Indeed, humanity has experienced many pandemics, but nothing has ever received such a global response as we see today with the coronavirus.
The globality of the coronavirus is its uniqueness.
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Many millions of people die from viruses and other diseases every year. What then is the big deal with the coronavirus?
I think that it is not about the health aspect of the virus as much as it is about humanity’s reevaluation of itself.
We have no feeling of this reevaluation taking place, but this is ultimately behind our reaction to this crisis.
There is a new sense of globality around humanity today that has never existed before, and this is why our response to the coronavirus is particularly unique.
Kabbalists over the generations have pointed to our generation as the one where we would have such a sensation, and they connect it to the entrance into a new era of human connection.
One of my students recently asked me, in light of the social distancing conditions brought on by the coronavirus pandemic, gatherings of up to 5,000 people were initially permitted, then 2,000 people, then 500, 100, 10, and 5. The question was: Why nature is doing this to us, and what will result from it?
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It is written, “Being scattered: for the wicked it is a benefit to them and to the world; but for the righteous, it is bad for them and bad for the world. Being gathered: for the wicked it is bad for them and bad for the world; but for the righteous, it is beneficial to them and beneficial to the world.” (Mishnah Sanhedrin, 8:5)
The social distancing conditions come as “benefit to the wicked.” We need to understand firstly what it means that we are “wicked,” and then why our scattering is ultimately of benefit to us.
The wickedness that the verse speaks of is embedded in our very egoistic human nature, which by default prioritizes personal benefit over benefiting others.
The more we develop, the more the ego grows, and in recent times it has become bloated.
Our pre-coronavirus world looked like a wild struggle for wealth, status and power, where we each tried to make our way in life by comparing ourselves with others, and always feeling deficient relative to them.
Therefore, social distancing lessens our jealously and calms down our society.
While in these social distancing conditions, we have been given a chance to become worthy of re-gathering. That is, by developing considerate attitudes to each other, to the extent of our mutual consideration, we will become worthy of coming closer together. On the contrary, the more selfish we are toward each other, then we should detach to the extent of our selfishness.
Not only the US, but all countries would be wise to comprehend that humanity is headed toward more and more integration, and that they should follow suit.
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In order to progress toward increasing global connection harmoniously, we require regular learning that enriches our understanding of our nature-based connection beyond borders, and also that we humans are the most harmful element within nature that needs to learn how to stop causing harm, and start becoming more balanced with nature.
The coronavirus’ social distancing conditions provide us with time for very important introspection in this direction: We can now see how the way we related to each other before the coronavirus was getting out of hand, and that while we are in stay-at-home conditions, we can revise our connections to each other so that we come out of this period ready for more positive social relations.
Therefore, education that brings us to more positive connection is what all countries would be wise to prioritize during this period in order for us to come out to a more balanced, peaceful and harmonious world.
Together with connection-enriching education, countries should secure people’s basic needs for food and housing. Families should be provided with the same per capita, relieving everyone of the pressure to make money. Moreover, food and housing would best be provided directly, and not by transferring monetary amounts into people’s bank accounts, as it would assure that people are provided with life’s essentials, and not that they would waste it on surplus.
Unessential industries and finance should be paused in the meantime, i.e., no transactions, and no giving or paying of loans. It should all simply freeze for the time being.
By taking care of our basic needs and providing us with learning materials that aim at raising awareness of our increasingly interdependent state around the world, and how to improve our connections to each other in order to experience such a state harmoniously, then we will optimally realize the current conditions that COVID-19 has placed us into, and our exit from the pandemic would be to a much better world.
Personally, it has affected me similarly to how it has affected many people around the world: by placing me into social distancing conditions.
I follow all the instructions of the Ministry of Health, and encourage everyone to do the same.
One of my students asked me, why does a Kabbalist follow the government’s instructions in such situations if Kabbalists are supposed to live above this world, in connection with the root of life?
I observed this example in my own teacher, Kabbalist Baruch Shalom HaLevi Ashlag (the Rabash). When I was with him in the Gulf War of 1991, under missile attack, I saw how strictly he adhered to the government’s instructions to stay at home.
