Once man comes to his Egypt, over time he acquires greater and greater desire to receive there. At first, he accepts this desire with joy. He feels good about the fact that he is developing, getting richer, and understanding the world.

This is how our entire world has been developing until recently. But we suddenly discover that all our achievements are not good for us. In fact, we have built a prison for ourselves, real slavery that we cannot escape from. Egoism is burying us, binding us hand and foot. Even though we have done so many seemingly good things for ourselves, they suddenly start to overpower us and control us.

First, I work in order to acquire things, and then I have to continue and continue to work in order to maintain my acquisitions, develop, and improve them. I am working harder and harder to pay for a bigger house, a car, a better school for the kids, and a lot of other things.

A person sees that he is in slavery. Previously, he thought that he was arranging life for his own benefit. Now it turns out that he cannot rest and enjoy life. He is working more and more. His wife is working now too, and they still cannot get out of debt. This is real slavery, which has no end in sight.

In addition, the coronavirus pandemic happened, and who knows how many more such blows are awaiting us ahead. We are beginning to realize that we have built a life that is no good. Yet, there is a positive aspect in this because it is now that the wisdom of Kabbalah can be revealed and people are able to listen to it. And this is why it is being revealed.

Then these two forces that appear in nature: the Pharaoh on one hand and the Creator on the other, help us advance to the end of correction, “…the two angels that accompany one on the eve of Shabbat [Sabbath]…”
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From the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 4/4/21, “Pesach “(Passover)

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Question: Pharaoh (Hebrew: Parah) is the main acting force. Your teacher Rabash explains that “Parah” means “Peh Ra” (bad mouth). What or who are we talking about?

Answer: We are talking about someone who denies that the world is ruled by a good force, the upper force of the Creator, and claims that the world is ruled by evil, an egoistic force, and that this is the only thing that should be developed and controlled.

Question: If you read the word “Parah” from right to left, you will get “Oref” (back of the neck). What does it mean?

Answer: This is the reverse side of the Creator. In practice, there is one upper force, literally called the Creator, which manifests itself both in a good form and in its opposite: as an evil force called Pharaoh (Parah).

Question: What does it mean that the Pharaoh sucked all the good out of the people who worked for him?

Answer: This is what we see in our lives: no matter what we try to do, nothing good comes out of it in the end because we use egoism only for the sake of reinforcing it.

Question: So it is impossible to enjoy egoism? As soon as we are fulfilled with something, this pleasure instantly fades?

Answer: Not only that, but there is an even greater egoism we fulfill again. Thus, we are always in pursuit of egoistic pleasure that in the end never fulfills us.
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From KabTV’s “Spiritual States” 3/26/21

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My new article on Linkedin “How Long Will Money Make the World Go ’Round?”

Business Insider wrote that an Oxfam International report found that between March 18 and December 30, 2020, the wealth of the ten richest people in the world increased by $3.9 trillion. According to the report, this gain alone, which those ten people had made in less than ten months, “could pay for everyone to get vaccinated and stay out of poverty.” At the same time, the report estimates that “between 200 million to 500 million people may have fallen into poverty during 2020.” Does it really have to be this way?

How long will money make the world go ’round? Until all of us understand that kowtowing to the ego is not the solution. Matters will keep going from bad to worse until we change our way of life, our state of mind, our motivation.

The only substitute for the ego, and which will create a world where we enjoy living, is love. That word, which we so readily disparage, is the only word we have to describe the most powerful force in existence: the power of giving.

Indeed, we have built a world that exalts nothing but money and power. Money grants power, which enables acquiring more money, which grants even more power, so in the end, money makes the world go ’round. And behind the zeal for money stands the ego, the engine that drives civilization. We have crowned the ego, let it build our society in its image, and now we’re paying the price for fawning on it.

Joe Biden plans to increase taxes on the rich in order to balance the load on the people and finance some of the financial toll wrought by Covid-19, but I don’t think it will work, not in a society where the rich are the powerful. If he goes too far, they can simply move him out of the way.

