Question: There are times when someone asks you a question and you answer it very briefly, and sometimes you do not even want to give an answer. It also happens that we ask the same question, and you pour out your soul and open wide spaces before us. How do we catch this moment when you can say something?

Answer: If I cannot answer a question directly, but have the opportunity to answer it in a different way, then I answer.

Kabbalists have large limitations in what they can say and what they cannot. In addition, it is possible that by the time you ask the question for the second or third time, the state of the group has already changed. This is why I can talk about the topic that interests you. That is, there are many different conditions. The difference may even be in several days.

Comment: Sometimes you say that it is impossible to talk about something at all, and at other times you address this topic and develop it widely.

My Response: It is because the time has come. It does not depend on me. I am just a transmitter here.
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From KabTV’s “I Got a Call. Ask a Kabbalist a Question” 3/6/13

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Workshops are a spiritual act because they force people not to argue with each other, to complete each other, to be equal, to speak on a certain topic set by the workshop leader, and then think about it for a while.

If during the workshop five to ten questions are raised that people discuss, then this helps them build some kind of system within themselves and identify goals and stages of their development. As a result, they create a spiritual space between themselves based on mutual bestowal and kindness.

By discussing the topics of getting out of egoism and rising above it, they build between themselves that clearing on which they want to feel the manifestation of the Creator.

A workshop is the state where a person builds his spiritual vessel, which is a common spiritual vessel. Moreover, he begins to understand that this is outside of himself, that this is a way out of himself— the implementation of the method.

During the workshop, a person correctly expresses himself, his “speaking” level; that is, a man is called Adam, similar to the Creator. Of course, there are many erect-walking creatures; a rooster is also erect-walking. And a person is called “speaking” because he can express bestowal and love and lead another person to bestowal and love.

Therefore, today there is nothing more effective than workshops in which we all are permeated with one goal, one idea.
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From KabTV’s “I Got a Call. Why Do We Need Workshops” 4/5/14

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Question: What is the effect of family workshops when, say, five couples sit and talk to each other? In theory, they share things that they may not have shared directly.

Answer: Yes, as a rule, what a wife cannot say to her husband or husband to his wife, they say through others.

The reason for the effectiveness of such communication is that people create a common field, a predisposition to openness. As they say, a bad example is contagious, but in this case, it is a good example. After all, when the others open up, it draws you in, it affects you, and you unconsciously get carried away with others and start saying things that you could not say to your other half alone.

Question: How is it that such an intimate conversation seems to come out so easily?

Answer: Because people see that there is nothing intimate here. The rest of the families have the same issues as they do. What intimate matter might that be? Only shame (an egoistic quality), arrogance, fear of falling in the eyes of others, and so on.

But when, without self-reproach, without saying “we have it even worse,” everyone simply and frankly speaks, then the correct relationships between genders, between spouses (this is not the same thing), between parents regarding children, and so on are clarified. This greatly reduces family tensions.
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From KabTV’s “I Got a Call. Family Happiness” 12/7/13

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Question: Is there such a thing as a special opinion in Kabbalah and how can a person use it based on the essence of the wisdom of Kabbalah?

Answer: There is a special opinion in Kabbalah. This is the opinion of the Creator, the opinion of nature, which is characterized by its unshakable, unchangeable, absolute, and eternal laws. No one can change them, there is nothing we can do about them.

If a person understands this, then the only correct and reasonable thing left for him is to maintain himself and everything around him that has freewill so that it comes to the correct balance and correct combination with nature. That is all.

We need to understand that we are in a network of rigid connections. The moment we move away from it, slightly change the angle, and make a minimal phase rotation or change one relative to the other, the transparency immediately changes and there is a blackout.

We need to strive to ensure that all the upper energy passes upon us. Once we can feed on this endless energy, we will not need oil, gas, coal, or any power sources for ourselves, all of them will completely disappear. There will be a completely different technology of life.

But for this, we need to understand the laws of nature and try to comply with them, because in this case, we will be able to receive from it directly everything we want without obscuring ourselves.
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From KabTV’s “I Got a Call. Personal Opinion” 12/28/13

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Comment: Israeli medicine is one of the best in the world, but at the same time it is in a big standstill concerning the detection of diseases.

