My new article on Linkedin “Job Sharing Is a Great Idea (in Theory)”

Job sharing, when (usually) two people share the same position and split the job between them, has been around at least since the 1970s. However, in recent months, with the “encouragement” of the coronavirus and the rapid evaporation of jobs and demand for employees, it’s become a more common, and often a convenient way to secure income yet maintain functionality in other aspects of life such as family and leisure. Among the more prominent employers that incorporate job sharing are some very large ones such as Qualcomm and even the U.S. Federal Government.

To some of the people, in some companies, and for some of the time, this may be a convenient arrangement. However, recently, job sharing has been touted as a solution for the dwindling job opportunities due to the Covid-19 pandemic. As a solution for mass-employment, I think this is a hopeless idea. I don’t think either employees or employers will be happy with the results of such an experiment, if employed in large numbers, and for a good reason.

The barrier that stands between companies and successful job sharing is human nature. Without developing a whole new attitude to life’s purposes and to other people, our basic instincts of competition and (mainly) envy will destroy any attempt at mass-implementation of job sharing. This kind of arrangement requires people to be able to complement one another, mutually benefit from each other’s strengths and mutually compensate for each other’s weaknesses. I don’t see how people, who are naturally hostile to each other, behind the urbane smiles, can do that without an extensive and profound educational process.

Just as children cannot share, so are adults incapable of it. The only difference is that adults hide it behind phony smiles and fake gestures of friendliness. But put them in a situation where they need to sacrifice something of themselves, even if only their opinion, and you will see right away the value of their “friendliness.”

The coronavirus is forcing us to rethink everything, including our occupation and employment paradigms, and this is great since they have been poisonous to society for over a century. However, in order to build successful paradigms, we first need to comprehend the nature of the change that the pandemic has instigated. Covid-19 isn’t merely a virus that is here today and gone when there is a vaccine. It is the beginning of a new era, a more collaborative one, where people are dependent on each other and must therefore communicate and connect.

Yet, employing connection on such a profound level as job sharing is a bit like the attempt to make all people equal in Communist Russia without educating them about the value of equality and why these values are noble (if you believe them). It made the whole Communist experiment doomed before it even started.

What we need to focus on these days is education, not occupation: education about the world we live in, our interdependency, and mutual responsibility, which exist whether we like them or not. We need to develop solidarity and mutual concern in our communities, and grow from there. Shifts such as job sharing must come naturally, as a result of people’s desire to help one another, and not as something forced by employers, the state, or even circumstances. These reasons will not sustain people’s motivation for long.

Unemployment is a big problem, but governments must resolve it through benefits that it will give to people so they can secure a decent standard of living, benefits that will be contingent on participating in courses or trainings that inform about the interdependency we just mentioned. In this way, people will understand why we need to connect and improve our social relations, and how we can achieve it. When people understand, they cooperate much more keenly and society can remain calm and stable. For this reason, I think that countries and employers that want to help their countries should focus on two things only: provision of necessities and education about interdependency and promotion of social solidarity.
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My new article on Linkedin “On to the Next Pain!”

Great! There is a vaccine for Covid-19! It’s time to move on—to the grip of the next pain…

While it does indeed look like we’re almost through with Covid-19, it’s clear that we haven’t done anything to merit getting over it. And what we haven’t done in 2020, we’ll drag along to 2021. With the additional challenges that the next stage in our development is destined to present us, there is no doubt that next year will be harder than this year.

We have changed during the past year; we need a new kind of satisfaction, deeper and more meaningful, one that relates to relationships and not to material goods and showoff.

