From My Facebook Page Michael Laitman 2/20/22

Every deficiency, lack, or negativity we feel, every worry we experience, and every concern in our hearts, are only the results of the severance of the loving connections we once had with one another. This is why the only way to correct anything in our lives and in the world around us is to restore and improve our human connections.

When we move toward connection rather than toward separation and hostility, as is the case today, everything that seems threatening, menacing or empty, every ache in our hearts and every pain in our bodies will become positive, filled with joy, connection, and love. All we have to think about is changing our relationships from hostility to friendship.

Because we are different, we are stronger together and weaker apart. When we care for one another, the differences between us complement each other to form a whole, and wholesome society. When we are apart, they weaken us. This is why we needn’t try to make everyone the same, but rather caring, and leave our views and characters as they are. Then, the whole world will find its peace and harmony.

Photo by: Baruch Ratz

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From My Facebook Page Michael Laitman 2/3/22

In old movies and in many Disney films, there is a classic format for a love story: A beautiful young princess is in trouble, usually taken captive by a villain, a brave knight comes to her rescue, she falls madly in love with him, they marry, and live happily ever after. Alas, in reality, the princess is neither beautiful nor regal, the knight is neither brave nor noble, and the marriage is neither happy nor long. Love is not a crush; it does not just happen. Love is a relationship, a process of building a bond one step at a time. Only people who have made lifelong friendships and have been there for each other can say they love each other.

People like to remember the butterflies in their stomach when they think about falling in love, but that is not a foundation for a lasting relationship. If you feel butterflies in your stomach, it is more likely a bad stomach than real love. A superficial acquaintance is just that: superficial. It makes no sense to pick someone to share your life with just because you had a good time at a party.

You can meet anywhere, even at a party, but love is something you build. When you have been together for a long time and you have reached a point where you trust your partner to help you when you need it, and your partner trusts you to do the same, then you can begin to think of it as love.

There are two levels of love: The first is the one I just described, which is basically a strong emotional bond made of friendship and trust. The second, deeper kind is one where the lover lives to please the beloved and derives joy from that rather than from self-centered satisfactions.

Achieving this kind of love requires more than trust; it requires concessions, deeper and deeper concessions. “Love,” my teacher RABASH used to say, “is a pet that feeds on mutual concessions.” When two people constantly seek where they can make even more concessions in order to please the one they love, their love for one another will continually grow.

Therefore, the secret to a happy life is to keep feeding the love you have for each other with concessions, putting your partner first, and you second, if at all. If you live in this way, you will transcend time, your love will be infinitely stronger in the end than in the beginning, and you will never tire of each other or of life.

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From My Facebook Page Michael Laitman 2/1/22

Why do children wake up with their eyes wide open and jump out of bed while we open them just wide enough to see the phone so we can set it to snooze? Why are young people energetic and ready to “conquer the world” while older people are cautious and hesitant? Can we stay young-spirited forever? After all, if life is not a game, there is no excitement in it. And if there is no excitement in life, what is the point of living?

If we want to keep enjoying, we need to make life a lifelong game. This game is very different from anything we know. It is not about what we can receive, but about what we can discover! By connecting to other people, we discover new worlds, other people’s worlds!

How do we achieve this? Quite simply, we need to focus on others rather than on ourselves. This may sound simple, but if you try it, you will realize how self-absorbed you are.

We are all like that. Even those who feel that they are generous and giving are absorbed in their giving and do not see how much they do it for their own interest, and how they are focused on their own benefit when they give. Giving is fine, but the focus is the point here. Had the focus been on the receiver, the giver would have discovered countless revelations that are hidden from a self-centered eye.

For the game to succeed, you need partners. It is impossible to play the game of giving without people to whom you can give and from whom you can receive. Therefore, there must be a group of people, up to ten or so, who play the game together.

