Lesson 2: The People of Israel’s Birth
[With Chaim and Gilad]
Chaim: Hello to you all. We’re glad to be here in the second lesson of Like A Bundle of Reeds, lessons to talk about the role of the Jewish people and anti-Semitism and why this is all happening—the lesson that explains really what we’re doing here, why everything is happening and…
Gilad: …what we can do about it. I went to my parents’ house yesterday, and I told mother that she should watch the course. She was born and raised in Australia; her parents went there after the second world war. I showed her the clip we showed last week and she was in total shock. She wasn’t able to watch last week and I showed her the clip of the students in universities and she was in total shock of it. Her immediate reaction was, “What can we do?”
First of all, I told her to watch the course and we’ll tell her what to do. But her immediate response was that we have to write letters, we have to try to contact them, and I think that our immediate response to watching these anti-Semitic actions, seeing what’s happening in the world, is to do something, act. It’s very important to know what the right action is, otherwise we’re [in neutral] and we see no change.
I wonder what she might say about what we’re going to watch now. We have another clip for you. If the one last week made you feel uncomfortable, this one is really disturbing. Let’s just watch it and keep talking afterwards.
An exercise on the campus of the University of California at Berkeley:
Opening scene: Student waving ISIS flag and shouting that ISIS only wants its own state, that they don’t kill people, that America is responsible for all the deaths in Iraq and Syria, etc. Students walk by without paying any attention; a couple of them say things like “Right on!”
Next scene: Student waving Israeli flag appears and before he begins speaking those walking by begin shouting out against Israel, accusing them of causing all the problems on the planet.
So, [Israel] enslaves the whole planet, huh?
So, after this bit of entertainment… There is a very unfortunate situation right now in Ferguson, MO, which is as we know a suburb of St. Louis. Surprisingly, or not so surprisingly, guess whose fault it is?
It’s probably the Jews’ fault.
What does the paper say?
Let’s look at the sign. “Occupation is a crime Ferguson to Palestine Resist U.S. Racism Boycott Israel.”
[reminder about question and answer forum]
So why is all this happening? We have to go back a little bit and get back to the roots of why this is happening, because this doesn’t make sense. To reiterate quickly what we said in the previous lesson.
The Israeli nation was formed as the result of a split in Babylon between Abraham, who discovered that there was one force in reality, and the ruler of Babylon at the time, Nimrod.
What we are saying is what the sources tell us. We are not going to get into historic arguments of whether or not Nimrod and Abraham actually lived in the same time and whether or not Abraham was actually in Babylon, or maybe in Haran, which is a place in Babylon, it doesn’t matter. What matters is that from Abraham’s time onwards, you have two directions, two trends, in reality. Let’s look at a drawing.
What you have here is Babylon, and from that point onward, you have two trends. One trend is humanity, the other trend is Israel—Hebrews, Israel Jews—it’s all the same. What’s the difference between humanity and Israel? The difference is that Abraham’s group adopts or embraces a very fundamental principle. In a word, it’s love your neighbor as yourself. In other words, love the other more than you love yourself. That’s how they all lived, so they ended up being very tight, very united, very close, and because they actually achieved that state internally they discovered something else, that there is a binding force underneath the whole of reality, and that binding force that ties everything together is the creative force of reality. So they call it the Creator.
Afterwards it was given the names the Lord, God, all kinds of names, but all these names refer to states of unity, unity of reality, oneness of reality. The two trends split and Abraham’s group of students developed into the people of Israel eventually, through Isaac and Jacob, etc. This is the situation. How does that all happen? We said we were going to discuss the evolution of desires. How did we come to that situation where we even need to create that split?
First of all, the force that Abraham discovers, he calls it the power of bestowal—giving. Now once you have a force of bestowal, it necessarily creates a desire to receive. Otherwise it can’t bestow. The manifestation, the action, of the power of bestowal is the power of reception. This is not a new concept to humanity. There are similarities in every culture, every teaching—yin/yang, male/female, giving/receiving, you see it in nature, you see it in everything that moves, in electric charges, in atoms for example, the negative and positive, heat and cold constantly balance each other out. Only when you have these two forces do you have balance in reality and reality can exist.
Reality, our world, develops as a result of interactions between those two forces. It develops in stages. We call it evolution. It started with the Big Bang, and went on to create the planet earth, and then finally life on earth began about four billion years ago with plants and then animals and humans, the top tier of evolution so far, not physically, but in mental capacities and emotional capacities, or at least in emotional complexities.
How does this develop? It develops, and this is what Baal HaSulam and other Kabbalists say, in stages. These stages go from the still (the inanimate), to the speaking. Let me read something to you; slide # 2 please.
You have four levels of desire. And this is what Rav Ashlag and many Kabbalists wrote about. [reads passage]
What does that mean? We said a few minutes ago that a desire to bestow necessarily creates a desire to receive, otherwise it cannot bestow. Everything else keeps developing by default. It cannot stop developing. These are the cause and effect processes that we see. As desires to receive keep developing, they evolve into what we finally have in our world. Meaning what?
