My new article on Linkedin “A Peace Treaty or a Piece Treaty?”

The new term for a peace treaty is “normalization agreement.” In recent months, Israel has signed several such “treaties,” and more are in the works. I’m all for peace, but I’m afraid that the current type really means that countries just want a piece of the pie: to benefit from each other’s economic and technological advantages. This is not real peace and will not give Israel any peace of mind.

On the surface, it seems as though Arab countries have finally realized that although Israel is a small country, it’s got a significant impact on what is happening around the world, and it doesn’t look like it’s going to disappear any time soon, as our enemies wish we would. Although Israel isn’t liked much, its influence is felt in every country and region in the world. This makes diplomatic ties with Israel instrumental to every country.

It is all part of the global process we are going through. Globalization is a train that has embarked on its way and can no longer be stopped. It is connecting us increasingly tighter, and although some of us still believe that we are in the Middle-Ages and can trample each other with horses and pierce our enemies with spears without suffering the ramifications of our misdeeds, reality proves otherwise. Nations are beginning to grasp that there are only losers in a war, and diplomacy is always more lucrative than bloodshed. Because of it, and because we are becoming increasingly connected and interdependent, even Muslim countries find it harder to slight a historic and human phenomenon such as Israel.

Yet, despite the apparent normalization in relationships and the respite in overt enmity, I don’t think that these peace treaties will benefit Israel in any meaningful way. With all due respect, I view peace differently than the press. While these normalization agreements are preferable to armed conflicts, I don’t think they are bringing us any closer to the real correction of relations that we have to make, and for Israel, this is bad news. Israel needs to sign only one peace treaty: peace within itself, among its own people.

In Hebrew, shalom (peace) comes from the word “shlemut” (completeness). It means that there can be peace only when there is completeness among all the people in the nation, when they do not try to eliminate one another but to complement one another and thereby create completeness that is greater and stronger than each of them individually, but which is built, sustained, and strengthened by all of them together.

In that sense, peace has nothing to do with Israel’s ties with other countries; diplomatic ties are irrelevant here. Shaking hands with Arab leaders is great for business, but that’s all it is, business. And like all business deals, they will last only as long as they are good business. When they are not, they will disintegrate. Almost twenty years ago, our normalization agreement with Morocco disintegrated because Morocco objected to Israel’s policy in the West Bank. Now, although Israel’s policy has not changed significantly, Morocco has reinstated normalization. In other words, when it’s good for business, there is peace; when it’s bad for business, there is no peace.

As I wrote above, Israel will find peace only when its people make peace among themselves by learning to complement one another rather than compete with one another to death. When we achieve this, the rest of the nations will come and learn, just as they did in antiquity, when, according to the book Sifrey Devraim, nations would “go up to Jerusalem and see Israel … and say, ‘It is becoming to cling only to this nation.’”

The people of Israel have been given a unique method, a “trick” to overcome egoism. They learned from their forefathers that to make real peace, you must preserve the differences and simultaneously champion unity as the solution to the disputes. In this way, you create a united nation that consists of countless opposites. As long as the Jews could sustain their unity above their differences, they were undefeated; their diversity of views and emboldened unity made them insurmountable. But once they let their differing views set the tone, they disintegrated, dispersed, and became the nations’ laughing stock.

Nevertheless, the Jews still hold the method, even if they’re unaware of it. This is why wherever war breaks out, the adversaries blame it on the Jews. It is not because the rivals use Jews as easy scapegoats, as some Jews believe; it is because people really do feel that Jews are responsible for the hatred in the world. In other words, they are saying that if Jews wanted, they could bring peace to the world.

But until the Jews make peace among themselves, they will not know the paramount importance of their peace to the rest of the world. They must implement it first, and the results will come later.

