Medium published my new article “Children, Imagination, and Creativity”

When children watch a movie, they are glued to the screen. Children are naturally imaginative; they “live” what they see. They do not distinguish between fantasy and reality as adults do. Their imagination can take them anywhere — to the most wonderful places or to places that will leave them traumatized. It is therefore our responsibility to see that they go to good places.

After children watch a movie, we can often see how deeply it impresses them. We can find the body language, tone of voice, and phrases of the characters they watched spontaneously reflected in the children. These are not only transient impressions, but influences that shape their entire worldview and have a significant impact on their future.

Because children naturally learn by example and perceive what they see on the screen as reality, they perceive the events in the movie as examples of real life. As a result, they will try to imitate in real life the behavior and attitude of the protagonists they saw in the film.

Consequently, if we want our children to grow up sound in mind and mentally capable, we should expose them to entertainment that provides them with the right examples. There are several things we need to consider when it comes to giving children the right examples.

First, children’s movies should feature realistic characters, not mutants or distorted characters of any kind. For example, if animals do not talk like humans, they should not do so in children’s movies. Talking animals may be good entertainment for us, but they distort children’s perception of reality.

Second, a good film should neither preach nor frighten. On the contrary, it should enthrall the children and take them on a journey that will instill in them a positive attitude toward themselves, their friends and family, and toward the environment. The thinking should be this: Good social connections produce good results. When we work together, give, love, share, and care, we can change anything for the better.

Third, we should prepare children prior to watching a movie, and talk to them afterwards. Preparing and concluding together will help them process the messages correctly and they will make the most of the experience.

Finally, it would be a good idea to give them an assignment, preferably to a group of children such as siblings or classmates. The assignment should go something like this: On a clean sheet of paper, draw a new, perfect world or a perfect city. Depict the relationships between people, where and how they build their houses, what schools, parks, and stores look like, and everything else that is part of their lives.

Afterwards, have a serious discussion about their assignment; there is much to learn from it. At the end of the project, you can take the children to see professionals and ask them about their work. For example, ask teachers how they see their jobs, how police officers feel about the relationship between them and civilians, how architects make decisions about various aspects of the houses they design and how these decisions affect the lives of the people who live in them, etc.

As William Shakespeare wrote, “All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players.” It is up to us to determine whether our children watch horror movies or cheerful ones. To a great extent, this will determine if they grow up thinking that life is a nightmare or a wonderful adventure.
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My new article on Linkedin “The Bully Is a Victim, Too”

One of the most painful, yet often undetected social phenomena among children is ostracism. Usually, it happens when a leader in a social group, such as a class or a sports team, picks a child as a target for exclusion and turns the rest of the group against the victim. To the child, it is a horrific experience that can scar a young soul for life. Worse yet, a bully who behaves this way feels emboldened by it and is therefore likely to repeat it either toward the victim or toward other children. To cure this social ailment, we need to understand why bullies behave this way and how we can help them adopt more positive patterns of behavior.

Bullies target children they perceive as weak, who do not stand up to them, or who are socially isolated. The bully’s goal is not so much to make the victim feel bad, as it is to make the bully feel good about himself or herself.

Often, bullies come from homes where they feel insecure. They may be suffering from physical or emotional abuse and feel trampled on at home. To compensate for their sense of inferiority at home, they need to feel superior elsewhere, and that other place is likely to be school or a sports team, or any social setting where the bully participates.

Compared to other forms of bullying, the problem with exclusion is that the bully “recruits” the rest of the group to gang up on the victim, leaving the victim socially isolated and without emotional support. For a child, such a situation can be devastating.

To tackle the phenomenon, it is not enough to punish the bully. A punishment might stop the bully from continuing to harass the victim for whom he or she was punished, but it will not stop the bully from looking for other victims because the need to bully will continue. Worse yet, it might make the intimidator continue to bully, but in more stealthy and sinister ways.

Therefore, it is essential to understand why the bully behaves this way, and provide the compensation for the lack that the bully needs in more constructive ways. Instead of the bully seeking compensation by him or herself, the society should offer the compensation in a manner that fills the bully’s emotional deficiency and does not hurt others.

Human nature requires us to feel good about ourselves. If there is a place where we feel inferior, we will not rest until we compensate for it. Therefore, if a person feels loved and supported, he or she will never feel inferior, and will therefore not wish to make others feel unloved or excluded.

The solution to the problem of bullying, therefore, and especially that of ostracism, lies in the hands of society—to create a warm and loving environment for all the children where they can grow and express their unique qualities in a socially-constructive manner, for the benefit of all of society.

