According to the wisdom of Kabbalah, initially, only the Creator existed—the will to bestow and to fulfill. In order for Him to be able to realize this desire, He created the will to receive, to be fulfilled. This is the matter of creation.

As a result, the entire universe consists of two opposite qualities: the will to bestow, to fill, to love, the qualities of the Creator, and the will to receive, to fill only oneself even at the expense of others, the qualities of creation.

The will to receive does not have to bestow in order to change and become similar to the Creator. It cannot emanate anything from itself. But it can receive in order to bestow like a child would eat to please his mother, and although he receives physically in action, he is actually bestowing as he acts in order to please her. We do the same with respect to the Creator.

We receive everything from Him, but if we restrict ourselves and agree that we will receive only in order to bring Him contentment, then we become the bestowing ones, equal to the Creator. He bestows upon us because He is the very quality of bestowal, we receive with intention to bring Him contentment, and then we are equal to Him.

The equivalence of qualities with Him reveals the Creator to us, and we begin to feel Him, understand, explore, and be in absolute contact with Him.

So, the Creator has only the will to bestow. The creation has both a will and an intention: the will to receive and the intention “for my own sake” or “for the sake of others,” including “for the sake of the Creator.”

By altering one’s desires from bigger to smaller and one’s intentions “for one’s own sake” or “for the sake of others,” a person can raise or lower oneself relative to the Creator, come closer or move away from Him. In this case, the intention changes the essence of the action itself. That is the point of our correction.

We cannot change the action, but by changing the intention from “for our own sake” to “for the sake of others,” the meaning of our action can change to the opposite and become bestowal instead of reception. If I receive from the Creator in order to bring Him contentment, then I am considered to be the one who gives Him pleasure, that is, the bestower.

This is how we begin to understand our work: by correctly combining the will to receive with the intention to bestow, a person correctly forms himself, adjusts relative to the Creator. This is called working in three lines.
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From KabTV’s “Conversation about The Book of Zohar”

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Comment: Nowadays many people say that scientists who go beyond science cross the line of purely scientific research to something mystical. And they would really have a new inner knowledge open up.

My Response: To do this, they must become Kabbalists. And there’s nothing to be afraid of. There is no mysticism here.

We are talking about our five sense organs in which we attain the world around us and build earthly sciences on them, and also how we change ourselves. We broaden our sense organs in order to build another science on them called “Kabbalah.”

This science depends on changing our sense organs, not on the devices that we create to complement the five material sense organs.
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From KabTV’s “Conversation about Science”

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Question: Is it possible to heal loneliness?

Answer: Yes. Loneliness is actually a blessing, but we just need to make sure that loneliness doesn’t lead us to all sorts of unnecessary and undesirable consequences. Because if lonely people suffer from their loneliness, they are ready to do anything. They can become radical extremists and so on, and they can also engage in drug abuse and commit suicide.

We need to look at different kinds of loneliness. If it is intellectual loneliness, it is a blessing for a person and for humanity. If it is not intellectual but scientific, it can also be a blessing, although today’s science is conducted increasingly more in groups. But if it is psychiatric, psychological loneliness, it should be looked into and we need to help a person balance it somehow.

Everything depends on whether a person feels comfortable being lonely. When my loneliness is invaded, it is very hard for me. I can stand a person for a while and then I can’t do it anymore. I need to leave, to retire, to be by myself, to be alone.

Question: What is correct loneliness?

Answer: Correct loneliness is that which leads to one’s internal development.

I understand a person as an entity, each one spends part of his time totally on his own, inside himself, contemplating and reflecting on different matters. He spends a small part of his time with others. On the whole he “lies” when he is with others, and tries to make a certain impression and thus acts and presents a different person, not himself.

How can a person not be lonely? It is possible to make him not feel lonely if you educate him correctly. It is possible to educate a person at any age. It means that you need to show him that he can gain from the right form of loneliness.

If he understands that only by the right connection with another person can he reveal the upper world, transcend the boundaries of life and death, of his own existence, it already sounds enticing.

Question: What does the right connection with another come down to and how can it be attained?

Answer: The right connection is when one person seemingly dwells in another. This is what is referred to by “make your desire the desire of another.” By doing so, when I exit myself and dwell in another, which means that I begin to work on the desires of another and to fill them instead of filling my own desires, by using my whole physical and creative potential in order to fill another, I seemingly move to dwell in him. I seemingly begin to feel that life flows through him.