Until then, we will have to settle for treaties to get pieces of the pie rather than real peace.
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My new article on Linkedin “Why Israel Is Going for (Yet Another) Election”

Israel, it seems, is going for yet another general election in what seems to be a never ending series. It’s not as if these campaigns yield very different results each time, but the political deadlock seems to leave politicians with no choice but to go for one election after the other, knowing they will solve nothing. And it’s true, they won’t solve anything because when politicians want separation so that they can have their piece of the pie, nothing will be resolved. Only when a leader who genuinely wants to unite the entire people rises, Israel will be out of the impasse.

Since its beginning, Israel adopted a version of the British parliamentary system and attempted to implement it in the new country. But what works for other nations will not work for us. Just as ancient Jewish Law was fundamentally different from that of its neighbors in antiquity, so now we must nurture a system that serves our purpose in being a sovereign nation.

Israel was formed out of outcasts from various nations and tribes. These castaways rejected their faiths and traditions and joined Abraham’s group since he established his group based on the principle of unity above all differences. Abraham maintained that although we are all different, and although we harbor hatred for each other, we must cultivate the element of mercy among us and crown it as our prime goal. This is why Abraham symbolizes the quality of mercy.

Abraham did not deny the hatred among the members of his group, but stressed that only if we build above it the quality of mercy, we will build a strong nation. Centuries later, King Solomon phrased that principle succinctly when he said, “Hate stirs strife, and love will cover all crimes” (Prov. 10:12).

Israel’s leadership was always about unity, not about division. The Mishnah (Sanhedrin 4:3) writes that “The Sanhedrin was as a round semicircle so they would see each other.” The book Likutei Halachot explains what these words mean: “The love is mainly that they saw each other, for they could not tolerate one not seeing one’s friend. …The vitality is mainly through peace and love among Israel, which is regarded as seeing one another. …This is the meaning of what our sages said, ‘company or death,’ for vitality is mainly through love of friends … since when there is no love and there is separation, it is impossible to receive vitality and it is regarded as death … for the separation between each other is regarded as death.”

That was the system of governance of our forefathers. If we compare this to our current system, we can see how far we are from where we should be.

Israel has no place among the nations unless it functions the way Abraham had intended. If we don’t, the nations turn against us, as they have so many times before, and thereby force us to unite. But temporal unity will give us nothing more than a break from the pressure. If we want to resolve Israel’s problems, we have to start functioning as a spiritual nation, the way we were meant to function—a nation that spreads the light of unity above differences, and thereby becomes “a light unto nations.”

In the current system, we will keep bickering until we start fighting one another physically. Before the fall of the Second Temple, the Romans put a siege around Jerusalem and waited for the Jews inside to kill each other and make their conquest that much easier. By not realizing why we are here and what we need to do, and by insisting that only we are right and they are wrong, instead of trying to forge unity above our differences and hatred, we are doing to ourselves what our forefathers did to themselves back then. Clearly, nothing good will come out of this.
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New Life 450 – The Phenomenon Of Emigrants From Israel, Part 2
Dr. Michael Laitman in conversation with Oren Levi and Yael Leshed-Harel

If we emigrate from the land, hatred will come that will bring us back here again and will compel us to build the spiritual Israel. The problem today in Israel is that the environment doesn’t provide us with any support. The young feel that the environment is coarse and is not connected to their soul; they struggle constantly. The cost of living, security problems, uncertainty for the future, and poor education means they don’t see a future for themselves.

In order for people to feel connected to this nation and return, Israel has to build a unique force based on love and mutual responsibility. In order to stop the emigration, a new general, social education is required.
From KabTV’s “New Life 450 – The Phenomenon Of Emigrants From Israel, Part 2,” 11/11/14

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Michael Laitman, On The Times of Israel: “On Jewish Unity and Anti-Semitism – The Rise and Fall of the First Temple”

(Article No. 4 in a series) In the previous article, we described Israel’s formation into a nation and how they were given the task to be “a light unto nations” by becoming a model of unity above differences. This article is the first to explore Israel’s attempts to maintain their unity after establishing nationhood, their failure to do so, and the consequences of that failure.

