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Michael Laitman, On The Times of Israel: “Headed for Exile?”

It has been more than two months since the general election in Israel took place. Although the results showed a clear winner, and no one disputes the integrity of the election process, the tensions in Israeli society seem to be growing all the time. There is talk of civil disobedience, apprehension of politicians who incite against the government, and repetitive mentioning of the words “civil war.” A well-known journalist even said that nothing will change until a lot of metaphoric, and even real blood is spilt.

As has happened many times before, the people of Israel’s worst, if not only enemy is internal division, internal hatred. No ruler has ever vanquished us unless we first annihilated one another. We are at a crossroads once again, and once again, we seem to be choosing the path of pain.

The fact that we all know our history and what has been our bane throughout the ages, makes no difference. No argument or reasoning will convince us to make concessions, or even negotiate with our dissenters. Our attitude has always been totalitarian: Either our rivals accept that we are right and relinquish all their claims, or we fight them to the death.

Politicians who expressed one opinion only a few years ago, now express the complete opposite opinion only because their position has changed from being in the government to being in the opposition, or the other way around. Every issue—from Israel’s judicial system through its economy to its security and defense—is subject to political position. Considerations of the best interest of the country simply do not exist anymore. Even if the country falls to pieces, “leaders” will not give up until they are king of the hill, even if the hill is a heap of smoldering ashes.

When the only considerations are what serves my ego, of course it is impossible to let anyone rule but me. If I am not the prime minister, I will interrupt and interfere in any way I can. This is the prevailing mindset.

I remember that years ago, I was slightly involved in the Israeli political system, but for years now I have refrained from any involvement. The only result of political meddling is that it puts the country at risk, and I want no part in it.

Our enemies rejoice at the sight of our internal hatred. Like the Romans did two thousand years ago, they will use our inner fragmentation and drive us out of here. As has happened so many times before, we will, God forbid, be exiled.

Throughout our history, our people have been exiled, slaughtered, burned, and tortured to death. All these torments came to us for our inner hatred. Nevertheless, we have refused to accept that our only road to happiness and peace is the road of loving one another.

Even though our nation conceived the ideas of love of others, charity, and mutual responsibility, we have always shunned these notions. Instead, we agreed to love only those who thought like we did and lived like we did. We have set an example of both mercy and cruelty, but in our annals, the latter has always ultimately won.

King Solomon said, “Hate stirs up strife, and love will cover all crimes” (Prov. 10:12). We are great at carrying out the first part of the verse, but we are awful at following its latter part.

We cannot hope to agree with one another; this will never happen. Our only hope is to learn that despite our disagreements, we are one nation. Unless we understand that just as brothers do not murder one another simply because they disagree, neither must we. Otherwise, we are headed for death and exile.
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Question: How can we not go crazy from the current news?

Answer: I personally listen to the news. However, it depends on which ones. In principle, they don’t drive me crazy. I understand that this is our world and today it still has to move along this trajectory.

But I hope that in the near future the world will sober up and begin to understand how to better to behave, what shape to take, and what kind of relationships to build.

I think that everything that is happening now will shake up the world and people will feel the need for mutual positive movements.
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From KabTV’s “Blitz Questions and Answers” 1/6/23

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The will to receive is set in the emanated being only through its awakening to receive of its own accord (Baal HaSulam, The Study of the Ten Sefirot, Part 1, “Inner Observation,” Chapter 6, Item 24).

Question: Is creation the emanated being that has its own personal will to receive?

Answer: Not only to receive, but even to become similar to the Creator. This is why, desire goes through four phases of development, and it is in the last phase that it develops a free personal desire to become similar to the Creator. Before that, it is not yet considered a creation because it goes through involuntary stages of development.
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From KabTV’s “The Study of the Ten Sefirot (TES)” 1/1/23

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This means that after this law of the will to receive pleasure has been imprinted in us, we define ourselves by the name “operation” (Baal HaSulam, The Study of the Ten Sefirot, Part 1, “Inner Observation,” Chapter 5, Item 22).

After the law of egoism has been imprinted in us, we act only for the sake of our ego. Therefore, it takes great strength, diligence, and perseverance to understand how we can correct it to the opposite. Although the Creator is waiting and ready to help us in this.

Receiving for one’s own sake brings death to the bodies and every kind of torment and labor to the soul.

Question: Why is receiving for one’s own sake the cause of death?

Answer: It is because a person sees that he does not reach fulfillment. Eventually, this leads him to death, to exhaustion.