In order to succeed in discovering the other players’ worlds, we need to think good thoughts about them. Otherwise, we will have no incentive to approach them, no desire to discover their world. We can think good thoughts about each other if we do good things for one another. These can be the simplest things, but they must make us feel good about each other. Positive thoughts about each other bring us closer, and closeness opens our minds and hearts to others, so we can see the world through their eyes.

As with any game, the more we practice, the better we get, and the harder, yet more rewarding the game becomes. But unlike any other game, as we improve in it, we will find that our entire perspective on life changes and expands, and we become wiser and more competent.

The game of life, unlike any other game, reveals to us the secrets of life, the secrets of reality, because when you can look at something from all angles, nothing remains hidden from you.

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From My Facebook Page Michael Laitman 1/31/22

While other countries celebrate Mother’s Day and Father’s Day separately, Israel celebrates its annual Family Day, to honor the family unit and its centrality to Israeli life. Each year, Family Day in Israel falls on a different date, as it follows the Hebrew calendar rather than the Gregorian calendar, and this year it takes place tomorrow, February 1.

If you look at the statistics, it seems that the family has lost much of its centrality. This is as true for Israel as it is true for most of the world, especially the western world. As of 2021, “There were 37 million one-person households in 2021, or 28% of all U.S. households. In 1960, single-person households represented only 13% of all households.” Moreover, “34% of adults age 15 and over had never been married.” Clearly, the family institution has lost its shine.

There are several reasons for this. First, people live much longer today than they did a hundred or a hundred and fifty years ago. At the same time, they are not taught about the importance of maintaining the family unit. When upbringing does not instill in us the importance of maintaining the family unit through trials and tribulations, people give it up quite easily.

In order to do something that is not immediately rewarding, people today need meaning. We live in a time when people cannot do what does not make sense to them, what seems to have no meaning. In order for people to maintain the family unit, they must feel that it is important. Otherwise, they will just get up and leave.

The world today does not support staying in the traditional family structure. People can take care of themselves financially and do not need the support of a spouse or a partner. As a result, as soon as there is a disagreement, and there are always disagreements because no two people are the same, they move out and move on.

Therefore, in order for people to choose to stay in a family unit, there must be a reason that is greater than the family itself. According to the wisdom of Kabbalah, if we seek spiritual correction, then within the process of correction we will also develop a connection with a partner. In the end, nature will require this correction from us, and in the process of correction, we will feel the mutual commitment of a man to a woman and a woman to a man.

A corrected family relationship is part of our correction. Until we achieve correction, the state of humanity will continue to deteriorate. But perhaps if we can convey the benefits that a correct, spiritual relationship brings with it, people will not want to part ways. It all depends on the meaning that people find in their relationships because as I said above, without a spiritual connection, people will have no reason or ability to maintain family relationships.

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From My Facebook Page Michael Laitman 1/17/22

Over the past weeks, a strange story has been running through media outlets from the Wall Street Journal to the New York Post and other news outlets in the US, the UK, and Europe, that Scotland is set to officially pardon and apologize to more than 3,800 witches. The witches will not get any benefit from the pardon and apology, nor will any of their family members. They have all been dead for centuries, as the witch hunts took place between “1563, when the Witchcraft Act was brought in, and 1736, when it was finally repealed,” according to The Guardian.

I would not have bothered to mention this were it not brought to my attention by one of my students. Since it was, I must say that the whole thing is pointless, and potentially harmful. It will be of no benefit to anyone. If anything, it might arouse an outburst of witchcraft and other oddities that contribute nothing to humanity.

The fact that we even bother with such things, and that many newspapers report on them, shows that we have made no progress since the 1700s. Centuries after the repeal of the Witchcraft Act, the world is still teeming with “visionaries,” “prophets,” and all sorts of “seers.”

The correct way to relate to our past is to acknowledge that this is how it had to happen, and that there are such stories in every nation. We should not dwell on them; it is nonsense.

