Question: There are different calendars for measuring time: the Gregorian, Chinese, Jewish, etc. Why does everyone use exactly the same calendar all over the world?

Answer: It was simply accepted by the international committee. But did the Chinese live by this calendar, or India, or South America? No! If you take any of the Arab newspapers, a year written there is calculated from their prophet, not from the Christian one.

Jews also do not measure time by these dates. What is measured by them? This is only the external side. I lived for thirty years among Orthodox Jews. They measure nothing according to the usual calendar. Absolutely everything is measured only by the solar-lunar calendar: months relative to the Moon, years relative to the Sun, time relative to sunrise and sunset. That’s it! And there are no problems with this.

Holidays do not move anywhere. Everything is absolutely clear because in the Jewish calendar the Sun and the Moon completely coincide with each other. Therefore, it is clearly known on which days there may be which holidays. Let’s say Purim was on the fifteenth of the month of Adar. Then on the fifteenth of next month is Passover. Everything is absolutely clear, no problems.

The calendar has been around for thousands of years and it has not moved anywhere. There is no need to change to new time or old time; there is nothing to do because it is composed in accordance with nature. not just with the Sun or just with the Moon, but with both heavenly bodies that control us. Between them is the Earth.

The Sun shines through the Earth at the Moon, and thus we have phases of the Moon. That’s it; everything can be measured. You have no idea how accurately the calendar is compiled, astronomical hours, minutes, seconds, angles, etc. I can show you a book of ancient astronomical tables and with what accuracy they are compiled!

Question: But people could not take it from the outside. Can it be that there was some kind of internal record?

Answer: On the one hand, they took it from the inside, from their understanding of nature. But on the other hand they mastered all the dimensions because people needed a clock, for example to arrange a meeting. “You and I will meet at three o’clock in the afternoon.” Therefore the clock has always existed.
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From KabTV’s “I Got a Call. When Did Time Appear?” 3/6/13

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Michael Laitman, On Quora: “Is it true that stubbornness is a characteristic quality of Jewish people?“

Max Nordau, one of the Zionist movement’s founders, was quoted as telling Ze’ev Jabotinsky that “logic is a Greek art and Jews can’t tolerate it. The Jew learns not by way of reason, but from catastrophes. He won’t buy an umbrella merely because he sees clouds in the sky. He waits until he is drenched and catches pneumonia.”

It is true. Jews generally do not believe in signs of upcoming occurrences, but we change after we receive strong blows. The Torah also writes about Jewish stubbornness that we are a “stiff-necked people” (Exodus 33:3; Deuteronomy 9:13; Nehemiah 9:16; Acts 7:51). It is due to the big ego residing in us. We can do nothing about it, as it is one of our inherent traits.

While it has its cons, it also has its pros. The pros of our stubbornness and our big ego in general is that if we apply the method we once received to rise above our ego, then we will be able to balance and manage two great positive and negative forces together, as it is written, “Love will cover all crimes.” We will have our “crimes,” our egoism, below—the minus—and above it, we can discover the quality of love, bestowal and connection—the plus. We will then become worthy of showing a positive example to humanity of how to overcome the divisive ego that tears human society apart, and how to cover that ego with an umbrella of love, giving and positive connection, effectively elevating human consciousness to new heights of harmony and peace.

Based on the video “Is Stubbornness a Characteristic Quality of Jews?” with Kabbalist Dr. Michael Laitman and Oren Levi. Written/edited by students of Kabbalist Dr. Michael Laitman.

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Preparation to the Lesson

Lesson on the Topic, “I to My Beloved and My Beloved to Me” 

Lesson on the Topic, “The Importance of Dissemination”

Writings of Baal HaSulam, “Study of the Ten Sefirot,” Vol. 1, Part 4, Chapter 6, Item 12

Selected Highlights 

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Comment: It seems to us that in ancient times people were primitive. But you said that they were clearly aware of the connection between them.