In relation to following laws set by the government, there is a saying in the wisdom of Kabbalah, “I dwell within my people.” It means that we discover the positive unifying force of nature in the accumulation of human desires that aim at some extent of unification.
In short, I follow the government’s instructions, especially in such cases as wars and pandemics, and advise my students and anybody willing to listen to do the same.
In addition, the coronavirus has affected my organization, the Bnei Baruch Kabbalah Education & Research Institute, by placing us into a completely virtual format. We continue our daily lessons and other activities with students connected from their homes. This was no major change, since we have a system setup for virtual lessons that has been running for many years, and many students connect daily from around the world in a virtual setting, so we were well-prepared for that.
Other than the study, we are responding to the coronavirus by rigorously explaining how the wisdom of Kabbalah sees the coronavirus through many posts, articles, videos, and other means.
Essentially, we explain how:
the coronavirus emerged as a response to humanity’s over-inflating egoistic-competitive relations;
the coronavirus came to save us from a worse man-made disaster that we would have brought upon ourselves if we let our exploitative relations continue growing unabated;
we can expect a major long-term change in human society as a result of this period brought on by the coronavirus, one where we will calm down and become more focused on life’s essentials, and less on keeping up with the Joneses;
the optimal use of our current social distancing conditions is to engage in learning about how we can better understand our place in the world, where it is headed, and how we can bring ourselves into balance with nature.
I thus invite anyone who wishes to connect to us, to join our lessons (links in my Quora bio) or to visit our website where we update with materials about Kabbalah’s view on the coronavirus.
Due to commenting frequently on the coronavirus outbreak as nature’s response to the egoistic and exploitative way we as a human society had been relating to each other leading up to the pandemic, I was asked by one of my students:
How could a virus on a biological level come about as a result of people becoming increasingly egoistic and exploitative? It is clear, for instance, if one country wants to retaliate against another country that was exploiting it, but how are nature and viruses related to negative person-to-person attitudes?
To the naked human eye, it indeed seems as if the biological level and the level of human relationships are separate.
Everything in nature began from a single particle. That particle started connecting with another one, and then another one, and so on and so forth. At some point, this process generated atoms, and with further such development, molecules came about.
Life emerged when energy and information became transmitted between the various particles. This process then further developed into more and more complex forms of life.
In other words, everything in nature has been created such that even its tiniest parts are intrinsically connected with the whole universe.
Within this completely integral system, the human is the most complex and qualitatively highest level of all, and human thoughts, attitudes and relationships hold the most powerful influence over nature’s other levels.
Due to the capacity of human thoughts to impact other levels of nature, there is a Kabbalistic saying that states, “Everything is clarified in thought.”
I understand that we are unable to notice the extent of our thoughts’, attitudes’ and relationships’ influence on nature, and thus when a seemingly negative phenomenon strikes us, such as the coronavirus we now endure, we look like children who point at a broken glass that they accidentally hit while playing around, saying that it fell by itself.
However, the way that the coronavirus has forced us all into a common global situation, with many millions of people under stay-at-home orders, should serve to wake us up to our thoughts, attitudes and relationships to each other as being what ultimately connects us into a single network.
Moreover, we would be wise to reach the conclusion that our thoughts, attitudes and relationships to each other are the most important network that determines how nature responds to us.
If we create balance in such a network, we will then see how other levels of life become balanced. The gates to heaven on earth—a world of absolute perfection—will then open up before our very eyes.
The coronavirus is a major historical event that is changing the face of human society around the world.
One minuscule particle surfaced that has already infected over a million people, caused dozens of thousands of deaths, and moreover, put spokes in the wheels of civilization.
Within weeks, our lifestyle of shopping, cafés, restaurants, bars, clubs, travel, sports, culture, churches, synagogues, mosques, and in short, any public gatherings, came to a sudden halt.
The coronavirus physically isolated people across continents to the same stay-at-home conditions, with the mere ability to leave home for life’s essentials.
With the rat race we were running coming to a standstill, the coronavirus has shown us an example of how when we leave the environment alone, it rejuvenates and improves. For instance, the notoriously polluted air of urban China, and the water in Venice’s canals, after a relatively short period of lockdown, cleared up.
