A Letter to You:

My close friend, a Jew, died, and for the first time I found myself in a Jewish cemetery. His family decided to bury him according to Jewish law. The first shock for me was that he was buried the next morning. Why were they in such a hurry? No one really had time to say goodbye to him.

Also, this tearing of clothes in the cemetery, what for? And the fact that they throw the body into the ground without a coffin, just wrap it in some rag and bury it. These customs seem to me somehow inhuman, they do not have the warmth of a farewell, everything happens quickly, without love. Why? After all, the Jews are so family-orientated, and we see just coldness here.

My Reply: First, the fact that a person is buried not in a coffin but in the ground is natural. As it is written: “From dust you are and unto dust you shall return.” And there is nothing closer to our animalistic body that is already dead than the earth. It is necessary to allow a body to decompose normally in this environment. To disappear. And everything to completely decompose.

You have to turn to dust so that there is absolutely nothing left of you. This is first.

Second, the dead must be buried as quickly as possible. The fact that he said it was done the next day is already not a Jewish custom. It is necessarily to bury the body on the same day, on the same evening. If, for example, a person died unexpectedly, no matter how, at 8, at 10 pm, he should be buried by midnight. As quickly as possible.

Question: Why such a hurry? Not even to say goodbye to the dead?

Answer: There is no need to say goodbye to him and see him! No! The body should not be touched. Life has gone out of the body, the body is already considered untouchable. It is impure.

Question: What about tearing the clothes?

Answer: It is a sign of mourning to tear the clothes.

Question: Can you explain why, from the point of view of Kabbalah?

Answer: Clothes are called “Levush“—it is the external form of the soul. Since our loved one has left us, a part of our soul has gone with him.

Question: Why does he write that there is coldness here, there is no warmth, there is no respect for the body?

Answer: Why? On the contrary, this is respect for the body but in a way that he does not understand.

It is not about treating a dead body like someone living, but what is required to be done to a dead body; you must fulfill everything. This is our attitude toward the dead. Besides, this is done in such a way that any person who has lost his life would be equal to all others. He is not buried in rich clothes, not in a golden coffin. Nothing like that!

Even more, they do everything as much as possible so that the body rots as quickly as possible, breaks away from its shells.

Comment: Here I remember the Pharaoh…

My Response: To the contrary. Quite the opposite.

Comment: Yes. You also were in the basements of the Hermitage [The State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg]. There are mummies there and you can even distinguish facial  features. They were able to preserve them so well. That is, humanity has a completely different attitude.

My Response: The opposite one.

Question: Why?

Answer: It is, I would say, a hymn to egoism.

Question: A hymn to egoism, yes. That is what I wanted to talk about. Is this a hymn to egoism to bury in such a way, with honors?

Answer: Of course! That is, he is eternal, he is perfect, he continues to exist. We will bury his servants and horses and everything else with him. We will cook him some dishes, and so on.

And the Jews, on the contrary, even have custom to put lime in the ground with the body, so that the body decomposes faster.

Question: Does it mean that it should turn to dust as quickly as possible?

Answer: Yes. To break away from our lowest, worst world. That is, wrap it in a rag, in a simple white cloth, nothing more, put it in the ground, and bury it.

Comment: The world has not accepted this centuries-old tradition.

My Response: Of course. Because it is far from egoism. Egoism does not allow the body to be so disrespected.

Comment: That is, we live in a world that respects the body. It is even evident from the letter where he writes that there is no warmth, everything is very cold. We need to say goodbye to the body.

My Response: And there is nothing of it here. Here is a dead shell that is worthless and should rot as quickly as possible. It is not necessary to regard it in any way. Everything that remains went to the spiritual root, and it exists there.

Question: Can you call it reincarnation? That is, the faster the body decomposes, the faster the soul will return for future correction.

Answer: Of course. This is also considered, but the body has nothing to do with this. The soul broke away from the body and that’s all.

Comment: If only people would hear when the Kaddish is read and what it says. In effect, it does not say “What a grief that he is gone! How could he leave us!” But thank You, Creator, that You took this body. A person cannot understand that, of course!

My Response: Of course. How great You are, the Lord, for doing this to our loved one. May Your great name be exalted, the Creator.

Comment: Could you please explain this?

