My new article on Linkedin “Way Ahead of Everyone”

A student told me a joke he had read on the internet: Israel is way ahead of everyone. While the rest of the world is still grappling with Covid-19, Israel is already two disasters ahead—the Mt. Meron stampede disaster and the military campaign against Hamas. Gallows humor isn’t funny, nor is it meant to be. It does, however, point directly to the truth. In our case, the truth is that we are not learning from experience, and this is why we suffer.

Instead of examining why Covid-19 came to us, we tried to get rid of it as quickly as we could so we could get on with our lives. Covid gave us time to think, but instead of thinking why we got it, we thought only about what we will do when it is gone. So now that we got over it, we’re taking other blows since we didn’t learn the message that Covid came to teach us—that the problem is in our relation toward each other.

This, indeed, is our core illness: our poor relationships, sickened by ill-will. Because we didn’t learn it through Covid, we suffered blows in the form of the Meron disaster, the Guardian of the Walls campaign, and the riots of the Arabs all over Israel. At the current pace, the next blow is right around the corner.

The only change I do see from our “pre-Covid” days is that we are not so attached to our jobs anymore, or even to the concept of work as we thought of it before. We have learned to let go of the rat race, and this is a good sign. Nevertheless, it is far too little to make a real change.

A positive change in our lives will come only when we learn to focus on our connections with each other and try to build a society where people are responsible for one another and care for one another. If we stop wanting to feel superior, and start wanting to feel connected, it will affect the entire world.

Since human beings are at the top of the pyramid, everything we do or say, but mainly think, trickles down to all other levels of reality. When we have bad thoughts about each other, it produces bad results on every level of reality. By wishing harm to others, we tilt the world off balance and bad things begin to happen. If we think about it for a moment, we will realize that no other being bears ill-will toward other beings. But we, humans, bear plenty of it. In fact, we bear nothing but ill-will, as it is written, “The inclination of a man’s heart is evil from his youth” (Genesis 8:21).

Therefore, if the only being that bears ill-will toward others stops wishing others harm and begins to wish them well, everything will change accordingly. If we change our thoughts from bad to good, we won’t need to advance from bad to worse; we will go from good to better.
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My new article on Linkedin “David and Goliath – Reversed”

We all know and love the story about David and Goliath. It’s very easy to sympathize with little redhead David who stands up to the giant villain, Goliath, defeats him against all odds, and saves Israel from the wicked Philistines. But in the past few decades, it seems as though the roles have been reversed, and Israel, who was once the favorite since it was the underdog, has become the Goliath in the area, the villain that the poor Palestinians are fighting against all odds.

It’s not as if Israel is trying to slay Palestinians indiscriminately. In fact, no army has ever come close to the efforts that the IDF is doing to avoid hurting uninvolved persons. The other party, Hamas, sends rockets explicitly indiscriminately into civilian residential neighborhoods in towns and settlements all across Israel, yet the world sees only one villain in the conflict: Israel.

Is the world blind? Does all of humanity not see the truth? The world isn’t blind; it sees the truth very clearly, and precisely because of it, it sides with Hamas. Its real grievance against the State of Israel is not that we are attacking the Gaza Strip, but that we are not letting Hamas annihilate us. The world thinks that this is what we deserve, since being the most developed, we are supposed to lead the world to a better place, and since the world is not going there, it is our fault, and Hamas is only serving us a well deserved punishment.

Regrettably for us, we are not doing the one thing that will change the world’s mind about us: to lead the world to an unselfish way of life. With our selfish, egocentric manner of existence, we are causing the eruption of egoism throughout the human race, at every level and in every direction, and this is what causes all the catastrophes that the world has been experiencing.

No one consciously chooses to be antisemitic. The most developed part of anything is always its head. Since human nature is selfish to the core, as in the verse, “The inclination of a man’s heart is evil from his youth” (Genesis 8:21), and Jews are the most developed nation, they are also the most selfish. Since the head determines what happens in the body, and the head is selfish, the whole world becomes tainted with selfishness, and it’s the fault of the head, namely the Jews. This is why from the perspective of the world, Hamas has every right to shoot at us, we have no right to shoot back, and if it kills civilian Israelis, it is doing so on behalf of all of humanity, and it is our fault that it is doing so.