The seriousness of such events should lead us to a few conclusions:
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The fact that a tiny and barely visible virus has caused so much death, illness and socio-economic change shows how small and weak we are in nature’s presence.
The way we were living our egoistic, consumeristic and materialistic lives was detrimental to the environment and to ourselves, and when we live according to mere essentials, nature quickly rejuvenates.
While forced into social distancing conditions, we should ideally revise the way we have been living our lives.
When revising our life’s course, we would be wise to ask ourselves how we reached the state we entered, look into where we are headed, and also, whether we can impact a positive change moving forward.
How did we reach a state where we were polluting the world so much, causing so much harm to the environment and to ourselves? It stemmed from a fundamental opposition between human nature and nature in general.
Human nature is self-centered egoism. It aims to self-benefit at others’ expense, and when unabated, it leads us to a struggle for power and control.
On the contrary, nature’s quality is interconnectedness and interdependence. When left undisturbed by the egoistic human interference, natures guides all of its parts to harmony and balance.
After the explosion of the Chernobyl nuclear reactor in 1986, releasing ten times more radiation than the amount in Hiroshima, scientists estimated that the area would be uninhabitable for the next 20,000 years. However, a decade later, a blossoming nature reserve emerged from the nuclear ruin, with trees restoring themselves, and a variety of animal species reemerging: reptiles, poultry and various mammal species, some of which had not lived in the area for many years before the disaster.
Nature continuously develops its diverse and interdependent parts to a state of balance.
Since the egoistic human nature is opposite to nature’s unifying tendency, we lack the intuition to maintain balance with the rest of nature.
However, we have been granted the ability to become aware of our opposition to nature. We can learn through such blows as the coronavirus pandemic that by letting our lives run on an opposite egoistic course to nature, we end up suffering.
Also, unlike animals, we have the additional mental capacity to ask about the source of our pain, and reach the conclusion that our opposition to nature is the root of our troubles. We would then consciously and willingly undergo a transformation to balance ourselves with nature.
Unlike nature’s inanimate, vegetative and animate levels, which function instinctively in balance with the integral nature, we humans, devoid of this instinct, have the ability to prioritize our own social values that shape the social influence and public opinion that affects the way we all think and direct ourselves.
If we therefore organize social values according to nature’s value—mutual consideration and responsibility in order to realize nature’s interconnectedness and interdependence harmoniously in our connections—then we would supplement what we instinctively lack through our own conscious and willful participation in nature.
Therefore, the seriousness of the coronavirus crisis, while disastrous in many respects, also offers us an opportunity to upgrade human consciousness and the quality of life in society. How? By activating mutual consideration and responsibility in our connections.
If we fail to revise ourselves in order to become more considerate and responsible for each other, then we can expect nature to place us in even stricter conditions until we realize the need to positively connect.
How, then, can we undergo this shift of consciousness in practice?
On one hand, governments would need to provide basic income, food, housing and health-care, in exchange for our participating in educational programs where we would learn why and how to implement the principle of mutual consideration and responsibility in our lives.
On the other hand, by prioritizing values of mutual consideration and responsibility, we would aim to promote ideas and examples of the kind of positive connection human society needs throughout our media, which currently sends us a barrage of divisive messaging.
With mutual consideration and responsibility becoming society’s guiding principle, the media would address the problem of how our divisive drives negatively impact and weaken human society, and that the way to a more conscious and stronger society is by becoming better connected.
By coupling a more unifying media discourse with a connection-enriching educational agenda, we would learn how to accept, understand and get along with everyone, becoming influenced by a new atmosphere of mutual understanding, support, awareness and sensitivity.
As a result, nature would have no further need to send us pandemics or other crises in order to wake us up to our need to positively connect. In the same vein, we would experience a whole new kind of harmonious and peaceful life, where we live in balance with nature.
Aside from the ecological benefits that the stay-at-home orders spanning the world’s continents have brought about, such as significant drops in pollution and carbon dioxide emissions, another major positive impact is that the COVID-19 crisis put spokes in the wheels of our over-inflating egoistic, exploitative and manipulative interactions, heated social division and tense international relations, which were leading to a world war.