This is a totally different life; this is spiritual life. Why is it spiritual if it is a person like me? It is because I become another by trying to feel him instead of myself, which means that I exit myself. It is as if my body dies, and I with all my intellect move to dwell inside him. This is where a person can exit his own body.

Question: Can it be any other person, like a donor, in order to feel that I am alive, happy and fulfilled?

Answer: Yes. By moving to dwell in another you roam in a totally different space.

Question: And this is the remedy for loneliness?

Answer: It is not only the remedy for loneliness, but the remedy for death. It is a remedy that makes you immortal, in order to attain perfection and to ascend above yourself, above your ego.
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From KabTV’s “News with Dr. Michael Laitman” 1/27/19

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Preparation to the Lesson

Writings of Baal HaSulam, Shamati #54 “The Purpose of the Work-1” 

Writings of Baal HaSulam, “Preface to the Wisdom of Kabbalah,” Item 89

Selected Highlights 

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My new article on Linkedin “Reflections Following the Results of the Elections in Virginia”

In the end, identity politics is just that: politics. It is not real life; it is make-believe. In the end, humanity will reject ideas that do not coincide with nature. It may require a big war, perhaps another virus or some other trigger, but it may not. Either way, humanity will turn away from such exaggerations of the ego and establish a balanced and harmonious society where people find their self-expression in manners that contribute to society rather than shatter it into myriad confused and unhappy individuals.

Traditionally, the American people are quite conservative, in the good sense of the word. There are fluctuations back and forth but in the end, I believe that Americans will draw conclusions and follow what is natural and not the bellows of people with trendy ideas that are here today and gone tomorrow.

Changing one’s identity, deciding that I am something other than how I was born, all these are signs of growth. However, growth needs to be guided, or we grow where our ego leads us—away from each other and deeper into ourselves—toward separation, alienation, and sadness. This is where critical race theory and identity politics are leading us, and the residents of Virginia used the gubernatorial elections to refuse this direction. Instead of developing our true identity and realizing its full potential, the ideas that were rejected in this election encourage us to adopt another identity, and then spend the rest of our lives trying to justify our choice. This is not a recipe for happiness.

However, there is a good reason why such ideas are implanted in people. When people are busy trying to determine who (or what) they are, it is easier to govern them.

By nature, rulers want only one thing: to rule. It is easy to handle people when they are confused and deal with other issues besides the government and what it is (or is not) doing for them. Find them an enemy, find them a cause, and they will busy themselves with it and leave the rulers to enjoy the amenities of governance. Machiavelli wrote about it centuries ago, and human nature has not changed since.

Yet, all this is happening for a reason. The idea of wanting to change who we are is not without merit. It stems from an inherent yearning to find a higher purpose in life. Wanting to break the boundaries of nature is an expression of our disagreement with who we are.

Unlike any other being, it is an inherent desire in human beings to search for answers about their existence. Where do I come from? Why was I born? Why is there pain? Why was I born into my sex and not into another? Can I change who I am? And in the end, what is the purpose of my existence? These years I have been given, is there a meaning and a purpose to them beyond just passing the time as best as I can? And if there is, what is it? These questions are characteristic of humankind and drive us into the frenzied confusion that we are in today.

However, we will not find the answers to them within ourselves. We will find them in our connections with others. The shattering of our society “helps us,” in a warped kind of way, understand that we have built an ill society, and we must rebuild it if we want to be happy.

But we needn’t change anything within ourselves. There is nothing wrong with any of us as individuals. The only thing that is wrong is the way we treat each other. Therefore, our relation to each other is all we have to correct.

When we begin to feel more united, that we belong to one another like family members belong to one another, we won’t need to change who we are because we will focus on making other people feel loved and cared for.

In a good family, people don’t worry about themselves; they worry about each other and about the whole family. But because everyone in the family thinks this way, everyone is happy because everyone feels loved and cared for.

These days, when everyone is dependent upon everyone else the world over, we have to start building this feeling not just in our families, but among everyone. Eventually, this blanket of concern should cover all the people in the world.

