My new article on Linkedin “From Physical to Virtual to Spiritual Connections”

The world has been in a virtual, or semi-virtual state for about a year already, and connections between people have become largely virtual. Now, “thanks” to new strains of Covid, borders are closing and airports are shutting down once again. It seems as though physical ties are taking less and less “space,” and humanity is driven to a new form of communication.

When we connect in this new way, we will discover that just as our physical connections have been driven by the desire to benefit ourselves through our connections with others, our emotional connections are driven by the desire to benefit others through our connections with them. These desires to benefit others create such powerful mutual connections that the network they form is in fact shatterproof.

We should not take this lightly. This is not some ephemeral episode, but a profound and permanent phase in human development that we are just beginning. It is an opportunity that nature has given us to rise to a higher, more internal level of connection.

The physical connections we still see are very tense and negative, and often even aggressive. Think of all the protests we have seen over the past nine months: the looting of stores, burning of property, riots and demonstrations everywhere, and finally the storming of the Capitol building. And it’s not just in America: In Israel, too, riots and protests have been growing increasingly violent and aggressive, as they’ve been in Europe, and recently even in Russia.

Conversely, communication through the internet is very passive, neutral, and almost devoid of anger. It is clearly not the ideal way to communicate, but in the absence of ability to communicate positively on the physical level, the virtual option is the next best thing.

However, virtual connection is not the end goal; it is an intermediary phase to a more internal connection. Once we have cleared out the physical aggression, we can begin to connect on the level of emotions. And not just with kin or with friends, but with everyone! To build a working society today, you must create at least some level of affinity with all the members of society. Otherwise, it will fall apart, as we have seen throughout the world this past year.

We might think that we can overcome the coronavirus, find some vaccine that will eliminate the bug, but even the pharmaceutical companies developing the vaccines don’t promise absolute success; they know it’s much trickier than that. We can already see that the virus has partially outsmarted existing vaccines that have just come out, and it is constantly mutating, adapting itself to our attempts to kill it. The bottom line is, “We stand no chance against it.”

However, we can circumvent the problem and tackle the virus where it can’t harm us. If we stay virtual but start connecting internally, with our feelings rather than with our bodies, we will both defeat the virus and heal the social ills of our time in one go. When we achieve this, we will also see that this is where the virus was directing us from day one.

Until the appearance of Covid-19, our minds were fixed on one form of connection. That is, we communicated virtually, as well, but physical contact was always regarded as more substantive and meaningful. At best, the virtual connection was a preparatory connection for the physical one.

In the absence of the physical option, the virtual connection became all the connection we had, and that is far from enough. This deficiency is directing us, against our will, to search for a more meaningful connection, to sort of reconstruct the depth of the physical connection but without the physical aspect of it. This will force us to seek ways to connect in our emotions, and this is the whole idea.

If we work on this new connection long enough and hard enough, we will achieve it. When we do, we will discover that this is not a new form of connection, but that all of reality has been connected on this level all along, and the sense of “Eureka!” is only from our perspective. We will find that we have been blind to the deepest, richest dimension of reality, to the root from which everything stems—the connection among all the parts.

When we connect in this new way, we will discover that just as our physical connections have been driven by the desire to benefit ourselves through our connections with others, our emotional connections are driven by the desire to benefit others through our connections with them. These desires to benefit others create such powerful mutual connections that the network they form is in fact shatterproof.

Once we tap into it, we will never want to return to our old, superficial, and corrupt connections of exploitation and misery. We will discover that the world around us is harmonious, balanced, and provides for everyone abundantly. We will find that all we need in order to learn anything at all is to tap into this world-wide-web of invisible strings that sustains us, and all the information will be readily available.

This is the reason we are being pushed from the physical level to the virtual level, so as to finally arrive at the spiritual level of life and of all of reality.
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My new article on Linkedin “No More Sacred Cows”

Despite lockdowns, strict guidelines, and new vaccines expected to combat COVID-19, morbidity is constantly intensifying and mortality is at its peak. Regardless of who is in power, world leaders are discovering they are incapable of finding feasible solutions to emerge from the crisis. The impotence to deal with the pandemic and its subsequent effects will eventually exacerbate and exhaust human leadership, reveal its failing and fragile governance, and motivate us to recognize that there are no more sacred cows. The world demands a higher leadership: the leadership of nature.