If this explanation seems far-fetched, look at reality: The whole world sides with Hamas; the UN is accusing exclusively Israel of genocide; countries from around the world have already pledged to give Hamas more than a billion dollars to repair the damages from the campaign, even though Hamas stated that the damages were only 350 million dollars; and Israel’s status in the world is plunging while that of Hamas is soaring simply because it stood up to us—the David-turned-Goliath, in the eyes of the world.

It does not have to be this way. Just as we are tainting the world with egoism today by simply being egoistic, we will clean it up by not being so. And just as the nations feel that their struggles among themselves are because of the ill-will we install in them, when we are unselfish, they will feel that their spirit of friendship and care comes from us.

In antiquity, the equation was very clear: During the time of the Second Temple, around the 3rd century BC, the Jews were relatively united and got along well with one another. At that time, scholars from Greece came to learn from the prophets, Ptolemy II, King of Egypt, summoned 70 sages from Jerusalem to teach him the wisdom of the Jews and to translate the Pentateuch, and people from all the nations would flock to Jerusalem during the three annual pilgrimages when Jews would assemble there. Philosopher Philo of Alexandria wrote that people watched in awe how “in the merging of the hearts … they would find the ultimate proof of unity.”

The world is learning from us by example. If we behave like bullies toward each other, they behave like bullies toward each other and blame us for it. If we behave toward each other with care and compassion, so will all the nations treat each other and will thank us for it. This is what the rabid antisemite Vasily Shulgin meant when he wrote that if the Jews, whom he hated more than anything, “rise to the height to which they apparently climbed [in antiquity] … immediately, all nations will request, ‘Give us Jewish [instruction], wise, benevolent, leading us to the good.’”
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My new article on Linkedin “Finding Peace of Mind”

Today’s reality gives us little reason for peace of mind. Uncertainty prevails everywhere, and the future is bleak. It seems like the best idea would be to find a little cabin in the boondocks of the Australian backcountry or the Canadian far north with a few farm animals and forget about the world. What a shame that most of us can’t do this, though.

Here in Israel, we think that if we didn’t have to fight against our neighbors, everything would be just fine. In truth, however, it would be far, far worse! We, Jews, would consume one another. If anything, it seems as though we were given enemies from above in order to prevent us from annihilating one another. The more we hate each other, the more they hate us, which in turn prevents us from destroying one another.

This is clearly unsustainable. The only way to find peace of mind in today’s world is to annihilate the hatred among us. Mutual hatred is destroying us, destroying our relationships, destroying our planet, and destroying our future. Just as we are currently teaching ourselves to compete against others as hard as we can and strive to reach the top of the heap, we must teach ourselves to be caring, considerate, and kind.

It is okay that we are not really like that; it is only the beginning. But if we don’t begin to cultivate concern, we will never achieve it. Instead, we will continue to fight and destroy one another until we destroy humanity. On the other hand, if we begin to work on kindness, consideration, and caring, we will learn how to nurture these qualities within us. In the process, we will change all of humanity not only in our generation, but for posterity, as well. We’ve never had a generation whose members were genuinely kind to one another. If we create the precedent, it will be that much easier to maintain that pro-social attitude since we will witness its benefits.

We think that we are separate beings, but we are not. In truth, we are all connected and influence each other whether or not we realize it. If we infuse humanity with ill-will, we will hurt ourselves, as well, even if we do it in order to protect ourselves from others. Conversely, if we infuse the system with kindness, kindness will spread through the system and return to us. And if we all do this toward each other, we will bid farewell to problems.