How long will money make the world go ’round? Until all of us understand that kowtowing to the ego is not the solution. Matters will keep going from bad to worse until we change our way of life, our state of mind, our motivation.

The only substitute for the ego, and which will create a world where we enjoy living, is love. That word, which we so readily disparage, is the only word we have to describe the most powerful force in existence: the power of giving. We may sneer at these words, ridicule and belittle anyone who merely brings up the notion of love or giving, but we’d be wrong to do so. Nothing is more powerful than love.

Think about this: Would you be here were it not for your parents’ love for you? Would this world be here were it not for the trillions of species that continually create and nurture their offspring? Despite the myriad destructive forces around us, life continues and even evolves because the power of life, the power to give and cultivate life, is stronger than all of them combined.

Until the beginning of the 20th century, this was also the situation in human society. But since then, the destructive forces of egoism in humanity have intensified to the point that they now pose an existential risk not only to our species, but to the whole planet. Now, we, humanity, must make a conscious effort to raise the power of love and giving above the power of the ego—the desire to take for myself whatever I can, however I can, and as much as I can.

The ten billionaires may be eye-catching examples of egoism, but if any one of us were in their shoes, we’d be the same and act the same as they do. The plague is in all of us, so only all of us can heal it. If we set our minds on it collectively, we can shift the paradigm from taking to giving, and become “parents,” progenitors of a world that operates on a new kind of fuel.

In the new world, no one will sit still until everyone is safe and cared for. Just as the whole body has no rest and no peace of mind unless all of its organs are well, so we will feel about every person in the world, that all are parts of me, and I cannot be at peace if everyone is not at peace.

Today, moving toward that mindset is a must. We have become so interdependent that unless we take care of everyone, everyone will suffer. If we take on this mindset, we will blossom. If we eschew it, then we have sealed our fate.

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Question: The Creator constantly hardens Pharaoh’s heart. On one hand, he says: “Come to Me.” And on the other hand: “I will harden his heart.” Why?

Answer: Because the purpose of our egoistic development is to make sure that it is impossible to exist in egoism and to ask the Creator to free us from it.

This is the purpose of our being in the Egyptian slavery, in the slavery of egoism, to make sure that it is only to our detriment and that only the Creator can get us out of there.
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From KabTV’s “Spiritual States” 3/26/21

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Comment: When a person recognizes his egoism as evil, the quality of Moses (from the word Limshoch, to pull) is revealed in him and starts to pull him out of his ego.

My Response: Moses was raised by the Pharaoh’s daughter Batya. He grew up in this environment, acquired the wisdom of the Pharaoh, and became like the Pharaoh with all his egoistic attitude to life.

Question: Does it mean that even our altruistic inclinations are based on egoism and develop from it?

Answer: Well, we see what is happening, all of humanity is developing egotistically. Only now sprouts of our mighty egoistic activities are gradually beginning to appear: the things we have done to this Earth, how pointless and only to our detriment everything is. We live this life, spoil it for each other, and die. This is our existence.

It is this recognition of the evilness of our egoistic nature that we must reveal in this generation.
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From KabTV’s “Spiritual States” 3/26/21

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Question: Israel should have stayed in Egypt for 400 years, but they left earlier, after 210 years. Why?

Answer: They had to reveal the need to break free of egoism over400 years, but it was fully revealed in them in 210 years.

On the other hand, 400 years is the four stages of the development of egoism that they are still going through. We are going through it also because our earthly path does not stop here. Egoism still manifests in us until we completely reverse it into its opposite.

Question: A few thousand years ago, man emerged from an animal through a natural evolutionary process. Can we also call what we must go through now an evolutionary process?

Answer: Sure. The same upper force called the Creator controls us, gradually develops  egoistic properties in us on the inanimate, vegetative, animate, and human levels. Each level consists of the same four sublevels.

Question: That is, as I live these levels develop within me. For example, the animate level in me is a person who works, takes care of himself, his family, and his entire material life. Then the level of the human within human begins to develop in me. How is it manifested?

