In the News (from Financial Times): “The Group of Two that could change the world” American political analyst Zbigniew Brzezinski, advisor to Barack Obama during the presidential campaign and former national security adviser to President Carter, proposed that China and the US collectively work out all of the world’s problems.

My Comment: Unless it’s forced by external circumstances, any form of isolationism is opposite to the integral, global laws of nature that are being revealed in our time. Therefore, doing this will only bring about an even greater crisis.

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Question: In one of the lessons you said that America is built egoistically to unite more than other nations because it is comprised of different nations (is ethnically and culturally diverse), and that it is going to be okay in this crisis if the people unite. My question is: doesn’t this speak to some space in me? Some space inside me that egoistically would like to get along with the other people in my life?

My Comment: Of course, this is how we start correcting our nature: by searching for a better egoistic life. However, while studying Kabbalah we begin to feel the value of having a direct altruistic attitude to others; its independence, greatness, and the infinite, eternal sensations that become revealed in it. And then we discover how to attain this, and consciously aspire to come out of egoism.

In the News (translated from SvobodaNews): The Institute of Economics of the Russian Academy of Science (IERAS) reports that Russians are faced with a decline in income. They will have to take any job, save money, raise their professional qualifications, and support each other. At this time it is important to stay connected with family and friends, because people will have to come out of this difficult situation together.

My Comment: Indeed, this prolonged suffering will force people to unite – and not just within each nation, but all the nations together. Kabbalah enables us to understand what is happening, and then people will also be able to quickly understand what to do in order to attain equivalence with Nature, with the quality of bestowal and love. This quality is the basis for survival in the unified system of humanity.

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Questions I received on the Israeli Palestinian conflict:

Question: Why did Israel choose this time of all others to start a war?

My Answer: The war in Gaza started because of the falling oil prices. Hamas would be nonexistent without help from Iran, and Iran’s plan is to become an Arabic superpower, which is only possible if oil is expensive. Therefore, in order to raise the oil prices, Iran ordered Hamas to start the war.

Question: How is it possible to manage without the tunnels used for delivering goods?

My Answer: There are over 1500 tunnels between Egypt and Gaza, and these tunnels are the basis of Hamas’s socio-economic power. Hamas builds the tunnels and sells each one for $170,000. Hamas also receives $16,000 for giving permission for a tunnel to be dug. Moreover, the goods delivered through these tunnels are taxed by Hamas, resulting in millions of dollars in profit.

This is why Hamas reacted the way it did when its “economy” was shut down. And there is no other opportunity for them to make a profit in Gaza. The solution lies in replacing the terrorist government with a peaceful one, which will start building the economy and making its own living.

Question: If the quality of life improves for the residents of Gaza, will terrorism vanish?

My Answer: Any normal government takes care of its citizens and tries to provide them with jobs, safety, and national security. A terrorist government, on the other hand, tries to deprive its citizens of all these, in order to receive humanitarian aid and then distribute it by reselling it. Therefore, the more impoverished the nation is, the better it is for the terrorist government, because people think less and will agree to anything. This is why the Hamas government didn’t build bomb shelters in Gaza, and why the Palestinian terrorists always shoot from behind the backs of the civilians.

Question: But can’t the international community restore order?

My Answer: No one is interested in this; everyone profits off of it. Hence, when the terrorists are retaliated against, they appeal to the international community, shouting, “Look! They attacked us.”

Question: But isn’t it the UN’s mission to bring peace to the world?

My Answer: The United Nations profits from the world’s tragedies. The workers of the UN line their pockets with the money that “sticks to their hands” during the distribution of resources. This is why they’re interested in having the conflict continue and having Gaza remain impoverished, in order to steal from the resources released by their organizations.

As we can see, money is at the core of the whole conflict, and this is also why the current global crisis is economic in nature. This is exactly the kind of crisis that is capable of changing the entire world.

