My new article on Linkedin “Headed for Another Masked Summer?”

The summer vacation has barely begun, and we are already seeing signs that it might soon end, or at least the fun part about it. Covid-19 is returning to Israel in a big way and threatens to do this summer what it did last summer, keep us at home, or at least at a distance from each other. It seems as though nature has no mercy on the children, who only want to enjoy the summer—their brief break from a traumatizing school year riddled with corona lockdowns.

But then, why should nature have mercy on children if we, their parents, don’t? That is, through our own misconduct, we are bringing on them the lockdown that we could prevent if we only conducted ourselves more responsibly. If we were better parents, we’d do what we have to do, both regarding ourselves and regarding our children.

And what we have to do is reorganize our relationships. Otherwise, we will not be able to cope with Covid, and certainly not with the upcoming viruses that are already standing in line to plague us, and which are bound to be more troublesome than the current pestilence.

Until we learn that we must rearrange our relationships from competitive to supportive and from callous to caring, nothing good will happen. We must understand that our only cure from the virus is by healing our hearts from negative thoughts about others, developing positive ones, and connecting with the very same people we currently repel.

To connect means to understand and feel that I am dependent on others. I may live in my physical body, but the heart of this body is in someone else, not in me. And not only is it in someone else, but in everybody else besides me. In other words, each and every one of us is entirely dependent on everyone else. We don’t determine our fates, and we don’t determine our present. In fact, we don’t determine anything; our interconnections determine everything, and we only follow the dictates of this network, consciously or not.

Even if we cannot feel this right now, we should at least understand that this is so and realize that if that’s the case, then “Love your neighbor as yourself” is not some lofty motto that no one takes seriously, but our only hope of changing our lives, of shifting them toward a positive direction.

We can ignore it and continue treading the path of meanness we have nurtured so fervently for so many decades, but it won’t be long before life forces us through pain to rethink our route.

The virus isn’t our enemy; it is showing us the truth of our interdependence. Had we acted on this truth, we would not have had a pandemic whatsoever. Our social responsibility would have made us separate ourselves once we got sick until we got better, and the virus would not have spread. This, by the way, is what sick bats do in order not to infect other members of their cloud (a colony of bats). If we had their sense of responsibility, we wouldn’t be talking about the Covid-19 pandemic, certainly not two years down the line.

Because we are utterly dependent on each other, we influence each other. This is why it is so important that we monitor our feelings toward others and try to cultivate positive ones. By doing so, we will influence others, who will influence still others, even without speaking about it. Before long, that positive wave will come back to us and to our children.

We determine each other’s fate, so let’s be responsible. Let’s draw the obvious conclusion that “Love your neighbor as yourself” is our only viable option for the future. We have tried everything else and look where we are: on the verge of another masked summer. Now that it’s getting to our children, we should stop taking risks. I hope we will learn and implement this lesson that nature is trying desperately to teach us before it resorts to harsher means.
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A poll conducted after the Israeli-Palestinian conflict showed that Jews in the USA are against Israel. They think that approval of the ultra-left will save them from pogroms, as was the case when Nazis first came to power in Germany. 100 years later, history is repeating itself!

@WHODirector-General @DrTedros: “The mortality rate is rising again. The #Delta variant is rampant in the world. The #pandemic is not over anywhere. It will take collective action to defeat it.”

My Comment: Nature will bring us, against our will, to the need to unite in order to survive, if we don’t wish to unite on our own! #COVID19

Everything depends only on our aspiration to be united, “Love your neighbor as yourself”
This is the mission of the Israeli #government!
Otherwise we will bring ourselves to exile again.
It says so in all our sources.
This should be the directive for our government!

We have to realize that this land will belong to us only on the condition that we correspond to it, that we strive to be the nation of #Israel, similar to the Creator in the quality of bestowal and love.
Otherwise we will bring ourselves to exile again.