Once they became a nation by vowing to unite “as one man with one heart,” the people of Israel set out to Canaan. Along the way, they had many internal struggles, as well as struggles with external foes. Their growing egos kept challenging them in new ways and they had to find new tactics to overcome them. However, as it is written in The Book of Zohar (BeShalach, item 252), “Anyone who wages a war in the Torah is rewarded with increased peace in the end.” In other words, the wars that the people of Israel fought were over keeping the vow of complete unity.

Still, soon after Israel conquered Canaan and made it the Land of Israel, the disputes grew so fierce that the nation divided into two kingdoms: the Northern Kingdom (Israel) and the Southern Kingdom (Judea). The Northern Kingdom was weaker spiritually and its people quickly abandoned their commitment to unity. The Talmud (Yoma 9b) describes the leaders of the Kingdom of Israel’s malevolence toward each other very poignantly: “Rabbi Elazar said, ‘Those people, who eat and drink with one another, stab each other with the swords in their tongues.’ Thus, even though they were close to one another, they were filled with hatred for each other.” With such relationships, it did not take long for the Kingdom of Israel to dissolve into obscurity to this day.

Meanwhile, in Judea, our forefathers did not behave much better than their now vanished relatives. The 1st century Jewish-turned-Roman historian Titus Flavius Josephus details the misconduct of our forefathers. While the list of misdeeds is far too long for the scope of this article-series, it is important to realize how brutal was the hatred of the Judeans for their brethren. In The Antiquities of the Jews (Book IX, Chap. 5), Josephus offers some gruesome details on the foul manner with which the kings of Israel treated one another. When writing about the anointing of King Jehoram, who ruled merely seventy years after King Solomon, who taught that “Hate stirs strife, and love will cover all crimes” (Prov. 10:12), Josephus says that “As soon as [Jehoram] had taken the government upon him, he betook himself to the slaughter of his brethren and his father’s friends.”

King after king, the rulers of Judea murdered one another in an astonishing display of depravity. Josephus writes that King Manasseh “barbarously slew all the righteous men that were among the Hebrews. Nor would he spare the prophets, for he every day slew some of them, till Jerusalem was overflown with blood” (Book X, Chap. 3).

Clearly, this demeanor was not sustainable, and when the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar II invaded the land of Israel, Judea was far too weak to defend against him. Although we are taught that Nebuchadnezzar conquered Judea and destroyed the First Temple, it is important to note that our sages and all the ancient texts do not attribute the fall of the Temple to Nebuchadnezzar, but to our own vices against each other.

Incidentally, this pattern of pointing the finger to our own sins as the cause of our misfortunes, rather than to external foes, was the predominant mindset in antiquity. This changed only in recent centuries, when our arrogance and self-righteousness grew to such levels that we could not see any fault in ourselves and blamed all our troubles on others, despite millennia of our own sages telling and writing otherwise.

The exile in the Babylonian captivity was short but eventful. We will cover the events that led to the threat of destruction and eventual liberation through the Cyrus Declaration in the next article, where once again, we will see that unity brings freedom and happiness, and separation brings misery to our people.

—

For much more on this topic, please see my latest publication, The Jewish Choice: Unity or Anti-Semitism: Historical facts on anti-Semitism as a reflection of Jewish social discord.
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Michael Laitman, On The Times of Israel: “The Chance We Were Given Today, 73 Years Ago”

On November 29, 1947, the UN General Assembly voted in favor of a resolution, which adopted the plan for the partition of Palestine, which paved the way for the establishment of the State of Israel. For the Jewish refugees from the Holocaust, that resolution meant hope of a safer life in a Jewish state. For the world powers, it was a way to ease the burden on their conscience after having done nothing to save the Jews throughout the war, and even prevented their escape while it was still possible. For the world, it was an unwritten, unspoken, and perhaps inadvertent contract between the Jews and humanity, where the world was to give the Jews a sovereign state, and the Jews would build in it a role model nation that would serve as “a light unto nations.”