Answer: In pursuit of great desires. On Earth even today, you can see tribes, peoples, and civilizations that live in the Stone Age, on trees, and in other conditions. The difference between them is in the level of the desires that exist in them. In accordance with them, these people develop an appropriate environment around them, relationships with each other, and so on.

Question: How can one determine that someone is developing at the human level? These are not just some altruistic qualities. There are a lot of altruists around who run and help everyone.

Answer: A person usually does not realize how these desires develop. For example, we look at a child and see that he is growing, he already has some other desires that are not the same as before. As the child does not understand this, so do we not understand it.

Our desires change. A hundred years ago, we were completely different people. We look at how people lived 100, 200, 300, or 1,000 years ago, and we see that they were quite different from us in many ways. Thus, we go through the stages of the development of egoism in us.

Question: Let us say there are two people before us. In one of them, the level of human desires is developing, but not in the other. What is different between them?

Answer: The rate of development of egoism in each of them.
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From KabTV’s “Spiritual States” 3/26/21

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Question: Philosophy justifies egoism. It is no coincidence that one of the theorists of the modern postmodern paradigm, José Ortega y Gasset, said: “I am I and my circumstances.” Ninety-nine percent of people now live by this formula. How do you think about this?

Answer: I try to live not according to circumstances, but according to the way Kabbalah interprets it. It shows that the world is undergoing very serious changes. We see this every day.

But the question arises: What can we change? On one hand, circumstances give us some framework within which we can act. On the other hand, we have no right to agree with them because otherwise our egoistic nature will lead us into such states that we may not get out from.

Therefore, according to the wisdom of Kabbalah, we must still fight with our nature, that is, understand it but not agree with it and be creative about the egoism that underlies it.

Kabbalah shows a very simple way to this, which we have never used. If we try to connect correctly according to certain laws, we will come to the point that our individual vectors will join together and become one common vector.

In the Torah this is described as follows. There was once one great soul of Adam. But the fact that he allegedly ate the forbidden fruit from the tree of knowledge of good and evil, that is, let egoism inside himself, he shattered into tiny parts—all his thoughts, all desires. Naturally, it was not a person, but a common image. And we are his children, so we are called ” the sons of men,” the sons of Adam.

This means that in each of us there is a small soul (soul means desire and intention). But all our souls are divided: egoism has gone inside this huge, massive structure, has torn it into parts and is between them, like the sea, whose waters cut the earth and form an archipelago. That’s how we are separated from each other.

If we want a different future for ourselves, an exalted, spiritual one, then we must turn this sea of egoism that separates us from each other into the opposite, into connection between us. Then we will reach another dimension, another world, in which our egoistic intentions and desires will not separate us, but, on the contrary, will altruistically connect us, and we will again gather into one single image of a Human with a capital letter.

This is what we must come to. And our nature pushes us precisely because it constantly proves to us that in our present nature we will find neither peace nor rest.
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From KabTV’s “Together about Important Things” 7/18/18

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We all have to go through two stages of our path, and the first is the exile from spirituality. This stage is very long because first the inanimate, vegetative, and animate nature develop.

Then a human appears who also has to go through four levels of development: inanimate, vegetative, animate, and speaking inside human, until he begins to realize that he is under control of the will to receive for his own sake. Egoism keeps us in slavery, preventing us from being free. Therefore, a human himself defines his state as an exile from the force of bestowal, the force of love and connection.

Throughout history, only a few people have come to this conclusion, but in our time we have entered the period of what is called the “last generation,” when nature pushes all of humanity to reveal that we are in exile from the will to bestow, from mutual love.

Egoism holds us in this terrible slavery. When we realize this, we will understand that there is only one way out: to shout, to ask, to demand with all our might, the upper force, which has placed us in this exile, to bring us to freedom. The difference between exile and redemption is only one letter “Aleph – א,” which symbolizes the revelation of the upper force, the Creator, in our world.

