Question: Why do Christians determine their holidays according to the solar calendar and Muslims according to the lunar calendar?

Answer: Because the sun and the moon are two forces that exist in nature and they affect us.

The sun gives us everything, it gives us life. This is a very clear force. Therefore, all Christian holidays and calendars work under the sun. And for Muslims, as well as for Jews, the calendar countdown is determined relative to the moon. The lunar month begins with the new moon.

By the way, the months specified in the Christian calendar come from ancient Rome and have the ancient Roman names July, August, etc., while the Jews have different names.

Jews take their calendar from the middle line, because there are three lines in the governance of our nature. Two lines descend from top to bottom: solar (left line, Christianity) and lunar (right line, Islam).

And since the Jews have a tendency to imitate the upper power, they were guided by Kabbalah, according to which they took an alternate, solar-lunar calendar. Therefore, on the one hand, they have a very complex calculation system, but, on the other hand, it is the most universal.

Imagine a calendar created two and a half thousand years ago. Up to today, it has been smoothly carried out without any problems. We know the revolutions of the sun, the revolutions of the moon and its phases. We know in advance when there will be leap years, 17^th anniversaries, 28^th anniversaries, 50^th anniversaries; there are such periods. And all this comes from the first day of creation, when the first man, Adam, revealed the upper power for himself.

Since then, we have absolutely clearly known any date in history: on what day of the week it happened, in what year, and so on. But there is a correspondence between our central calendar and the Muslim and Christian ones, since it includes both of them and combined them together in a special middle line.

Therefore, the hours in it are calculated as in the Muslim calendar, meaning the period of darkness is divided by 12, resulting in arbitrary night hours. For example, an hour in the Muslim calendar can last 50 minutes, and in the Christian, 45 minutes. The Christian calendar simply beats time: the twenty-four hour period is divided into 24 equal parts. And for Jews and Muslims, it is divided into 12 day and 12 night parts. The winter hour is long, and the summer night hour is short. It’s more like a sundial. There are a lot of interesting things in this.

But the most important thing is that in the Jewish calendar everything is clearly carried out and known in advance. We don’t need to calculate anything. For example, in the Muslim calendar, holidays can float: one year they fall on summer and another year on winter. In Christianity, too, because it is linked only to the sun. And in the Jewish calendar it always works precisely because we exist simultaneously influenced by the sun and the moon, which symbolize two lines.
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From KabTV’s “Close up. Formula of the Creator” 7/18/10

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Question: You say that science is in crisis, that it has reached a dead-end beyond which it cannot reveal anything. Are there people who have come through this dead end?

Answer: To do this, we need to change our qualities. That is, a person, as a instrument, has exhausted himself in this.

He has exhausted his feelings and his mind because he feeds only in egoism. Our desire is the matter in which we receive, feel, study, and investigate. In other words, our matter is our desire, which has now reached the threshold of its growth and has reached its limit.

Therefore, science stops just as everything in our world begins to slowly stop. We have nowhere else to go. We have no such desires, no vision ahead of where to go, why, and what for. We are at a stage where scientists feel this and very widely so.

The essence of a person is a desire. Today it stops us. In doing so, it challenges us to somehow take it to the next level.

The wisdom of Kabbalah says that you just need to move into a new system of perception. When we perceive in our desire everything that falls into it, we measure, study, investigate, and then, proceeding from this, we build our science, our attitude to life, and our life.

Instead, we need to learn to perceive the other way around, not in the system of reception, but in the system of bestowal, when you get out of yourself and feel the world that exists outside of you, undisturbed by you.
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From KabTV’s “Close-Up. The Will of the Universe” 28/11/10

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Preparation to the Lesson

Writings of Baal HaSulam, “Study of the Ten Sefirot,” Vol. 1, Part 1, “Inner Transformation,” Chapter 6, Item 26

Selected Highlights

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Question: What does Holocaust Remembrance Day mean to you personally?

Answer: It is the fact that we still need to remember the Holocaust of European Jewry in addition to all the huge tragedies that the Jewish people have experienced in their long history. This was a mass extermination of Jews in the modern world, in the modern era. No one anticipated that this was possible. Even today it is somehow hard to believe that this could have happened.

Yet it is what happened, and I have no doubt that it could happen today too. It could happen exactly as it did 70 years ago.

Question: This sounds quite scary. Didn’t history teach us anything?

Answer: No, nothing has changed. People have absolutely not changed. And they will quickly build all those concentration camps.

Question: Why have we evoked and still evoke hatred upon us?

Answer: This is a question. Because this is what we are. Because we do not want to change ourselves and thus do not want to change history. Until we change, the world will not change.

Comment: But the world did not say: “You have to change.” The world simply destroyed Jews and hate them.

My Response: Man appeared in this world in order to change and to accordingly force the world to change. If man does not change, the world practically remains the same. That is, it changes, but it changes at a very slow pace.

