A question I received: You always say that man is not free and obeys his genes, instincts, and influence of society. At the age of 20 he is fully formed, like a freshly minted coin, and all his actions are predefined in advance. So is it possible to be a free man, and what does it mean – to be free?

My Answer: To be free means to feel that you are 100% dependent upon the Creator, but “of your own free will,” meaning that it is your decision to be so.

Man feels free when he decides, on his own, that he wants to remain under the influence and authority of the Creator, instead of being slave to his egoism.

We can’t imagine what freedom means, because we think of it as the absence of any influence. However, that is an impossibility, as there is no such thing as an empty void free from any influence whatsoever.

Freedom is a balance of forces, achieved through one’s conscious choice and effort.

We can only become free if we rise above our egoistic desire.  This does not mean that we involuntarily and completely fall under the dominion of the Creator and the desire to bestow.  Instead, it is a choice we make to be governed by the desire to bestow instead of the ego.  It is then that we can reside in the balance between the attributes of reception and bestowal. Such a state is called freedom (Klipat Noga).

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In the News (from Biocompare): “100 Reasons to Change the Way We Think about Genetics”

For years, genes have been considered the one and only way biological traits could be passed down through generations of organisms. Increasingly, biologists are finding that non-genetic variation acquired during the life of an organism can sometimes be passed on to offspring—a phenomenon known as epigenetic inheritance…The main question now is: How often does it happen? “The analysis of these data shows that epigenetic inheritance is ubiquitous …,” write Eva Jablonka and Gal Raz, both of Tel-Aviv University in Israel.

My Comment: This is precisely what Kabbalah states: our environment influences our thoughts and desires, which in turn influence our behavior, and our behavior alters the genes of the following generations. See Baal HaSulam’s “The Freedom.”

It turns out that our thoughts and desires shape our offspring, and over the course of many centuries a human being becomes a consequence not only of the original genes, but also of the way of life (the thoughts and the desires) that his ancestors chose for themselves.

Biology illustrates to us the fact that Kabbalah is not a theoretical science, like philosophy. It is a way to selectively change ourselves and the world.

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A question I received: Suppose that all of humanity gets together as one family and decides that they will divide all the resources fairly between all seven billion people. But what will happen if people remain inside their egos, which only continue to grow?

My Answer: It is impossible to do what you describe without correction. Therefore, the way to all of this should be paved by education. When I say “education,” I mean the teaching and explanation about one’s freedom of choice, the goal of creation, the essence of a human being, how we perceive reality, and the development of humanity by way of egoistic development. It’s because we have to learn how to live in the new, unified, interconnected system. We cannot run away from this system, and thus we have no choice.

You are like a fish caught in a net, and in order to survive, you have to learn the laws of this net. We must now learn the laws of the new global world and pass them on to the whole of humanity. People have to understand these laws and the fact that they have no choice. Otherwise, they will be pushed to the same thing by suffering, until they will finally start to obey the common law of nature against their will.

This is how the laws of Nature are becoming revealed. Kabbalah and Bnei Baruch are not trying to give people orders as to what they should be doing. Rather, they have to understand these things and agree with them, at least in part. However, in order to get there, there has to be a permanent media campaign that would show people examples of the correct behavior. All of this should be encouraged by society, and it can only happen when people will realize that this is the only possible choice.

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Matan Torah – Talks, 26.10.05-16.11.05: “The Revelation of Godliness (Matan Torah)”,Talk 1

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Two questions I received on work in the group:

Question: You said we should feel inspired by the group even when we know this inspiration is artificial. Could you clarify?

My Answer: Because a person is a created being, his essence is the general will to receive pleasure. One’s environment tells him what he should be feeling pleasure from, and the environment transmits this influence onto a person through education and advertisement. These create a value system inside the person.

This is why our only freedom of will lies in choosing what environment will tell us what we must enjoy in this life. The enjoyment can be of two types:

1. Of this world, where one desires to attain things in this world
2. Of the Upper World, where one desires to reveal the Light and become fulfilled by It

You decide which is right for you. (For more on this, see Item 4 of “Introduction to Talmud Eser Sefirot.”)

Question: Do I have the right to demand from the group a display of the importance of the goal, or is the group there for me to display the importance of the goal to them?

My Answer: You can demand it, but this relationship has to be mutual!