If the Creator is revealed in our lives, we will feel that we are coming out of exile, out of the control of our egoism, which no longer locks us in the dark corner of the entire vast reality. Therefore, the most important thing to begin with is to realize that we are slaves of our egoism, our Pharaoh, that we work for him with devotion and love and obediently fulfill all his whims. We do not detach ourselves from him, so much so that we are in solidarity with him. It is only when we begin to receive blows for associating ourselves with egoism that we recognize that it is concerned with its own good, and not with our benefit.

This revelation comes only through a special illumination from above, from the Creator, who awakens in us the feeling that there is another governance in the world, not only of this terrible egoism. There is another governance in the world of the forces of connection and love.

Now we feel ourselves between these two forces fighting with each other, and we want to belong to the force of love, the force of good. The evil force that controls us is egoistic, and therefore, it is not related to the upper force. It turns out that instead of enjoying our egoism, we begin to perceive it as evil and ask the Creator to take us out of the control of the evil force.

This is how we gradually become free from the enslavement of our egoism, we come out of Egypt, out of the control of the Pharaoh, the evil inclination, and come under the control of the good force of bestowal and love. We are always under control of one of these two forces, it is impossible otherwise: either one or the other. If one of them rises, the other one falls, and vice versa.

Therefore, looking at the historical process that humanity has gone through, we can say that it is all called the Egyptian exile, starting from the first days of the creation of the world. There was not even a human being yet, but the will to receive was already dominating the world. Only there was no one to identify it and to want to change this dominion.

When a person discovers the control of egoism over him, he tries to come out of it, and then he enters the next stage already outside of Egypt, in the land of Israel.

There is nothing more than these two states: either Egypt or the land of Israel, and now we stand right on the border between them, between these two desires. Let us hope that we will quickly discover the control of the evil inclination over us and that we will not want to remain under it, will define egoism as evil, and we will move to the control of the good desire.

Therefore, there are only two states in history: Egypt and Israel. Until today, all of humanity has existed in Egypt with the exception of  selected individuals, the Kabbalists, who have already emerged from it and are illuminating our path. All the rest of nature is under the control of egoism, but in our time we are already able to reach bestowal.

The sooner we discover that we are under the hated control of Pharaoh and want to escape from this slavery, the closer we will come to the exodus from Egypt. This discovery will be made by all of humanity, with the realization of the evil of egoism that poisons our lives, and then we will all exit to freedom.
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From the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 3/23/21, “Pesach (Passover)”

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My new article on Linkedin “When It Comes to Vaccines – There Is No Union in the European Union”

It’s hard to describe the European Union Covid-19 vaccines fiasco better than James McAuley did it in his most recent column on The Washington Post: “Imagine being in the middle of the greatest public health crisis in a century,” he writes, “and finally, thanks to the ingenuity of science, you get the tools to end that crisis — but, out of nowhere, you decide you won’t use them. Welcome to the European Union, where political leaders dwell in mansions of bureaucratic incompetence and political arrogance as a third wave of covid-19 cases threatens the continent and new variants emerge.” Later in the column, McAuley asks what it will take “before the E.U. vaccinates its citizens as if their lives were on the line?”

Covid-19 is just the first and mildest blow; many more are en route. The first blow has claimed millions of lives. The looming blows will claim many more. As long as we make egoism our king, life will punish us, and the ego will not let us recover. Blow after blow, humanity will collapse under the pain until we all realize that our real enemy is not nature, which inflicts such blows as Covid, but our own egos, which do not let us overcome them easily and quickly.

McAuley offers many reasons that could result in such a fiasco, but I think the truth is plain and simple: It is a struggle led by nothing more than big egos that care for nothing but their own prestige. When has there been union in the European Union? Never! From its very beginning, there have been nothing but power struggles, exploitation, and abandonment of member states in need. (Remember Greece in the 2008 Financial Crisis or Italy in the first wave of the pandemic?) When these come alongside lofty statements that “Building a fair and well-functioning society is a political priority for the European Union,” to quote the EU Science Hub, or a page that the EU titled “European solidarity in action,” to document (the few) examples of solidarity in Europe in facing the Covid-19 crisis, one can’t help but feel deep mistrust in the sincerity of the leaders of the EU.