Up to 34% #Jews in the USA think that #Israel is an #apartheid state! Just like in Nazi Germany, they will have to learn the truth through their personal experience…
From Twitter, 7/13/21

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My new article on Linkedin “Living with Covid”

To me, the news of experts realizing that Covid-19 isn’t going anywhere is good news. From the very beginning, I said that even if there is a vaccine or a drug that cures Covid, the virus will mutate or another bug will come along and render our efforts futile. As I have said probably hundreds of times since the beginning of the outbreak, trying to outsmart nature with technology will not work. We are products of nature, so trying to outsmart our producer is, to put it mildly, unwise.

Personally, I am happy that this is the way nature is directing us. I am not at all happy that people are suffering, but they are not suffering because of nature, but because humanity is obstinate and insists on going where nature isn’t going. When you bump your head against the wall of reality, you’re bound to get a major headache. In the case of humanity, this headache manifests in millions of needless fatalities and countless people suffering from long lasting symptoms because of our mulishness.

Like it or not, Covid is telling us to slow down. The technological rat-race we’ve been on has nearly devastated humanity, and we need to calm down and bring it under control. People need to stop fighting and start talking about what really matters: our relationships.

Since we cannot communicate with each other positively in the physical realm, nature has shifted us to the virtual one. If we learn to communicate positively in that realm, we will see Covid easing its grip and letting us communicate with each other physically, too.

Nature is using Covid to teach us that our real immune system is not in our bodies but in our hearts, in how we relate to one another and how we feel about each other. Since we are all connected, one person’s ill-will percolates to everyone else, and our negative emotions spread like viruses and sicken us. Positive emotions percolate and spread, as well, but those are desperately scarce, hence the pitiful state of humanity.

The vaccines are helpful in keeping the pandemic at bay, but as long as we avoid making the necessary changes in our relations, the virus will keep returning in various forms and intensities until we realize that we need a more fundamental change than just a new vaccine. Covid is not a strain of flu. The way to remove it is not physical, but emotional. Only when we comprehend this, we will be able to heal ourselves, after we heal our malignant relationships. Then, we won’t have to go on living with Covid.
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Comment: I recently saw a photograph of a prescription given to an elderly woman by a doctor on the Internet. For the past year, she has maintained a distance of six feet from others, even with family members, as recommended. She got vaccinated and still continued to follow these rules. She did not even come close to her beloved granddaughter who was born sickly, and whom she had cared for. It was very difficult for her, but she was more afraid for her loved ones, not for herself.

This woman began to get very sick. They were preparing to say goodbye to her. Medicine did not help, nothing helped, and then the doctor in despair wrote her a prescription: “You are allowed to hug your granddaughter.” She hugged her and began to recover.

My Response: Naturally. That person deprived herself of powerful sensations. It is impossible to live like this. She was already killing herself with this relationship with others.

Question: What is a hug? What is this revitalization?

Answer: This is a great power. If a person is deprived of the feeling of love, even animals—we know this from animals; they perceive it very clearly—it turns their whole life upside down. Nothing can be done, we must love each other.

Comment: In general, this woman could communicate with her granddaughter at a distance, but this was not enough for her. She needed just physical contact—to hug her granddaughter.

My Response: Of course. Nothing else.

Question: Now that we have been separated like this, and then suddenly, perhaps, we will be brought together, we will be able to understand what love is after all. We will understand that if we are deprived of it, this is not life. Was that why we were separated so that we would approach this embrace differently?

Answer: Yes. I agree. The distance was created for us on purpose so that we would have a real craving for each other.
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From KabTV’s: “News with Dr. Michael Laitman” 4/1/21

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My new article on Linkedin “Human Relations in the Age of Lockdowns”

A response to one of my recent posts said that on the one hand, I say that Covid-19 has come in order to make us stay at home and disconnect from one another. On the other hand, I say that it came to teach us how to be close to nature. But since human nature is to connect with others, as we are social beings, there is an apparent contradiction here since you cannot connect if you are locked down at home.

A line in a piece of Jewish poetry called “Go My Beloved,” reads, “The end of the work is in the preliminary thought.” It means that when you do something, you must think of the final outcome that you want to achieve before you begin to work on achieving it. Otherwise, you are certain to go the wrong way.