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In the News: (from Sky News): “Union Condemns Six Month Teacher Training” Prime Minister of Great Britain Gordon Brown proposed establishing courses of accelerated retraining to enable individuals to change their professions and become school teachers within a half a year. However, the acting general secretary of the National Union of Teachers, Christine Blower, said that six months’ training was “very, very far from being enough.”

My Comment: We have to establish global education courses for everyone without exception – the employed and the unemployed both. We have to teach everyone how to exist in a global, integrally-connected world. People have to learn where their freedom of will lies and what kind of behavior Nature demands from us in regard to ourselves, our families, close ones, and strangers, and on all levels: economic, political, cultural, religious, and so on. Just as we educate children in order to prepare them for life in the world, so everyone must now learn to live in the new world.

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Four and a half thousand years ago, there was already a situation similar to the one we have today, and there were researchers who understood this strange phenomenon. They understood what goes on in an isolated society where everyone’s interdependence becomes revealed and where people begin to understand that Nature does not allow them to relate properly to each other, as the situation demands of them.

They revealed the method of working with the nature of a human being in order to help people interact with each other properly so as to survive. However, this shouldn’t be done just for the sake of survival, but also to attain prosperity, development, and well being. They discovered how it is possible to influence a person, explaining that in order for this to happen, we have to attain the structure of the system.

It’s logical that we have to discover the system in which we exist. This is necessary in order to understand what binds us together, in what way are we interdependent and what kind of union we must achieve. We have to discover what our present nature is like, what we are capable of changing and what we aren’t, where our freedom of choice lies, and how we can change what must be changed.

We cannot change the program or the matter we are made of, and we cannot change the principle by which this system functions. The only thing we can and must change is our attitude, perfecting it to make it similar to the integral and harmonious system we are in. This is the only freedom of choice we have. It’s truly a wonder how everything in Nature is arranged in such a way that even if we wish to intervene in other aspects, we cannot change anything. We received a system where everything is predetermined except for this one thing. The connection between its parts is an egoistic connection, but it can be transformed, and this is precisely what we have to do.

There is a science that explains how to perform this action. If you use this science, you’ll be able to perform this action. It does not talk about anything except the connection between people, summed up by the rule, “Love your neighbor as yourself.” And this is now being revealed through various problems.

This science tells us what constitutes our only freedom of will: the unification of people with one another, and nothing else. Today this is being revealed to us by Nature itself, which is making us see the problem that needs correction – the broken connection between us. It also tells us how this system works, how we can achieve this connection step by step, and how this entire enormous, universal, amazing system will look in all of its splendor once each and every one of us, and all of us together, will implement the proper connection.
(From the lesson on Baal HaSulam’s article, “One Precept,” on 03.05.2009)

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A question I received: What kind of power balance should be established in the world? The G-20 leaders want to create a better power balance between different countries to make sure that no country will be able to control the others. How do you envision the map of the world’s power balance, when done correctly?

My Answer: I do not see this as a good situation. Any action that’s based on the human ego is ignorant of the needed inner changes in people’s relationships to each other. Therefore, even if it’s done for the sake of balance, it will lead to the recognition of evil and will manifest in a negative form. As a matter of fact, people will not otherwise recognize the evil inside themselves. If we won’t bring about a correction of interpersonal relationships, then it’s worthless to create any new regulator. It won’t help and will only bring us to a more corrupted state.

Our world is abundant: it has natural resources, developed industries, machinery, technology, economy, a banking system, and agriculture. Everything is 100% fine-tuned. We only lack a connection between us. That connection cannot be attained by means of a regulator, which the G-20 leaders hope to employ to solve our problems on the corporeal level. They are thinking, “Let’s create a special computer that will make all the right calculations.”

But the fact is, the calculations that need to be made are inside us, and they have to be done for the sake of our neighbor! What does Baal HaSulam say in the newspaper “The Nation?” He writes, “There must be fair distribution between everyone! Oil, gas, metal, and everything in the earth belongs to the whole of humanity in equal measure. You cannot have something if someone else does not, because it belongs to everyone equally!”

All the people must work for each other’s benefit, and do so willingly, rather than because of some regulator. Using a regulator to achieve this would be similar to the KGB in Russia. This has to happen because of your own desire!