What haven’t we done? We haven’t learned that we are interdependent; we haven’t grasped it deeply and internalized its message: that we have to take care of each other just as much, if not more than we take care of ourselves, or else we make each other sick. We also didn’t learn that the job market has changed forever, and we haven’t prepared a new one, suitable for the new era. We haven’t grasped that the most important work today is to build solidarity and mutual responsibility. All we have done is blame one another for every wrong we could detect, while regarding ourselves as blameless. In the past year, we failed to realize that blaming someone for holding other views is not only flawed; it is self-injurious since if you destroy that other, you will destroy yourself as well. We haven’t realized that we cannot be right if we think someone else is wrong for having other views. We wouldn’t be thinking what we’re thinking unless those other people thought what they are thinking. This is the truth, and we haven’t gotten any closer this year to recognizing it.

The job market we should have built, to return to our past year’s failures, should have been one where people worked at what was necessary, while the rest of the people were occupied with cultivating solidarity, since, as just said, the most important work we can do today is connect with one another.

As for income, anyone who engaged in these pro-social occupations would receive an income that would suffice for decent living. It would replace existing benefit programs, and receiving this income would be contingent upon participating in these efforts to build solidarity in the community, the country, and the world.

While it sounds like a tall order, and not something we can achieve in a single year, we haven’t even taken step one, and this is where we failed.

Now that there is a vaccine, people will want to return to the 2019 way of life. It might boom for a while, but it will soon dwindle. We have changed during the past year; we need a new kind of satisfaction, deeper and more meaningful, one that relates to relationships and not to material goods and showoff. Employers will look for employees but they will be much harder to find, and like it or not, we will have to go in the direction that Covid-19 has pointed us: connection in the hearts rather than in the bodies.

And as before, the longer we stall in 2021, the more painful the next blow, which will come for sure, will be.

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My new article on Linkedin “Democracy Can’t Beat Human Nature”

2020 began with a blow and is ending in turmoil. Covid-19 landed a painful whack on the face of civilization and stopped us in our tracks. Since it struck, we’ve been living in standby mode waiting for a vaccine to arrive. But however painful, the pandemic pales in comparison to the turmoil that the United States is going through after the presidential election, and which no vaccine can cure. It is said that when Wall Street coughs, the world’s stock markets catch a cold. We can only guess how the collapse of American democracy that we are witnessing today will impact the rest of the world, but whatever it is, it won’t be pleasant.

The good news is that the bleak future of America and the world is not written in stone. At least for now, we can determine it. But doing so will require commitment, determination, and most of all, acknowledging that we have reached the end of the rope and if we don’t do what it takes to save ourselves, we are doomed.

I am a kabbalist and a scientist. Before I started to learn Kabbalah, I was a scientist and did extensive research on how organisms maintain homeostasis (balance) in dynamic conditions. When I had come across my Kabbalah teacher, Baruch Ashlag—the firstborn son and successor of Yehuda Ashlag, author of a complete commentary on the The Book of Zohar—his approach appealed to me precisely because it was so scientific. Ashlag the son continued in the footsteps of his father, who, besides being the foremost kabbalist of the 20th century, was deeply interested in social sciences and humanities, and very prolific in his writings about it. His extensive knowledge of Kabbalah, which is the science of connecting people through social cohesion, helped him tremendously when he analyzed social systems and processes he lived through in the eventful mid-20th century.

In his latter years, after World War II, Ashlag occupied himself in two colossal projects, only one of which he managed to complete. Before his death, he published the complete commentary on The Book of Zohar which we now call the Sulam [Ladder] commentary. After this enormous achievement, Ashlag is now known as Baal HaSulam [author of The Ladder]. At the same time, he was working on what could have been an extensive explanation of the structure of society that Baal HaSulam thought humanity should build in order to establish a just, sustainable, and prosperous society. He left us with only drafts and notes, but there were so many of them that it is easy to see where he was going with his ideas.