The same goes for Covid and how humanity should deal with it. It is very true that humans are social beings. Moreover, the whole purpose of humanity is to connect in a way that benefits both individuals and human society. But to achieve this goal, we need to know how to connect in a way that yields these benefits. If we connect incorrectly, we are harming ourselves, human society, and our entire planet.

Currently, there is no question that we are connecting incorrectly. A quick scan of human relations around the world reveals a frightening picture of enmity, abuse, rampant killing and murders between countries and within countries, financial exploitation, a military arms race, ambitions to obtain nuclear weapons, race related social tensions, depression, oppression, aggression, and every imaginable form of malice. Human society is rife with inhumanity.

Until now, nature has let us “sort things out for ourselves,” so to speak. But over the past several decades, it has become clear that we are either unwilling or unable to change, and in our efforts to destroy one another, we will destroy our home planet.

So, what do parents do when their children don’t stop fighting and can’t work things out by themselves? They send them to their separate rooms. Clearly, the parents would like nothing more than to see their beloved children get along and become best friends. But if all their efforts to make peace between their children fail, they have to stop the fighting by separating the children altogether. Afterwards, when the fighting has stopped, the parents and the children can calmly examine their relations and start connecting more positively. Yet, even when they are permitted to connect, the children must always remember that they can be sent back to their rooms if they misbehave once more.

Nature is dealing with us much like those parents. It no longer settles for “punishing” us locally, through natural disasters or other local crises. It has sent us a global blow that has shut down humanity’s hostile operations toward others and toward nature. Just like those loving parents from the example, the idea is not to disconnect us from each other altogether. On the contrary, the idea is to allow us to learn how to connect to one another positively, one step at a time.

As soon as we begin to want to connect positively, nature will respond positively. It does not operate like a person, but more like a machine that responds to certain stimuli. Anything that operates similar to it arouses nature’s positive response, and anything that operates contrary to it arouses a negative response.

Since nature functions as a harmonious and balanced system, as I wrote in my previous post, if we build a balanced and harmonious human society, nature will not impose any restrictions or limitations on us. But if we insist on bullying each other, well, nature is a bigger bully than any of us. I hope for all of us that we will learn nature’s lessons sooner rather than after it demonstrates its strength.
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My new article on Linkedin “Here Comes the Delta Wave”

For anyone who thought that Covid-19 left us along with the year 2020, the new strain, called Delta, has news: Covid isn’t going anywhere. As I have been saying since the beginning of the outbreak (check my posts from a year and a half ago), the coronavirus isn’t yet another bug; it is ushering in a new era, and it will change every aspect of our lives. The faster we learn the characteristics of this new era, the sooner we will be rid of the virus. So far, we have been reluctant students, so the virus keeps coming back, hence the Delta strain.

We have already been forced to change many things in our lives. We no longer fly frantically from place to place (perhaps except during holidays), and many more of us want to work more from home, or only from home. Nevertheless, these are only superficial changes. The real change has to take place within!

That change should be a complete overhaul of our relationships. Until today, we’ve treated humanity as if it were separate from nature. The virus shows us that we are subject to the same laws as the rest of creation. When we don’t follow them, we impact the system negatively, and when the system becomes dysfunctional, because of our negativity, we suffer the consequences.

Our relationships are subject to the same laws as the rest of reality. In all of reality, there is balance and harmony. This is what allows systems to become stable and sustainable. Day and night are harmonious and balance each other out. The same goes for birth and death, the seasons of the year, and depletion and rejuvenation; everything is cyclic, harmonious, and balanced.

The only thing that is not cyclic, balanced, or harmonious is human relations. Until now, we have engaged in constant struggles that seek to harm, ridicule, humiliate, and patronize others. This was not a struggle for survival, as with the rest of nature. It was a war that strove to achieve absolute power, and degrade and abuse everyone else.

This is why I am thankful to Covid. For all the pain it has wrought on us, it has saved us from much greater harm we would have caused ourselves had it not arrived.