The problem is that we don’t know how to relate to anything correctly, not to religion, not to magic, and not to charms. We are so confused that we don’t even know what we don’t know about ourselves. We don’t know why things happen, where they come from, and who or what controls our lives. We try to find support, but we have nothing to rely on.

We need to realize why we are here and how to achieve our purpose in life. Instead of clinging to superstitions, we need to rise a little higher than our sorry daily lives and find the higher, nobler purpose of our lives.

Our world is ruled by a force that is the absolute good. We, on the other hand, are ruled by a quality that is the complete opposite of it. In order to build the world properly, we must transform ourselves and become like the absolute good, to synchronize ourselves with the force that governs all of existence.

The place to start the transformation is among ourselves, in our relationships. If we establish our relations on mutual responsibility and helping one another, we will create a different world.

This has nothing to do with God, Satan, or the like. In other words: We must learn to live for each other and not for ourselves. Then, we will not need superstition or similar nonsense to improve our world because our attitude toward each other will make it good.

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From My Facebook Page Michael Laitman 1/15/22

Not long ago, there was a story in the press about a disabled twelve-year-old boy whose class went on a hiking trip. The boy thought he’d have to miss the excursion and was very sad about it, but his classmates decided they were not going to let it happen. They arranged for a special wheelchair and took him along. Throughout the hike, they pushed him along the trail, and the boy felt like one of them, an equal among equals.

There is a profound lesson in this story. On the surface, it seems like the classmates were wonderful kids who helped their disabled classmate, and he was the handicapped whom they helped. This is true, but it is only part of the truth, and not the deeper part. The deeper part is that through his disability, the boy helped his classmates rise above themselves, above their egos, and connect with another human being. That gift he has given them is the greatest gift that anyone can give.

By allowing others to help, a disabled person gives the helpers an opportunity to connect, to work together. When we emerge from the sense of self, from the obsessive preoccupation with what we want, how to get what we want, how not to get hurt, and all the other “Me! Me! Me!” thoughts, we enter a new world, carefree and happy. Disabled people, who desperately need our help to do what we take for granted, make it possible for us to venture into that new world precisely through their vulnerability.

Our duty to them, therefore, is to do what we can to make them feel that they are not limited by their situation, that they are equal to us in every way. It is as if nature is sending us a message calling us to rise to a new world of freedom from ourselves, and the bearers of the message are the disabled people in our midst. This is why it is our duty to help them, and our gain if we do.

Photo Caption:
Disabled veteran and first responder cyclists are seen as they participate in Project Hero’s California Challenge — a week-long bicycle ride from Santa Cruz to Los Angeles, California increasing awareness to combat the national mental health emergency posed by PTSD and TBI. Friday, October 22, 2021, in Santa Barbara, California, United States. (Photo by Jason Whitman/NurPhoto)

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From My Facebook Page Michael Laitman 1/6/22

When you look at people immersed in computer games, you get the feeling that they would readily jump into the computer and become the avatars that represent them in the game. Indeed, computer games answer all our questions. Some people even believe that in the future, we will live in a computer network and communicate with one another in a world that is completely virtual. But games have a purpose: to make us ask about reality and our place in it.

From a broader perspective, we can see that our “reality” is a game, as well. We buy, sell, win, and lose. If you tell a child what you do all day, he will tell you that you, too, play games.

For most people, today’s games are different from the ones their parents played. They no longer play ball or ride their bikes through the park. They play on their phones, alone or with other people online, or they watch others play.

There is a reason for this. We build reality according to our desires. As our desires have changed, our games have changed accordingly. As we have become more self-absorbed and narcissistic, our games have changed to reflect our self-centeredness.

Also, in many ways, children in today’s games feel like they are building their own world. This is far more satisfying than playing basketball, for example. If we, adults, felt like we were building an entire world to live in, much like kids do in Minecraft, for example, we would never come out of the game.

On the computer, on the playing field, or in life, we play to win. But thousands of years ago, the authors of the Midrash said (Kohelet Rabbah), “One does not leave the world with half one’s wishes in one’s hand, for one who has one hundred wants two
hundred; one who has two hundred wants four hundred.”

