Question: Is the reason for all our problems, from natural disasters to the coronavirus, the lack of balance in human society between the desire to receive from society and the desire to give?

Answer: Yes, human society violates itself and everything around it. If we really were in balance with each other, corrected, not selfish, if we balanced egoism with connection and love, we would see how all of nature would follow us.

Question: To balance these two tendencies in man is a whole science. Is this within man’s power?

Answer: This is a person’s duty. One must reveal all the laws of his and the surrounding nature and bring all this to an absolute, integral, full interaction. This is man’s task not only here and now, but in general, a cosmic task.
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From the TV program “The Post-Coronavirus Era,” 4/16/20

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Question: Before, almost the entire southern part of Italy survived thanks to tourism. If there is unemployment, how will people feed their families?

Answer: I understand that now many professions, positions, enterprises, and businesses will not be able to return to their previous state.

The fact is that it is necessary to enact an absolutely clear state program. This should not just be help in the form of a handout, but a deliberate involvement of the whole society in solving this problem.

It is solved by reducing the workforce that is not necessary. At least for now. It is better to send people home and give them a minimum normal income.

We must understand how to create a new society. To do this, you need to constantly conduct conversations, discussions, but not like they are conducted now on television where various government officials are invited and they grind what they need.

It is necessary to invite specialists, scientists, but not all kinds of public figures who dream of becoming prime ministers. And then we will be enlightened and see to what state we really should come. It will shine for us more and more, and I see it.

Question: You say that only state systems can solve employment problems. If this is so, then what is the point of the Kabbalist tackling the theme of the coronavirus instead of spiritual development?

Answer: I am not saying that states can solve this problem. This is a problem for society and manufacturers. Society must decide what it needs and what it does not need any more, and take on the functions that the state has taken away from it in order to manage everything.

The fact is that such laws of competition reign in governments that they are not able to solve these problems. I do not blame them because human nature has driven us into such a state.

By no means do I believe that this should be left to the governments. Maybe they can do something, at least for now, if society protests against them by organizing demonstrations and protest marches. Indeed, many firms and enterprises will not be able to return to their normal activities.
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From KabTV’s “Fundamentals of Kabbalah,” 5/3/20

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Question: Now the quarantine has been relaxed, people have taken to the streets: restaurants, hairdressers, and shops in continuous consumption. Everything is the same as before, nothing has changed. So, why was the virus needed?

Answer: I think we cannot change in the first time around. But nevertheless, we started to doubt whether we might have been living incorrectly. Everything is revealed by comparison.

But the first time around, it is unlikely that we will be able to draw conclusions. Moreover, we have not yet returned to the past and analyzed what happened. We take our sitting at home as an incarceration, imprisonment.

And now, we will go back to work and gradually see that going back to the practices of consumption will manifest in us as negative. Then we will know what to do.
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From KabTV’s “Fundamentals of Kabbalah,” 5/3/20

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Question: You say that nature is an integral system and that everything in it is built on love. But we know from history that everything in nature is built on competition, survival, and suppression of one’s neighbor. How would you comment on this?

Answer: It is very simple. Each of us consists of two parts: animate and human—in one form. In the animate form, we submit to the general evolutionary development and nothing can be done about it.

And the human in us should be above competition, only in mutual assistance. Kabbalah teaches how to create a human society from us animals. This is the only way we can survive. Otherwise, we will simply disappear—even as animals.
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From KabTV’s “Fundamentals of Kabbalah,” 4/12/20

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Medium published my new article “Surfing the Pandemic Waves”

Public discourse now speaks of a second wave of COVID-19 when the first one is far from over. Just when we thought the epidemic was under control, the opening of the economy has brought new contagion outbreaks around the world. What does this portend for the future? We may try to avoid flip-flopping policies on how to tackle the pandemic and its consequences, but the truth is that now we only see the tip of the iceberg of what lies in store. What we do know for certain is that our way of life will change forever. The most important thing for us to understand is that nature is driving us to new forms of connection among us since we all influence and depend on one another, just as the waves of coronavirus infection illustrate.

“The more we unite through the heart and soul, and the more we understand nature’s guidance today, our anxiety about the future will decrease. Our consciousness will be enlarged and we will begin to discover a higher dimension which nurtures us so wisely, the force of nature. This is a force whose signature characteristic is love and pure giving.”