My Response: There is no cessation of life and there is no death. It is simply a transition in our understanding from one state to another. So why should we suffer?

When water turns to steam and then steam condenses and falls as rain, and again, the cycle of water in nature, should we regret the past, the present, and so on? No. We just say: “Thank you for these transformations.”

Question: I wonder, will this come to the world? When we start treating the body this way, will it be called advancement?

Answer: Of course.

Question: What are the seven days called “Shiva“?

Answer: Seven days of mourning are absolutely Kabbalistic concepts.

Question: Do they sit at home for seven days?

Answer: Yes. Until the soul is completely separated with the body, does not completely leave the body, and does not break the connection with it.

Question: Does it take seven days?

Answer: Seven days. Then 30 days. Then a year.

Question: Can we conclude this with one sentence? Something about the body and the soul.

Answer: I think the best thing to say is: try to live in the soul, not in the body.
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From KabTV’s “News with Michael Laitman” 11/30/20

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Question: I have a great desire to attain the wisdom of Kabbalah, but I don’t have any desire to connect to people who live only according to corporeal values. When I think about the world, I am filled with a sensation of meaninglessness of this kind of activity, and this is the reason for my resistance. How should I build the left line?

Answer: Why should you connect to people who have no desire to attain the upper world at all? Connect to them in the ordinary frameworks and relationships at work and in the family. If your wife, for example, doesn’t want to study the wisdom of Kabbalah, it makes no difference, keep the ordinary daily relations with her.

Spiritual work is fulfilled only with the friends in the group. Only with them can you be soul to soul. So don’t try to find partners for the spiritual path in the ordinary secular society and don’t worry that they are not there.

You need to find a group and feel the Creator in the contact of your souls. This is an amazing heavenly attribute.
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From KabTV’s “Fundamentals of Kabbalah” 11/25/18

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Question: Can a soul be reincarnated in another race or nationality? Or are there some restrictions?

Once a woman of Tatar nationality asked me, “I moved from Tatarstan to the United States. Will I now be reborn as an American or in the next life will I emerge again in Tatarstan?”

Answer: No. This woman absolutely does not have to be born with the same qualities, the same nationality, and in the same country as the time before.

Unfortunately, we are very limited in our understanding of the world. The laws of the universe are absolutely the same in everything and for everyone. Therefore, we are not reborn into anyone. The quality of the soul determines the fate of a person.

Question: Do the same principles apply to Jews?

Answer: For Jews, these principles are more rigid. Those souls that have to carry out the method of correction in this world are born Jews. According to this, they are positioned in this way in our world.

Therefore, we see people who, during this life, suddenly join the method of correction. However, it does not mean anything for the next time.

Question: Is the gender of a person also predetermined or can it change?

Answer: The gender also changes depending on how a certain methodology should be carried out in this world. Therefore, a person is born either a man or a woman, of some nationality, and with some qualities. This is all determined by the ultimate purpose and what he must do in this life. All the parameters of our existence are manifested in accordance with this.

However, people should not get attached to this! The important thing is what I can make of myself! Everything else is not important. Among us were representatives of other nations, such as Rabbi Akiva, who became a great Kabbalist.

It all depends only on the person.
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From KabTV’s “Ask a Kabbalist” 12/31/18

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Question: From a letter: “I am full of hatred for the parents who brought me into this world! Why? Did they not see that this world is a garbage heap, that it is not fit for a living?! I do not want to live in it and I cannot leave on my own. I live with constant pain.

Despite this, I am married. But I said to my wife on the first date: “We will not have children.” She agreed. We have been married for five years. My wife asked me to write to you and ask for your opinion. But so you know, my mind is made up.”

That person writes with an unambiguous opinion that he is not going to bring children into this world. But his wife seems to want to. What do we do with all this? Is the world really such that it is scary to bring children here?

Answer: So, what? It is scary, but you bring them. Do the right thing, what a person should do. Do everything for it.

Question: Should I think about children?

Answer: You should think about children, you will think about children. Now you are not thinking about children, you are thinking about yourself.

You have to give birth to the next generation. Because that is the way in nature—look at animals. As for the next generation, we are like animals. Each couple should give birth to a boy and a girl.

Question: Those who have decided that they do not want to, can they be called a family?