If children work together on projects that require everyone’s skills, they will learn to rely on each other, trust each other, and delight in each other’s talents. Most importantly, they will come to care for one another. Instead of envy, their sense of interdependence will bring them to support each other as each child’s unique abilities benefit the entire group. When all the children cooperate in this manner, they form a harmonious society where each individual is fully satisfied and at the same time cares for the rest of all the members of the group.
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Michael Laitman, On Quora: “How can we help disabled children?“

School trips are no ordinary experience for 12-year-old Mayan Hanan, who has a rare disease that makes him struggle with severe pain during long walks. His class arranged a special wheelchair capable of navigating through the varied terrains. Mayan shared: “On this trip I felt that I’m like everyone else and that I’m equal among equals. Everyone really made a big effort for me.”

Such is an example that what helps a child with a disability is to support them, participate with them, and identify with them.

To identify with them means to understand their suffering, to accept them as equal and to wish for us to live and participate in everything together. And participation means sharing everything that we have 50-50.

How can we share the disability of another person? We can take half of their disability by adding our strength to theirs. And the disabled person supports the able-bodied person by providing an opportunity to help and feel that they contribute.

What exactly does a disabled person give us? This is the crux of the matter. It seems to us that the able-bodied person gives to a disabled person only because we fail to understand how much the disabled person gives. Participation gives us an opportunity to connect and to act together.

What is the correct attitude toward people with disabilities? For the able-bodied, it is a call from the general forces of nature that we need to take these supposedly disabled persons into our society, take care of them, and bring them to a state where they feel no disability at all. It depends only on our correct attitude toward such people: that there is no disability and that we are equal in everything in life.

How are we equal? We are equal in that we share all good and bad things among us equally. When we reach these feelings, even if only a little bit, then we will feel ourselves in a different state. We will be in a different world, one of true equality, which is worthwhile to live in.

Based on the video “Disability Equality from a Kabbalist’s Perspective” with Kabbalist Dr. Michael Laitman and Oren Levi. Written/edited by students of Kabbalist Dr. Michael Laitman.

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Question: What is happening now with our children? Why is there currently so much negativity in the brains of young people? Why do both boys and girls try to change their gender to the opposite? What is happening on Earth?

Answer: The problem is that humanity is not standing still. Even the animal world is gradually developing. Humanity is also evolving because egoism is developing in it; it is as the main force of our life that is aimed at receiving, seizing, and desiring.

If a person does not have the correct education, then his egoism becomes uncontrollable, eats the person himself, and this leads society to terrible, disfigured states. This is what we are seeing in the world today.
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From KabTV’s “Meetings with Kabbalah” 1/5/22

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Comment: The principle of criminal law provides for the inevitability of punishment. A person should know that if he commits a crime, he will be caught and convicted. And this fear allegedly saves him from misconduct.

My Response: Unfortunately, we always draw the wrong conclusions. Fear does not help and crimes are committed. If the same criminals were to work eight hours every day and after that would spend another six hours a day engaged in spiritual methods, then we would see how it would help.

Not only would it help, it would make them the most useful members of society. By going through their selfish impulses, they would begin to understand what controls them. They would correct themselves, change, and begin to feel why this happened to them. A person in this state is more likely to improve no matter how terrible a criminal he may be.

As soon as such people with great egoism—tough, egotistically directed—begin to encounter a methodology with the revelation of the true higher state, they become the most predisposed to correction. We just treat them the wrong way.

Question: Suppose a person who committed some crime works and studies the Kabbalistic methodology, so he is in the process of being corrected, but is not corrected yet. At this point, should he be isolated or not?

Answer: No. You cannot isolate a person from society. It is created by the social element. It is necessary to put him in the right framework, the right environment, assign him to work and to study so that he is busy there for 15 to 16 hours a day, and leave the rest of the time for sleep and a little for the family. But in no case distort it.

People who have been released from prison, suffer in all their internal systems—biological, physiological, psychological—and are terribly traumatized. Man is not made for this. We see that this does not lead to anything good.
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From KabTV’s “Close-Up. Presumption of Innocence” 3/10/10

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Question: The parents of fifteen-year-old teenager Ethan Crumbley were arrested in the United States. He shot four people at his school.

A teacher saw the boy viewing images of bullets. The boy explained that his family engaged in shooting sports. The school attempted to immediately informed his mother about it, but only was successful to get a corroborating response from the mother a day later.

The following day, the day of the shooting, a teacher saw the boy’s drawings that depicted a semi-automatic weapon, a person who was shot, a laughing emoji, and the words “Blood everywhere,” and, “The thoughts won’t stop. Help me.” The school called the parents in for a conference and requested the parents to take the boy home. The parents refused and left their son at school.  They also failed to disclose that the boy had a weapon that the father had purchased for his son.

On the same day the 15-year-old shot and killed four students and wounded 7 others in his shooting rampage in a high school in Detroit, Michigan suburb. He killed four students, and seven others were injured.

What kind of parents are these?!