The threads of connection between the people and their leaders have long been torn, although only now the rift is being fully revealed. Now we can no longer rely on the decrepit and shaky leadership of the past. Instead, we must learn to communicate properly and learn how to support each other. Within this new network of connections, we will create an infrastructure for an entirely new kind of leadership, the supreme power of nature, a power that will raise us from the crisis and help us build a new life.

Nature has its own pace of development which is currently on the fast track due to the pandemic. If we cannot beat nature at its game, we better join it in its trajectory toward a more balanced human society. The systems we have created—family, neighborhoods, cities, societies, and countries—are all based on purely egoistic relationships, on exploitation and competition, on contempt and arrogance. In such systems the spirit of division grows and they are in stark contrast to the form of nature that strives for connection and unity.

The conflict between the laws of society and the laws of nature—the gap between the egoistic and the altruistic—is what led us to the current crisis. This conflict became the tipping point that toppled us into the coronavirus plague on a global scale.

But there is room for subtle optimism. Alongside the sickness and the difficulties, the despair and helplessness, a great new desire is arising; a desire that has always been present but only now emerges in clarity from the harsh grip of the pandemic that is squeezing the breath out of us. The public is beginning to realize that all the paths we have walked throughout history are of no use to us in this difficult time of crisis. Even in all the research and academic knowledge we have accumulated and the sophisticated technology and advanced medicine, there is no lasting benefit. Within the span of a year, the tower of cards we had worked so hard to construct for generations collapsed before our eyes.

The virus that nature has sent us requires us to recognize that nature is spurring us on to the opposite direction from our selfish human calculations, toward a trajectory of complementarity, of support and help, of consideration and solidarity, of concern and mutual guarantee. Such social behavior, which includes choosing values of brotherhood and friendship, strengthens the bonds between us and brings us closer to creating an entirely new social fabric that exemplifies harmony with nature.

If we respond positively to nature’s redirection and strive for a cordial connection, we will discover that we are strengthened by a great connecting force, a supreme power that allows us to overcome contradictions and oppositions, a force that solidifies the human race into a new cohesive unit. And the more we increase love above transgressions and factions, the more we will invite this positive force of nature, the more a unifying source will arise between us that will bring us to higher states.

It is a fruitless hope to expect anything from the government or organizations and politicians to lead toward a positive change. Because the peaks and plateaus they promise us are not in the direction of social unity, their offers are empty and irrelevant.

Although this desire to harmonize with nature as a united humanity is growing gradually and awareness of it is increasing organically, there is still a requirement and duty to proactively focus on and explain extensively the program and evolution of nature. Otherwise, our growing egotistical tendency threatens to continue to pull us apart while we trample on others.

We do not need connection for the sake of control, nor do we need separation in order to govern, but what we need is a type of connection whose purpose is mutual complementation in order to create a sense of equality. This equality we will build is not equality that flattens everyone, but equality that empowers through differences, one that respects every individual’s desires and singularities, yet wisely complements them and shapes them into patterns of connection similar to the trends observed in nature.

The threads of connection between the people and their leaders have long been torn, although only now the rift is being fully revealed. Now we can no longer rely on the decrepit and shaky leadership of the past. Instead, we must learn to communicate properly and learn how to support each other. Within this new network of connections, we will create an infrastructure for an entirely new kind of leadership, the supreme power of nature, a power that will raise us from the crisis and help us build a new life.
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My new article on Linkedin “Wars Are Just Too Risky”

It’s not as if struggles are a thing of the past, but it seems as though people are beginning to grasp that war is a bad idea. From Khamenei to Putin, from Xi Jinping to you name it, world leaders are realizing that the world is so unsteady that if they start a war, no one will win.

Even regional wars seem more and more like a bad idea; everyone is terrified of what they might lead to. It does not mean that there are no power struggles. There are struggles and there will continue to be struggles, but I don’t see an all-out war on the horizon.

The thing is that the world has become so interconnected that if you start a fire somewhere, you have started a fire everywhere. Previously, you could use proxy wars to provoke other countries. If a certain country wanted to provoke the US, for example, it would instigate a military conflict in Latin or Central America. Countries also used Africa as an arena for provoking other countries, but today we have become too globalized and wars have become too risky.