Also, while ordered to stay at home, we are now given time to calm down from our usual rat race, reconsider what is most important in life, and learn a deeper perspective of how nature works in order to exit this crisis into a better state.
Essentially, if we use this period we are now in to upgrade our awareness of ourselves as parts of a single interconnected and interdependent system of nature, it would result in an immense positive impact, both for ourselves and for nature in general.
The COVID-19 crisis is a prime example of how nature’s interconnectedness and interdependence is becoming increasingly revealed among us humans, as it forces us all into a common global problem.
We would thus be wise to learn from nature, to adapt our human thoughts, attitudes and relationships to the integral way in which nature operates.
If we fail to use this period in order to upgrade the quality of our connections, then we can expect nature to respond with further blows, whether an intensification of the current pandemic, or other natural disasters.
The principle is that according to nature’s interconnected and interdependent form, we, as the human level within nature, have to assume the same form in our attitudes and relationships to each other, in order to experience a harmonious and peaceful existence.
We have the free choice to make this leap, since our egoistic human nature that involuntarily prioritizes personal benefit over benefiting others sets us up in opposition to nature’s consideration of the whole.
Our selfish makeup is what led us to create a society functioning by each one trying to profit off of everyone else. However, as we see with the onset of the coronavirus pandemic and other crises in our world, such egoistic development has reached a limit.
Nature is now trying to wake us up to our need to make a further step in our development: to exercise positive, supportive, encouraging and considerate relationships in a place where we by default relate negatively to each other.
Yet, as much as nature leads the horse to water by giving us this global shock, it still cannot make the horse drink. We will still have to make that leap from negative-egoistic relations to positive and mutually considerate ones by applying our own free choice.
This becomes possible if we study how nature functions as a complete integral system, and how each of us together need to act similarly in order to reach and maintain balance in the system.
Essentially, we need to reach a state where we care about others to the same extent as we care about ourselves.
If we thus use the time when we are bound to our homes in order to upgrade our awareness of nature’s unifying principle, and implement it in our relationships, we will then see far-reaching positive impacts of the COVID-19 crisis—a shift into a completely new and harmonious state among humanity the likes of which we have never experienced before.
How could a virus on a biological level come about as a result of people becoming increasingly egoistic and exploitative? It is clear, for instance, if one country wants to retaliate against another country that was exploiting it, but how are nature and viruses related to negative person-to-person attitudes?
To the naked human eye, it indeed seems as if the biological level and the level of human relationships are separate.
Everything in nature began from a single particle. That particle started connecting with another one, and then another one, and so on and so forth. At some point, this process generated atoms, and with further such development, molecules came about.
Life emerged when energy and information became transmitted between the various particles. This process then further developed into more and more complex forms of life.
In other words, everything in nature has been created such that even its tiniest parts are intrinsically connected with the whole universe.
Within this completely integral system, the human is the most complex and qualitatively highest level of all, and human thoughts, attitudes and relationships hold the most powerful influence over nature’s other levels.
Due to the capacity of human thoughts to impact other levels of nature, there is a Kabbalistic saying that states, “Everything is clarified in thought.”
I understand that we are unable to notice the extent of our thoughts’, attitudes’ and relationships’ influence on nature, and thus when a seemingly negative phenomenon strikes us, such as the coronavirus we now endure, we look like children who point at a broken glass that they accidentally hit while playing around, saying that it fell by itself.
However, the way that the coronavirus has forced us all into a common global situation, with many millions of people under stay-at-home orders, should serve to wake us up to our thoughts, attitudes and relationships to each other as being what ultimately connects us into a single network.
Moreover, we would be wise to reach the conclusion that our thoughts, attitudes and relationships to each other are the most important network that determines how nature responds to us.
If we create balance in such a network, we will then see how other levels of life become balanced. The gates to heaven on earth—a world of absolute perfection—will then open up before our very eyes. [262693]
Michael Laitman, On Quora:“How will society change post-coronavirus crisis?“
I think that we will not rush to malls like we used to, and that we will see the manufacturing-buying-disposal chain as a thing of the past.
