and particularly unity above differences and divisions. King Solomon said (Proverbs 10:12), “Hate stirs up strife, and love will cover all crimes.” The Book of Zohar (portion Aharei Mot) describes the relation between uniting precisely above hatred, and what it means for the whole world: “‘How good and how pleasant it is for brothers to also dwell together.’ These are the friends, as they sit together inseparably. At first, they seem like people at war, wishing to kill one another. Then they return to being in brotherly love. …And you, the friends who are here, as you were in fondness and love before, you will not part henceforth … and by your merit there will be peace in the world.”
The ancestors of the people of Israel united so deeply that they became as one, or as the great commentator RASHI described it, “as one man with one heart.” Only once they achieved that profound unity, they were proclaimed a nation, having united with the power of bestowal that we refer to as the Creator, and with each other. Once they achieved that unity, they were commanded to lead the world to unity, as Prophet Isaiah (42:6-7) described it: “I will appoint you as … a light to the nations, to open blind eyes, to bring out prisoners from the dungeon, and those who dwell in darkness from the prison.”
Indeed, if we examine the ancestry of the founders of the Israeli nation, we will find that the greatest among them had non-Jewish roots. They achieved greatness because they united the people, not because of some ancestral privilege. Abraham, the founder of our nation, was not born Jewish; the nation did not exist before his time. Moses’ wife, Zipporah, led the women of the people of Israel along with Moses’ sister, Miriam, after they came out of Egypt and crossed the Red Sea. Rabbi Akiva, the greatest sage after Moses, whose disciples wrote The Book of Zohar and the Mishnah (the basis of Judaism), was born to parents who were not born Jewish. Another one of Rabbi Akiva’s greatest disciples, Rabbi Meir, who is the third most frequently mentioned sage in the Mishnah, and whose wife Bruriah is cited in the Gemara, descended from the Roman Emperor Nero. And last in this list, but certainly not the least, Ruth the Moabite, the heroine of the Biblical story, was the great-grandmother of Israel’s greatest king, King David, and whose dynasty were the kings of the people of Israel for centuries, during Israel’s greatest times.
We therefore see why the wisdom of Kabbalah pays no attention to one’s physical ancestry. If a person believes that unity of all people is the ultimate value, that everything else is secondary to it, and strives to unite all the people “as one man with one heart,” in the spiritual sense, that person is regarded as a member of the people of Israel.
From the spiritual perspective, as the wisdom of Kabbalah sees it, being Jewish has nothing to do with one’s color or creed. The only “test” is whether one strives for unity or for self-centeredness. As long as one chooses unity, one is Israel. If you ever watched one of my lessons, you will see that I have students from all over the world and from every ethnicity and background. The one thing that unites all of us is our aspiration to unite above all differences. This is the spiritual people of Israel.
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Comment: They say that a person produces about 60 liters of tears during his lifetime.
My Response: But they are no longer tears of grief or joy, which are the result of some experience, but tears necessary for washing the eyes.
Question: Yes, probably all the data were mixed up during the research. Interestingly, people can cry from birth to death tens of thousands of times, including crying in childhood and all our subsequent states.
German scientists have estimated that women can cry from 60 to 70 times a year, while men do it ten times less. They determined that men cry for 2 to 4 minutes on average and women’s crying can last much longer.
What is the spiritual difference between female and male tears?
Answer: I cannot say that there is a difference in the spiritual world because a woman and a man are slightly different structures there than in the corporeal world.
It is clear why in our world women’s and men’s tears are so different. A woman is experiencing everything more emotionally externally, and a man is experiencing everything more emotionally internally. Therefore, women’s, men’s, and children’s tears differ in levels—in the threshold of experience. They all manifest themselves in different ways: more often, less often, deeper, in different forms.
However, in the spiritual world, there is no difference between male and female tears. That is, the external manifestation has a certain form, but there is no internal difference at all. There is no difference between a spiritual man and a spiritual woman in the release of tears.
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From KabTV’s “Spiritual States” 11/6/22
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Now we shall come to clarify the thought of creation. Certainly, “The end of the work is in the preliminary thought.” Even in corporeal humans, with their many thoughts, the end of the work is in the preliminary thought (Baal HaSulam, The Study of the Ten Sefirot, Part 1, “Restriction and Line,” Inner Observation, Chapter 1, Item 10).
The thought of creation is to reveal the great desires in all created beings and fill them with what they want.
In other words, the thought of the Creator is to delight the created beings.
Question: Why do we not feel this thought?
Answer: We feel it in some measure. After all, we do feel the desire to enjoy, but in a very minimal dose.
The will to bestow in the Emanator necessarily begets the will to receive in the emanated, and it is the vessel in which the emanated being receives His abundance.
Since the Creator is the will to bestow, the result is that the will to receive automatically appears in creation according to the law of cause and effect.
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From KabTV’s “The Study of the Ten Sefirot (TES)” 10/30/22
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Let me explain it in souls of people, which are also spiritual: It is known that the form of the spiritual law is simple. Certainly, there are as many souls as there are bodies, where the souls shine. However, they are separated from one another by the disparity of form in each of them. (Baal HaSulam, The Study of the Ten Sefirot, Part 1, Item 4, “Restriction and Line,” Inner Observation).