The key to finding peace of mind is not to run away from society, but to improve it so that everyone concentrates on giving others peace of mind. Only in this way, through a system of mutual responsibility, we will find lasting, solid, and joyful peace of mind in life, now and in the future.
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My new article on Linkedin “Let’s Pollute Mars, Too”

Every so often, tycoons such as Elon Musk come up with another craze that has to do with inhabiting Mars. According to the magazine SciTechDaily, “Elon Musk has claimed he’s confident there will be a city of 1 million on Mars by 2050, transported there by 1000 Starships proposed by his SpaceX venture.” I understand that playing with spaceships can be fun for multi billionaires, but it isn’t going to help humanity, it won’t make our lives any better, or teach us anything about life itself.

What’s worse, it will replicate the damage we have done to Earth on Mars. Because living elsewhere will not make us different people, we will bring to Mars the exact same flaws in our nature that have caused us to ransack and deplete our home planet to the point where we are looking for another planet to inhabit. Living on Mars will not make us caring people, considerate toward each other and to nature. The exploitation that has destroyed human society and our natural environment will do the same to Mars, so anyone who moves there will be just as discontented as those who stay here, if not more so.

In general, research into new colonies, prolonging life expectancy, and other such fanciful fields of exploration do nothing but plant false hopes in people’s hearts that somehow they will be happier, when the opposite is true. On Mars, a planet that is unsuitable for sustaining humans, life will clearly be far more difficult than on Earth. Likewise, if we could live much longer than today thanks to scientific developments, it will only prolong our misery. We don’t know what to do with ourselves in the eighty years we have now, let alone in 800 years. People will kill themselves or one another; futility will drive them out of their minds.

If people want to improve the quality of their lives, they have to begin by asking what they’re living for. Most people aren’t in that place yet, but it will come. When it does, they will discover that life is not about inhabiting new planets or spending 800 years traveling around the world and eating in fancy restaurants, but that life is about connecting to the people around us and to the environment we live in. They will begin to nurture deeper and deeper connections with each other until they reach a point where the physical body becomes meaningless, and life is no longer bound by the existence of our protein body.

This is the future that awaits us. We can make it happen that much sooner if we focus on cultivating our connections here and now, or we can look for happiness on Mars. If we choose the first option, we will begin to feel the positive change at once. If we choose the second one, happiness will remain a long way out.

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My new article on Linkedin “A New Level of Pressure”

Operation Guardian of the Walls may seem like yet another round in a seemingly endless campaign between the Israelis and the Palestinians, but it isn’t. By all indications, it marks the onset of a new level of pressure on Israel and Jews the world over, one that will impel us all to reflect more intently on the reason for our being here in Israel, and the existence of our nation altogether.

Antisemitism is no longer exclusive to Republicans or Democrats, to Europe, or to the US. It is omnipresent, and Jews the world over are beginning to feel that there is no escape from it. This is the positive thing about it: It is clearly a pervasive, natural phenomenon that we cannot dodge. From day to day, humanity is being divided in a way we’ve never seen before: Jews on one side, and everyone else on the other. Those on the Jewish side are feeling mounting pressure from the world’s intensifying hatred, while everyone else is being prompted to hate the Jews.

In a sense, it is reminiscent of Abraham’s situation when he started talking about the need to unite and rise above the ego in his homeland of Babylon and found himself at odds with almost everyone, including the king, and even his own father, Terah, who supported pushing his “unruly” son into the furnace.

It is not an indiscriminate pressure. The nations are pressing Israel and Jews to change their behavior. The demand itself is correct, but without understanding the nature of the change, the Jews experience it as arbitrary hatred rather than as a demand for a specific correction. If this continues, it will explode with an attempt on the part of the world to inflict on the Jews a final annihilation. In fact, the only reason that this has not yet happened is that our vocation requires our presence in order to carry it out. But if we shun it for not much longer, nothing will help us, just as from a certain point, nothing helped European Jewry in the 1940s.