Related Material:
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News Report (translated from Scepsis.ru): The recent years, dubbed the “era of globalization,” will not go down in history as years of prosperity. They will be studied (if there will be someone left to study them) as a time of bloody regional wars, the growing poverty of the Third World, and the crisis of the Western middle class; a time when technological progress and financial speculation brought outrageous profit to tens of thousands, while casting hundreds of millions to the bottom of the social ladder.

The current crisis will be no exception: as we speak, some are already making plans to ensure that the losses suffered by the financial speculators will be reimbursed at the expense of regular citizens and debtors from poor countries.

My Comment: It all depends on how you view the crisis. Kabbalah views it as the beginning of goodness – as the revelation of the evil that is our egoism, the revelation that egoism is the one and only source of evil in our lives. It is the reason why we only perceive a tiny, negligible fraction of our eternal existence. This revelation, that egoism is evil, will be followed by a renunciation of it, and then by the correction of human egoism to bestowal and love.

We will then feel our existence as eternal harmony, called the Upper World or Paradise. And we will feel it both during the life of our physical body and after it dies. So let us accelerate this process by studying the method of our correction.

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I had two conversations that were recorded for the TV show, The Butterfly Effect. The topics discussed were, “Changing Our Direction” and “The New Global Order.” Speaking with me was Zalman Shuval, one of the owners of the Bank of Jerusalem and former Israeli ambassador to the USA.

Related News Story (from Financial Times): “Turmoil needs more effective solutions” Huge bank rescue plans co-ordinated three months ago by many governments were meant to let confidence recover. But governments and banks have had to respond to a renewed outbreak of fear. Anglo Irish Bank, nationalized on Thursday, and Commerzbank, given €10bn by Germany’s government last week, are among the institutions all but overwhelmed as measures once seen as dramatic have proved insufficient.

My Comment: For now nobody yet understands the fact that we are now in a different “coordinate system,” where everything operates in an integrated manner. Now, the only things that will work are those aimed at bestowal and the good of everyone. The rest is doomed to fail, maybe not immediately, but in the near future. We can’t do it all at once, but gradually we must learn about the new world we now find ourselves in! However, for now, people don’t believe me.

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News Report (from The Times): “A tidal wave of discontent threatens China” The Chinese Government announced yesterday that exports had fallen at their fastest rate in a decade. China’s exporters are collapsing, pulling down other businesses with them. According to some serious statisticians, the unemployment rate may have already passed 20 per cent. This makes the severity of the economic crisis in China much sharper than in the US and Europe.

Following in the footsteps of the US Government, the Chinese Government in November announced a four trillion yuan ($600 billion) public spending package to get the country out of the slump. But this won’t work in China. If the Chinese Government does not take a New Deal approach, it risks the Chinese people revolting and overthrowing those in power. Across the country there is mounting evidence of popular discontent turning to violence.

My Comment: The crisis is unfolding completely differently in free countries and in totalitarian countries. The closer a country’s structure is to free development, the calmer the unfolding of the crisis will be, and the quicker its people will realize the cause of the crisis and how to come out of it: through free correction of every person and all of us together.

In the free countries, a person is used to taking care of himself, and therefore he perceives the need to change differently. He takes it as his personal concern, rather than transferring the responsibility for the needed changes to the government. Because the people in the free world have this psychological preparation, they have an advantage over the people who grew up in countries with restricted freedom (responsibility).

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News Report (from Physorg): “Reverse evolution in real-time” Evolutionary biology tells us that replaying life’s tape will not look at all like the original. Now, scientists provide the first quantitative genetic evidence of why this is so. In this study, to be published online this week in the journal Nature Genetics, scientists recreated natural selection in real-time, in the laboratory and provide the first quantitative evidence for natural selection on so-called standing genetic variation. The researchers used laboratory-grown populations of fruit fly (Drosophila melanogaster)… some of the ‘reversed’ flies may be phenotypically identical to the ancestral flies, but they are genetically different.