Answer: This is the highest egoism, and you cannot call them a family.

A family is a male and female individual who create their own kind.

I say what is written in Kabbalah. Kabbalistic wisdom is higher than our world’s, and it speaks about how it is established by nature. Call it nature or the Creator. We are obliged to reproduce our own kind, and thus we continue ourselves in our descendants.

Question: And for those people who deliberately do not continue themselves in descendants, does something, somehow later respond to them or not?

Answer: Their story ends with them. But a person should strive to continue oneself.
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From KabTV’s “News with Dr. Michael Laitman” 11/30/20

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Question: In order to see a single force behind all objects and phenomena, do I have to find desires that support this idea inside of myself?

Answer: No, you will not be able to find such desires in yourself. You must be in the appropriate group from which you can receive them.

The fact is that none of us have any desire for unification. There is no desire for bestowal in us. But when we gather in a group and we see how selfish we are, how much we do not want and even despise all this unity, we begin to understand how far we are from the spiritual quality, the quality of the Creator.

Then, we have no choice but to try all sorts of artificial techniques to get closer to each other in order to reach the state of asking the Creator to unite us.

All group work consists of setting an example of striving for unity for each other. Although we do not have this natural aspiration, when we artificially do this, we set an example for our friends.

As a result, we come to a state in which we seem to be striving for unification but, in fact, we do not achieve it. This is where the difference between the desired state and reality emerges. This difference creates an impetus for us to turn to the Creator.
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From KabTV’s “Spiritual States” 4/15/19

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Outside of himself, a person sees the world as contrived by himself and, therefore, he can change it.

The world that we see now is made up of our inner uncorrected properties. Nevertheless, we can create a different world—a real one—not with our internal properties, but with those that we will create outside of ourselves in relation to others and then to the Creator. This world, the spiritual world, will be real. It turns out that our world is actually mystical and the spiritual world is true.

We can do all of this now, during our lives, here in this world; we can pass the states of life and death and go out into immortality. After all, the upper world is not based on absorption, like our world in which by ceasing to enjoy one is gradually dying. The upper world is infinite because its love and bestowal are infinite and can only grow. Therefore, existence in the upper world does not occur within the framework of time.

Time does not exist. It only indicates the depravity of our world; it was—passed, it passed—was, it will be or it will not, and so on. In the upper world, we only rise from perfection to an even greater level of perfection; the past is included in the future, and, therefore, it is felt by us as the world of infinity in space, time, motion, and in everything.

We go beyond the bounds of time, beyond all the limitations, which our egoism paints in the corporeal world within our terrible properties.

Entering the next world depends on the extent to which we acquire the qualities of bestowal and love. As soon as we begin to acquire them, even on a minimal scale, we will immediately feel ourselves in a different volume, a different space, moving in a different field, dealing with a different force that will pull us into itself, and we will follow and realize it, adapt, and identify ourselves with it more and more.

This is the revelation of the Creator to a person in this world. Then, this world will gradually disappear like a haze and we will remain only in the spiritual world and identify ourselves with the upper force of goodness and bestowal, which is called the Creator.
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From KabTV’s “Kabbalah – Science of Life” 3/1/18

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Preparation to the Lesson

Lesson on the Topic of “Devotion”

Selected Excerpts from the Book, Yosher Divrei Emet

Selected Highlights

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My new article on Linkedin “Toward a Year of Reckoning”

2021 will not be an easy year for America. It will not be an easy year anywhere or for anyone, but Americans are likely to feel the heat more than others. The conditions for a perfect storm have ripened; the combination of a plague that claims thousands of lives daily, a failing economy and uncertainty about the future of personal finance, searing hatred between Left and Right and Blacks and Whites, and loss of confidence in both the media and the authorities will force Americans to either stop everything and contemplate their future as a nation, or let the country accelerate its downward spiral to destruction.

Everyone already recognizes the severity of the situation; everyone is already talking about it, and I am really happy that they are. I hope that these scrutinies, however tough they may be, will help the country get a grip on itself and put some order in the chaos.

The two forces struggling in America, between Left and Right, are two approaches to life that exist all over the world. America possesses all the contradictions; it is a kind of modern Babylon. For this reason, if Americans can overcome their divisions and form some form of solidarity above their differences, which will certainly remain, then America will set an example that everyone will gladly follow.