My Response: In what way were they primitive? Twenty generations of Jews before and after Adam, ten before Noah, and ten from Noah to Abraham were not primitive. They were attaining the upper world in the connection between them. They realized that this was their destiny, and this was why they existed in this world.

Therefore, they did not do anything needless, and they did not create any great monuments, palaces, or deity-statues. They did not build anything! They did not need it. They were doing internal work. Everyone had a place to stay, bread, water, meat, and milk, everything they needed, and that was enough for them.

Look at the ancient civilization that lived here in Israel. What did they leave behind?

Nothing. Of course, there were cities and settlements, but very simple ones.

And the Temple! What was in this Temple? Nothing special. Two hundred by two hundred meters, or even less.

Everything was so simple because it was aimed at internal spiritual development. And when people went into exile from here to all countries of the world, they lost practically nothing; they took a book with them and left. They lived by completely different values.

And what did Greeks and Romans do? When I first came to Washington, I took a look: “This is Rome—one and the same!. Buildings and columns, this is all ancient Greece.” It is the same in Berlin. The thousand-year-old Reich is the heir of Rome. And in Russia they also built something similar.

And here there is nothing of the kind. Where is anything built here? Or where can you get something from ancient history that you would like to restore? There is nothing. One needs to just build ordinary buildings, live there, and that’s it. Everything else is inside.

Even modern new buildings, no one cares what type they should be. There is no architecture, no special music, no literature in the cultural sense, and so on. There is nothing, and there is no need for any of this! All that is needed is a normal living environment in order to provide clothes, shoes, and food that are necessary for the existence of the body. Everything else is just spirit.
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From KabTV’s “I Got a Call. Ancient People and Cultures of the Past” 3/8/13

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Comment: You once said that the world should be afraid not so much of catastrophes and environmental pollution as of unemployment that as soon as the world will be flooded with unemployed people, there will be chaos and a catastrophe worse than an external catastrophe.

My Response: The fact is that the countries will be obliged to support the unemployed. Maybe this will not be a big problem, although of course, it is still a big load. Society is not adapted to the redistribution of goods and satisfying the needy somehow. Everything works according to the old pattern, money, social benefits.

The problem is not that the unemployed are people who have nothing to live on. These are people who feel unnecessary to anyone and they must fill the feeling of emptiness, worthlessness, and insignificance within themselves. They have very bad problems.

A person is created for being able to participate in some kind of work. We see that animals are constantly in search of food, in some kind of communication with each other, in some kind of clarification, in moving from place to place. They are always in internal and external motion. Even if there are fights between them, they do not harm each other purposefully. All this is necessary and embedded in the life cycle of all living things.

A person who leaves work, kind of dies. How long can I sit on Twitter, Facebook, and other sites? There are such programs on television today that there is nothing to watch at all. That is, people degrade so much so that absolutely everything human disappears in them. They are not interested in any growth.

Why go to school? I learned to read and write a little, and even not to write with a pen but to type on the computer and that is it.

What else do I need? I can only send “ha-ha” and “ho-ho” in this correspondence, and that is enough. I watch TV shows, and that is enough. What school? What for?

Once upon a time, school was designed to prepare a person to become a worker, and if you continue your studies at the university, then you become a civil servant or an employee, and so on. But why bother now? That is, school is dying. The whole culture is dying. It closes in on this television, which in turn, drops, as they say, “below the baseboard.” People are in such a state. What will happen to them next?

We could leave it all to chance, but nature has its own laws, its own plans, and its own goal. Therefore, it is very difficult to just ride the waves. It will shake us all the time. Wars, riots, and wild things will happen in the world.

No government will be able to cope with this because in each country 90% of the people will be unemployed. What are you going to do with them?

The only thing that remains is the path of integral upbringing and education, for everyone, from young to old. Only this can raise a person to the next level, and then you will be in unison with nature, you will not have contradictions. You will definitely find good signs in this movement.
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From KabTV’s “I Got a Call. If You Lost Your Job” 3/13/14

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Comment: We believe that people who lived a thousand years ago or even more were very primitive, and now we are so cool. Actually it is the other way around.