So what is that point of reference we should now start with? It is education – learning where the problem comes from. There’s no need to do anything in the world except man’s inner correction! Even the climate will change because of this! We have no other way out of the situation. And the purpose of our dissemination is to make this fact known.

The G-20 leaders are like children who will gather at their summit and play it out as if they have a solution in their hands. They will then start to carry it out in the world, and it will fail just like all the previous ones did. They will all fail.

There are many programs like this now. For example, the Japanese government began giving out money to its people. But people won’t spend it; they will just save it for a rainy day. Yet the government presumes that people will immediately run to the stores to spend it. How can I spend the money if I don’t know what is going to happen to me tomorrow!?

The entire world is in a “frozen” state. Everything has come to a halt. And the only reason this is happening is because our intentions are not aimed at benefiting each other. So let us hope that we will be heard.
(From the lesson on the Baal HaSulam’s article, “The Freedom,” on 03.13.2009)

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A question I received: In your opinion, will the global world definitely come to communism, seeing as Marx is in style again, or is there a possibility it will return to earlier social orders, starting from the primordial time and on?

My Answer: The development of society has brought us to the realization that we are interconnected, and in the future it will make us realize that we have to live like one family, according to the rule, “from each according to his abilities and to each according to his needs.”

Marx recognized that this is possible only under the condition that people will see work itself as a vital need, an expression of their feeling of love, rather than a necessary means of existence (also see Baal HaSulam’s newspaper, “HaUma (The Nation”). When people’s attitudes change in this way and every individual’s egoism will be corrected, our productive forces will bloom and we will reveal all of Nature’s abundance through similarity to Its laws.

Marx explains that first a negative force destroys the former state, and then a positive force forms a better state, to the degree that the positive force becomes revealed in full. However, development under the influence of the negative force is lengthy and full of suffering. But if a person knows the path of development, he can elude the control of the negative force and take his development into his own hands. The benefit is that the time and the suffering are reduced.

In order to go through this path instead of the natural path of suffering, we need an artificial mechanism to help us develop, which can be controlled like an incubator that permits chickens to breed quickly and reliably, for example. But first we need to study Nature in order to construct this artificial mechanism according to Its principle.

Kabbalah gives us the complete template for creating such an “incubator” for all of humanity. This “incubator” is an organized, correctly structured environment or society. It’s an environment that influences every person in it, directing him toward the purpose and compelling him and all of society to change and take on the necessary form. See Baal HaSulam’s article, “The Freedom.”

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In the News (from The New York Times): “Our Greatest National Shame” Our No. 1 priority must be education. That makes the new fiscal stimulus package a landmark, for it allocates more than $100 billion toward education. Education Secretary Arne Duncan argues: “We have to educate our way to a better economy, that’s the only long term way to get there.”

My Comment: It’ll be a real pity if this sum won’t bring any improvement. And chances are – it won’t, because in order to create a new education system, it’s necessary to create the right environment for every student – one that will elicit new, altruistic qualities in them (see the article “The Freedom”). In other words, schools must provide a full day of classes, and the children should only go home in the evening, to spend time with their parents and to sleep. In addition, the interactions among the kids should be organized according to a new, integral program that will teach them how to connect with society and to take every member of society into consideration.

However, in the above case, the money will be spent on the kind of education that turns children into various specialists, whereas the real problem lies in upbringing – how to turn a child into a Human Being.

(The above picture shows me together with my son and daughter.  Both were raised in a Kabbalistic education system and now have successful careers in Kabbalah.)

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In the News (translated from BBCRussian): Paul Wolfowitz, the former head of the World Bank said, “It’s one matter to understand how to battle the crisis, and it’s an entirely different matter to find a unified approach. Much was done in Davos to coordinate activities between different countries, but they still don’t know how to battle the crisis. The next meeting will be held in April and I hope they will be able to develop a coordinated policy. However, it’s necessary to admit that there is no unified opinion on how to overcome the crisis. Some leader will stand up and say, “I will take care of my citizens, I will impose custom tariffs and protect my market, and I will subsidize our economy so it will survive” – and if everyone will do this, no one will survive!”

My Comment: The crisis is only a symptom of our imbalance with Nature, which is global and integral. There are two paths we can take from here:

• Move toward harmony with Nature by uniting with each other, which will bring us goodness as a result, or
• Move toward even greater imbalance with Nature by disconnecting with each other, and going through even more suffering as a result.

The choice is ours.

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