We are governed by connection. We may call it globalization or we may call it a pandemic; either way, we are all inexorably connected. Therefore, the only smart thing to do is use the connection imposed on us to our benefit.

Connection itself is not bad. It is actually very good for us, if used correctly. It saves costs, saves efforts, utilizes advantages in one country to benefit other countries, and has the potential to make our lives much better. The problem is that we are trying to use connection to deepen our exploitation of each other rather than for positive purposes.

The solution is not to disconnect; connection has past the point of no return. The solution is to fix the connection so that we don’t use it to exploit and control one another but to embolden and support one another. If we do that, everyone will benefit from it.

To change how we use connection, we have to change our mindset. We have no choice but to shift from a mindset of power struggles to a mindset of support. Why? If we don’t change our mindsets, we will suffer more and more until we surrender and agree to support each other nonetheless, so the sooner we change our mindset, the better. Bit by bit, we must sink into our minds that the era of wars is over, and the era of connection and mutual support has begun, and we must act the part. This is where reality is going, and behaving any other way is, well, out of touch with reality.

Heads of states will continue to struggle for power, but we, humanity, must sink into our minds that connection is our only option for a decent life. If we embrace connection, our governors will have no choice but to play ball. If we let the idea permeate into our minds, it’ll permeate into our lives. Wouldn’t we all want that?

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My new article on Linkedin “History’s Clock Is Ticking”

If you look at the world from a bird’s-eye view, you will see that its parts are gradually coalescing. We may approve or disapprove of the process, but it is both involuntary and irreversible. And the more we coalesce, the more frictions emerge. The trajectory of reality is unchanging—toward greater connection, greater interdependence, and greater integration. What may change is how we experience it. If we object to it, it will be painful and bloody. If we embrace it, it will be easy and joyful.

There used to be ideologies, ideals, and doctrines that people strove to implement in order to establish what they believed was a successful way for society to conduct itself. Now, the masses are awakening the world over, and they don’t care about ideals or doctrines. If they feel solidarity among them, they will support the government that makes them feel it. If they feel division, they will revert to aggression and violence, as is happening now.

No regime, anywhere in the world, will succeed these days, and the world will decline into more and more chaos, since no regime aspires for connection. None of today’s world leaders are suitable for the task of uniting the people since the motivation of all of them is power, and not the well-being of the people. While this motivation was enough to establish a stable government before, today it will not work. If it goes against the movement of nature—the trajectory of reality toward connection—it will not work.

It’s not as though governments will fall to pieces tomorrow, but the trend is clear, and nothing that leaders might do can change it. The direction of today’s governance must be toward connection in the public. If leaders want the public to connect to them, while they are on top and the public is subordinate to them, this is not connection and it will not work.

History has its own clock. One tick at a time, it is moving toward its final goal: the union of all of humanity into a single entity. As it moves, it exposes our inherent aversion to it. The abhorrence of otherwise civilized people toward people who hold different views is only the prelude. The chasm will deepen and so will the suffering until we decide that we have no other way to live except together. We, humanity, can choose to go by the short and pleasant path of connection, or by the long and painful one of division and hatred.

We should not wait for leaders to take us on the path of connection. As stated above, their sole interest is power, their own. Connection among people contradicts their aim since if people are united, they don’t need many governors and big governments. Only when people are divided do we need to compromise and governors can alternate seats, and in the end, benefit themselves at the expense of the public. Therefore, we should let governors govern, while we nurture our connection regardless of their intentions to divide.

Also, and this is important, connection does not mean sameness. In order to build successful societies we must cultivate our differences, not bury them. When we use our uniqueness to complement each other and create a more complete society, rather than to compete against others and strive to supersede them, life becomes simple and easy, and there is abundance for everyone.

When we use our differences for the common good, we create flexible and responsive societies that can adapt to any situation and make the most of it. Just as a body utilizes different parts of itself to perform different tasks, whenever social or economic conditions change, a diverse but unified society will be able to respond to it much better and use its diversity to grow stronger rather than disintegrate and leave its members vulnerable.