After a heroic battle, the Jewish settlement paramilitary organization in Palestine repelled the six invading Arab armies from Egypt, Iraq, Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, and Saudi Arabia, which joined the armed forces of the Arab residents of Palestine, and established the State of Israel. It was time to start carrying out Israel’s commitment to the world.

This is when troubles began. Israel had been fraught with division from the very beginning. Zionist groups strove among themselves over power and over the way to run the struggle for the establishment of the State of Israel. Once Israel received sovereignty, these struggles did not abate but rather escalate. Waves of immigration from Arab countries and war ravaged European countries created new cultural enclaves, and every sect mocked the other sects. Many Jews from poorer countries, mainly Muslim countries such as Morocco, Libya, and Iraq, were sent to towns far from the center of the country and became what is known as “the second Israel.”

In June 1967, another misfortune struck Israel: After being threatened and harassed by its neighboring countries, and after realizing that there was no hope of avoiding another war, Israel opened fire. Within six days, and with relatively few casualties, Israel defeated and conquered territories in Egypt, Syria, and Jordan, including the Old City in Jerusalem. While the military triumph was a much required blessing, the hubris that it brought with it has been a plague we haven’t been able to shake off despite all the years that have passed, and all the failures we have suffered since then.

That hubris has only made our separation worse, and Israel has become a model of divisiveness, alienation, internal hatred, and slyness, the opposite of our intended goal in being here. Instead of mending the separation that inflicted on us the ruin of the Temple and the exile two millennia ago, our return to Israel seems to have revived the enmity within the Jewish people, and the ancient unfounded hatred is resurfacing.

The Jewish people are very opinionated and intransigent. This is our nature and nothing will change it. Nor should it change. We have been given this obstinacy not for ourselves, but precisely so as to serve as a model to the world. We must give up the notion that we can ever change each other’s mind. Instead, we must focus on nurturing unity above our different views. We need to focus not on this or that moral or ideology, as these only separate us. Rather, we should strive to elevate the value of unity itself!

Only if we focus on uniting above our differences, we will find the real merit of the differences, the real value in each distinct view, and the benefits of uniting above them. If we unite above our opposite opinions, we will create an entity that functions like any organism does, where the different, and often opposing, organs work in harmony to create a solid, healthy living being. If any part of that body were to grow weak or disintegrate, the living being would die. If all the organs operate to the fullest, this is when the organism is the healthiest and strongest.

If Israel makes peace among its vying sects, the world will look and learn from its example. If Israel does not do it, the world will regret having agreed to the creation of the Jewish state in the first place and will take whatever measures are required to eliminate it. Israel, in that sense, depends on itself. Its internal relationships will determine its external future. No other country in the world is in that position.

In Hebrew, the word “shalom” [peace] comes from the word “hashlama” [complementation]. If the struggling factions in the Jewish people learn to complement each other rather than compete and wish to annihilate each other, they will benefit, the world will benefit, and there will be peace, both in the sense of complementation, as well as in the sense of tranquility and good relationships. If the factions in Israel do not manage to unite above their differences and complement each other, then we will miss the opportunity that the world had given us on November 29, 1947, and the State of Israel will not be able to survive.
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New Life 449 – The Phenomenon Of Emigrants From Israel, Part 1
Dr. Michael Laitman in conversation with Oren Levi and Yael Leshed-Harel

The people of Israel are a group of people who are associated with our ancestor Abraham in Babylon on the basis of kindness, connection, and love. They were a group of strangers who interacted with love in order to go Yashar-El (straight to) the upper force. The land of Israel is a spiritual place to which people who have a desire for connection with others and with a higher power are drawn. People who abandon the importance of being connected together with others in the land of Israel emigrate from the land.