First the most basic level of the desire to receive is the still, inanimate level, minerals. In our world you see it as hydrogen—the first material that was created—and then helium and the rest of the chemical foundations were created. Finally created were more complex molecules and evolving into planets, galaxies and stars. This keeps developing. At some point—and this is important to remember—these materials keep creating more and more complex systems of inanimate materials. Why?
Because according to the law of unity, to that singular force that Abraham crated, the more you relinquish self-interest and work for the benefit of the collective, the stronger you are, because you are more in synch with the fundamental force of reality. Atoms become more and more complex, and molecules become more and more complex, and eventually it’s not enough. The desire to receive grows to the point where they begin to replicate themselves. Let’s put it that way. There’s a very elaborate explanation about how life begins and why it begins in Dr. Laitman’s book called Self Interest vs. Altruism. The whole books talks about the evolution of desires.
Basically life as we know it begins as nothing more than a molecule that can replicate itself. This doesn’t happen by choice. It certainly doesn’t happen by chance. It happens because it’s a development of the desire to receive, what Kabbalists call the will to receive. This is important to remember because it allows for the creation of more complex systems. So now you have unicellular organisms and you have life. They begin to congregate, creating colonies of unicellular creatures. Gradually these colonies divide into different functions, where each part in the colony does something else. Eventually they all converge into a single organism and you have life as we know it. They develop into the vegetative and then the animate level. And then you have animals and finally you have humans which is the highest development, the last degree, in the animate development—still not speaking. Eventually humans begin to communicate as humans, language develops, and then you have all four levels of desire in reality. You have humans.
But this is not yet where the split happens. The split happens when the fifth level appears. We have to remember that what I described doesn’t just happen in the world. It happens in each of us internally as well. Think about the development of a baby. When it’s born it’s nothing more than a little animal. All it knows is it wants to eat and sleep and poop. As it develops new desires emerge and that’s why babies develop. As the desires emerge they open their eyes and they try to get more information. They absorb more information and grow and develop. What develops in them? The desire. That’s why they look like they want to devour the world.
Eventually, a new level of desire appears, Abraham’s level, which is being dissatisfied with life as a whole. This means that it’s not enough to say ‘Life is great, I have plenty to eat, I have a roof over my head, I have a family, that’s all I need.’ People start asking about: What’s life for? What’s the meaning of it all? Why is this happening? These were Abraham’s questions, and that’s when Abraham discovered the power underneath everything.
What he discovered was that humanity was intended to achieve that fundamental force of reality—the power of unity that creates everything—to perceive it and feel it and become like it, Creator-like. It’s described in the Bible as, ‘And they all know me from the least of them to the greatest of them.’ It’s also described as Dvekut, adhesion, which means adhesion with what? Adhesion with My qualities, meaning the Creator’s qualities. In other words, all of the people in the world are intended to eventually attain the Creator, become like the Creator, in the sense that they perceive the power of unity and as a result they perceive everything that is happening in the world.
Slide # 3.
This is by Rabbi Nathan Neta Nota Shapiro. He was a famous Rabbi and a Kabbalist as well.
What does it mean that Israel have yet another, fifth part? This is when we should remember that Israel is a state of being. Abraham, who started Israel, was not Jewish of course. There was no such thing as Jew at that time. Israel is a person who has a desire, Yashar Kel, Israel. Yashar means straight and Kel means the Creator, so straight to the Creator. If you want to discover the Creator, and that’s all you want, then you are internally, spiritually Israel. It doesn’t matter if you were Christian or Muslim or Buddhist or Jewish. If you don’t want to discover the Creator, but you want other things, like to make money, to have a good life—which is fine, by the way; it’s not one or the other; we’re talking about the dominant aspiration of a person. If the dominant aspiration of a person is to make money, to gain wealth, to gain power, then that person is not Israel internally. Accidentally you may be born Jewish or not, it doesn’t matter. Now we’re talking about the internal state.
I was trying to understand the connection to the last lesson. You were talking about the development of the desires. Last lesson we concluded we explained that if you want to understand the reason for anti-Semitism today, let’s go back to the beginning to see where the Jewish people started their way, and we’ll try to understand from there. What this seems like is like this hatred that’s founded.
We spoke about the fact that Abraham wasn’t satisfied by current explanations or idol-worshipping—saying this idol is for this and if you want to make money, that’s that idol, and it’s raining and you want it to be sunny it’s this idol, maybe you want it to be raining it’s that idol, and so on and so forth. Abraham wasn’t satisfied by that and he broke the idols, meaning he broke that consensus, and he searched for something higher. He felt something higher and that desire of his that led him to search for the force that encompasses the entire nature, and he said it’s called Israel, because it’s the desire that’s directed to that force that we call Creator, or nature, or however you want to call it.
And now you added another level of explanation to that very same story. You’re saying that there are four regular desires and that Abraham’s desire to discover this force of nature, to be in balance with it, to work accordingly, which is unlike Nimrod’s direction…
That’s where the split happened.