The bottom line is that we must not wait for leaders to do our work for us, and we must not expect them to improve our lives. If we want a good life, we will find it in unity with everyone, when we make unity our topmost value, rather than this or that political idea. Society, as I said in the beginning, is coalescing. Only if we embrace our differences and use them to forge unity will we go through this process successfully. But if we succumb to the notions of separation and aversion, we will sow wind and reap the storm.
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My new article on Linkedin “Can Society Govern?”

Today’s society is divided because it is in the interest of politicians to divide. If you never heard about racism, and you and your family lived next door to a family of a different faith, ethnicity or skin color, would it cross your mind to doubt their decency because of these differences, or would you relate to them according to the people they are?

The political protests in Russia and Belarus, the Covid-19 riots in Western Europe, the disputed presidential election in the US, and the coup in Myanmar mirror the crisis in governance that the entire world is experiencing. People have lost trust in their governments, so they take to the streets, take up arms, and try to force their opinion on their countries. But the days of forceful governance are coming to an end. If people have no trust in the government, the government will not be able to govern. We are on the doorstep to a new era, where connected societies will govern themselves. Not without administrators, of course, but society will call the shots and not elite groups of manipulators who preach one thing and do another.

Today’s society is divided because it is in the interest of politicians to divide. They sound divisive rhetoric into every microphone that gives them voice, and the hatred they spew sets people off against each other for no reason at all.

Think about this for a minute: If you never heard about racism, and you and your family lived next door to a family of a different faith, ethnicity or skin color, would it cross your mind to doubt their decency because of these differences, or would you relate to them according to the people they are? We are approaching a threshold beyond which the vitriol of hate-politics will stop working. People will gradually begin to see that hating other people for their ethnicity, faith, political view, color, or culture does not do them good. It hurts them and benefits the politicians who use this technique. When this happens, people will truly be willing to connect, and true popular leaders will rise.

They will not be politicians; they will be people who are true servants of the public, who make sure everything runs smoothly only so that people can engage in what really makes them happy: being together, socializing, forming bonds and uniting.

Connection is a power in and of itself. Connection is the engine of reality. Everything we see around us consists of countless parts and items intricately connected in perfect harmony that enables them to work flawlessly together. Every animal society also works this way, as do the animal societies within the overall ecosystem where they live. Only we, humans, through our hate-politics, strive to part what can’t be parted, break what can’t be broken, and we become frustrated when the work of our hands, the society we’ve built for ourselves, does not function and does not provide for our needs.

When we give up on the lunacies of hate-speech and cancel-culture, and embrace the different elements that make up who we are as a society, we will find that there is abundance for everyone, and for anyone who wants to join. The only criterion for good living is connection among the individuals that make up a society. Thanks to opportunist politicians who seek to profit from our division, we have now learned that hatred doesn’t pay. We have broken everything and we are not happy. Therefore, now we can begin to build. Now we can begin to establish a society that follows one and only principle: connection. Everything else will fall into place naturally. And that governance of connection will be the real governor of society.

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My new article on Linkedin “The Ancient Divide Is Menacing Today”

You can always tell when a youth becomes a grownup: It’s that shift in their attitude when instead of blaming others for their misfortunes, they examine themselves soberly, learn what they did wrong, and work on improving it so it doesn’t happen again. Our nation, too, has an attitude, and that attitude determines our fate. When we are mature and examine ourselves judiciously, we succeed. When we lean toward the victim’s narrative, we are victimized.

Since the onset of our nation—when we came out of Egypt and established our nationhood by pledging to unite “as one man with one heart” and be “a light unto nations”—we have been divided into two groups. One group followed the spiritual idea of sticking to the rule, “Love your neighbor as yourself.” These people went through ups and downs in their level of unity and often fell into deep hatred, yet they always came through and united above their divisions. They saw in their divisions a calling to reinforce their unity even more. The other group that formed back then took to observing various customs and traditions. They were satisfied with observing rituals and did not seek union of hearts because they did not see this as the core of Judaism.