As the world grows increasingly belligerent, people feel that the origin of the aggression is the Jews. Even if the Jews don’t feel it, this is what the nations feel, and they say it very openly. Denying it won’t help since this is what they feel, and reason never defeats emotion. They will buy into any pretext, and there will be no way to convince them otherwise, since they will be right: We are the cause of their misfortunes.

The ancient onus on the people of Israel to bring unity to the world, to set an example of implementing “Love your neighbor as yourself,” has never been revoked since it was given. As then, so now, the people of Israel are the focal point of humanity. We were, and we are the purveyors of the faiths, ideologies, and ideas that drive the evolution of humanity, and we cannot opt out. But the only thing that the world needs now is unity, solidarity. It’s got plenty of everything else, but zero care and mutual responsibility. Our nation, which was established on the basis of mutual responsibility and love of others, and from which entire nations drew their social ideals and morals, must revive its commitment to its task, establish internal unity, and become the example that everyone expects it to become.

We must understand that our conflict with the Arabs is not really with the Arabs; it is with all of humanity. This is why the whole world sides with Hamas, a designated, officially proclaimed terrorist organization. The fact that humanity is on the side of the terrorists indicates that the one thing that is worse in the world’s eyes than terrorists, the one thing that does more harm than a genocidal organization that uses children as human shields, is the Jewish people.

Even if they cannot articulate it, their demand from us is unity. If we unite, they will lift us on their shoulders as in the prophecy of Isaiah (49:22), since they, too, will be able to rise above their conflicts and establish world peace. If we do not unite, the world will unite against us.

For more on this topic, refer to the books The Jewish Choice: Unity or Anti-Semitism, Historical facts on anti-Semitism as a reflection of Jewish social discord, and Like a Bundle of Reeds: Why unity and mutual guarantee are today’s call of the hour
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My new article on Linkedin “The Conflict Isn’t Territorial, It’s Spiritual”

We think our struggle with the Palestinians is over territory, but it isn’t. It is a purely spiritual conflict, and not with the Palestinians, but with ourselves. Since the Jewish people has abandoned its cause, it lost its legitimacy to exist as a nation. Until we restore our unity, we will be pariahs in the eyes of the world, which will tolerate our presence only as long as it hopes that at some point, we will return from oblivion, restore our solidarity, the essence of our nation, and be the example that everyone expects us to be. If we wake up in time, the world will unite around us. If we overstay its patience, it will unite against us.

Any attempt to attribute a historical aspect to the conflict misses the point and distracts us from our task. Instead of trying to prove that we were here first, which is like the chicken and egg argument, we should accomplish what we were made to accomplish, and this will end all the arguments and conflicts since everyone will support us.

To accomplish our task, we must remember that the Jewish nation is unlike any other nation. It began as an eclectic cluster held together by the idea that unity and solidarity are the keys to a solid society. The early members of the nation left their homelands and countryfolk to join a group whose members they did not know, and who often came from rivaling clans and tribes, yet subscribed to Abraham’s ideology that solidarity should be the backbone of society.

Our ancestors struggled quite a bit among themselves, rising and falling according to the level of their unity. Nevertheless, by the time of the Second Temple, the word of the innovative society had gotten far and wide, and people from all the nations came to see the miracle. Greeks scholars came, learned from the prophets, and returned home to develop the Greek philosophy. Ptolemy II, king of Egypt, summoned seventy sages from Jerusalem to translate the Five Books of Moses into Greek, thereby creating the first translation of the Bible. But before he let them translate, he sat with them and learned from them. According to Flavius Josephus, after two weeks of extensive learning he said “he had learned how he ought to rule his subjects.”

The renowned philosopher Philo of Alexandria wrote that Jewish pilgrims, who gathered in Jerusalem three times a year, “made friendships with people they had not met before, and in the merging of the hearts … they would find the ultimate proof of unity.” Likewise, the book Sifrey Devarim writes that gentiles would “go up to Jerusalem and see Israel … and say, ‘It is becoming to cling only to this nation.’”