Granted, it is a long journey, but its end is bliss, and nature is willy-nilly pushing us that way. Therefore, the sooner we align with nature, the happier we will be. In the end, isn’t this what we all want?
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My new article on Linkedin “Covid – the Career Terminator”

We are not even two years into Covid, but it is already clear that the virus is revolutionizing civilization. Things we took for granted until recently, such as work, school, and entertainment, have become debatable on many levels. The virus is not only affecting our health and our lives; it is changing how we see ourselves as human beings and as members of society.

Until the virus landed on us, we branded people, in large part, by their careers or jobs, and their lifestyles. Having a career used to be a symbol of success. There was a romantic tone to the word, and images of frequent “work” trips, company credit cards, an apartment in a high-rise with a guard in the lobby, and a social status for others to envy.

Somehow, Covid dimmed the glamour. It is not that people utterly reject the idea of a career, but it is not as enviable as it was two years ago, and its appeal is only waning.

We still want money, and we always will, but we are willing to pay much less for making lots of it. We are not willing to sacrifice so much of our social lives, our other interests, our peace of mind, and our family time for a social status. In part, it is because we no longer find it so enticing, and in part, it is because others no longer find our career “titles” enviable. They see our long hours at the office, our frequent flights, and they pity us for having to work so hard instead of enjoying life.

But the pandemic has gone deeper than changing our perception of work. Bit by bit, it has reawakened in us the “big” questions, those we have suppressed for years under the pressure of survival in a hyper capitalistic world: the questions about the meaning of life.

Just as the warming climate melts the permafrost and lets out gases that change the composition of our atmosphere, the virus is dissolving the ice in our hearts and opens them to long-frozen feelings that change the atmosphere in our society. We are learning to think more socially and less individually.

The fear of infection has made us acknowledge that we are dependent on others for our health. Now, with the crisis in supply chains due to the coronavirus, it makes us realize we are dependent on each other for our food, for the price we pay for things, for our ability to buy holiday gifts, for our entertainment, our social lives, and for our schools and education.

We may not realize it but the virus teaches us to reassess our values: who we consider great and admirable, and who we despise. It teaches us to judge people not by how much they make, but by how much they contribute to society. We started by applauding health and medical workers, then moved on to acknowledging that supermarket workers are indispensable, and now we realize that these invisible people are the ones who enable us to live and worry about ourselves.

Thanks to the virus, we are finally learning that each person is unique because each person can make a special contribution to society that no one else can. In our uniqueness, we are all equal.

When the process of welcoming each person’s uniqueness is complete, we will find that the hatred in our hearts is gone. We will realize how precious each of us is, and we will be grateful for the existence of every human being on this planet. When this happens, we will be thankful to Covid – the career terminator and generator of unity and peace.

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My new article on Linkedin “Silence Is Golden”

I spent countless hours conversing with my teacher, Rav Baruch Shalom Ashlag (RABASH). For the most part, we spoke when we were alone during our daily morning walks or during our frequent two-day trips to Tiberias.

I once asked him what he did before I came, since when I met him he was already seventy-three years old. He said, “I was alone.” When I asked him if he didn’t need to talk to someone, he simply said, “No.”

Today, thirty years after his departure, I understand what he meant. I sit alone in my room and feel no need to come out or speak with anyone. I could sit here for a hundred years and not mind it whatsoever. I take strolls here and there, but since the closures started, I am mostly by myself, and I am perfectly content. Were it not for my students or the necessity to spread the wisdom of Kabbalah to the world, I wouldn’t utter a word.

In this I am like many Kabbalists before me. They, too, did not spend their days in idle conversation. They studied together and read from authentic Kabbalah sources.

This was also what RABASH and I used to do. Even when we were alone, such as in Tiberias, we would sit facing each other, The Book of Zohar or The Study of the Ten Sefirot open on the table between us, cups of Turkish coffee next to them, and we would read, and read, and read.

Once in a while, RABASH would stop reading to explain something, or I would ask a question about the text, but for the most part, we would read and connect between us, rising to a shared, spiritual feeling. Noting more was needed, nothing at all.

When an important event occurred, such as a war or elections in Israel, or other events that stirred the Israeli public, we would exchange a few words about it, but not for long, and certainly without prattling about it. We would not veer off from thinking about life’s purpose for a moment; every second mattered.