That said, we can make things that much better if we choose to follow nature’s dictate instead of being forced into it.

If we let our ill-will toward each other keep contaminating our relationships, we will suffer worsening consequences. But if we change our approach toward each other, not only will we feel better with each other, but nature, too, will treat us well, as we will be as balanced and harmonious as nature itself, and for the first time, a positive element in our world.
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My new article on Linkedin “4th of July, Happy Interdependence Day America!”

As America celebrates its 245th Independence Day, the United States faces two serious threats: the Covid-19 pandemic and its recent Delta variant and record-breaking extreme heat waves in North America. On this important occasion I wish for America to overcome its challenges by building a safer nation that is resistant to all the phenomena from nature and the polarization within society. They need to properly realize their power and make good changes within the country if they want to thrive.

North America is boiling, literally. The traditional 4th of July fireworks displays have been postponed or canceled in certain locales due to heat indices and drought conditions. There are also recommendations to stay indoors. In Portland and Seattle, temperatures reached a record high of 116 degrees Fahrenheit. Health authorities in British Columbia, Canada also reported unbearable temperatures that caused the deaths of at least 700 Canadians.

We should not conceive these blows in North America as punishment. For instance, I do not see Americans as the worst people that have made terrible mistakes or committed some injustices that made them deserve this. It is natural for the whole continent and, actually, the whole world to experience extreme weather.

The world has been evolving and has now reached a new stage of development, a completely different level; humanity must fully recognize the unity of nature as a holistic system, one whole. We need to comprehend that the state of nature depends on the relationships between human beings, the highest level in the pyramid of nature, which influences the rest of the system: inanimate, vegetative, animate, and human itself.

Therefore, if we try to build a balanced system of human relations, all of nature will calm down. The comprehensive solution to the ecological and social dangers we face lies in efforts toward global connection in which we will feel how dependent we are on everyone. Therefore, we will think twice before engaging in any ill-treatment of anyone else.

So how do blows help us advance? Americans are so proud of their independence, more than and above all other countries, and now they are entering the process of testing their own independence, their values, what they are independent from, and what is worth dreaming of. I think it is the beginning of a long and extraordinarily special learning process that will be accelerated by the current political scenario in America where the heat waves are burning the social cohesion.

America has built a strong and prosperous country with a good infrastructure and know-how on how to use money well. But can they still use everything they have built rationally? I am not quite sure, I am very worried about their future. They need to do more to abstain from political divisions and to think about how to build a stable society otherwise they will not be able to successfully face the threats from natural phenomena and internal explosions from various factions within their society. There are many countries in the world waiting for America to reach an internal boiling point and explodes. This sounds like bad news, but it is actually good news because America now has an opportunity to revive with a new awakening, and real chance to reach a true Independence! I wish you success!
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The coronavirus will inevitably return. We did not draw the correct conclusions from the first wave of the pandemic, and the second wave will come. All that we understood from the first wave is that we should stay at home, and if we go out, we should wear a mask and keep distance between us. And of course, this is not enough to correct our state.

Therefore, I initially did not expect the coronavirus to disappear quickly. This was only the first wave and a second would come after it, and it is already happening. Not just a repetition of the wave, but new mutations of the virus from a new source. And closer to winter, I think there will be a third wave.

It is very possible that these waves will come with great frequency, time after time, to teach us that we need to finally do something with ourselves. Otherwise, the virus will disconnect us from the normal life we had before. We will have to change the whole routine of life, the economy, industry, forms of work, child care, and forms of communication and interaction.

The virus affects everything because our whole world is built on the connection between people. The pandemic is striking precisely this connection between us. We will now begin to feel more and more how much of a qualitative disturbance this blockage of connection is. The pandemic does not allow us to communicate even with masks on.

The virus will mutate to such an extent that vaccinations will stop working so that we will start thinking about what should the nature of the vaccination be, what it should do, and how we should prepare ourselves so as to not undergo heavy blows. We need to start getting smarter!