Eventually, we fell from unity and invaders started flooding the land. First came the Hellenists, the Jewish converts who adopted the Greek culture and abandoned unity. Then came the Seleucids, who destroyed the Temple once. The Maccabees defeated them, rebuilt the Temple, but not the unity, and so the Romans came and ousted us from here entirely.

We didn’t lose the land because we were weak; we lost it because we were divided. When we are divided, the world stops loving us, stops seeing us as an example they want to follow, and does not want us around. Following the crushing of the Bar Kokhba revolt in 135 AD, The Roman emperor Hadrian wanted to do away once and for all with the pugnacious Jewish people. To achieve this, he not only dispersed the remaining Jews in Judea around the Roman Empire, he changed the name Judea into Syria Palaestina (lit. Palestinian Syria).

To this day, the world sees this stretch of land as Palestine, and not as Israel, since we have not lived up to the name Israel, which entails mutual responsibility and love of others. If we want the land of Israel to become Israel once more, we first have to become the spiritual people of Israel: united “as one man with one heart.” Only under this condition will our struggles be through and we will find peace among ourselves and with the nations.
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My new article on Linkedin “What Antisemites Want From Us”

Mass demonstrations with ferocious hostility against Jews and Israel’s right to defend itself are increasingly common around the world as new crowds join the latest global antisemitic campaign fueled by biased media coverage. The establishment of international committees to investigate war crimes on the latest Israeli military operation accompanies renewed existential threats from Iran for the annihilation of the Jewish state. In short, there is a global consensus that Jews are the main problem in the world.

Let’s be clear. This is not about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, religious fanaticism between Judaism and Islam, intensifying clashes of opinion between right-wingers and leftists, or between Democrats and Republicans. The problem is not focused on the limited area of the Land of Israel either, because the phenomenon of hatred existed long before the establishment of the State and would continue even if we were to emigrate from it to other parts of the world. We are dealing here with a natural phenomenon—antisemitism, a law of nature.

However, this is not just a narrow hatred toward Jews that I speak of, but a broader hatred. Even without Jews on the planet, there would be hatred between each person and others, a vibrant and fermenting hatred between all streams of humanity. The root of the problem is the human ego that is at the core of human society, an ego that grows and begins to consume itself. And the only way to curb it is to correct it.

It just so happens that Jews have a unique method of connecting and being saved from the clutches of the formidable ego that exists in the human race. And this salvation is not just for the Jews alone, but for all without exception.

Because worldwide, we are all connected in a global, integral communication network, every small shift affects the rest of the systems, moving all the networks. Israel is a major hub in the grid of power relations in this globalized system. If its members would repair the bonds between them and transcend the natural egoism, the connecting force Jews would create between them would radiate “light into the nations.” This is the spiritual ideology that the Jewish people were founded upon.

The history of the Jews began in ancient Babylon about 3,800 years ago. Our ancestor Abraham gathered around him representatives from a collection of clans which have today evolved to constitute the whole of humanity. Meanwhile, over the years, Abraham’s adherents have become the people of Israel—a group that worked to discover the power of unity in nature; a team that, for better or worse, has been chosen to implement the terms of mutual guarantee between people according to the rule, “love your neighbor as yourself.”

From the point of view of nature, the change that will take place within the hearts of the people of Israel is the transformation that will spread throughout the world. Because our egoism or self-centered vision constantly grows and neutralizes the sense of danger that hovers over our Jewish heads, even while pressure from the world in the form of antisemitism increases, this notion of our Jewish responsibility to unite and be the role model for humanity to follow is still far from our understanding.