My Comment: Creation descended from the highest level to the level of our world in order for man to consciously ascend – along with our entire world – back to the perfect level of bestowal, love, harmony, and balance. All movement is pre-programmed in advance, so as to advance only toward the final goal. This goal will necessarily be attained, and everything is moving along just one path.

However, man can either slow the process down or accelerate it. By doing the former, he evokes suffering and crises, and by the latter – abundance and comfort.

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News Report (from WebWire): “A Crowded World: Researchers use computer scenarios to study crowd behavior in time and space” The scientists at the School of Geographical Sciences at Arizona State University have created a model of crowd behavior. Their results were as follows:

1. There is rapid exchange of nonverbal information in crowds

2. The actions of a single individual can shape the dynamics of an entire crowd

3. Individuals who would never ordinarily engage in anti-social behavior such as looting might do so anyway when associated with a riotous crowd; and, conversely, anti-social individuals may see their bad behavior checked by other members of a well-behaved crowd.

My Comment: The science of Kabbalah has been explaining the same laws of individual and social behavior for thousands of years. It explains these and many other laws, how to use them to benefit the individual without infringing on his freedom and while enabling him to develop harmoniously, and how to use these laws for the benefit of society in a way that avoids conflicts between the individual and the society. It explains how the two can come to an ideal coexistence, where individual gain is equal to social gain. This is possible if the importance of the individual is equal to the importance of society as a whole, by observing the law, “The general and the particular are equal.” This observance is possible when everyone is equal and interdependent, and every person strives only to fulfill the desire of the single whole, seeing this as his mission and receiving absolute fulfillment from it.

This is the state we exist in from the very beginning. It is called the “World of Infinity.” We must desire to ascend (morally) from our present state, called “this world,” to the level of the “World of Infinity.” This desire will draw onto us the Light (feeling) of bestowal and love, which fills us in the “World of Infinity” – and this Light will then correct us, giving us the quality of “Love thy neighbor as thyself.” This isn’t inconceivable. Even scientists now prove that an individual’s qualities can change instantly under the society’s influence. Therefore, everything depends on our decision to create the right influence over each and every one of us. Therein lies our freedom of will.

Related Material:
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News Report: An article that appeared in today’s The New York Times, called, “2 Years After Campaign Began, a Different World,” shows how different the world was when Obama became the Presidential candidate in February of 2007. It was before the economic crisis, and the situation in Iraq and the Middle East was just beginning. The article poses the question, “While the world has changed, has Mr. Obama changed along with it?”

My Comment: Life will force him to change. However, I wish for him to go through the change as quickly as possible – after all, he is the Creator’s angel.

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News Report (from Economic Times): “Antarctic mission runs into protest” An Indo-German expedition is currently sailing to Antarctica with 29 Indian researchers to conduct a two-month mega experiment that may help fight climate change… the LOHAFEX expedition involves sprinkling 20 tons of iron in the Southern Ocean… Pouring iron into the Southern Ocean, which is iron-deficient, leads to a proliferation of an algae called phytoplankton. The plant takes up CO2 from the atmosphere and, after it dies, probably sinks into the ocean depths trapping the greenhouse gas with it. If the dead algae sinks deep enough, the CO2 could remain trapped for centuries. With global warming becoming a major challenge for humankind, OIF holds the promise of taking out an estimated one billion tons of carbon from the air every year if applied on a large scale. … The green activists, however, say the 20 tons of iron sulphate that LOHAFEX intends to dump into the ocean could adversely affect the marine ecology of the region.

My Comment: None of the “scientific” methods are able to bring us into balance with nature, which is disrupted by man’s actions. Man evokes the imbalance through his connections in the society: Instead of maintaining balance in the closed system of society by having a kind attitude to one another, people are throwing the civilization off balance with their hatred for each other. As a result, the breach of balance occurs on all other level of nature as well. These disturbances cannot be corrected by any method, other than by correcting man.

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