The coronavirus will not quickly disappear from among us. It may remain for years though it may change its form. This is why it is imperative that we shape society and the economy in accord with the emerging reality. Experts warn that within a few months we will be in the deepest recession since WWII. Businesses will collapse, people’s savings will run dry and they will be unable to return loans, pay off mortgages, or pay rent. The unequivocal signs are already here. Therefore, we need to revolutionize our priorities.

Countries must invest their resources in the vital industries that can ensure that every person’s basic needs are met at a reasonable level. Public budgets should secure funds for this first and foremost on the list of priorities and not squander resources in other areas because of pressure from once powerful stakeholders. Luxury industries will certainly suffer a severe blow due to the economic crisis. It would be pointless to attempt to recuperate them because their products will have very little demand.

Thought must precede action: Tomorrow’s humanity will need a much calmer lifestyle, free from senseless running back and forth, one centered around the essentials instead of the superfluous. People will need to invest primarily in building deep ties among them to discover in them the taste of life. Our good future lies in research and development of connections and love among all people, and this enterprise will be our exit to a new world.

Until we reach these desired human connection, we must cleanse ourselves of non-vital businesses which only increase the destructive competition among people, suck out precious resources from nature, and pollute the air, earth, and sea.

The era of coronavirus is peeling away the non-vital husks of an outdated way of life in an intelligent manner. Gradually, it will slim the economy to healthy and sustainable dimensions and the non-essential fat will fall away.

Governments will have to think outside the box in order to provide employment and livelihood to the millions who will be ejected from the labor market. The best solution will be to provide the citizens with universal income conditional upon active participation in social education and community building.

This escape route through education will offer a gateway to a new understanding in humanity about the changes taking place in this special era and what they mean in the development of man, society, and the world, as well as the kind of new relationships that must be established among people. Those who study will also work a few hours in areas which build community and society.

The happiest and healthiest possible life evolves out of caring for others, just like a mother who is always concerned about her children and finds an incomparable sense of satisfaction and vitality in providing this care. Although seemingly contradictory to the notions of social distancing, the era of corona is actually here to teach us how to correctly approach each other, — the true form of connection at the internal level from heart to heart, and how to avoid hurting each other.

The more we unite through the heart and soul, and the more we understand nature’s guidance today, our anxiety about the future will decrease. Our consciousness will be enlarged and we will begin to discover a higher dimension which nurtures us so wisely, the force of nature. This is a force whose signature characteristic is love and pure giving.

Therefore, the coronavirus is not just an epidemic meant to frustrate and destroy, but an evolutionary riddle for us to solve together. Our success will depend on our unity, not only to ride the wave of the pandemic, but to reach the crest of the wave for a healthy and secure future.
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Comment: We know that people are immersed in the Internet now; they don’t seem to need anyone, just a gadget and internet access. Recently, an experiment was conducted: five days in a single, cozy cell without the internet.

My Response: That is a death-like experience.

Question: This was in the UK, where TV Channel Five launched the show called “In Solitary: The Anti-Social Experiment.” Each person had a single, comfortable cell with a soft bed, sanitary conditions, and wholesome food for five days.

But the main condition was complete solitude. People could only draw, read, and talk to themselves. And within a few hours, they began to panic.

Everyone coped with this panic in different ways: one pressed the rescue button, one started talking to the surveillance cameras, and another had an upset stomach. Only one person, a female blogger, who had set herself the goal of getting rid of her habit in this way, had brought pencils, markers, and a lot of paper, and she drew some meaningless pictures.

What was the conclusion of the experiment? Researchers write that a social
being, a human, suffers from loneliness, but a citizen of the modern world with constant internet access does not fully realize this until he is completely isolated.

Mankind and loneliness, are these categories compatible?

Answer: A person, who had always been closed in the world and now finds himself torn away from it, feels a huge vacuum. He worked at the pace of this world, day, night, news, and so on, all of these programs and calls, and suddenly he no longer has access to any of it. Of course, this is a huge void for him.

People used to live in such emptiness. I remember my childhood and youth until the 90s. In 1995, I created my first website kabbalah.info. Before that, how did we live? We had newspapers and television. Before television, which came to me in 1955, we had newspapers and books.

Question: What has changed in a person in just 50 years that he suddenly cannot be alone?

Answer: A person has a connection with the world and he cannot live without this connection. It is not the electronic web; it is the web of connections between us that has opened up. We can no longer exist without feeling each other. But, we fill this feeling with completely different thoughts, news, and with other unnecessary things. But, in general, we have discovered a web of connections between us.

I feel like I am connected to it and I cannot do without it. It is like air to me. I am connected and I feed from it; I get this information feed and it keeps me going. Without it, I do not feel like I am alive.