We are hard-hearted and stubborn people. Even while poisoned arrows are fired at us we are unable to believe what is happening and the magnitude of the problem. At the last minute, the “smart Jew” within us always tries to rise up and claim that the situation needs to be studied, digested, and understood, its cause and effect analyzed. A good calculation is made if we think it will pay off. On one level, Jews hear, but by the time that the message truly permeates and becomes real to us, I fear that it may be too late. Hopefully, this current crisis of antisemitic hatred and hostility will be the exception to what has been the rule and we will finally come to recognize the truth that the only chance that we have to ensure our good future instead of being beaten is through our connection.
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My new article on Linkedin “Drowning in Migrants”

Europe seems to be drowning in a new wave of migrants from Africa. Italy, Spain, and Greece are seeing an upsurge in migrant numbers, new stories of migrant boats drowning, and new stories of entire towns and regions in Europe becoming “awash” in migrants. If the trend continues, in a few years, the entire southern shoreline of Europe will become Muslim. Migrants will swamp it, Islam will take over, and Democracy, precisely the ideology that has allowed migrants to settle in Europe, will be a thing of the past there.

It will not stop in southern Europe. Despite some resistance, the same scenario will unfold in central and western Europe. The Muslims who have come there since the beginning of the wave in 2015, and those who have been there for twenty or thirty years, have formed a comfortable cushion for newcomers. They will not need to change their culture, as did the first immigrants who moved into Europe some thirty years ago. The new migrants will feel very much at home among their fellow Muslims, and the native Europeans, both secular and Christian, will succumb to the newcomers’ takeover of Europe.

Regrettably, the mandatory education program that I wrote about years ago has not been implemented to this day, and as a result, the situation now is even more dire than before. However, there is still time. The only way for Europe to avoid a transformation into a Muslim continent is to employ mandatory education on everyone who comes there before they come, and on all those who have come recently. That way, those who are unwilling to change will not be allowed to migrate, and those who do, will know where they are coming and how to conduct themselves according to the European spirit of democracy and socialism.

Another crucial element that must pervade through the educational system that Europe must employ is the concept of the oneness of humanity. People must understand that we are interdependent, that a problem anywhere is a problem everywhere, as the coronavirus demonstrated all too well over the past year and a half.

Today, understanding our mutual responsibility is the most important since our lives depend on understanding it. If people living in conflict areas will understand that the conflicts between them will not be solved by war, that they must form unity above their differences, yet without eliminating those differences, they will transcend the problems that plague the world today. If they do not understand it and struggle with each other to impose their own beliefs on others, it will demolish everyone, losers and winners alike.

In an interdependent system, where everything is part of the whole, the well-being of one part affects the well-being of the entire whole. Think of a ball full of air. As long as it is full, you can play with it and enjoy it. But if there is a tiny hole in the ball, the entire ball becomes deflated and completely useless. This is how we need to think of humanity. If Europeans can teach themselves this simple truth, they just might be able to save their home and become a prosperous continent once more.

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My new article on Linkedin “Jews vs. Israel”

It is nothing new that Jews are campaigning against the State of Israel. It began with various Orthodox groups that objected to the founding of the Jewish state, and is continuing now with groups such as Jewish Voice for Peace, or individuals such as Noam Chomsky, Bernie Sanders, and others. Recently, the campaigning of Jews against Israel has even come to the corporate world when a group of 250 odd Jewish employees of Google signed a letter urging its CEO to recognize “the harm done to Palestinians by Israeli military and gang violence.” The signatories also “object to the conflation of Israel with the Jewish people,” declare that “anti-Zionism is not antisemitism,” and demand, among other things, “the termination of contracts with institutions that support Israeli violations of Palestinian rights.”

In some sense, I do agree with them, though not in the sense they would probably hope I would. Indeed, we, Israelis, are not conducting ourselves as Jews. The word Yehudi [Jew] represents two things: 1) our origin, the ancient kingdom of Yehuda [Judah], whose capital was Jerusalem. 2) Yechudi [united/unique], meaning the aspiration for unity, for oneness. This is why the Jews made the tenet “Love your neighbor as yourself” their foremost commandment. Because today, we are so far away from unity, I agree that we are not conducting ourselves as Jews.

When Abraham began to assemble people around him and form the nucleus of the Jewish nation, there were no Jews. There were Babylonians, where he lived. Abraham spoke to them and called on them to unite. He invited everyone, indiscriminately. In Mishneh Torah, Maimonides writes that Abraham “began to call out to the whole world … wandering from town to town and from kingdom to kingdom until he arrived in the land of Canaan … When [people] gathered around him and asked him about his words, he taught everyone … until he brought them to the path of truth.”