The only way to win the game is to ask about its purpose. When we ask, it is as if we stop the game and demand to know why we’re playing in the first place. In life, too, we should stop and ask why we do what we do, why there are stars, air, Earth, people, why everything exists and why we live. When we ask these questions, it is like going back to our childhood when we asked ourselves these questions. When we ask, the questions themselves bring us answers, and answers are the only victory we need.

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From My Facebook Page Michael Laitman 12/16/21

According to Reuters, “Australian scientists and artists are looking to hold the world accountable for the Earth’s future by creating an ‘indestructible’ storage device to record humanity’s handling of the climate change crisis.” The device, which they dubbed “Earth’s Black Box,” will record “every step that humanity takes towards or away from the impending climate catastrophe.”

I understand people’s need to leave something behind, and I can see why they think we are all going to die soon. But what are we going to show, how foolish we were? What have we got to show that will make future inhabitants of Earth avoid mistakes?

In my eyes, we need to focus on the here and now, on building our lives rather than documenting our deaths. After all, the only reason we are nearing extinction is our relentless drive to destroy each other, regardless of the fact that we are destroying the entire world in the process. If we only stopped trying to destroy each other, we would stop destroying the planet and everything would be fine.

Now, before we are gone, we should bring this truth to everyone’s awareness and start changing our relationships toward mutual support and improved connections. We can build solidarity among us, but we must first accept that it is necessary for our survival. Otherwise, our obstinate egos will not allow us to think of anyone but ourselves.

Even this initiative, which seems like a good idea, leads us in the wrong direction: away from thinking about connection and toward accepting an inevitable destruction. It is not inevitable; it will not happen if we focus on fostering solidarity rather than hostility.

We needn’t document the past; we need to build the future. We can build a beautiful future, but we can only build it together. If we build it for each other and not only for ourselves, everyone will be safe and sound, and there will be no climate catastrophe to document.

Photo Caption:
Scientists Build Indestructible Earth Black Box To Record Climate Change And Civilisation, 10 Dec 2021 Credit: Earth’s Black Box/Cover Images

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From My Facebook Page Michael Laitman 12/15/21

Searches for the answer to the question “Why do I feel sad?” broke all records with a 10% jump from the previous year in the rankings of the most popular Google searches for 2021. Searches on topics such as: anxiety, stress, sadness, grief and methods to cope with them increased incomparably.

I can understand why people feel that way and I feel sorry for them. Even more difficult for me is to see that this suffering is not producing any results. It is as if the pain were not big enough to bring them out into the streets to demand global change.

Obviously we need to get to a level where the suffering is already coming from multiple directions and is felt by everyone. Only then will we begin to understand that across all the worries and problems, we need to connect with each other, to unite to influence leaders, to drive out the blight, to bring down inflation and to eliminate sadness.

I see this clearly: all human suffering stems from a lack of connection between us. We do not have good, friendly and amicable relations. Yet, simultaneously we are interdependent of each other and our happiness is dependent on the happiness of others, but we refuse to accept this reality.

Instead, we do not care that we cause harm to others, we do not curb our egoism, our relentless penchant for self-benefit, that drives us to commit harm and to be indifferent.

When suffering inevitably increases (Google searches show suffering is trending upward worldwide), then collectively we can recognize the problem and its solution, but when will that happen? How many more blows and of what magnitude will we have to endure? We are like heedless, stubborn children who do not want to hear anything. We do not want to acknowledge that we live by the laws of the ego. So, through blows and catastrophes nature will compel us to realize we have no choice but to submit to and abide by its laws since we are surrounded by and enclosed within the inescapable force of nature.