My Response: This is a big problem. In Israel, they don’t treat you until you begin to die, but they will not let you die. The approach is this: You are left to manage your health, but as soon as you become very ill, then they start to take you seriously.

You can’t do anything; this is a problematic country. Here medicine is private, public, and divided into all sorts of levels. The country cannot get over itself. And it won’t!

This is not an ordinary country. It will become a normal society only when it strives for connection—not human, but spiritual. That is when it will be able to build all its levels, all its systems, in the right way. Otherwise, it will be a bad example to all mankind. Nothing good will happen here.

You won’t see Jewish brains working properly here. You won’t see any achievements here that are beneficial. It is because it doesn’t work in the direction of our purpose. I see it very concretely and explicitly.

People wonder why, and they don’t understand why. We will always demonstrate a negative example until we begin to show humanity another example—connection.

As soon as everything is aimed, first, at uniting everyone into one single nation and the conditions of support, brotherhood, and mutual guarantee are fulfilled, then at this level we will be able to work miracles and show the whole world that it is based on unity that any amazing success is achieved, and all problems, any crises, are solved. But without connection, not.

We must give humanity a good example, and if not, it will always be bad. Such is fate.
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From KabTV’s “I Got a Call. Israeli Medicine” 12/7/13

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Preparation to the Lesson

Zohar for All “Introduction to The Book of Zohar,” “The Letter of Rav Hamnuna Saba” 

Selected Highlights

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Michael Laitman, On Quora: “Can humans be tamed?“

We need to develop ourselves as human beings beyond our animate level of existence, and it is possible with a certain kind of education.

Developing ourselves as human beings means learning and balancing ourselves with the integral laws of nature operating on our lives. If we learn how to positively connect among each other in human society, with altruistic attitudes replacing our current egoistic attitudes, we then develop ourselves beyond the animate level of existence and become human beings in the fullest sense of the term.

First, we need to provide for our animate lives, giving our physical bodies the food, sex and family that they require, then after taking care of those essentials, we can begin our human development. We then need to learn who and what we are, where we are from, why we exist, how we can develop ourselves, how we can control our human development, what our attitude to our surrounding society should be, what society’s attitude should be toward us, and how we can develop together harmoniously, i.e. us in relation to society, and society in relation to us.

We need to supply ourselves with this development that will make us human beings. Unfortunately, I see nobody understanding what it means to develop a human being, and we thus fail to realize such a process. One of the outcomes of our lack of development into human beings is our inability to understand the younger generation. We become increasingly detached from them, and do not know what will happen with them or how to guide them in a beneficial direction. We thus let life unfold as it does, into a proliferation of problems and crises.

Very simply, we need to learn what nature wants from us, and to develop in order to balance with nature’s demands toward us. If we meet those demands, we can then build a harmonious and peaceful world, one that is in balance with nature.
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Based on the video “Can Humans be Tamed?” with Kabbalist Dr. Michael Laitman and Tal Mandelbaum. Written/edited by students of Kabbalist Dr. Michael Laitman.
Photo by Alexandr Hovhannisyan on Unsplash.

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Michael Laitman, On The Times of Israel: “Is Road Rage Happening More Often?”

Road rage has recently escalated in a display of violent incidents in Israel. One person was murdered at a pedestrian crossing for making a remark at a motorcycle driver, and in another incident, a driver threatened to kill another driver and then sprayed him with pepper spray. In a recent survey, 50 percent of the public stated that they witnessed violence on Israel’s streets, a number that was 20 percent just a few years ago.

Where are such escalations of violence leading us? We can reach states where we head into the streets as if we head into a jungle, with no idea whether we will return home because we might get eaten alive. We see how everyone sits in their vehicles with no consideration for others, wanting to treat others as if they were their slaves.

It is a matter of attitude. An attitude of mutual understanding, responsibility and closeness would obviously dramatically decrease road rage and its outbursts.