Therefore, if we are not united, we are disconnected from the heart and soul of Judaism, from the very meaning of being Jewish. And if we are not calling on the whole world to unite, as did the father of our nation, Abraham, we are not carrying out his legacy. So in what way are we Jewish? And if we aren’t really Jewish, then what is our claim on the land of Israel?

We can do more than silence our critics both within Judaism and among the nations of the world; we can bring everyone to support us, including Hamas and anyone we currently perceive as our worst enemy. But for this, we must first stop hating one another and start living up to Abraham’s legacy of unity and oneness.

And we must begin with each other. Saying we want to unite with all the nations, while at the same time vilifying, pillorying, and demonizing our own people, exposes our insincerity. When we unite with one another, above all the current divisions among us, the nations will believe our candor and gladly join our efforts.

The worst antisemites in history, such as Adolf Hitler, Henry Ford, Vasily Shulgin, and countless others, all wrote about their contempt for Jews because of their hatred of each other. Objecting to the security, and even existence of the State of Israel, sends the world a message of internal division, and the world responds accordingly—with disgust toward us. No other nation denies its own right for sovereignty, and no other nation places its own people last in the list. By doing so, we are not appeasing the nations’ anger; we are increasing it and turning it into hatred since we are proving that we are not striving for unity. Only if we return to our roots, the aspiration for unity, we will win the world’s favor and support.

Our nation was created so as to be an am segula [a virtuous nation]. Our only virtue is our unique unity, when people of diverse backgrounds, faiths, and cultures have united into a single nation, as did Abraham with his disciples. Without being a virtuous nation, there is no benefit to the world from our existence, and it wants to do away with us. This is what we are beginning to experience more vividly today, and it will continue to escalate until we understand the message and adopt the virtue of unity and oneness, or suffer the consequences that our nation has suffered so many times before.
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My new article on Linkedin “The Case for (the Right) Envy”

“Love is as fierce as death; envy is as hard as the netherworld” (Song of Songs, 8:6). Envy is one of the most intense emotions. We often try to hide it, even from ourselves, because it is such an unpleasant feeling, a direct hit on our selves. Being made of desires to receive pleasure, envy makes us feel that we are not only not receiving, but that others are receiving what we are denied. Nothing is harder for our ego to tolerate than the feeling that we are robbed by others, that they are somehow better, more powerful, more successful than us.

My teacher used to say that for himself, he would love it if he could wear nothing but pajamas. It’s comfy, it’s got big pockets to fit anything you might need, it’s warm in the winter and pleasant in the summer, what more could you ask than to wear pajamas? But we can’t wear pajamas because people will gossip about us; they will not appreciate us if we don’t dress according to the social dress code, so we have no choice. In order not to be humiliated, we wear uncomfortable clothes and do what other people want us to do. Therefore, envy, and the fear of being humiliated, dictate our entire lives.

However, envy doesn’t have to be negative. It makes us envy what others have and that we would like to have, as well, but if we wanted to have positive things, then envy would increase our motivation to obtain those positive things. By positive things I mean things that embolden us, that strengthen our society, increase our solidarity, and boost our sense of self-fulfillment. For this to happen, our society needs to nurture pro-social values. When society values people who contribute to society, who make people happier and more connected to each other, then everyone begins to envy them and want to become like them.

In this way, using envy, we turn society from competitive and abusive to supportive and inclusive. When people compete at being kind, there is no end to the achievements they can make. Moreover, when they perceive helping others realize themselves as an expression of their kindness, it helps everyone become the best they can be, and at the same time want to contribute their achievements to improving their society even more. There is no end to the achievements that such a society can make.

Therefore, envy can be bad or good, depending on the values that we envy. If we teach ourselves to value what is good for all of us, our envy will become an engine for happiness.

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