The inanimate, vegetative, and animal levels in creation practice mutuality based on their interdependence, and therefore the general natural system preserves them and provides the balance between them. Only the human race acts contrary to this system and shows no tendency to reciprocity; it singularly disrupts this equilibrium. We receive only for ourselves according to the laws of egoism and are unwilling to give according to the laws of nature. Thus, we disturb the balance not only between us, but also in all the other levels of nature, and they, like a mighty boomerang, smack us right back.

The year 2021 has been a year of discovering great inadequacies in the relationships in human society, a revelation of so much ugliness of the selfishness that dominates the human race and drives it to fight, harm and destroy. We must see this exposure of our nature as an opportunity and the foundation for building a new social structure.

We will rise from the crisis in the right way if we direct our efforts toward connection and cooperation. In this way, by the end of next year, our most pressing questions in life, such as “Why am I sad?” “Why am I suffering?” will be answered and put back in order.

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From My Facebook Page Michael Laitman 12/12/21

America is deeply divided, split in half between the political left and right. It is particularly alarming when such polarization blinds American Jews to antisemitism and makes them oblivious to it if the hatred is coming from a political sphere that they concur with. That is exactly what is happening now and which may bring dangerous consequences in the future.

In a rare speech, Michael Bloomberg, the Jewish-American billionaire and former New York Mayor, recently called on U.S. Jews to refrain from partisanship and open their eyes to “antisemitic violence that is deeply unsettling,” and coming from all sides. The hatred is manifested as physical violence against Jews, damage to synagogues and subversive conspiracies on social media.

“When faced with these kinds of attacks, we like to imagine that our community will naturally put aside its differences and stand together in solidarity,” Bloomberg said. “Yet history records that the opposite is often the case. The Talmud teaches that the Second Temple was destroyed in part because of baseless hatred — one Jew against another.”

Does Bloomberg’s statement indicate that American Jews are beginning to understand what their role is and how they should act? I hope so. However, this is not the correct way we should come to the realization of our role in the world as Jews. Not being aware of it just prolongs the agonizing pressure of hatred towards the Jewish people.

But despite the great difficulty facing American Jews, they still dream of a promising future. If they do behave in any fraternity between them, it will only be like brothers in time of need, to preserve themselves and be saved from antisemitic pressure, not out of a tendency to fundamentally investigate their origins, role, and destiny. Jews have no sense of closeness to their roots. If not for the hatred towards them from all strata of American society, which points to them negatively as Jews, they would have long ago been totally divided.

Due to the reluctance of the Jews to know who they are and what they are and due to their evasion of Judaism and their role, the antisemitic pressure continues to increase and may easily reach a similar situation to that of Nazi Germany. There, too, it all began with petty and marginal things, until it deteriorated to the point where Jews were excluded from state law, and from outside societal laws in general. If this happened in Nazi Germany which was more developed and the Jews were an integral part of it, there is no reason why it should not happen in America.

History has repeatedly tried to teach us, Jews, that we will be really valued and appreciated not for leadership among other peoples, not for financial success and prosperous business. Rather, we need to get to a point where we know exactly what to engage in, what our mission is. Know it and implement it.

Our mission is related to the free hatred that was revealed between us in the Second Temple, but the mission did not end there. Quarrels and conflicts are the basis on which we must transcend, lovingly cover all crimes and thereby set an example to the whole world that is in constant war and needs a similar method of connection. This has always been our destiny. No other people can fulfill our role, and as long as we do not perform it, the world suffers and consequently hates us.

There is no expectation here from Bloomberg and American Jewry to become unconditionally pro-Israel and develop sympathy and closeness to Israel, but the aspiration is to be pro-Jewish. For now, the State of Israel is neither an example nor a “light unto nations”, nor does it have a tendency to approach our identity and our destiny. There is nothing in today’s Israeli society that can be boasted of, spread and shown as an example of unity and cordial connection.

Every Jew, in Israel and abroad – and in general anyone who can connect to the Jewish idea – should strive to direct himself to the values of the people of Israel, to the foundations of Judaism which are connection over separation, love over hatred, “and love your neighbor as yourself”—this is the whole Torah.
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