The divide between the two groups was never bridged, and over the years, hatred and alienation have developed between them. These two groups might have been able to live side by side peacefully were it not for the vocation of the Jewish people. We were not created to follow rituals and observe customs and traditions; we were created in order to be a light unto nations, to set an example of unity “as one man with one heart.” If we omit the element of unity from our Jewishness, we lose the meaning of our peoplehood. This is why our Torah states, “Love your neighbor as yourself” (Lev. 19:18), and why our sages wrote explicitly “What you hate, do not do unto your neighbor. This is the whole Torah, and the rest is commentary” (Shabbat 31a). Of course, hatred sometimes erupts, but it is precisely so as to show how to rise above it by increasing our unity. This is why King Solomon wrote, “Hate stirs strife, and love will cover all crimes” (Prov. 12:10).

The Book of Zohar, too, explains why we have disputes and why it is vital that we rise above them and set an example to the world. In the portion Aharei Mot, The Zohar writes, “‘Behold, how good and how pleasant it is for brothers to also sit together.’ These are the friends as they sit together and are not separated from each other. At first, they seem like people at war, wishing to kill one another … then they return to being in brotherly love. …And you, the friends who are here, as you were in fondness and love before, henceforth you will also not part from one another … and by your merit, there will be peace in the world.”

For many centuries, our forefathers fought to maintain their unity despite the chasm. When they succeeded, they thrived. When they failed, they were punished and banished by foreign rulers such as Nebuchadnezzar, King of Babylon, in the First Temple, and Titus, the commander in chief of the Roman legion, in the Second Temple. However, our forefathers did not blame Nebuchadnezzar or Titus for their woes, although both committed their said atrocities against our people. Instead, our forefathers blamed themselves, their own people, for their lack of unity, for slandering each other, for shedding blood, and for hating one another. After the ruin of the First Temple, we reunited in Babylon due to the threat of destruction that came from evil Haman. Soon after, we were given back the land of Israel. After the ruin of the Second Temple, we dispersed, immersed ourselves in the nations around us, and lamented our misfortune. As a result, we remained persecuted, used, abused, banished, and murdered for two millennia.

In the late 19th century, we started to take matters into our own hands and established the movement for creating a Jewish sovereign state once more. We still did not realize the significance of unity above all divisions to our nation, but we abandoned the victim narrative and started to work on a solution. After the Holocaust, the nations decided to give us a chance and granted us sovereignty in the land of our fathers.

Here, we abandoned the victimhood narrative but developed a new, even more sinister narrative: hubris. We think we are powerful, we think we’re entitled, and we think we are smarter than everyone else. Additionally, there is still that part of the nation that thinks that because it observes rituals and customs, it is entitled to protection from above. The one thing no one thinks about is unity. Instead of setting an example of unity, we have become an example of conceit, entitlement, and mutual disgust.

And just as before, by doing so, we have turned a powerful empire against us. The new administration in the US is anti-Israel and seeks to abolish the Jewish state, to strike it off the map. We should have no qualms about it. If we want to thwart its scheme, our only weapon is our unity. Otherwise, it will succeed, and we will be left with nothing but our narrative of victimhood. But just as before, our misfortune will not come to us because of any outside ruler, but because of our own division and mutual hatred, which we have cultivated instead of mutual responsibility and loving our neighbors as ourselves.

We have no time to lose. If we do not rise above our hubris, stop childishly blaming others for our woes, and begin to take matters into our hands and unite very, very soon, we will not be able to save our country.
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My new article on Linkedin “One Year into Covid, and Nothing Has Changed”

It’s been a year since we started imposing tightening closures the world over because of Covid-19. At first, we thought that we would shut down the economy and send people home for a couple of months, the summer would come and Covid would go, just like the flu. We were wrong. Covid didn’t go, it isn’t going, and we have learned nothing since day one of the pandemic.

The closures, when imposed, are motivated by politics rather than by public health concerns. When decision makers believe that a closure will reflect negatively on their political rivals, they support it. When they think it will help their rivals, they oppose it. But in neither case is public benefit a factor in their decisions.

And the virus, like all viruses, keeps mutating and tightening its grip. Now the world is alarmed by the appearance of mutations from the UK, South Africa, Brazil, and California. But even without an official mutation, the virus today is far more violent than it was when it first appeared. In the beginning, doctors thought it hardly ever affected children. Now, more than a third of the patients are children, at least in Israel, some of whom are seriously ill, and others are suffering from acute and life threatening side effects after they have become virus free, such as Kawasaki-syndrome like symptoms that impact their hearts and brains. And throughout this time, we have been reluctant to look for the real source of the plague.