What’s more, it is fascinating to see the clarity with which Baal HaSulam saw the future events that we are now experiencing first hand. He recognized that all people are inherently self-centered and will therefore exploit, bully, and subjugate others if only they knew they could get away with it. As early as the 1930s, he wrote the following in his essay “Peace in the World”: “In simple words, we will say that the nature of each and every person is to exploit the lives of all other people in the world for his own benefit, and all that he gives to another is only out of necessity. Even then, there is exploitation of others in it, but it is done cunningly, so his neighbor would not notice it and concede willingly. …This is an unbreakable law. The only difference is in people’s choices: One chooses to exploit people by obtaining lowly lusts, and one by obtaining governance, while the third by obtaining respect. Furthermore, if one could do it without much effort, he would agree to exploit the world with all three together—wealth, governance, and respect.” This is what we are seeing today: an absolute sense of entitlement and therefore unabashed and unbridled exploitation, or at least attempts at such exploitation. And as Baal HaSulam said, “It is done cunningly, so his neighbor would not notice it and concede willingly.” A few years after his warning, the Nazis came to power.

At around the same time, Baal HaSulam wrote elaborately on the faults of Russia’s communism, explaining that it wouldn’t last because the ideals of equality and contribution to society to the best of your ability, while receiving only what you need for your sustenance, was imposed on people who weren’t educated in this way, and would therefore fail. In fact, he was so confident about his observation that he wrote about Russia’s downfall in past tense even though he did it in the 1930s, when Russia’s communism was in its prime. In the essay “The Peace” (a different essay from “Peace in the World”), he wrote, “Indeed, history itself has troubled in our favor and has prepared for us an established fact, sufficient for a full appreciation and unequivocal conclusion: Everyone can see how a large society such as that of Russia, with hundreds of millions in population, more land than the whole of Europe, second to none in wealth and raw materials, and which has already agreed to lead communal life and practically abolished private property altogether, where each worries only about the well-being of society, has seemingly acquired the full measure of the virtue of bestowal upon others in its full meaning, as far as the human mind can grasp. And yet, go and see what has become of them: Instead of rising and exceeding the achievements of the capitalist countries, they have sunk ever lower. Now, they not only fail to benefit the lives of the workers a little more than in the capitalist countries, they cannot even secure their daily bread and clothes on their flesh.”

In the 1950s, when Baal HaSulam wrote his drafts and notes detailing his views about the sustainable and just society, he projected a dismal future for democracy, again because of lack of proper education. In these pieces, published in The Writings of Baal HaSulam, Baal HaSulam explains that he sees no future for democracy precisely because of the inherent evil in human nature, which has still not been corrected. In his words, “Since the dawn of time, it has never happened that the majority of the public governed a country. Either the autocrats did … or the oligarchy, or the deceitful democrats. But a majority of the simple folk ruled only in the days of Hitler, who, in addition, promoted wickedness toward other nations. He elevated [the value of] benefitting the public to the level of complete devotion since he understood the frame of mind of sadists, who, if given room to discharge their sadism, will pay for it with their lives.”

“Indeed,” continues Baal HaSulam, “it is the absolute truth that there cannot be a good and complete society unless its majority is good because the management reflects the quality of society… If the majority is bad, the management will necessarily be bad, as well, for the wicked will not place over them rulers of whom they do not approve. We need not deduce from the modern democracies,” he explains his lack of hope for them (back in the early 1950s), “as they use various tactics to deceive the constituency. When [the voters] grow wiser and understand their cunningness, the majority will certainly elect a management according to their spirit.” Therefore, Baal HaSulam explains that in order to deceive the public, the rulers of society place “dummies” that look good but are actually powerless, and their sole purpose is to enable the rulers to keep ruling undisturbed. In his words, “Their main tactic is that they first hail people with good reputation and promote them either as wise or as righteous, and then the masses believe and elect them. But a lie does not persist forever,” he concludes.

In the end, as Baal HaSulam says, a democracy that allows a self-centered majority to decide its leader will elect a self-centered leader, according to people’s inherent nature. This cannot hold for long. In the end, self-centeredness reaches such extreme levels that the whole system becomes corrupt and falls apart. At that point, democracy becomes yet another victim of evil human nature.