Comment: But there are still some fulfillments. People are receiving pleasure.

My Response: These pleasures are intended only so that we do not part with life. Just for that. But this calculation is hidden from us. If we clearly saw how much we enjoy and how much we suffer, we would not want to live.
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From KabTV’s “The Study of the Ten Sefirot (TES)” 12/18/22

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Question: Olga writes: “Dear Michael Laitman, I have been listening to you for a long time and usually agree with you. But I can’t agree with one thing, which you think is the main thing: that the Creator is kind. But it’s not like that; He’s not kind. Look around. Even if I repeat like a mantra that the Creator is good, this horror will not stop anyway. Why is He so unkind to us? In fact, innocent people are suffering.”

Answer: It is true that people suffer. It is true that the Creator is unkind. But He is fair.

Question: For whom, I wonder, is He fair?

Answer: For those who follow His instructions. He set the bar and the conditions: “This is so, and this is so.”

Question: And what are the bars? Can you say?

Answer: Be kind to each other.

Comment: Look at what is happening around!

My Response: We make our own future and present. We wrap everything up ourselves.

Question: What about His governance? You keep saying, “The Creator’s governance is good, kindness, and doing good.”

Answer: Only we need to be consistent.

Question: So is this law of good relationships the main law?

Answer: Yes. He set everything to spin like this, and it will spin. And if you want it better or if you want it worse, you make it yourself. It is a rule.

Question: Can we be kind to each other?

Answer: If we try very hard, then yes.

Question: By ourselves? Without any help from above?

Answer: Yes, without any help. There is no Creator, there is nature. We do well and we get correct, good actions from it, or vice versa.

Question: By the word “nature” what do you mean?

Answer: “Elokim” (Creator) according to gematria, in its internal numerical meaning, means “teva,” nature. And there is nothing else.

Question: When you say nature, what do you mean?

Answer: Nature is everything! The whole universe.

Question: Is there a law of the universe that we do not comply with?

Answer: Yes. This is the law of absolute kindness, love, connection, and so on. We are inside this law and do not comply with it.

Question: Can we start matching it? Without any help from the upper?

Answer: Yes.

Question: So can we stop starting all these wars and all these troubles, and not hate each other and so on?

Answer: It all depends on us.

Question: How do we do it, anyway?

Answer: First convince all Jews of this, and then it will be easier. The world began with them, and the world will end with them!

Comment: Start with the Jews so that they themselves are on good terms and show the whole world an example of good relations. Such a simple phrase, and we have not been able to approach it for millennia.

My Response: We cannot; we cannot give an example and achieve this.

Question: What do we need to do in this case?

Answer: To tell all this first to the Jews and the rest of the nations of the world. And for all of them to start this fight for peace, and to convince each other that this is the only way to restore order on Earth.

Question: But first you still have to convince the Jews, you say?

Answer: Yes.

Comment: It follows from all this that all this horror, everything that is happening, all this hatred, that the Creator is not kind, in all this…

My Response: The Jews are to blame.

Comment: It’s no secret that they don’t like Jews, they hate them, and put all the blame on them.

My Response: This is an unconscious sense of truth.

Question: We suffer because Jews haven’t done their job. Is this the truth?

Answer: Yes. This is how every person in the world feels. Except Jews.

Question: Olga asks a very simple question: “Why is He so unkind to us, as innocent people are suffering”?

Answer: He wants to lead us to good. And we resist.

Question: Then the question is: what is it about us Jews that we don’t want to take these steps? Or do we take them, but incorrectly?

Answer: There is a central point of the world in us, which is connected with the whole of nature in general, and is the central point of nature.

Question: So there is a point in us that is connected to the central point of nature?

Answer: Yes. And if we adjusted it and balanced it, then everything in the world would be balanced.

Comment: What a responsibility and burden do you place on the Jews!

My Response: I’m not placing anything! I’m just explaining.
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From KabTV’s “News with Dr. Michael Laitman” 12/8/22

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After the people of Israel pulled all desires out of Egypt, the “vessels” and gold and silver jewelry, then all their egoistic qualities died in them.

As it is said in the Torah about the entire generation that exited Egypt, all their egoism died and then they received the opportunity to reach the next level, called the land of Israel (Eretz Israel), a desire aimed only at bestowal and love. “Eretz” is “desire (Ratzon)” and “Israel” is “Yashar Kel (straight to the Creator).”

The Creator is the force of bestowal and love, which is the main force of nature. Everything else is manifested as its particular types. The program, according to which this force works, is aimed at making a person independent and with the desire to be in a state of bestowal and love.