It is written in the Mishnah that Shimon, the son of Rabban Gamaliel, used to say, “All my days I grew up among the sages, and I have found nothing better for a person than silence. Study is not the most important, but deeds; and one who speaks too many words brings about sin” (Avot, 1:16).

Kabbalists are silent because they listen with their hearts. They listen to our common heart, the heart of the human system called Adam HaRishon, of which we are all parts.

We are born locked inside the bubble of our ego; we cannot listen to our common heart. Instead, we only listen to ourselves.

What I had learned from RABASH is to listen deep within, beyond the ego, to the common heart. In the depths of our soul, there is a longing to break through the boundaries of ego and feel the common heart. When we connect with it, we will truly be able to hear what is outside of us. We will be able to converse with the soul of all of humanity, with all of nature, and through them with the Creator.

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My new article on Linkedin “The Canopy – How Jews Can Break the Spell of Antisemitism”

It seems like a vicious circle: Every time Jews settle somewhere, the local population welcomes them, they prosper there and believe that they have found their “new Jerusalem,” new homeland, but right when they become complacent, their hosts turn against them, banish them or kill them, and often do both. Since the Jews were exiled from Jerusalem in the first century CE, they have been driven out from nearly one thousand places. If you stick a pin anywhere on a map of Earth, chances are that Jews lived there and were ousted from there.

We thought we were safe in England until we were driven out from there in the 13th century. We thought we were safe in Spain until they expelled us in the 15th century. We thought we were safe in Poland until we were butchered there in the 17th century. We thought we were safe in Russia until the pogroms of the late 19th century taught us better. We thought we were safe in Germany until the Nazis came and taught us that no place and no time are safe for the Jews.

Now, many of us still think we are safe in America and in Israel. We are not, and we mustn’t mistake complacency for safety.

Yet, this is not an unbreakable spell. If we conduct ourselves correctly, we can lift the curse and have a bright and prosperous future. For this, we must build a canopy of unity over our divisions, which will shelter us from the stormy clouds ahead.

We are nearing a critical point in the history of the world, and we Jews will be at its center, as we always have been. We will be accused of everything that is wrong in the world, as we always are, and there is a lot that is wrong with it today.

There will be no distinction between Jews in Israel and Jews abroad; all of us will face the world’s indictments. Moreover, the more we stall, the more momentum and intensity the hatred of the Jews will gain.

In the past, we could run from one country to another when things got bad. But one of the most important lessons we can learn from the Holocaust is that Germany was not alone in its hatred for the Jews. The Nazis were willing to expel the Jews right up to the Final Solution, but the developed countries closed their gates without exception. They even convened in Evian, France, for a special conference in 1938, where they decided not to grant German and Austrian Jews visas, while adding denunciation of how the Nazis are treating “their” Jews. Hitler took it as proof that the world tacitly agrees with his arguments against the Jews.

European Jewry had nowhere to run, and the vast majority of it was eliminated. Now we are facing a worldwide wave. If there was nowhere to go then, there is certainly nowhere to go now.

However, the ominous future does not mean that there is no hope. On the contrary, we have every reason to be hopeful since we have a key that can solve the problem in an instant if we only place it in the lock and turn it open.

Our shelter is not physical, but spiritual: It is our unity. As such, it needs no place, and we need not flee to one country or another. All we need is to find the strength within us to stop hating one another. After all, this is why we were expelled from Jerusalem in the first place.

It is beyond the span of such a short piece as this to detail their words, but our sages throughout the ages have advised us to do only one thing to avert trouble: unite. One by one, they promised that if we love each other as brothers, we will be safe from harm.

There have been too few times in history when we listened to them, and these times were so peaceful that we hardly hear of them today. It is simply that there were no wars, poverty, or division in Israel during those times; there was nothing “interesting” to report. Nevertheless, this is our way out of trouble; unity is our salvation. For more details on the merits of our unity, please look in my book The Jewish Choice: Unity or Antisemitism.

Our unity will not give us any military strength. It is itself the source of our power since this is what the world wants to see from us—that we unite above our divisions. At a time of great division, humanity wants the Jews to lead not in cyber technologies, but in resolving social rifts through cohesion and solidarity.