Take a common scenario for many people: You’re driving. You’re late to work. The traffic jam seems to get worse each day, making it take you longer and longer to get to work. You’re aggravated, and someone suddenly cuts you off.

What should you do? Very simply: you should give way to them out of love for them.

“What!?” you ask. “What could they possibly have that I should love!?”

They are your fellow human beings. And if you’re angry that the other driver should also act lovingly toward you and not cut you off, then you should think about how they depend on your example—and give them a proper example of how to behave.

We live in an era that demands our self-transformation. Today’s tightening interdependence in human society makes us responsible for one another. Therefore, our shift to a better world depends on the extent to which we feel, think and act out of our mutual responsibility.

In practice, we need to realize our mutual responsibility first by taking care not to harm others, that we first and foremost consider the safety and well-being of others. We can become accustomed to a state of mutual responsibility the more we absorb this idea and examples of its behavior from our surrounding environment.

If we saw that our own child sat behind the wheel of every car we encountered on the roads, then we would indeed behave differently. We would no longer worry about being late for work. We would instead care for the people around us, and the more such mutual care would spread, the more harmonious and peaceful our world would become.

We should thus try to see our loved one or our close friend in every driver on the street, and more generally, in every person.
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Based on the video “Is Road Rage Happening More Often?” with Kabbalist Dr. Michael Laitman and Oren Levi. Written/edited by students of Kabbalist Dr. Michael Laitman.

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The year 2022 was marked by difficult events: war, climate change, protest demonstrations around the world, and much more.

This year has been difficult for humanity, and we enter 2023 with a feeling of complete uncertainty about the future. The one thing that is clear is that we are facing a very difficult period accompanied by high inflation and unrest in different countries.

People do not want to understand each other; countries cannot make peace and stop wars. There are many problems: climate change, epidemics, fires, water and electricity outages. Humanity does not behave correctly, and therefore, with every year our life is falling apart more and more. And in this new year 2023 we will have to realize this.

Unfortunately, humanity has not learned any lessons from the past year; it has not made any attempts to improve and change, but simply continues to sail with the flow of life to where this stream carries it.

I look at the future of humanity very skeptically because we don’t have enough intelligence to work on our mistakes, as at school we worked on mistakes so as not to repeat them again. And therefore, there is concern about how we will move forward. Everyone looks to the future with great uncertainty and does not know what to do with our lives and how to resist our egoism.

It is unclear where to put radioactive waste from nuclear power plants and from weapons, from nuclear bombs. The problem has grown so much that it is already out of our control. Who knows how it might end.

We see that two countries, Russia and Ukraine, are waging a war that has no end in sight. The confrontation is only intensifying; the last thing left is for it to turn into a nuclear war. China demands to expand its zone of influence in the world, and conflicts are growing in other countries. I don’t see a good future for the world ahead.

It looks like we will have to go through the realization of the evil of our nature and answer for all the mistakes made in the past and the ones we are committing today. And after that, we may have hope to come to a good life.

And the main thing that we lack is the heart! We do not have a cordial attitude toward each other, and therefore, unfortunately, we cannot feel someone else’s pain, and we cannot unite to help each other. We burn and destroy natural resources, destroy the globe, and at the same time we cannot have a good life.

To fix everything, we need to change a person, and we do not want to learn this and do not even believe that this is possible. We have not yet come to the realization of evil and do not know what the true cause of such a comprehensive crisis around the world is. The true enemy of man is his egoism. And even if we sometimes admit it, we don’t know how to resist our ego.

Therefore, we still lack a genuine recognition of evil.

We need to rethink our past and draw the right conclusions from it for the future. Everyone already understands that by continuing in the old way, we are burying ourselves. After all, we have neither mind nor heart, our only acquisition is a weapon with which we can destroy the entire globe. And with all this, we are not able to stop and turn to a new path.

Even the upper governance cannot say exactly what our future will be because a person is given freedom of choice. Humanity can determine for itself the way it wants to move forward. Whether he will be good or bad depends on our choice, both today and tomorrow.
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From KabTV’s “The World” 12/15/22

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