Question: What is democracy in your view?

Answer: Democracy is the latest fairytale of humanity, when it is slowly discovering that with our nature, human nature, we will remain in a state of absolute barbarism if we coddle and pamper our nature as we are doing now and ask it what to do.

Currently, all kinds of adornments of this barbarism are going through the process of the realization of their pettiness. They are gradually falling off humanity, and what remains is the evil, grumbling, salivating “muzzle” of the modern generation that no longer has any thirst for anything.

The last generation has hit the wall, so to speak. It does not want to leave home from mom and dad, does not want to make decisions on its own, does not want to do anything, everyone wants to be freelance artists.

They are not interested in great accomplishments. Even in the area of egoism they do not want to invest in anything. They calmly allow their moms and dads to work and do not make any decisions without consulting with dozens of friends on Twitter or Facebook.

This generation is completely opposite to the previous one. In the 1960s, during my college years, the generation was boiling, ambitious, marching out. What ambitions and aspirations are there now? There are none! “Leave us alone! Figure out everything for us. We do not need anything from you and wish you would not want anything from us. Just provide for us in some basic way, and that is all.” That is the generation we have now.
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From KabTV’s “I Got a Call. What is Democracy?” 10/12/13

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Comment: Shame and guilt are feelings directly related to social norms. As norms are changing, shame and guilt are changing. What used to be shameful is not considered so today. Shame, nevertheless, is the result of incongruity to the ideal. Self-condemnation is a destructive forms of shame is constant self-condemnation.

My Response: That is correct. Why does a person feel ashamed? As a result of self-condemnation.

Question: What does he condemn himself for?

Answer: Everything. That is why there is a sense of shame: “Why am I like this? What is wrong with me?” And so on and so forth.

Question: Is this feeling good or bad, and should it be exterminated?

Answer: It should be very well targeted. Then there will be no sense of shame, and there will be serious work on yourself.

Question: Should there or should there not be a sense of shame?

Answer: The feeling of shame for the fact that you did not have time to correct yourself into something more proper, kind, and so on.

Question: So, I actually have to see something good in front of me in order to experience shame? I do not see anything too good around me. There must be an ideal opposite me. There are no ideals today. I am talking about an ordinary person.

Answer: No, it is not about you seeing the ideal in someone in front of you. The fact is that you would see yourself a little better, a little better than yourself at the moment.

Question: Where does the point of shame begin—from which moment? I have to see something good and feel that I am not like that?

Answer: The point of shame begins from the moment you study yourself and realize that you have to be a little better and comparing this image—to be better than yourself—shame arises from the difference between them.

Question: Where can I get this image?

Answer: We can get it only if we study the science of Kabbalah. It will tell us what it means to be righteous and, based on this, we will see how much we have not grown to this level, and we will be ashamed.

Question: What is a righteous person from the point of view of Kabbalah?

Answer: A righteous person is one that justifies the Creator’s action on him. In everything. And then, by realizing that I am not like that, I feel ashamed.

Question: Then there are two shames. Is the shame experienced by an ordinary person in our life real shame?

Answer: That is a different matter. It is a shame that I was caught stealing, and so on.

Question: Would you call it shame, the fact that I was caught?

Answer: Of course. There are a lot of people who blush like that. And if they were not caught, they would feel proud.

Question: But that is not the same shame you talk about all the time?

Answer: No. I am only talking about the shame that arises in a person who feels himself a degree less than he should have been. Meaning, a degree less than the righteous. And he must come closer to this state of the righteous all the time.

Question: Shame in our world, the usual shame when a person blushes that he was caught stealing, does this shame lead to that other shame or is it a step toward it? Or is it purposely given to us in this world after all?

Answer: It is interconnected but very complicated.

We should try to do what is revealed to us.

Question: And when a parent says to a child: “You should be ashamed of what you did,” where does he come from?

Answer: He must proceed from the fact that the child will correctly discern between what is desired and what is actually there.

And when a child understands this difference, he is ashamed that he is not in the best state where he could be, and then this feeling arises in him which can be called shame.
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From KabTV’s “New with Michael Laitman” 8/18/22

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Preparation to the Lesson

Lesson on the Topic “Faith Above Reason”

Writings of Baal HaSulam “The Freedom”

Selected Highlights

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Michael Laitman, On Quora: “Who are the Jews today?“

Around 3,800 years ago, Abraham the Patriarch reached a perception of the oneness of nature, a perfect unity of everyone and everything as a single whole. He taught the ways of attaining the perception of nature’s oneness to anybody who was willing to learn back in ancient Babylon, and the Babylonians who advanced as a group implementing his methodology became initially known as “the people of Israel,” and later as “the Jews.” Every Jew today has a part of that perception, but it is yet to reveal itself, i.e. it exists only in potential.

Revealing the full extent of the perception that Abraham once attained would bring humanity to a state that Kabbalah calls “the end of correction,” i.e. the end of our development from perceiving in an incomplete, transient and divided manner, to perceiving a world where everyone and everything connects as one. We would then discover reality in its entirety: all worlds, created beings and various forms as one system filled with a single light, i.e. with a single force of connection. In such a state, we would perceive the true, whole and perfect reality.

Moreover, reaching such a perception is not a matter of whether a person is a Jew. Being Jewish is not about being born to a Jewish mother, as is commonly accepted in today’s world. A Jew is someone who yearns for connection (the Hebrew word for “Jew” [Yehudi] comes from the word for “united” [yihudi] [Yaarot Devash, Part 2, Drush no. 2]). Anybody who aspires to positively connect with others is on the way to becoming Jewish. The first stage toward reaching a state of unification is the condition that Hillel stated—”Don’t do to others what you hate”—and afterward we aim to reach the condition of “Love your neighbor as yourself.”

People who are born as Jews have certain remnants with exalted and powerful potential that come from a completely different perception of reality than the one we experience today. Also, humanity’s future development will lead to everybody having to reach the same perception as Abraham, where we perceive everything and everyone as one, and toward that perception, it does not matter whether someone was born a Jew or not.

Who is a Jew? A Jew is one who wishes to unite everyone, and who feels the whole of reality in addition to feeling oneself. We are Jews if we feel that everything and everyone belongs to us equally as to everyone else, and we yearn to attain the perception of our lives’ source, the discovery of everything and everyone as one.

Based on the video “Who Is a Jew Today?” with Kabbalist Dr. Michael Laitman and Oren Levi. Written/edited by students of Kabbalist Dr. Michael Laitman.

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