My Response: No, in Europe people were indeed really primitive. Look what was going on there in the Middle Ages, the way they lived, all the lawlessness, dirt, problems, lack of hygiene! Of course, there was wildness.

Who could read and write? Who understood history and geography? Who understood how he lives? Everyone was thinking only about how to survive. A small handful of people were busy burning away their lives, and the rest thought only about how to feed themselves.

Now they are showing us luxurious bedrooms and so on and so forth. Naturally, for the kings there was everything, and for the rest nothing. They slept like dogs on a litter and did not wash because they thought they might get sick from it.

What were they doing? What was the culture? What did they read? What did they talk about? They had none of this. I am not saying this in reproach. There were, of course, educated people, philosophers, theologians, etc. But I am talking about the masses.

The Jews for a long time maintained knowledge and a certain spiritual level. However when they fell from this level 2,000 years ago, they preserved their way of life, although it was purely external and mechanical. Study, education, upbringing, the relationship of husband and wife, children, all this has been preserved.

The book Shulchan Aruch contains the entire set of laws according to which Jews live in this world. It has not changed for 3,000 years. How to give birth, how to educate, how to cook, what is kosher, what is not kosher for eating, how to behave, marry, divorce, wash, etc., everything is specified down to the smallest details. A person is a machine; he needs instructions on how to use himself.
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From KabTV’s “I Got a Call. Ancient People and Cultures of the Past” 3/8/13

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Question: Is it possible to say that the Klipa (peel) represents obstacles that need to be overcome before acquiring spiritual knowledge?

Answer: Yes, it is not just obstacles. They are specially designed in such a way as to protect the fruit. Therefore, a person who wants to reach the inner filling of the fruit must overcome these external forces that protect the fruit.

He must correct himself in such a way that external forces are not an obstacle to him. That is, the Klipa (outer shell) protects the fruit from a person who is not yet ready to taste it.

The fruit is knowledge. If it opened up before the Klipa surrounded the fruit, it would harm the person. We see that whenever knowledge falls into the hands of people who are morally unprepared for it, they use it to the detriment of themselves and others.
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From KabTV’s “Spiritual States” 8/21/22

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Medium published my new article “Alone Is Not Always Lonely”

It seems like social media, pandemics, and modern life have made us isolated people, more alienated from each other than ever, and enjoying mainly our own company. People’s conversation time has been declining for nearly thirty years, and even video calls cannot reverse the trend. It appears that communicating with other people is simply not appealing to more and more people. But considering the fact that we are growing increasingly narcissistic, this trend should not surprise us. In the future, we can expect it to continue, and even accelerate.

I, too, feel that I would rather stay in my room and spend my time the way I like to than to socialize with people who largely do not interest me. I have my books; I have science news and other news that I watch; and I have various other interests.

I can sympathize with people who feel they do not need other people to satisfy their social needs, since we are all becoming increasingly focused on ourselves. The need for reciprocity, for approval from society, is diminishing in many people.

However, it is not that people are becoming increasingly anti-social. They are becoming increasingly fastidious, and do not want to waste their time or energy on futile connections that bring them no real benefit.

People are indifferent to other people because they are becoming more goal-oriented. They choose their goals in life and exert themselves to achieve them. This is a positive development that will lead people to pursue their life’s purpose.

As for me, despite my reclusive nature, my life’s purpose requires that I connect with as many people as possible, and on the deepest possible level: in my heart. To achieve my goal, I am willing to connect with any person and embrace any person. But were it not for my goal, I would still be happily secluded in my room as I was before I began to disseminate the wisdom of Kabbalah around the world, which is my life’s purpose and for which I will happily make any sacrifice.

And as I am, so are many other people becoming increasingly goal oriented. It is an evolution in humanity, and not regression. In the future, we will see more and more people connecting around common goals and avoiding casual interactions, which will seem pointless to them. They will be living on two levels: On the superficial level they will appear aloof or reserved, but on the deeper level they will be deeply connected to those who share their goals.
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