Man is born to change, to become an altruist, to be closer to others, to unite, and to show others that this is the way to live.

If Jews do not do it despite the fact that they are obligated to, then the entire world does not do it with them. Then we have a completely new picture of the world. That is, instead of moving forward at a certain speed, the world is slowing down. This slowing down causes such excesses.

Question: Are you saying that the world implicitly, subconsciously feels the guilt of the Jews for the world not changing, not getting happier, and that the Jews are to blame for this?

Answer: The Jews are to blame for this, and all the nations of the world feel it.

Question: What does “feel” mean? They “feel” sounds very mystical. After all, they do not say: “You have to change.”

Answer: Why don’t they say it? Ask people! Ask regular, educated people of our time: Europeans, Americans, they will tell you. It is because they are in contact with Jews.

Comment: Most of the time people say something like this about Jews: “They are bankers, they own all the capital of the world, they run the world. This is why we do not like them, why we hate them,” and so on. “They are the chosen ones;” the chosen ones imply that they are special. This is what they say about Jews.

How did it then pass over to ordinary Jews who are not such leaders of the world? 6,000,000 Jews were exterminated; this did not simply happen! 6.000,000! Children and women.

My Response: Hatred of Jews is absolutely in everyone. It is inside people subconsciously because there is a root in these people aimed at changing the world.

This root is anti-egoistic. It forces people to change, so Jews are slightly different. An ordinary person who has special intuition feels in a person if he is a Jew or not a Jew.

Question: Is it because, as you say, there is some special point in a Jew?

Answer: A special point that encourages him to change nature.

Question: Does humanity need this, precisely this, point?

Answer: Yes.

Question: Is this point contagious? Can it pass on to others?

Answer: Yes.

Comment: So, we were born with this point and are forced to travel the world.

My Response: You cannot get away from it, you must implement it.

Question: Does it mean that the closer the world comes to a dead end with all the hatred, with wars, the more it will turn to Jews and with even more anti-Semitism? Will it be even bigger than it was during the Second World War?

Answer: Of course! It will hate them to the measure that is necessary to change the world, but the world will not be changing.

Comment: I have been to Auschwitz and Dachau, I have traveled through these concentration camps, shot many movies there. I had a feeling that humanity would never come to this again. Never!

My Response: Easy! Any person can be persuaded in a second and be made such an anti-Semite that he himself will be the first to kill.

We have a responsibility to figure out why this is so and the responsibility to reveal to the world the reason for it hating us and not to dismiss it as all fiction. It actually exists, it is in nature, and that is why it will not disappear, and it does not depend on education or on intellect or on anything else.

On the contrary, the more intelligent a person is, the more educated he is, the more willing he is to reveal this reason: what is the difference between him and a Jew. In principle, once he understands this, he is very dissatisfied with it and is ready to really remove them all and remove them from the world altogether!

Once we come to a state that the world discovers that we are obligated to change from egoism to altruism, from hatred to love, which is very difficult to do, then can you imagine what kind of attitude will arise toward Jews? It is better not to talk about it in advance.

Now we are beginning to enter this transition period. And we want to start revealing it right now.

We, our organization, want to start revealing it now so that we can show everyone that it is possible. It is difficult, but it is possible to move into a completely different state of matter, one might say, from hatred to love.

Question: So are you saying that if the world starts to slowly understand this, then the pressure on the Jews will increase even more and more?

Answer: Yes.

Question: Are we thereby now directing the world toward the Jews?

Answer: Of course. We are saying: “Let’s help.” Because we all have to come to this stage of rising above egoism.

This stage of rising above egoism is now beginning to grow in the world. We must help it grow, like we grow crops in the field by watering, fertilizing, weeding, and so on.

We must help the entire world! This is called “to be a light upon the nations.”

The world will thereby come closer to this. However, when it gets closer to this, the world will have questions: what for, why, and how? That is, we will have to be able to explain it to the world.

Then we will have to draw the nations of the world after us to this state, to change from egoism to altruism. They will not go through the same states of ascents and descents as we do.

However, they will have to get tied to us and move forward with us. This is where the main moment of leaving Egypt is displayed, when we are in the form of Moses who goes ahead and all the nations of the world behind him. Here all the nations of the world rise from the egoistic level to the altruistic one.

This is called the time of the building of the Third Temple.

Comment: It sounds offensive to the nations of the world that we, Moses, we are leading.

My Response: Let them take this problem from us. I am ready to follow them.

Question: As long as they would lead to the right place? Will we then not be waiting for the next Holocaust that may happen? Are we then already bypassing it?

Answer: Yes. Here again everything depends on us.

Comment: How much responsibility is piled on us! There is no chance to live peacefully.