Until we change who we are, we will not change our leaders or regimes, and we will not be able to build a good society for all of us. We need to start acknowledging that not only is there room for all of us on this planet, but that we need all of us, all our views and our ideas, our fancies and dislikes, our colors and races and faiths and cultures. We need them because if they weren’t around, we, too, would be incomplete. Democrats would not be Democrats were it not for the existence of Republicans, and likewise Republicans. Can you think of manhood without comparing it to womanhood, or the other way around? Without each other, we wouldn’t be anything definable at all, just pieces of flesh wandering aimlessly until their time is due.

Today, more than ever, we need all of humanity to acknowledge this, and soon, so we will understand the harm we’re causing to ourselves through our cancel-culture and abhorrence for each other. As I wrote in the beginning of this longer-than-expected piece, we can still determine our future. When violence breaks out, I’m not sure it’ll still be possible. Therefore, we must hurry, convince ourselves and share with others the notions of our interdependence, of the vulnerability of democracy, and of the only remedy that can save our society and our future: education for connection.
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Medium published my new article “The Worst Year Ever?”

Stephanie Zacharek, a film critic for Time magazine, wrote in its feature article that summarizes 2020, which it titled “The Worst Year Ever”: “If 2020 were a dystopian movie, you’d probably turn it off after 20 minutes. This year wasn’t doomily thrilling, like a fictional apocalypse. It was, in addition to being wrought with pain, maddeningly mundane, the routine of the everyday turned against us.” Moreover, “Our most debilitating threat this year,” she adds, “was a sense of helplessness,” and “Not since the spread of fascism in the 1930s … have we been faced with so many abnormal events.”

With all due respect to the distinguished film critic, I wholly disagree. There has been nothing abnormal about this year, since there is nothing abnormal about this pandemic. On the contrary, up until this year, we have been leading a maddening, abnormal way of life, and the “restraining order” we got from the virus has reinstated normality on Planet Earth. For the first time in more than a century, life functioned normally!

We have been pushing nature’s limits to the brink of snapping, and the virus is only the mildest way it could conjure up to make us stop before we blow ourselves up along with the rest of the planet. Nature could not be gentler with us than with Covid-19.

Besides, how can any sensible person say about forest fires, hurricanes, a pandemic, and earthquakes that they are abnormal? How can natural phenomena be abnormal? Only a warped perspective can view natural phenomena as uncanny and the artificial as normal. Not only that, for a distinguished magazine like Time to declare in its feature piece for 2020 that nature is, well, unnatural, is a testimony to our miscomprehension of the world we live in. If anything is to be regretted about this year, it is our folly.

The people at Time clearly have no clue about their role as a means of communication, about the role of the media. Instead of using their magazine for educational purposes, to teach people where we are and where we’re going, they’re using it to circulate eloquent inanity.

2020 is the best year ever! It is the first time when nature has shown us, in plain view, how it responds to the distortions we install in its system. It tells us we have crossed the line and if we continue on the road we’re going, we will extinguish ourselves. Mother Nature is doing all she can to save her ungrateful children, and we whine like spoiled brats that she isn’t giving us the candy we want.

When you don’t know what you’re doing, stick your hands deep in your pockets and keep them there until you are smarter. We have been doing the exact opposite: switching every knob and pressing every button we could find in order to somehow squeeze more fun out of nature. It is only a miracle we have survived this far. The coronavirus saved our lives by forcing us to go home and limit our abuse of our only home. It is clearly a blessing, yet foolish we curse her on the front page of one of our most acclaimed publications.

The media is our number one educational tool. We should use it to learn about ourselves and our surroundings, not to complain about nature’s teaching but to explain how we should work within the ecosystem that is our universe. It is a closed system, and any wrongdoing bears its consequences. We may not feel it right away, but it is only because we are insensitive to our surroundings and oblivious to our interconnections. If we were slightly more aware of our interdependence, we would see the negative impact of our misdeeds straight away, and wouldn’t think that when those offenses take their toll on us, it is not our fault. Because not only is it our doing that we’ve had such an “eventful” year, it is nobody else’s.