I’ve said it so many times before: An organization that is founded on egoism cannot last, and the longer it does last, the more the people under its influence suffer until they break it up. All that the EU bureaucrats manage to do, and in this they excel, is make the rich and powerful people on top, even richer and more powerful.

“They shall sow the wind, and they shall harvest a storm,” said Prophet Hosea (8:7). Indeed, the spirit of alienation and exploitation that has pervaded the EU from its onset killed every chance of solidarity and is now costing the lives of thousands of Europeans every day while all of the developed countries are already emerging from the pandemic. When you do not nurture solidarity, you cannot expect to have it at a time of need.

Covid-19 is just the first and mildest blow; many more are en route. The first blow has claimed millions of lives. The looming blows will claim many more. As long as we make egoism our king, life will punish us, and the ego will not let us recover. Blow after blow, humanity will collapse under the pain until we all realize that our real enemy is not nature, which inflicts such blows as Covid, but our own egos, which do not let us overcome them easily and quickly.

In fact, if for each blow we would bolster our unity, we would achieve such union in human society that we would secure a good life for every person on the planet. We are already capable of it, but we have no desire for it since no one gets the credit, and without a trophy for the ego, there is no motivation to exert for it. At the same time, there is strong motivation to prevent anyone else from helping humanity so that no one else will get the credit.

Until we learn to forge true solidarity, we will not have a good life on this planet. Be it a fourth wave of Covid, extreme weather of unprecedented intensity, or some other ploy that nature might pull, we will be forced into greater and greater discomfort and pain until we surrender and dethrone our egos.

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My new article on Linkedin “Envy – How to Rein In the Monster”

As Israel is opening up malls and commerce is returning to full speed, the ailments of Western society are reappearing as though we’ve never had Covid. High-end stores are so crammed that people are standing in long lines outside of them hoping to spend a lot of money on posh accessories. You’d think that the coronavirus would have cured us of these ills, but it has done nothing of the kind. On the contrary, it seems as though people are shopping with vengeance.

People value what they see that others value. They buy things that others appreciate because it makes other people jealous. If we promote other values, people will naturally shift to showing off that they excel in those other values, for the exact same purpose of arousing other people’s envy. If we showed admiration to people who contribute to unity, solidarity, and cohesion in society, many people would want to be that way.

But why are they shopping in the first place? Do they really need new accessories? Probably not. In most cases, they are shopping to show that they shopped; that is the only reason they need. People are shopping, especially when it comes to elite fashion, in order to show that they have lots of money and make other people jealous. Were it not for jealousy, they wouldn’t bother spending hours in crammed lines and crowded shops for the questionable fun of blowing their salaries of high-end status symbols they don’t need, and possibly don’t even like.

Nevertheless, I’m happy that they’re so eager to buy. The more intensely they spend, the quicker they’ll understand that there is no real satisfaction in buying stuff that they don’t need, and the impression they make on others doesn’t make them really happy, unless you consider glee at having what others don’t a real form of happiness.

There is something more that we can do to accelerate the transition to more lasting happiness: People value what they see that others value. They buy things that others appreciate because it makes other people jealous. If we promote other values, people will naturally shift to showing off that they excel in those other values, for the exact same purpose of arousing other people’s envy. If we showed admiration to people who contribute to unity, solidarity, and cohesion in society, many people would want to be that way. They would act as if they’re kind and caring even if they aren’t, simply in order to arouse envy or not to feel inferior because they are uncaring. Other people wouldn’t know who is genuinely caring and who is not, and the impression they would get would be that everyone is like that. This would make them behave similarly, and very quickly, all of society will transform itself.

We mustn’t underestimate the power of envy; it is the most powerful force in human nature. We only need to rein it in, to direct it toward a positive direction, and our way to mending the ills of society is paved. And the sooner we start working on it, the better.
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