Question: If you take out the layers of information that a person receives, what is still important to him in this web of communication?

Answer: Look at what is going on in the evening on TV news and sports programs. Here, they dance, they shout at each other, and argue. All of this is now called “the world” or “our world.”

If it were all turned off, do you understand what would happen to the world? The world would plunge into the Middle Ages. The Middle Ages! People will have such a lack of information! They don’t need it and they can, in principle, survive without it, but they won’t be able to. They are already different.

You can view the news as it is presented and you will see that out of every 100 news items, maybe one or two will interest you enough to open them, and all the rest, you don’t need. But you cannot do without them.

Comment: Researchers write that all of this information showered on a person causes stress because it is so superfluous to him.

My Response: But he cannot be without stress.

Question: How would you fill the content of these programs?

Answer: I can choose the content, but it would require completely different people. We need to educate people. It is necessary for us to educate people regarding how to discover the source of life and the source of the world and how, not to be lost in these streams of news that are composed for them.

A person is in need of good connection. In need of good communication! And the web doesn’t make any connections. It’s just like a spider’s web.

Question: What is a web of good communication?

Answer: This is when each person thinks about how to do good to others.

Comment: And then, if he is isolated…?

My Response: This web will still act on him because others will think about him.

Question: And you don’t need any gadgets for that?

Answer: Nothing is needed! Only good intentions that will connect people with each other. People will be connected in such a way that everyone will feel one another’s good intentions and nothing else is needed. And, from this, everyone will be delighted and feel a sense of meaning of existence and in their capacity to rise above their “I” and so on. This is necessary.

I have no doubt that we will succeed.
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From KabTV’s “News with Dr. Michael Laitman,” 3/3/20

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Question: If all unnecessary jobs disappear, 90% of the population will remain unemployed. What will these people do and how will the economy support itself without these jobs?

Answer: But the people who occupied these places did nothing useful. What did they work for? To throw money around?

What are we afraid of giving up? Doing useless work: taking from one place so another can pull it out and throw it to another place? So some people can dig a hole and others fill it up?

Question: Baal HaSulam wrote in the newspaper The Nation: “Clearly, the measure of egoism inherent in every creature is a necessary condition in the actual existence of the creature. Without it, it would not be a separate and distinct being in itself. Yet, this should not at all deny the measure of altruism in a person. The only thing required is to set distinct boundaries between them: The law of egoism must be kept in all its might, to the extent that it concerns the minimum existence. And with any surplus of that measure, permission is granted to waive it for the well-being of one’s fellow person.”

We only need to find out what the benefit of others is. This is not just to redistribute production toward minimal necessities, but to determine what benefits will flow from this to others. How will we experience this, and what is this trend?

Answer: I think we need to create a new group of states that can really solve this. But there must be leaders who understand the integrality of the world and the need of the moment to bring it to an integral form.

Question: Where can we find such leaders and politicians? Look what is happening! Trump is now blaming China, China is responding in the same way, conflicts arise. The same trends as before. The world has not changed.

Answer: We, the Kabbalists, need to move in the direction of our vision. We must explain, in every possible way, advertise and disseminate our knowledge, which is consistent with the laws of nature.

Nature will not allow us to do anything else. As soon as everyone starts going back to the old ways, the mutated virus will hit even harder. Now its consequences are harmless. According to statistics during the worldwide reign of the virus, far fewer people have died than if it had not existed.

But the virus works for the whole system of humankind, and if we do not do what it is pointing us to, i.e., if we do not become integrally interconnected, then nothing good will come out of it. Wait and see. We are still on the way toward it. I see that, unfortunately, all countries want to return to the way things were in the past.
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From KabTV’s “Fundamentals of Kabbalah,” 3/5/20

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Question: Now in many countries people are starting to slowly take to the streets, fill up coffee houses, and go shopping. Can this going out of the house be called going out of the crisis?

Answer: No. Going out of the crisis means that we really understand what it means to be in the crisis, to get out of it, and to already have exited it. Until how we have not even delved into what happened to us.

We do not know the nature of this virus, how to completely get rid of it, whether it has other forms, whether they are recurring, etc. Therefore, we cannot confidently claim that we know where we are.

Everything is as usual: a person wants to live as conveniently, comfortably, and simply as possible. We can no longer afford to stay at home and, and therefore, they say we are, “exiting the crisis,” running away from where we stayed closed in for a while. But I would not say that by this we are really getting rid of the crisis.