My response: There is nothing scary here if we agree to do everything so that the Creator would do everything through us. Does He need representatives in this world? Let him do it through me, I agree. That is all.
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From KabTV’s “News with Dr. Michael Laitman” 4/25/22

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From My Facebook Page Michael Laitman 5/4/22

Envy has a terrible reputation. It has been blamed for so many crimes and atrocities that we have learned to dread it. When it emerges within us, it is a burning feeling that is difficult to control and difficult to contain. What’s more, it makes us want things we would never otherwise think of, let alone crave. Because of these discomforts and precarious ambitions that envy evokes within us, humanity has been seeking ways to overcome it for many centuries.

However, I do not think we should overcome it. Suppressing it or annihilating it (assuming we could) would be tantamount to saying that there are things in the world that are redundant or inherently and incorrigibly harmful, and we should get rid of them. Baal HaSulam, my teacher’s father and the greatest kabbalist of the 20th century, ridiculed this approach; he cynically referred to people who advocated it as “world reformers.”

In his essay “Peace in the World,” Baal HaSulam wrote that if we were to let world reformers have their way, “they would certainly have by now cleansed man entirely, leaving in him only what is good and useful,” in their eyes. One of the filths they would certainly cleanse would be envy, and that would be an unforgivable mistake.

Just as we do not stop using electricity although it can kill us, we should not suppress envy. Just as we have learned to utilize electricity to our benefit, we should learn to utilize envy to our benefit.

In part, we already do it. Mothers often turn their children’s attention to the success of other children in order to push them to try harder. By doing so, they use the child’s natural envy. When children see that their mother appreciates someone else, it makes them envy that other person and drives them to improve in order to gain their mother’s appreciation, too.

Envy is not a pleasant feeling, but pleasant feelings do not make us grow. Need is also not a pleasant feeling, yet need is the mother of invention. Likewise, although envy isn’t pleasant, it is the engine of development and progress. To put it bluntly, were it not for envy, we’d still be in the stone-age.

Like electricity, if used correctly, envy builds us and does not destroy others. When we use it in this way, seeing other people’s success makes us grateful to them as it is thanks to their success that we, too, are improving.

Therefore, we should develop a mature approach to envy, and thank the people whose success makes us succeed, as well. If we can achieve this, we will find that after some time, we will learn to appreciate them so much that we will begin to love them for the gift that they have given us through envy.

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My new article on Linkedin “We Need a New World”

A student wrote me saying that today, many people believe we need a new world. He asked, “If you had a chance to build the world from scratch, where would you start?” I answered him that I would begin with one country, one self-sufficient country. Then I would ask for some time to develop people, to develop the society.

The problem is that we are like little children who expect the world to work the way we want it to work simply because we want it. It doesn’t work this way. For things to work the way we want them to, we need to learn how to make them happen, how to do it properly.

By learning, I do not mean that we should learn about the world, but about ourselves. We need to change ourselves so we can build a world where we will accomplish what we want without polluting the air, ground, and water, eliminating entire species of plants and animals, and eventually destroying ourselves.

The change we need to make in ourselves concerns our relation to society, the importance we attribute not to ourselves, but to the society we live in. In other words, the connections between us should be our main focus, as opposed to our current disposition to focus on ourselves.

Only once we change ourselves, the products we create will be contributory to the world as a whole. As our mindset will change from narcissism to mutual consideration, everything we do will aim to serve everyone rather than only ourselves.

This does not mean that we will not have personal items or that we will not need personal things, but the way we make and use them will inherently incorporate the thought about the common good. As a result, we will not need to worry about making sustainable products or environmentally friendly production processes because it will be our nature to work with everyone’s benefit in mind.

In other words, the degree to which we elevate humankind is the degree to which society will rise. The success of a country does not depend on technological advancement, mode of governance, or educational paradigms.

The success of a country depends on the extent to which people keep the common good in mind. Social cohesion and mutual responsibility are the sole factors that determine the fate of a nation.

Once we have built one such country as a role model for humanity, it will be possible to emulate it throughout the world. This was my reply to the student who asked how to build a new world.

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Michael Laitman, On Quora: “Why hasn’t COVID-19 ended yet?“

COVID-19 has not ended yet because we still have not responded properly to the virus.

How were we supposed to respond? We were supposed to connect with each other, i.e., to come closer together and become a bit more humane and courteous toward one another. If we would have done so, then we would have weakened the virus.

We have to understand that COVID-19 is no ordinary virus. It is a virus that demands of us to change our attitudes toward each other for the better.

It might seem outlandish that the virus would know about how we relate to each other, but it indeed knows and includes everything. First of all, it is a living particle. It is not on the still or even vegetative levels of nature, but it is on the animate living level—just like us. It has intellect and emotion, and it perceives and influences the environment. It connects with other particles, enters the human body and takes control over it.