If we do not learn the lesson that Covid-19 has taught us in 2020, 2021 will teach us the same lesson even more painfully. It is not for nature’s meanness, but for our denseness. I feel sorry for Mother Nature; it is not easy rearing such obstinate children. At the same time, I’m grateful that she always chooses the least painful means to teach us what she must, and that she has finally chosen to reveal to us her ways, so we can study them and become grownups in our own world, too.
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My new article on Linkedin “2020- An Odd, Yet Wonderful Year”

As a kabbalist, I think that 2020 has been the best year in all the years that I recall. It is the year when humanity began to shake off and get rid of everything it had in the former life: chasing after money, excessive self-indulgence, and other forms of taking where our only thought was about reception, and nothing else. In this year, nature came and slapped us, commanded us to stop, and we had no choice but to go home and quarantine ourselves. The pandemic forced us to think about life, or at least get rid of the previous life, and this is why it’s been so good.

For humanity, I think that 2020 will be remembered as an odd year, “the year of the blow.” It is a year that stopped everyone’s regular life, when people went to work, entertained themselves, traveled, and so forth. I think people will remember that all of a sudden, this blow came, the special virus that forbade them to come out of the house, run around wherever they want, shut down movie theatres, even parks, occasionally, restaurants, and bars. In other words, the virus shut down the rat race that forced us to look at others and want to do the same.

The drive to go to bars, movies, travel, and so forth is not inherent in us. What is inherent in us is the drive to be like everyone else. If I see that others are doing something and they tell me that it’s good, I am compelled to do the same. We are a herd.

But who is the shepherd? The shepherds are the people with money and power who want to manipulate us into going to movie theatres, bars, and restaurants, to travel and engage in various activities that are lucrative for them, and which give them power.
This way of life is over, thankfully. We will not be as before. Even if we see people trying to return to the previous way of life, it won’t work. It won’t be the same, won’t feel the same, and even if we travel, dine out, and do everything we did before, we won’t be able to enjoy it like we did. It will seem pathetic, empty, lame.

Nature is teaching us to change our relation to our lives, to natural treasures, and to human society. Bit by bit, we will see that the Covid-19 pandemic is changing us. The year 2020 is indeed a very special year; it is the year of the birth of the new humanity.

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Thrive Global published my new article: “Why Covid Vaccines Give Me No Relief”

If we become a society governed by solidarity and care rather than alienation and cruelty, we will become a healthy and prosperous society, where everyone is free and safe.

Woman holds a vial labelled “COVID-19 Coronavirus Vaccine” over dry ice in this illustration taken, December 5, 2020. REUTERS/Dado Ruvic/Illustration

Since the beginning of the year, people have been trying to hang on to their previous lives in anticipation for a vaccine that would cure humanity from the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), which causes the coronavirus disease 2019 (Covid-19). Now it seems to have arrived, in multiple forms and from multiple companies. According to an essay published by the World Economic Forum, “A vaccine usually takes more than 10 years to develop.” In the case of Covid-19, it took several companies a measly ten months to develop it. How did several companies develop a vaccine 12 times faster than the average time? At the very least, it leaves one puzzling.

However, this is not the biggest issue here. What is most disconcerting to me is our delusional thinking that by getting rid of the Covid virus we will get rid of our troubles and return to our previous lifestyle, which inflicted on us the virus in the first place.

I have no doubt, and neither do countless scientists that I quoted in previous posts, that the coronavirus is only the first in a series of many more miseries that will land on humanity at a growing frequency. Getting rid of Covid will only expedite the arrival of the next, and more painful blow. We have to understand that our exploitation of nature and people is over. If we understand it and adapt ourselves to this reality, we will go through the mending phase relatively easily. If we are obstinate, nature has many more tricks up its sleeve to show us who’s really the boss, and none of them is pleasant.