The pandemic will force us to rethink our existence, reevaluate the purpose of our being here. It is a shame that we have to go through such agony to start thinking about it, but nature is inexorable; it won’t change direction just because we don’t like where it’s going.

In the end, we will see the connection between human nature and all of nature, and how the illnesses in human nature inflict on us illnesses from all of nature. It requires very little commonsense to see that the only sick element in reality is people. One look at any news broadcast will demonstrate the depth of our disgust with one another. No other part of nature bears such feelings toward any other part; the only part that’s full of hate is humankind. All other parts of nature get along smoothly and maintain a balance that supports the thriving of all species. Only we, people, destroy all parts of nature and destroy each other. Therefore, the only part of nature that is sick is human nature, and all the malfunctions that we see in the world are symptoms of the only malady—the sick hatred we feel for one another. So if we heal human nature, we will heal all of nature.

Hatred destroys not only people; it makes us destroy the rest of nature. Our hatred permeates all other levels of nature and causes them to destroy one another, just as cancer metastasizes.

We can cure ourselves from hatred, but we can’t rely on pharmaceutical companies or politicians to do it for us. Only we can cure ourselves, each and every one of us. The real vaccine is our mutual support, the mutual responsibility for one another, since if one of us falls, all of us will fall.

For the time being, I don’t see that humanity is grasping the concept of mutual responsibility and its role in saving our lives from the impending manmade and natural disasters—the worsening symptoms of our hatred. Each of us must feel responsible that we have not yet grasped it. When we all commit to rising above the hatred, when we stop blaming others for our woes and realize that it is not the differences between us that destroy us but the hatred that we feel for one another, we will begin to see positive changes, and not one day sooner. It doesn’t matter who is the prime minister or who is the president; a nation divided is a doomed nation. If we listen, we will save ourselves and the whole world. If we do not, we will destroy ourselves and the entire world.
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My new article on Linkedin “People of Israel, Unite Before It Is Too Late”

Any period before elections is nasty, and Israel’s campaign before Israelis go to the polls in March to elect the prime-minister is no different. The split is at its peak, the mutual contempt is celebrated while everyone pulls in opposite directions with only one goal in common, to slander the other. The difference between us and other nations is that the very existence of Israel depends on its unity in order to defend itself from all the evil forces that want to annihilate it, including forces within America.

The only period that can be compared to our current one, to get a little estimate of our dismal situation, is the time before the destruction of the Second Temple—days of unrestrained hatred, days of disgust and rejection, days that invite negative forces to dismantle our people.

As long as we fail to collectively turn the steering wheel with all our might to the right track, the deterioration of division will lead us down the slippery slope to a real disaster, to no less than destruction of our society. Behind the current U.S. administration are extremist forces whose ambition is to destroy Israel, to wipe us off the face of the earth, and to impose ideals opposite to the Judeo-Christian tradition. The minions of those forces will swarm to gleefully sign on its behalf to repeal the legal validity of the State of Israel—not with one hand, with both hands!

Therefore, if we do not come to our senses and realize how immersed we are in social sludge and ego that invites sick evils upon us, the situation will deteriorate and the forces of destruction will be revealed. At best, a few Israelis will be able to escape with a one-way ticket away from here.

There is a hard inner core in this administration that is confident in its position and strong in its will, and it is further supported by a number of American Jews who have learned nothing from the darkest period of the Jewish people. History repeats itself.

But just as this threat unfolds, the solution also reveals its hand. Our future fate depends on our knowing how to correctly focus the stronger latent power within the Jewish people: to connect as one man with one heart, above the forces of separation and conflict between us. Coming suddenly face to face with the threatening forces that loom against us, can spur us on and empower us to build and fortify a bond of love between us above all the hate that divides us.

The connection between us will save both us and the whole world. According to the seminal ancient book of Kabbalah, The Book of Zohar, which explains the secrets of the Torah: “Israel is the heart of the whole world, just as the organs of the body could not exist in the world even for a moment without the heart, so all the nations cannot exist in the world without Israel.” Therefore, the people of Israel must function like a heart that abides by the law of loving connection and passes it on to the world—in other words, acts as a light unto the nations.