After having a period to calm down from the consumeristic rat race we were running, we now—while we’re in the stay-at-home conditions of the coronavirus era—have time to contemplate on how a lifestyle where we each set out to benefit ourselves on account of others brought about great imbalance between us and nature.
Now, while isolated from each other in our homes, there is a lot of information being shared around that acknowledges how our pre-coronavirus life was leading us to a dead end, and how our current prolonged period of social distancing gives us a new space to revise the way we live our lives.
It is thus my hope that together with the recognition of our past competitive-egoistic paradigm falling short in the satisfaction and joy that it permitted us, we will also learn that true happiness will come if we enter into balance with nature. That is, as nature is an integral system, and as nature increasingly shows us how interconnected and interdependent we are globally—as exemplified by the current coronavirus crisis—then we would be wise to learn how to adjust our attitudes to each other to match the level of interconnectedness and interdependence that nature is developing our awareness toward.
We would then exit the coronavirus era by replacing our egoistic paradigm with a new altruistic one, inverting an era that was amounting more and more negative phenomena, such as exploitation, abuse, depression, stress, loneliness, anxiety and neglect, into its opposite positive form, where we would reveal mutual consideration, responsibility, support, encouragement, happiness, peace, unification and love.
And what would we do with the piles of plastic excess that we built much of our old economy on? What would happen to all the buildings and towers we built, all the malls and shopping centers, when we wake up with an upgraded human consciousness in the post-coronavirus world?
We would turn them into museums. We would wander around all these stores, gazing at all the unnecessary and unimportant objects we filled our lives with, thinking “How could we have thought that making, buying, selling and disposing of all this garbage would have brought us any kind of enjoyment? What were we thinking?”
The post-coronavirus era museums would act to signify our new state of upgraded consciousness: that by feeling a common atmosphere of support, consideration and encouragement, we would look upon our pre-coronavirus materialistic culture as an extinct era, and these museums would remind us that we would not want to return to such a failed attempt at happiness. It is as Kabbalist Yehuda Ashlag (Baal HaSulam) writes in his article, “Introduction to the Book, Panim Meirot uMasbirot”: “Man was not created for acquiring fortunes or for building buildings. Hence, one should seek everything that will bring one to love.”
What could be the benefits of a virus that is making hundreds of thousands of people sick, and killing dozens of thousands more, around the world?
One benefit is that it is aiding the awakening of how small and weak we are in the presence of a much greater nature.
The coronavirus is a prime example of how nature doesn’t discriminate between rich and poor, famous and unknown, powerful and ordinary, educated or uneducated, and many other categories that we place upon ourselves.
Thus, while we have been placed in social distancing conditions around the world, we can indeed contemplate on how equal we all are in relation to nature.
We can see how the boundaries we set between each other and between nations become negated by a tiny minuscule virus that penetrates them all, and thus would do wisely to learn from such an example.
Nature is an integral system, and it wants us to rise in our awareness in order to relate to each other as integrally as it functions.
If we thus use this pandemic to reach such a conclusion—that nature is bigger than us, and if we related to each other more integrally, changing our previous paradigm of trying to benefit at others’ expense to one of trying to benefit the whole human society and nature that we are all parts of, then we would enter into balance with nature and experience its reactions positively.
Until the coronavirus hit us, we let our egoistic human nature, which wants to benefit itself at the expense of others, separate us more and more.
The human ego shatters the perception of the integral nature into small pieces.
As devastating as the effects of the coronavirus have been, it is likely that if the pandemic would not have entered our lives, then we would have caused ourselves a lot more suffering by letting our egoistic behavior lead us to such hatred and division the likes of which could have erupted in a world war.
Therefore, the main benefit of the coronavirus is if we use this period to consider how equal we all ultimately are in the face of nature, how our egoistic way of life leading up to the coronavirus was leading us to harm ourselves, and that we would be wise to learn how we can come out of this pandemic with more considerate, supportive, encouraging and giving attitudes to each other.
Michael Laitman, On Quora: “If the coronavirus has a 95% recovery rate, then what’s with all the hype?“