We treat nature as though it’s lifeless, something we can discount and spurn, as though we can do with it whatever we want. Covid has come to teach us otherwise. Through it, nature speaks to us. It teaches us its language, its conduct, and gradually reveals to us its secrets.

Nature has no ambition to kill us. If it did, there are far quicker ways to do it than Covid-19. We call nature Mother Nature because this is exactly what it is. Like a loving mother, it wants to teach us with the least pain and effort what it is that it must teach us. It wants to show us how it works, how it thinks, what it wants and why it wants it. It acts before us like a mother acts before her baby: She laughs and sings, talks to her baby, makes faces, and points to other objects and people. Why does she do all this? After all, her baby doesn’t understand her, so what’s the point? The point is that the baby wants to learn, and by looking at the mother “performing,” it learns all that it needs to learn in order to grow.

Nature is treating us just like that mother. Like that baby, we don’t understand it; and like that baby, we don’t need to. All we need is to want, just like that baby, and the understanding will come to us, just as it comes to every baby ever born.

Nature wants to make us omniscient, wise and loving. It wants to show us how everything is connected, why it is connected, and our place and role in that connection. We don’t need to know it before we assume our role; we simply need to listen. Just as a baby first wants to learn, then learns, and finally performs, so humanity must want to learn, then learn, and only then perform.

If we adopt this attitude, we won’t need any viruses, natural disasters, or any other scares. These are nature’s last resort, when it gives up on grabbing our attention otherwise. If we are obstinate and don’t want to learn, to pay attention to nature and understand its language, then nature has no choice but to call our attention in the only way that works—by hurting us. It could hurt us much worse if it wanted to, but it doesn’t. We should be wiser than to say that Covid is just a bad flu, since nature can administer a much more serious “remedy.”

What we refuse to understand is that we don’t need to develop a vaccine; we already have it—it’s our positive relation to each other. It may not work if few adopt it, but if all of society transforms its attitude to one another, if we become a society governed by solidarity and care rather than alienation and cruelty, we will become a healthy and prosperous society, where everyone is free and safe.
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— Published on December 6, 2020

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My new article on Linkedin “Where Is China Running, and Why?”

Lately, it seems as though China is running at full speed in every direction simultaneously. In the past few weeks alone, it landed a probe on the moon, manufactured and is ready to ship millions of vaccines, beating Pfizer and Moderna, confronted Australia over control of the South China Sea, and reported that it is building a huge aircraft carrier, the kind that can be a game changer in the global arena. In addition, it is in constant conflict with the US over alleged attempts to intercept information, and Steven Myers and Keith Bradsher of The New York Times report that “China’s leader, Xi Jinping, is pursuing a strategy to make the country’s economy more self-sufficient, while making other places more dependent on it than ever.”

What’s the rush? Why is it suddenly so important for China to take over the world? Well, we could offer various political, social, and economic reasons why China is striving to shift from being a regional power and an economic superpower into being a military superpower with clout in regions far beyond its region. However, there is a simpler and truer reason: It’s China’s time.

Just as every newborn baby grows into a child, and then into an adult, so do countries. China has grown up, and like all grownups, it wants power and wealth. After millennia of isolation, China has emerged in the previous century like a sleeping giant that has just awakened. Now it is wide awake and wants its share, its respect, and its say in the world.

However, unlike other countries that have woken up, I don’t see China as posing an immediate danger. It doesn’t mean that it could not develop into one, but I don’t see an immediate threat coming from China.

Moreover, humanity is currently going through an unprecedented crisis of disintegration of human society and human civilization. It has been developing for years, but Covid-19 has exacerbated and accelerated the crisis to the point that countries cannot keep up with people’s disillusionment with authorities, capitalism, consumerism, the endless competition, soaring depression rates, and general dissatisfaction with life that has pervaded every family. The recent American presidential election is only a demonstration of things to come in many more countries around the world in the very near future.