Israeli brotherly love evokes a positive force—a supreme force over and above all our little individual forces—with the capacity to neutralize all evil. This power corrects, straightens, settles, and organizes reality in an integral and acceptable way for everyone. Only in Him must we trust, only on Him must we lean; this is the short and good way. The long and excruciating way would be to ignore the warning signs and the call for unity between us—the force which has been the foundation of the people of Israel since time immemorial—and to continue to allow hatred to gnaw away at our cohesion until our foundation is undermined and destroyed.

Trump has completed his term as president. He spoiled the people of Israel, gave us billions to sign agreements with the Gulf states and more, but we used those gifts to strengthen our pride, justifying ourselves in hanging on to it. Biden, and behind him Obama, on the other hand, operate along a rigid line. With the help of Iran and the rest of the hostile countries in the Middle East, their thrust will make our lives bitter indeed.

In the days of Trump there was an opportunity for us to wake up, to recover, to positively influence each other without the need for blows to drive us toward unity, but we missed the chance to do it through a gentle influence. Now the field has changed with the new administration and the challenges will grow. As it is written, “permission has been granted to the Destroyer.”

From now on, even the millions of sworn pro-Israel Americans who voted for Trump will gradually flock to the mainstream, join the opposite line and abandon support of Israel. These people are no less antisemitic by nature than others, and now that they do not have to fight for their party, they will not fight for us either. Therefore, the Israeli line must be sharp and uncompromising: we will only succeed if we connect above our differences, and this includes all sectors and small streams within our people. We will only succeed if we lovingly cover all crimes without exception with devotion. Only in this way will we be able to overcome those wanting to destroy us.

It is precisely when everything around us splits, breaks, and is on the verge of destruction that the time is ripe and ready for our connection and unification because the revelation of evil must precede the revelation of good. From the worst place where it seems impossible to find a common ground, there good will grow.

Any evil forces against Israel can be reversed for the better, and the reversal depends only on the unity between us. If we know how to unite as one, then we will align with an auxiliary force that will help us on our way to still the enemy and fulfill our destiny in the world.
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My new article on Linkedin “Every Time We Zig, Covid Zags Right Back”

We are well into our third closure in Israel but the numbers aren’t improving. More than a third of the population has received the first shot of the Pfizer vaccine, and more than an eighth has received the second one, and the plague is spreading as if nothing happened. Prof. Ran Blitzer, head of the Corona Cabinet at Magen Israel, the national program for fighting the coronavirus, is baffled. According to Blitzer, “By all expectations and models, we should have been in a different place … We should have seen a greater decline in the number of confirmed cases than we are seeing. We also should have begun to see a decline in the number of difficult cases, but we are not seeing this trend as much as we expected.”

In line with Prof. Blitzer’s dismay, the national mood is dreary and gray. It seems as though every time we zig, Covid zags right back. Every time we think we’ve found a way out of the plague, it finds new ways to return. And every time it returns, it returns more forcefully. In the first closure, only a fraction of the patients were children under 18. In the third closure, more than 35th percent of the active patients are children. Worse yet, we’re still not certain that the vaccines work for all the new strains that have popped up recently from the UK, South Africa, California, Brazil, and who knows what other strains are in store.

The coronavirus is exposing our weaknesses one by one. It is mocking our efforts to retrain it, and shows how easy it is for nature to fool our high-tech medicine that consumes so much of our resources. Every time we refuse to see the truth, the virus shows it to us slightly more convincingly, but people pay for it with their lives. When the plague broke out, doctors assured us that it doesn’t affect children. I said back then that it will affect children, that it will damage not just our lungs, but also our brains, and all because of our insistence not to see that there is no cure for the virus on the level where it manifests, but only at its source—in our abuse of one another and of nature. Now, some children are already in critical condition in Israel, assisted by ventilators, while other children, though still not in Israel, are suffering from Kawasaki syndrome like side effects, which destroys their brains.

Under these circumstances, I must reiterate that the only way to deal with Covid is through healing our social relations, because we will never destroy the virus. It is our poor social relations that drive us to compete and seek each other’s destruction, and it is that drive that makes every means acceptable. In our struggle to annihilate each other, we are annihilating innocent people, innocent animals, innocent plants, and the ground we walk on. There is nothing wrong with our planet; it could sustain all the beings living on it, and much more than that, if only we did not seek to outdo, humiliate, and exploit other people, classes, nations, faiths, and races. In short, our hatred of each other is destroying our planet, destroying our health, and will ultimately destroy us.