In short, the virus is much smarter than we think, and only when we make a significantly positive shift in our attitudes to each other will it go away for good.

If we wanted to check this in practice, then we could take one country or state—say, for instance, the State of Israel where I am living—and we could decide that we treat each other courteously, that we help the needy, the elderly and children—we think about others and try doing good. We should alleviate the situation where we become approached with questions such as, “Why didn’t you do this or that?” but we each make an attitude shift: we seek out where we could add in our positive attitude toward others, to show them that we truly wish to benefit them. If we do so for even one month, then afterward we could check what happened with the virus. Would it still be around or not? We could then also review other phenomena in our society, for instance, the amount of deaths by car accidents and other such problems in our society. It is very easy to review such results. Everything is in our hands to impact a positive change in the world.

Based on the video “Why Hasn’t COVID-19 Ended Yet?” with Kabbalist Dr. Michael Laitman and Oren Levi. Written/edited by students of Kabbalist Dr. Michael Laitman.
Photo by Martin Sanchez on Unsplash.

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Michael Laitman, On The Times of Israel: “Fighting for Independence”

Two days from today, Israeli Jews will celebrate Israel’s Independence Day. On that day, in 1948, while still repelling the charge of six Arab armies and immediately following the departure of the forces of the British Mandate, the leadership of the Jewish settlement in Israel declared the establishment of the State of Israel. Since that fateful day, we have not been independent. Moreover, we have yet to learn the meaning of the word, in its true and deepest sense.

In order to be independent, we need to learn what independence means and what denies us independence. According to Webster’s Dictionary, being independent means that you are a) “not subject to control by others,” b) “not requiring or relying on something else,” c) “not requiring or relying on others (as for care or livelihood),” and other, less significant definitions.

These definitions leave the most important aspect of our freedom untouched. Worse yet, in today’s world, Webster’s definitions of independence are impossible to carry out; we are all dependent on each other, living in an interconnected and interdependent world.

We could try going to the woods to live there independently. Some people do it, but for their perceived freedom, they give up every bit of amenity that civilization grants us, but even then, they are not really free. Besides, is it worth relinquishing the comforts of civilization for the sake of declaring yourself free? Clearly, most people do not think it is worthwhile.

So what does it mean to be independent if we are forced to be dependent on every thing and every one, and have no choice in the matter? Being independent means redeeming ourselves from the sneakiest, yet most powerful enslavement: to our own egos.

Like it or not, we cannot resist our ego. If it tells us to do something, we will do it. If we decide to go against it, it will be our own ego pretending to go against itself, manipulating us into doing what it wants.

Therefore, independence means liberation from our ego. How can we achieve this? If we think of others rather than ourselves, we will have become liberated from our egos.

Think of a mother who loves her child. She does not think about what she needs unless she needs it in order to enable her to keep tending to her child. She is not free from her ego because in her perception, her child is a part of her. Nevertheless, if we were to feel like this toward people who are unrelated to us, and toward whom we have no ulterior motive, that would be liberation from our ego, and then we would see how difficult it is to truly be free.

The State of Israel, returning to our subject, will win its independence only when Israelis are an example of independence from the ego. The Jewish people became a nation when they rose above their egos and united “as one man with one heart” at the foot of Mt. Sinai 3,800 years ago. Immediately after, they were given the task to set an example for the rest of the world.

Until the establishment of the Israeli nation, there was no precedent of a large collective of individuals from vying tribes and nations uniting above their differences for the sake of forming a new nation whose supreme value is love of others. But the people of Israel achieved it and therefore became indebted to the world to lead it toward independence from the shackles of the ego.

I think it would be wise to contemplate this idea this coming Independence Day. If we regain our independence from the ego, we will regain our respect from the world and the acceptance of the nations. We cannot be freed from our obligation to humanity to set an example of liberation from the ego. As long as we display division and self-absorption, we will be regarded as pariahs. But if we are true to our vocation, we will love each other and the world will love us, because we will show the way for them to love each other.
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Question: If a person asks God to change His attitude toward him, is that also idolatry?

Answer: Yes, this is a wrong idea about the Creator that He is supposedly acting badly now, but if I ask Him, everything will be alright.

Comment: But we all ask in this way.

My Response: Here is the problem. What are we asking for? Am I asking the Creator to change or for Him to change me?

Comment: Usually the scheme is simple. There are problems and a person turns to the Creator so that He would change His attitude toward him and remove the problems.

My Response: That is, now He is bad, and when I ask He will become good. Or should I ask that I change and see that His attitude toward me is excellent? After all, if He changes me, then I will stop seeing problems. Therefore, I must ask not for them to be removed, but for me to be corrected.

How can this be? I see myself from morning till night surrounded by negative forces affecting me and I must ask to see these actions as positive. For that, I must change.
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From KabTV’s “Spiritual States” 4/5/22

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