When Henry Ford, a notorious antisemite, advised his readers to learn from the ancient Jewish society (see the book referenced above), this is what he aimed for. When member of the Russian Parliament Vasily Shulgin, a rabid antisemite, wrote in the early 20th century that if the Jews were teachers, he and all the Russians would follow them (again, see the reference above), he meant teachers in unity and love of others.

Unity is our shelter. If we build it, we will be safe and appreciated everywhere. The only benefit that can come from the rising wave of antisemitism is that if we turn to unity, we will save ourselves from harm and save the world from war. I hope we take the advice of our sages before the wave crests on us and breaks.
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My new article on Linkedin “ The Building of Strong Jewish Communities”

It has been testing times for UK Jewry in the last few years and it appears that their struggles are showing no signs of abating. Temple’s shutdown and a worrying drop in synagogue attendance reflect the growing decline of the Jewish communities in Europe and around the world. It should be an eye opener for world Jewry to exert more efforts in building deeper connections between Jews beyond the walls of the places of worship.

British newspaper columnist, Simon Keltner, highlighted in a recent article that there had been a 20% drop in attendance at UK’s synagogues over the last 2 decades and expresses concerns about the future: “Unless synagogues can attract a younger demographic, they will die alongside their members, and there is solid evidence of historic synagogues having to close their doors for good through lack of interest.”

In fact, the South London Synagogue in Streatham closed its doors this year. The synagogue that had been open since 1867 announced the decision “with great sadness” due to lack of attendance and an inability to attract new members.

Most recently, Israeli media echoed the news about the closure of Liverpool’s iconic Princes Road Synagogue after almost 150 years of continuous operation, but it was later refuted by the temple’s administration. Their site though pleas for active participation of its members to keep the place alive.

The decline of the local Jewish communities is part of the natural devolution of the Jewish society worldwide. The further we move away from the previous generations, those who clung to the essence of Judaism, the more gradually we close synagogues.

The synagogue is the symbolic heart of a community, the unifying factor among its members. Its closure, in any city, indicates the disintegration of relations between members of the community. Nowadays, Jews identify less with their Judaism, particularly secular Jews. Some assimilate, some disperse, and consequentially communities crumble and disappear.

What might happen in the future with other Jewish temples? Most likely, larger religious denominations such as Muslims will acquire them. There are already some examples of this transformation in the city of Marseille, France where one of their largest synagogues became a mosque. The same has happened in other U.S. cities like Philadelphia.

Should Jews in those locations have fought harder for the preservation of their temples? No, they couldn’t, nor should they have. The real place of struggle should be within themselves, over their spiritual nature as Jews.

A “synagogue” is the symbol of a spiritual space where Jews must connect with one another heart to heart. From this common bond we must then turn to the Supreme Force, the Creator, to ask Him to raise us above the forces of separation between us to a state of mutual and complete connection.

A “synagogue” is a spiritual home where people gather as one family. If there is no inner connection between us, then there is no sense of belonging to the material place either. When this happens, it is only natural that the community ultimately vanishes. In an alternative scenario, a quorum remains but separation and conflicts prevail.

Our good future as Jews depends solely on the power of connection between us. Once the bond between us is severed, there is no point of return. It is not far-fetched to expect that many communities will soon reach such a precarious situation that congregations will disappear entirely.

The egoistic nature of human beings continues to increase, evoking greater forces of separation. Therefore, a gradual disregard for the sages of the generation and the elders of the tribe is also unfolding. Nothing holds the community together anymore and nothing encloses it from the outside.

Not only is the ego accelerating the dissolution of the community, but it is also serving as a call to action. In today’s global world we must communicate on a higher level, above time and place, on a level in which we feel like one global community. The means are available today through the Internet to connect the Jews across the globe, however, this also is an intermediate stage in the transition to a spiritual community, to the feeling of a common connection at the center of which is the Creator—the power behind the connection—who unites us all.

Not only Jews need to unite, eventually, the entire human race will have to come together. Jews have a duty to be the first, to lead the way and act as a light to the nations.

In my estimation, it will take humanity about twenty years to reach a huge climax in which the community will crumble; people will find no meaning in their lives and finally seek true meaning. Finding answers to that spiritual quest will lead us to establish a global spiritual community—a nucleus starting from the Jews and connecting together every person in the world into one tight-knit global community.
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