Answer: They themselves are a product of our society, of our state. They don’t know what to do. They don’t know what’s going on. They don’t know how to react to it. They are in some kind of confusion. And it’s not just them.

Question: But if they buy military weapons for a child or teach him to kill in some way, what is the parents’ idea? What is their philosophy?

Answer: The idea is that, in the end, he would be able to protect himself in this terrible world.

Comment: Which means in advance they are saying: “Son, the world is terrible, and you have to be strong.”

My Response: Yes. That’s what he feels.

Question: Where will we arrive with such a philosophy?

Answer: We will destroy each other.

Question: But we ourselves will die, right?

Answer: Well, then we’ll die.

Comment: In principle, we give birth to a child and at the same time we say: “In order to survive, you have to be strong, stronger than everyone else.”

My Response: Yes, that’s how the world works. Look at everyone from state leaders to everyone you see on the street.

Question: But what about this idea that we constantly uttered that we always wanted our children to be happy?

Answer: We don’t know what happiness means. Maybe happiness is, as they say in a song, “a warm gun.”

Comment: The concept of happiness is all mixed up. The understanding of happiness has ceased to be somehow warm, close, or dear.

My Response: No, no, it needs to be taught for a long time and really from a young age. It’s not easy. Today the world is not like that anymore. Today if you talk about such values, they will laugh at you and no one will be friends with such a child.

Question: So the child should be strong? The strongest in the class?

Answer: He should be feared. The cult of power, in principle, is the cult of our time. Be the first.

Look at what is being done between countries and states, in all kinds of enterprises, and between everyone. The most important thing is to be strong, to be physically strong like a bodybuilder, strong in money, strong in some game, in something. In general you have to be strong. And such a state leads to despair; it’s easier to just buy a weapon and employ lynch “law”.

Question: The fact that the boy has such hopelessness as evidenced by what he wrote on the day of the execution: “Help me! The world is terrible!”—is this a consequence of this parental affection, this parental love?

Answer: Maybe. Because he sees what a difference there is in relation to him from the outside world and from his parents. His parents are ready to do anything to give him everything. Even buy a gun.

Question: So are we the first to break the world with our love, as you say?

Answer: It’s due to incorrect parental love, which is realized in this way.

Question: How do the parents direct their love in today’s world so that a different child grows up, so that everything works out differently?

Answer: It all needs to be changed. We need to change at the root, at the core. And if the basis of our world is egoistic and we don’t think about it, then we simply can’t think of anything else except to stock up on weapons and each one to fence ourselves off, batten down, and live like this.

Question: And shoot back?

Answer: Yes. There’s no getting away from this. “My house is my fortress.” And this is the way to think and act.

Question: But how should we raise children?

Answer: That’s the way to educate: that he needs to constantly think and worry about his own safety. And such thoughts about his own safety, which the surrounding world imposes on him, lead to the fact that he draws the appropriate conclusions: I need a gun and I must, after all, destroy my haters.

Question: Then the question is: how will we change this world? What should we do to change this world?

Answer: You can’t ban guns; that’s understandable. You can’t ban hatred between people. The only thing you can do is teach them how to use love and hate correctly.

Question: How do you do that? How do you use them correctly?

Answer: This is already a whole science, and it needs to be learned at school.

And all these activities in class, in all kinds of subjects they study at school, geography, history, and so on, are secondary. The most important thing to teach a person is to interact correctly with others and with their environment—with the still, vegetative, animate, and people. This is the most important thing. And we don’t teach them that.

They came out of their mother, were born, and somehow in the first years we teach them how to interact with this world. And then, when we have to teach them the sciences of how to interact with this world correctly, we stuff them with all sorts of empty material.

But we do not teach how to treat other people, how to create the right society with them, how to make a person look at you favorably, or how to create a community.

Question: And this should be taught?

Answer: This is the most important thing! There must be a school for this. Because school exists in the transition between a small child who practically just came out of his mother—and for the first 5-6 years he is still next to her—and then adulthood. And adult life is with strangers, with other people, and so on. That is, the school should be in the transition from birth to getting out into the world. We do not give this preparation.

Question: So are we talking about a school for children as well as for parents? Because there should be the same atmosphere at home.

Answer: Of course, yes.

Question: And is a school for teachers as well?

Answer: This is naturally a common task.

This is called pedagogy; this is called teaching; this is called raising and educating children. It’s called parenting!

And what are they given? They are given a completely unnecessary education. It’s not parenting.

Question: What will happen then if the gun is still in the child’s hand? If he is brought up the way you say, what will he do with this gun?