The waves of the pandemic are like the Egyptian plagues that push us to rise above our egoism, to get out from the power of the Pharaoh. Is this the direction of our actions, thoughts, and conversations? Do we realize that the coronavirus is the same plague that the people of Israel experienced in Egypt: blood, frogs, lice, and everything else? We have to go through all this, but in a different form.

You can try to close borders so the virus does not penetrate from the outside, but this will not help because the Creator still implements His upper program. The virus will not disappear and will not leave us, because it has not caused any changes within us so far. And so it will have to beat the people of Israel and the whole world again and again.

Israel can by its internal correction cure itself and the whole world of the pandemic by serving as the medicine for the entire human society. If the Jews start treating each other correctly, the pandemic will disappear all over the world, and all of humanity will be cured.
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From KabTV’s “A Conversation with Journalists” 6/24/21

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Look what is happening: the Creator is allowing us to almost eliminate the pandemic, but as soon as we breathe a sigh of relief and take off our masks, it suddenly returns with a new force. This is to show us that nothing has gone away, and we have learned nothing from the last wave. Therefore, after a temporary abatement, it returns again.

We needed this respite to distinguish the second blow from the first one and understand that we did nothing. If the pandemic just continued, it would be one blow from which we would learn nothing.

Why were there ten plagues in Egypt? Was one not enough? The Passover Haggadah says that the people of Israel received four hundred blows, one hundred, two hundred, three hundred.

We are at the stage of the final correction when all evil must be revealed. However, in what form it will be revealed depends on us, on our desire to receive the force of correction.

The shortest, ideal way is to turn to the Creator and ask him for the force of connection. We must be connected together as in the corrected system of Adam HaRishon. However, there is no way we can reach such a connection except with the help of the upper force that would influence us and make it possible to connect with each other and all of us together with the Creator.

We have no other choice. Otherwise, we will receive blow after blow. The people of Israel are able to hear this because they have a point in the heart and the heart is the place where this information is received.

The coronavirus binds us. It is like a symbol of our egoistic connection. Therefore, it passes from person to person and manifests itself egoistically in order to eventually teach us how to change the relationships between us.
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From KabTV’s “Conversation with the Writers” 6/24/21

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My new article on Linkedin “ The Ten Plagues of Covid ”

In the last week or so, it has become clear that we are in the beginning of the fourth wave of Covid-19 in Israel. We thought we had beaten the virus, and so did much of the world, but once again we’re closing down as the number of new cases quickly rises. Even though about 60 percent of Israel’s population is inoculated, we’re still losing to the virus.

As I have warned countless times before, we’re not sickened by the coronavirus; we’re sickened by hubris and conceit. Self-importance and egoism are sure recipes for disaster, and we are proving it every time we see that Covid cases are declining. What’s more, Covid is not a local or a national problem; it is the problem of the entire world, and unless the entire world is included in the solution, we will not get rid of it. Covid-19 will teach us that we’re in this together, for better or worse, dependent on each other. Unless we think about each other’s health, we ourselves will not be well.

In a sense, I’m happy that Covid is here because it teaches us this mutual responsibility. At the same time, I am equally unhappy about our obstinacy and reluctance to learn, as it is costing us lives, millions of lives. I myself lost friends, students, and some of their family members to the virus. No one is excluded from this bug, which is precisely why it is so effective in teaching us mutual responsibility.

Just as the ten plagues in Egypt ushered a new era in the history of the people of Israel, when they pledged to unite “as one man with one heart,” Covid-19 is ushering the world into the exact same state. Its plagues will grow less and less quantitative, and more and more qualitative, meaning leading us directly toward understanding that without pledging to care for one another, we will not survive.

In the desert, after they fled from Egypt, the Israelites did not willingly accept the pledge for unity. They, too, had to deal with their egos. The Talmud writes (Avoda Zarah 2b) that “The Lord had forced the mountain over Israel like a vault, and said unto them: ‘If you accept the Law [of mutual responsibility], very well, but if not, there will it be your grave.’” Today, it seems as though Covid is taking God’s role in forcing us to make the same pledge. I hope we will not be obstinate much longer since the plagues, we already know, will only grow harsher.
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