If we want to defeat Covid, we must defeat the hatred we feel toward each other. Only if we do that will we start living a more balanced life, allow nature to restore its own balance, and the countless pathogens that have migrated from wild animals to humans will return where they belong. We will not restore Earth’s balance until we stop ruining it, and we will not stop ruining it until we stop ruining each other. This is the chain of corrections that must take place if we want to have a normal life, and nothing we can do will change it. I hope it does not take long before we listen to reality because the blows ahead are clearly growing worse, and we have had enough unnecessary agony.

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From My Facebook Page Michael Laitman 28/1/21

Today is the fifteen of the Hebrew month of Shevat. The Hebrew calendar consists of twelve months, which represent different states in a person’s spiritual development. The month of Shevat is regarded as the beginning of the year for the trees because on this month, the trees begin to awaken toward the end of the winter and the beginning of the spring.

It is written that man is as the tree of the field. Therefore, we celebrate this time of the year as the beginning of man’s spiritual budding. My teacher, RABASH, wrote an elaborate letter about the spiritual meaning of Tu [fifteen] BiShvat [of Shevat], Letter No. 29, which you’re welcome to read in our online archive. Below is the gist of his words.

The order of operations of man’s spiritual development can be compared to the operations we perform on trees if we want them to blossom and yield good fruit.

Fertilizing: This pertains to using the “litter” from our world as fuel and as a substrate on which we grow in spirituality. To succeed in spirituality, we must plant ourselves in an environment that
encourages spiritual growth, an environment that promotes the values of giving and loving others. However, the ego keeps spoiling and soiling our love. When we intensify our connection so it is stronger than the ego that emerges between us, we use the egoism as a reason to boost our connection. This is the meaning of fertilizing the tree, meaning the spiritual growth.

Hoeing: This means we must dig into our hearts and scrutinize the purpose of our being here. The growth of the tree depends on the soil in which we plant it. Then the soil must be cultivated, hoed, and turned inside out. Likewise, we must look into the depth of our heart, bring what is in there to the light, and find the purpose of our lives.

Removing calluses: Calluses are signs, indications of our spiritual work. However, our spiritual work must be concealed. Therefore, as we cut out the calluses from the tree, so we must cut out external signs of our spiritual work so as not to evoke envy or bad thoughts from others.

Removing excess leaves: Leaves precede the fruit. They represent the works we do in order to come to a state of working for the sake of others. As one approaches that state, these leaves have to be measured carefully and the excess leaves must be removed, so as to allow the fruit, the intention to give, to grow to its maximum potential.

Dusting: We dust the exposed roots and cover them with earth. Sometimes we come to a state of despair and think that we will never rise from our current state. “Dusting” means struggling with these thoughts [in Hebrew, Me’abkim means both “dusting” and “struggling”]. When doubts on our spiritual path appear in us, we must “cover” them up and keep growing.

Smoking under the tree: When there are worms in the tree, we spread smoke under it in order to kill them. Smoking represents burning yesterday’s spiritual work and starting over the next day as if from the beginning. This means that at each new spiritual degree, we must leave the previous degree behind, seemingly “burn” it. Otherwise, it hinders our entry into the new level. This is the only way to climb up the spiritual level to the purpose of life.

Stoning means removing the Avanim [“stones,” as well as “understandings”]. This means we must abandon our previous understandings in order to prepare the ground for new understandings. In the beginning of the work, our understandings are egotistical. We must clean up our hearts from those understandings and absorb new, altruistic ones.

Trimming is the final work that RABASH mentions. It means we must trim the dry branches and leaves from the tree so as to allow new ones to grow. The old and dry branches and leaves are everything we had acquired from our environment. These must be pruned so as to allow the new, spiritual understandings to grow. However, we must be careful not to grow too many new branches, as this would make us “too smart for our own good,” meaning that we would work too much with our minds and too little with our hearts, with our intentions toward others, which is the heart of our work.

If we follow these customs in our spiritual work with each other, we will have a great year and our spiritual fruit of love of others will be healthy, strong, and beautiful.

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