Question: What does it mean that there are souls and that every soul has some kind of body?
Answer: Desire in itself does not mean anything. But its form, that is, what it strives for and what it wants to be filled with, determines the essence of the desire itself and the object in which it is manifested.
Question: Baal HaSulam writes, There are as many souls as there are bodies where the souls shine. What does it mean that “the soul shines in the body”?
Answer: The point is that desire, which determines the entire property of the body, can vary; it can decrease, increase, and take various forms and types. Thus, some kind of evolution takes place all the time, like a change in the form of desire in its size or in its character. In this way all desires differ from each other.
The inner desire is defined as the soul. This also determines what the essence of this object is and what exactly it wants—whether it wants to receive for its own sake, for the sake of others, to bestow for its own sake or for others, in what form, and so on. All this separates the souls from each other and makes them different in the distance between them in quality and quantity.
Fulfillment of the soul is called light. It turns out that if desires are filled with something, for example, with suffering or with pleasure, then this is called the light of the soul.
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From KabTV’s “The Study of the Ten Sefirot (TES)” 10/30/22
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Question: You explained that in the process of studying Kabbalah, a person goes through experiences where the left line constantly opens up and it is necessary to overcome it all the time. What holds a person? What keeps him from leaving?
Answer: The level of development. Of course, you can go somewhere to the village and live an ordinary life, or become a railway caretaker—20 km there, 20 km here, check the rails, tighten the nuts on the sleepers.
Can you live this way? There you have no Internet or newspapers, only radio. You sit and listen to something. That’s all. In exchange, you have a quiet, good life.
You will develop a small vegetable garden around you plus a salary; from a passing train you will sometimes be dropped the products you ordered. You will live quietly away from everyone. What could be better? Walk through the woods with a gun, fish in the lake, listen to the birds singing. What’s wrong? Why can’t you limit yourself to this?
Comment: First, it is a separation from other people.
My Response: Why do you need other people? What do they give you? Look at what’s going on here, will you? Why do you need to sit in this “dumpster”?
You just can’t do it any other way. Not because you didn’t grow up in a gatehouse, but because according to your inner development you can no longer live in such a state. This is how nature develops you.
Look at what is being done with cities. In one century, the population of a city with a million inhabitants has grown to 20 – 30 million, and there is no limit to this.
Today, a person cannot live away from others. This is how the program of creation is specially designed to force people to connect so that they work together on their common egoism in the right connection with each other and use the method of influence of the upper light to correct themselves.
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From KabTV’s “I Got a Call. Careful, Kabbalah” 10/19/13
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Comment: There are many quotes about the benefits of silence. For example, “silence is the fence around wisdom.”
My Response: Yes, when a person is silent, he retains his wisdom, does not spray it. And if he talks, then all his wisdom gradually flows out of him into the air, to everyone else.
It must be understood that silence is always preferable. There is nothing in the world worth talking about. On the contrary, it is always better to remain silent.
Question: Then why is speech given to man?
Answer: In order to keep his mouth shut and say only what is necessary.
Question: That is, here a person is, as it were, given freedom of choice: he can say what is necessary or he can say different things?
Answer: It is better to remain silent about various things.
Question: There is a quote from Menachem Mendel of Kotzk: “There is no greater scream than silence” What does this mean?
Answer: When it seems to us that a person should say something, but he is silent, then we perceive his silence as a very serious statement.
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From KabTV’s “Spiritual States” 10/23/22
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Question: As a rule, when a newcomer comes to us, he is, as it were, elevated in his own eyes. Let’s say he was an ordinary janitor, and here he is exalted in such a way that he begins to inflate like a balloon. And then they let him go, and he either deflates or something else. Why does the system work like this?
Answer: To rub his egoism a little. He is “beaten up” so that he begins to take spiritual things seriously and neglect material ones. But it may take years until the whole procedure is completed and he begins to perceive himself correctly in relation to the spiritual world.
Comment: But the condition I mentioned is obtained naturally. For example, a guest comes from somewhere, and he just gets lost, and doesn’t know what to do.
My Response: In fact, by exalting a friend, we do not lie to ourselves or others and do not engage in sycophancy. It is just that we are really pleased that we see our friend who lives very far away and is connected with us.
Question: In this case, how can we protect the human psyche?
Answer: If he is constantly engaged with us, he sees how we treat each other, that we do not welcome him personally, but his contribution, work, and participation, that is, his efforts.
A well-organized group correctly introduces a person into the system.
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From KabTV’s “I Got a Call. The Greatest Man in the World” 10/12/13
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Preparation to the Lesson
| [media 1] | [media 2] |
Lesson on the Topic “Faith Above Reason”
| [media 3] | [media 4] |
Writings of Baal HaSulam “Study of the Ten Sefirot,” Vol. 2, Part 6, Item 15
| [media 5] | [media 6] |
Writings of Baal HaSulam “The Arvut (Mutual Guarantee), Item 24″
| [media 7] | [media 8] |
Selected Highlights
| [media 9] | [media 10] |
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