The fact is that the crisis is a consequence of the pressure of nature on us, which wants to see us integrally connected with all its parts. Its inanimate, vegetative, and animate levels work together in unison. And due to the fault of human egoism, nature throws us out of its framework, puts us outside of itself.

By its crises and cataclysms, tsunamis, volcanoes, hurricanes, and earthquakes, nature indicates that we arouse very bad, unbalanced forces in it and do not want to be its integral part. In order to do this, we need to become interdependent, interconnected between us. But we do not want that and cannot do it; therefore, humanity has problems.

Now we have reached the point where nature begins to push us to happiness with a stick. So all kinds of viruses are activated, which will inevitably push us toward connection, toward a more correct attitude toward ourselves and nature. In the near future, this will become clearer, until we understand how to behave.

Question: The feeling of the crisis is a feeling that evil rules the world?

Answer: The feeling of the crisis is those compulsive forces of nature that manifest themselves in order to balance the egoistic disturbances that we cause in nature.
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From KabTV’s “Fundamentals of Kabbalah,” 5/10/20

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Question: We do not understand the relationship between man and nature, let alone the relationship between people. They are totally hidden.

For example, the destruction of sparrows in China in the 60s led to famine in a country of tens of millions of people. The extermination of cats in North Korea caused the emergence of a huge number of rats and snakes, resulting in the need to import cats from neighboring countries.

The destruction of wolves also always leads to an imbalance in the number of deer and wild boars because wolves, in general, only kill sick animals.

There are many such examples. But my question concerns the human level in particular. Do you agree with the statement that in nature the general is more important than the particular?

Answer: But not one at the expense of the other. If we take an integral system, then each part in it is equal in value to the entire system. Otherwise, the system will not be integral, complete, and absolute.

Remark: It is also stated that if a person is needed by the general system, then he exists, and if not, he does not exist.

My Comment: I can say this about inanimate, vegetative, and animate nature, but not about man, because he, with his egoism, interferes with nature, dominates it, and can do anything, even against common sense.

Question: Scientists say that all systems go through some kind of evolutionary process, development. In the beginning, there is always a process of rejection and separation in order to move to the next state, to unification, but at a higher level. Now nature has divided us with a coronavirus. We are developing a kind of virtual reality. What is the next stage of the level of connection between us?

Answer: We still need to realize that our connection should, first of all, be integral and lead us to unity. We are not animals that unite instinctively. We are people, but we are against this connection. Egoism plays tough on us. So, we will have to recognize its corruption and rise above it.
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From KabTV’s “The Post-Coronavirus Era,” 4/16/20

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My new article on BIZCATALYST “The COVID-19 New World of Work”

We’re reopening the economy while COVID-19 is still here, well into 2020. From the looks of it, there will be COVID-21, too. And if this prediction comes true, will the economy survive it? What business can endure alternating for so long between opening and closing?

Some industries are essential. There is no question that food, housing, gas, electric power, and education are required. As for the rest, only a fraction of the pre-coronavirus transactions were truly necessary. In the new reality, what is not essential dies.

But governments will need money. Essential sectors such as food production and various services will provide work to some of the people, but the majority will be out of work for good. We have entered a world where joblessness is the norm, and occupation the exception. How will people live? If countries spend their currency reserves on futureless sectors, they will not have the resources to support people through the process of adapting their lives to the coronavirus era.

To adapt the society to the new era, all those who are out of work today, and will probably remain so, should be admitted into a program that will inform them about the new reality and teach them how to live in it. During the course, they will receive a full scholarship that will sustain them and their families.

The courses will not only provide information about the new world; they will also help the participants develop the right attitude to living in a world where people have abundant free time.

Just as people learn about the mindset required to succeed in the business world, or the attitude required to succeed in the high-tech industry, people will need to get acquainted with the frame of mind of the COVID era.

Accordingly, the program will include exercises in social communication that builds connections suitable for a world where everyone is dependent on everyone else, regular jobs are scarce, and people must rely on each other for their survival. Gradually, people will come to find value in bonding and socializing more than in their previous values such as obtaining wealth and power.

As the courses focus on fostering bonds among people, mutual responsibility, awareness of others’ needs, and concern for society, people will begin to think of these positive social values as the product of their learning. Just as it is possible to accumulate wealth, it is possible to accumulate happiness.

The more people become socially integrated, the happier and safer they will feel. People’s values and aspirations from life will change to ones that give them true and lasting satisfaction.

In this way, the coronavirus will usher us into a new reality, where some of the people tend to everyone’s sustenance, and the rest of the people tend to everyone’s happiness.
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