Answer: He will protect everyone. From whom? From animals, from aliens, I don’t know. He will have the idea of protecting everyone. This Earth and this is all mine. I want everyone to feel good.
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From KabTV’s “News with Dr. Michael Laitman” 12/9/21

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Comment: Two young men, aged 19 and 23, were tried for stealing car radios in Odessa. They admitted their guilt. Yet instead of three years in prison, they were sentenced to probation. The judge heard the case and decided that although they are adults, they were actually still children in their development, with a primitive vocabulary and so on.

The sentence obliged them to read 5th grade literature including The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, White Fang by Jack London, and Taras Shevchenko’s poem “Days Pass, Nights Pass.” The judge decided that classic literature would help criminals understand universal values and attitudes to private property.

Do such extraordinary human decisions mean something?

My Response: Yes. This shows us how much we lack the correct humanistic education.

Question: You are talking about humanistic education. What do you mean by that?

Answer: A kind attitude to others, that’s all. It is when your inner preparation does not allow you to be mean or rude or to cause harm and pain to another.

Simply put, it is when you care. Correct literature, particularly children’s literature, especially in childhood when children cannot feel this, should instill empathy for the other within them. This is the most important thing in birth and development, the feeling of the other, feeling what he feels, empathizing with him, and so on. There is absolutely no such thing in children by nature, and we must somehow teach them this.

Today we say the opposite: “If they punch you in the face, punch them back even harder!”—and so on.

This is our current education—TV programs and everything else.

Question: Would you want to turn it all around and provide only humane education instead?

Answer: Yes. Only empathy for others can bring us closer together and save humanity.

Comment: It seems like the judge might have had such a spark to educate in this way.

My Response: Maybe he is just a wise man and understands that nothing else will work on them. Young fools.

Question: Would it be even worse if they went to jail?

Answer: Yes, of course. They would go through the “school of life” there and will come out even bigger criminals.
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From KabTV’s “News with Dr. Michael Laitman” 10/28/21

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Comment: If we consider the system of punishment that exists today, it has, as it were, two principles. One principle is more humane where the attempt is to instill some moral norms through forced physical labor.

The other principle only involves punishment for all misdeeds. This system has no so-called middle line or correction.

My Response: But it cannot be here because it is not demanded by society itself. If you ask ordinary people or even the same lawyers, they have a lot of theories and philosophies, but in principle they don’t even know what they want to build in general.

What society would they like to see? What kind of person should be in it?

They do everything not from practice or from a plan that is aimed at educating a person, at changing society, and at a vision of the future, but only from what interests them at the moment. What should we do to earn money for ourselves, to become famous, and to rise above others and show off how we work?

Everything is aimed at justifying their appointment as their source of sustenance and success. As long as the system is selfish, it will continue to exist.
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From KabTV’s “Close-Up. Presumption of Innocence” 3/10/10

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Comment: You say that a person can be corrected only by seeing from the perspective of what he is doing to his soul. That is, when committing an offense, I see what I am doing to my eternal part when I reveal the whole picture of cause-and-effect in its overall scope and not at some short period of life.

My Response: Even within a short period of life a person can feel that everything is interconnected, can understand that he is connected to a common system, and can begin to realize that all other people are part of him, that life is short, and he will soon discover—either in this life or after—that by harming others he basically harms himself.

Moreover, this is the most direct harm that he inflicts on himself because in reality, we all represent one whole. We just do not see this system because it is revealed to us when we leave our body.

A person begins to master the properties of leaving the body either during this life or after when the body dies if you give him the opportunity to somehow feel it..

But it is possible. This is what Kabbalah deals with—a method for mastering the feeling that we are one single whole. Only in this case will a person have a different attitude toward others, as toward himself. So it is written: “Love your neighbor as yourself” because in this way we come to the only correct state that actually exists in the universe and only is hidden from us.

The secret world—the one that we do not feel—includes all of us as a single whole, as cells of one body.
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From KabTV’s “Close-Up. Presumption of innocence” 3/10/10

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Question: In ancient times in Israel, people who inadvertently harmed someone were placed in cities of refuge until the special jubilee year (Shmita Yovel). What happened if a person did not correct himself by that year? Was he still forgiven?

Answer: No. In the society where he lived, they would work on him. Punishment, of course, existed, but not in the form of imprisonment.

A person must be in an environment that not directly, but indirectly explains to him how to be a different element of society. And so, after some time, he receives a certain influence.

Give that criminal an opportunity to work and study philosophy, psychology, and other sciences; place him in a different environment so that he is in close contact with the others. This is the only way to influence a person.

And we, on the contrary, throw him into an environment of even greater criminals for whom perpetrating a crime is a brave deed. As a result, he comes out ready for new criminal actions.

Is this called punishment? This is called isolating him from society! You prepare him for more crimes. This is what we see.

We ourselves created such a society and systems of punishment. And according to Kabbalah, there should be a system not of punishment, but of correction.
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From KabTV’s “Close-Up. Presumption of innocence” 3/10/10

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