Precisely because America, more than any other country, has enshrined self-centeredness, their reversal of this ideology will indicate to the rest of the world that it is indeed possible to restrain the ego. If they discover that they have no choice but to “dethrone” the ego since the egoistic system no longer works, and the economic and social systems they have built around it are falling apart, they will have the required motivation to unite above the spite and rancor that have surfaced mainly over the past year. It will not be pleasant, but a reckoning, a recognition of the illnesses within society is mandatory if they are to set off a healing process.

Empires, too, rise and fall. But when an empire such as the United States of America falls, it will pull down with it many other countries and people. Everyone will suffer from the death of such a massive system as the US, not just Americans, though they will suffer most of all.

So far, I have yet to see the forces or people who are bold enough, impartial enough, and publicly accepted enough to lead the process of America’s healing. However, as long as it is possible to reverse the trend, we must not lose hope. The times ahead will tell if we have merited the title “humans,” and rose above our egos to form a new union of society, or have succumbed to our egos and gave up the helm to the beast within us.
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My new article on Linkedin “Can We Bridge a Chasm that No One Wants to Bridge?”

It is written, “Where there are no people, try to be a person” (Mishnah, Avot, 2:5). It seems very fitting that we should invoke this adage at a time when people have lost all trust in one another, in the authorities, and feel hopeless about the future. We are going through a hard awakening, a reckoning of the fragility of our society.

Democracy has proven its vulnerability once more. Italy was a democracy before it fell prey to fascism. Germany was a democracy before it succumbed to Nazism. Even the founder of China’s communism originally intended to form a democracy. The celebrated historian Maurice Meisner wrote about Mao Zedong, “Neither the terms ‘socialism’ nor ‘Bolshevism’ appeared in Mao’s ‘Manifesto.’ Rather, it was ‘democracy’ that Mao called ‘the basic ideology’ of resistance to oppression.” Now, it seems as though the United States of America is going through the same ordeal when a dream becomes a nightmare.

Does democracy always have to fail? Why does totalitarianism always seem to overcome it? Perhaps if we understand this, we will understand how to save our agonizing society.

Like it or not, different people have different views. There will never be sameness of ideas in any society at any time because, as our sages said (Midrash Rabbah, 21:2), “As their faces are not similar, so their views are not the same. Rather, each and every one has his own opinion.” So how do we determine who is right when we are destined to be different? Why must my opinion be right and the other’s opinion wrong if neither of us can convince the other? Is there a bug in the system?

No, there is no bug. The bug is in our understanding of the system. There is no similarity of views because there isn’t meant to be. There is meant to be diversity! Again, different opinions are not disagreements; they are diversity!

Why must there be diversity? Without diversity, there is no evolution, no growth, no life. Everything exists only through diverse, and usually opposite elements working together to maintain the system they inhabit. From particles of atoms to clusters of galaxies, the universe consists of opposites cooperating to maintain the system they occupy.

Animals, too, kill each other for food, but thereby maintain the health and guarantee the survival of the species that they hunt. We are living in a world of contradictions because only contradictions guarantee development and progress.

But we, people, are an exception. We establish democracies precisely because we value diversity and the necessity for disagreements as a basis for advancement, yet we yield before our egos and determine that only our view is correct. As our egos take control, we lose sight of the fact that stymying diversity is a death sentence to ourselves and to society? How can we not realize that it is precisely the opposite opinion that makes our own opinion matter? How can we not realize that it is my ideological adversary who gives my ideology merit?

If we silence one another, we will not only silence ourselves, as well, we will silence our minds, our hearts, and will eventually destroy our society and our lives. Nothing can be more dangerous than the belief that only I am right, and anyone who disagrees with me is wrong.

Being a person, to return to the opening proverb, means championing diversity when everyone scolds it. It means not thinking that only my view is right, but rather maintaining my view because this is my side of the bridge, while cherishing the fact that other people, who maintain other views, are maintaining the other side of it. The name of the bridge is diversity, and we build it by championing multiplicity of views. This is the only way we can begin to advance.

Just as we cannot walk on only one leg, but need both legs in order to move forward, so our opinions need each other so that we, as a society can advance. Where there are no people, it is because there are no bridges between them. Build them, and be a person.
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