Therefore, humanity’s most urgent problem is not China, but people’s disconnection from each other. China absorbed the achievements and ailments that humanity has accumulated over eons within just a few decades. If humanity will now restore human connections and rebuild the broken society that the West has become, China will absorb it, too, and will naturally change course from building aircraft carriers to something far less menacing and more embracing.

China has a very good relationship with Israel, and I see it as a great opportunity. Since setting an example of unity is Israel’s primary goal and primary role in the world, if we achieve internal unity, our good relations with the Chinese people will help them follow suit.

Just as currently, numerous countries come to Israel to buy new technologies and implement them in their countries, and recently including even Arab countries, if we develop unity, countries will be even happier to implement it in their countries. In the current trajectory of the world, unity will very soon become the most required commodity.

For this reason, I see China’s astonishing rise as yet another sign that we, Israel, must hurry and unite, so we can be a model of the most required commodity, and so that all the power that is now created in the People’s Republic of China will not go in the wrong direction.
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My new article on Linkedin “Looking Back at the Year of the Covid”

Looking back to the beginning of 2020, I see that people involuntarily accepted the Covid-forced changes in their lives. It is hard to call it a pandemic; it is more of a new force that has come into play, creating partitions between us and setting us apart. It sort of put us in our corners and forced us to behave in new ways. We may not want it, at least most of us, but it is nevertheless a compulsory force from above.

I am not surprised that Covid did this. When it just began, I said right away that it’s the beginning of something new that would be with us from now on. Accordingly, I suggested that we adapt our lives to this reality. I don’t think we should go back to the way we lived before, as it was unsustainable and actually facilitated the emergence of Covid-19. If I had a say in the matter, I would say the opposite—that I want Covid to pressure us to the point where we surrender and agree to change our hearts toward each other, and if not, let the virus keep separating us as it has been doing for the past year.

The world before Covid was a madhouse: people running around aimlessly, furiously fighting one another, competing for superiority and power, and increasingly depressed. Covid stopped all that because it changed the way we work, the way we socialize, and the way we treat our families. It changed our values, and I’m happy that it did because the old ones didn’t do us any good.

We felt free, but we were slaves to our egos. We felt entitled, but we used it to disenfranchise others. We felt powerful, but only because we humiliated others. And in the end, we were terrified that if we stopped bullying others, others would bully us. I’m glad that Covid stopped it, and I hope it never returns.

Now it’s time to find real freedom, the freedom to give, to support, and to make room for others. It is freedom to build a society of sharing and caring, solidarity and cohesion, mutual responsibility and trust in our neighbors. It’s time to build a new world.

Now that 2020 is ending, I hope we have learned what it came to teach us and spend the rest of the decade living out its lessons.

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My new article on Linkedin “Dreaming Away Pandemic Nightmares”

Either awake or asleep, thoughts about the pandemic haunt all of humanity like no other event in the last century. Covid-19 nightmares around the world are one of the most recent subjects of study. Harvard University research confirmed that people worldwide are experiencing remarkable changes in the frequency and nature of their dreams as a result of the global health emergency. This further confirms that the virus impacts humanity as a single body, and therefore, it is high time that we start acting as such.

The repercussions from the coronavirus are not isolated incidents but global occurrences that affect the whole human race. Daytime fears and concerns about the pandemic remain trapped inside people’s minds at night while they sleep according to a Harvard Medical School study. The research evaluated thousands of responses to a global survey recounting similar bizarre dreams of swarms of killer bugs and other virus-related imagery, regardless of people’s location and occupation.

Dreams are constructed from a set of thoughts and desires that a person accumulates during the day. Even if he may not be aware of them, they remain below the surface in one’s subconscious. When a person puts his head on their pillow and falls asleep, he no longer has control over his thoughts and hidden desires. During sleep they are withdrawn from the individual’s memory and arise in the form of dreams.