The people of Israel must live in the land of Israel, but in order to do this they have to return to living in connection and love. If we were “like one person with one heart, ”they would feel that in this land there is a force that belongs to them. If a spiritual revolution doesn’t happen in the land of Israel, the entire Zionist enterprise will fade away.
From KabTV’s “New Life 449 – The Phenomenon Of Emigrants From Israel, Part 1,” 11/11/14

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Evolution will certainly lead us to equivalence of form with the Creator, voluntarily or through suffering; there are only two ways. At first, the whole world develops unconsciously, only due to the forces of nature. But starting from a certain stage of development, a person breaks away from his animal existence and develops a person in himself, a spiritual form similar to the Creator.

Such people can attract an upper force to themselves and accelerate their development, and through themselves, as through an open channel, transmit this power of development to everyone else. As a result, all evil will turn into good, but we must contribute to this by becoming active participants in this process.

We are at the finish line of the process of development, and therefore it is worth taking an active part in it, so that we are not thrown back. Otherwise, there is a danger that it will turn out like in a child’s game when a player each time moves a few steps forward, but after the next roll of the dice suddenly is sent back almost to the very start of the game.

If we want to avoid such a return to the penalty circle of evolution, we should observe the laws of nature, the laws of the Creator, and try to unite more and more and connect with the upper force. And then more and more light will flow through us into the world.

The world is not to blame for anything, everything depends on the part of “Israel” who strive for the Creator, those who connect all the nations, this whole circle with the Creator through a line, a direct channel.
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From the 3^rd part of the Daily Kabbalah Lesson 11/18/20, “Connecting the World in the Last Generation”

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New Life 462 – The Conflict Between Nationalism And Democracy
Dr. Michael Laitman in conversation with Oren Levi and Nitzah Mazoz

Democracy means control by the people, which doesn’t happen in practice. Democracy is based on nationalism. Jews do not exist according to nationalism, but rather, they are people from different nations who are connected through one root: the law of “love your friend as yourself.” “Yehudi” (Jew) is from the word “Yichud” (unity) or “Eichud” (union). This means every person who accepts the union and love of everyone above all is a Jew. All of us, regardless of religion, require an education for love and connection. It is up to us to build an understanding in the public about what the “people of Israel,” the “nation of Israel,” and the “land of Israel” truly are. If we were to go in the direction of love and connection, the world would immediately change its attitude toward us for the better.
From KabTV’s “New Life 462 – The Conflict Between Nationalism And Democracy,” 11/30/14

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Remark: In an article published in June 1940, Baal HaSulam explicitly stated that all our troubles stem from a lack of unity. He wrote that we are like a heap of nuts that are united by a bag covering and binding them. But this measure of unity does not make them a cohesive organism.

My Comment: Jews are united only by suffering, political pressure, and the external hatred of all the peoples of the world. And from the inside, we are all in absolute rejection of each other. Therefore, this condition is wrong, unhealthy, and not for long.

Question: What is the future of the State of Israel based on spiritual roots?

Answer: We know that spiritual properties in a person can manifest and develop only from the feeling of a clear need for them.

Today we are in a state where we see that there are no “sacred cows” in the world, there is nothing from which to learn. Once everyone believed that one can learn from America, before that from Russia, etc. But no.

There is nothing worthwhile in the world, everything is falling apart, not any system justifies itself. In this state, we hope that people will finally turn to the science of Kabbalah and understand what society should be like, how people should properly educate themselves and create an absolutely new society that will exist in harmony with the entire integral nature.
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From KabTV’s “Systematic Analysis of the Development of the People of Israel” 11/25/19

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New Life 461 – The Law Of Nationalism – An Identity Crisis, Part 2
Dr. Michael Laitman in conversation with Oren Levi and Nitzah Mazoz

Abraham founded Israel as a spiritual nation because of its aspiration to aim at the upper force, the force of love. The secret that the Jews have is that by being as “one man in one heart,” we can reveal the upper force. This is our cultural heritage, but we don’t fulfill it. Today we are managed by the law of the ego and competition. If we want the vision of love and connection to come true, we have to accept anyone who wishes to join us and start a general, social educational process in order to learn about our roots.
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From KabTV’s “New Life 461 – The Law Of Nationalism – An Identity Crisis, Part 2,” 11/30/14

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