Abraham’s group, once they entered the land of Israel, began to fight for it because other nations also lived there. In addition, all sorts of obstacles arose in the group itself that were manifested in the characters of people, and they had to rise above them. This period is called the conquest of the land of Israel (“Kibush Haaretz“).
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From KabTV’s “I Got a Call. History of the Jewish People” 5/4/14

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Comment: You said that if a person is half a step away from leaving the group, essentially the goal he has been engaged in for a long time, then there is no point in holding him back because he no longer has the desire.

My Response: I am not in favor of holding a person by force. I feel that if I give everything I can, and the student does not become attached to our system through this, then his time has not come yet.

I don’t see much use in getting him interested and luring him in. I have no inner strength or inner motivation for this.

Maybe because my teacher Rabash had such an attitude that if his students care about connection between them and show support for one another, then in this state they should move forward. And if someone falls out of the general connection for some reason of his own, then he falls out.

You cannot hold a person by force. If he hears about the concept of the practical idea of correcting himself and the world, which he begins to feel the effect on himself in action, then he must make efforts and invest himself.

And if it does not do this sufficiently, then it is impossible to keep him recharged all the time.

Ultimately, he must learn to revive himself, to connect himself to an upper source.
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From KabTV’s “I Got a Call.  I am Fed Up With Everything!” 5/31/14

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Preparation to the Lesson

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Michael Laitman, On Quora: “What does the Tower of Babel represent?“

The construction of the Tower of Babel represents humanity’s first level of egoistic development that took place around 4,000 years ago.

The story of the Tower of Babel describes people who, out of increased egoism, aspired to reach the governing altruistic force of reality, the Creator, which is allegorically described by their desire to build a tower that reached to the sky.

Humanity failed to direct its increased egoism toward the Creator’s attainment, because attaining the Creator means rising above egoism and developing contact with the altruistic force that governs reality. Their increased egoism made them stop feeling each other and their positive connections. It made them want to exploit the Creator, which is the meaning of building a tower that reaches the sky. They subsequently stopped understanding each other, and their oppositeness from nature alienated them from each other and from the Creator, and they dispersed.

In other words, the Tower of Babel represents a process of whereby we receive a growth of egoism—the desire to enjoy for self-benefit alone—which detaches us from each other and from nature. Instead of working to unite above our increased egoism and correct the disconnection that our egoism brings upon us, the Tower of Babel story discusses people who thought that they would be able to attain the Creator through their egoism, and not by rising above it. As a result, they experienced a collapse of the positive connection that they shared before their egoism’s growth spurt, and they started feeling hatred and separation from each other instead of feeling that they belonged to one nation.

Since then, we might have compensated for our detachment with various scientific, cultural and technological developments, but while we have developed superficial connections to each other globally, our inner detachment from one another continues growing due to our continually-growing egoism. We also find today that our abundance of scientific, cultural and technological innovations fail to give our desires any real lasting satisfaction, which is exemplified by the fact that our era has the most cases of depression, loneliness, anxiety and stress than any other one.

In our current era, we are reaching the realization that we simply cannot fulfill ourselves, i.e. our egoistic desires. Any fulfillment merely serves to extinguish our current desire, and a new desire appears in its place. The growing awareness of our egoism’s dead-end in our era shows us a new phase of the Tower of Babel: Where the Tower was once destroyed by the Creator, today we are reaching our own realization of its destruction the more we see our egoistic desires leading us to a dead end instead of to the progress that we once thought they would lead us to. In other words, we are at a similar juncture that occurred in the time of Babel, only now we are aware of our situation.

According to the wisdom of Kabbalah, the meeting point of our increasing global technological, economic and commercial connection, together with our increasing inner egoistic growth and detachment in our attitudes to each other, marks the beginning of humanity’s connection into a new united civilization. We can learn from our past experiences and from the Tower of Babel’s story that if we follow the commands of our growing egoism, we will be led to destruction. In order to correctly realize our egoism’s growth, we need to learn how to unite as a single humanity above our growing egoism, which will lead us to a new harmonious and peaceful state the likes of which we have never seen before. It is my hope that we will gain wisdom and awareness and go the latter route sooner rather than later, and by so doing, spare ourselves and our future generations a lot of unnecessary suffering.
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Based on the book, A Guide to the Hidden Wisdom of Kabbalah, 3rd Edition, by Kabbalist Dr. Michael Laitman. Written/edited by students of Kabbalist Dr. Michael Laitman.

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