When our emotions, ideas, sensations, and desires are free from limitations, free from the oppression of the outside world, and without physical boundaries, they connect and integrate into a dream, mixing up elements and experiences which many times manifest in an illogical and bizarre way. This process has given rise to all kinds of theories and speculation about their origin and interpretation. But dreams are nothing more than that, a psychosocial and physiological process. At the end of the day, what we are is flesh with an internal nervous system that awakens us all the time and does not let us rest even in our sleep when our brain is no longer working at full power.

Dreaming is an important mechanism that allows us to process images and get rid of them. Sometimes dreams are not simple, they can put us into unpleasant situations, stress, and fears. It is therefore advisable to read something soothing or even funny before bedtime. Reading Psalms can also help to channel the thoughts in a good direction. Sex can also ease stress and release the body from the tension it has accumulated during the day.

The stress of our daily life since the coronavirus outbreak has become a worldwide phenomena. According to the wisdom of Kabbalah, this period is a time when humanity completes its stage of individual development and moves on to a higher and new stage in which all individuals connect as one body, to be as one family, one soul. Therefore, it is only natural that even nightmares are now globally similar as the world itself has become global and round.

We have all become connected, we share common challenges and experiences. We go through the same pandemic and face the same crises while we are awake. Although everyone thinks about their personal life, about their family and work, these individual thoughts are now merged in the world’s collective consciousness so our experiences are increasingly similar. These new conditions present a remarkable opportunity to transform our nightmare into the dream of a more pleasant world and vivid reality.
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My new article on Linkedin “At the Mall Today, in the Morgue Tomorrow”

Corona deniers abound in every country. You can see them demonstrating against government initiated lockdowns, walking around maskless, bragging about their carelessness and indifference to the harm they can inflict on others by infecting them, and packing public places as if it’s 2019. So what if more than a quarter of a million Americans died and countless others suffer from post corona complications that no one can explain, heal, or say how long they’ll last? So what if my “freedom of expression” jeopardizes someone else’s life? In a free country, I’m free to do what I want, right?

Wrong. We’re free to do what we want as long as it doesn’t inflict harm on others. When it comes to Covid-19, irresponsible behavior in public doesn’t fall into that category; it risks other people’s health, and possibly their lives.

I would like to suggest an idea to authorities that wish to contain the plague: Start a campaign and title it, “At the Mall Today, in the Morgue Tomorrow.” Take security camera footage of people in public places, how they have fun and hang out with each other carelessly, how they disregard safety precautions, don’t wear masks, don’t keep the required distance, and don’t avoid contact. Two weeks later, go over these data and cross-check them against registrations of new confirmed Covid cases. I’m sure the results, despite all the privacy laws protecting personal data, will show sufficient evidence that Covid is very real and people do suffer the consequences of their actions.

There is no intention to revenge inconsiderate behavior, but simply to prove that the danger is real. This act, as cold as it may seem, may save numerous lives by exposing the truth that so many people are trying to deny: Covid is real, and it is here!

Once people realize that there really is a problem, that the 270,000 odd Covid deaths were real people who are not with us anymore, they will be more open to contemplate ways to resolve the situation. This is when we need to start talking about mutual responsibility, solidarity, interdependence, and all those beautiful and true ideas that seem so insubstantial to people until interdependence hits them in the face because they or someone they love was infected by a careless person.

We need to realize, and start acting accordingly, that there is one basic rule to all of nature: All beings are one system, one entity. Just as there is no such thing as one organ being sick but the rest of the body is healthy, there is no such thing as one person being sick and the rest of humanity is healthy. A sickness anywhere is a sickness everywhere. The fact that we don’t feel it doesn’t mean it’s not true; it means that our senses are flawed, that we are sick with alienation, and that in order to heal the rest of our illnesses, we must first heal the condition of alienation.

If we work on this together, we can change reality. We can learn to feel each other, feel our connectedness and our mutual dependence. We can discover the benefits of mutual responsibility and solidarity, but first we must make a joint commitment to do it. When we are sick of isolation and loneliness, we will be able to heal ourselves from our senseless pride and start connecting. When we are sick of alienation, we will be able to see that alienation is our real sickness.

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