That was the uniqueness of it. So that fifth desire is the exact uniqueness of Abraham
Yes, and the Kabbalists call it ‘a point in the heart’—a new desire that says, ‘Life is great, but I’m not satisfied. This is not enough.’
So what’s the rest of the heart if that’s just a point in the heart?
It’s the rest of the desires.
So my desires, let’s say everything basically… if I want to eat or if I want to get married or I want to get a promotion at work or if I want to study for my Phd, all of those desires are desires on one level, and you’re saying that that point in the heart… all of those desires are desires on one level?
That’s the heart.
And the point in the heart is what, an awakening like Abraham had?
Exactly. And he wasn’t the only one, of course, he had a group of students and his family and everyone with him, and they all agreed, they all went with his desire. They had the same desire, they shared his desire. That’s how they developed the group. As they evolved they became the people of Israel. Why? Because they taught each other and they taught everone who came in.
At that time, by the way, in Biblical times, do you know what it took to convert into Judaism? It took… like Ruth did. She wasn’t Jewish, she was from Moab. She said, ‘Your people are my people; your faith is my faith.’ She said that to Naomi. Meaning what? She accepted the tenet, the principle, of living according to the law ‘love your neigbhor as yourself.’ And that discovering that the Creator, the creative force of life. That’s all it took. You had to change internally in order to become a Hebrew.
It seems like there’s been a long way since then to what we see now. Now if someone wants to be Jewish they take a process of converting. It takes a year or two years, so what’s happened since then?
A lot has happened since then. We’re going to talk about it in the next lesson. I don’t want to get into that. It’s too big a topic for now and it’s a big pitfall.
Why don’t you tell me about that desire we were talking about. That’s where we stopped with the current explanation. So that there’s that fifth desire which is… everyone has it?
That’s the thing. Nimrod didn’t have it. He couldn’t understand what Abraham wanted. What he could understand, though, is that what Abraham was aiming for was a threat to his power, to his ruling, because once you are governed by an internal quality, and a quality of bestowal, then you’re connected to everything, and you don’t need external power. Society becomes united and connected and doesn’t need external power. There’s a lot to explain here. That’s why Israel didn’t have a king for many centuries. Israel didn’t have a king and they remained together as a unified nation, without a king, without any ruler. Why? Because they were united internally, so they all knew the laws and they all lived by laws that they all felt were right.
What laws? Can you explain that? It’s a bit unclear.
Laws of unity.
So they have that point and those people, it’s not that Israel has that point, but those who have that point are called Israel. And those who had that point start living according to a different rule, a rule that leads them to a better understanding. _____ So why even they need a king, as you were saying. How does that lead them to live differently?
Let’s put it this way. You and are in that state, love your neighbor as yourself. What you feel, what you think, I know it, I feel it in me. Hypothetically, as an example. Not only that, what you want I immediately feel as my own desire. Just like with a kid. When you have a child and your child wants something, you naturally want to give it. But it’s reciprocal. It’s not a one-way street. It’s everybody treats everybody else this way. So you have a whole nation of people who feel each other—each other’s thoughts, each other’s desires—and they all work to fulfill those desires. So do they need any external ruler?
It’s like a family basically. Meaning that sensation of one another is closer than a family.
It’s one entity.
How does that work?
It works perfectly. Because you don’t need anyone to tell you how to behave toward anyone else, because you feel everyone else. As you raise your children you raise them to be in that state of being. They all grew into that.
So what’s happened to Israel since? I’ve seen Israelis, not just Israelis, meaning Israelites as you want to call them, the Jewish people. They’re all over the world, in Australia where in grew up, in America, in Israel, in Europe. That thing you’re talking about, it seems like on some level it’s there, because when Judaism goes through hardships it immediately goes back to that kind of sensation—that mutual responsibility, that mutual care…
It goes back to… it increases its unity, but it’s not that sensation. That sensation is lost, is gone. That sensation is created through the point in the heart, and the point in the heart is something that the Jews don’t sense right not. They don’t have that quality, obviously today, as we know, because the Jewish people is not united. Certainly not at the level that is described. But the memory of it—because of the Reshimot, recollections—exists underneath because it’s a state that existed in the Jewish people. When we think about it we see how different this is to anything else we see in the world today, and that existed in the world at that time.
It actually quite makes sense, because if you look at Judaism throughout history, you see that whenever the Jewish people were united in any form in history, they were always most successful as a nation. When they were dispersed, and they were separate from each other—not only separate physically but separate in their state of mind, in their not wanting to be united—bad things happened to the Jewish nation. That explains it on a deeper level.
Yes, but if we get into that we have trouble with historians who will tell you, ‘Yes, but look what happened in Spain. Some of them stayed Jewish, some of them converted to Christianity. They had a great life. They were in government and they were wealthy and everything was beautiful, and then all of a sudden it changed.’ You need to understand how things develop. So I prefer not to get into that, at least not now.
What we need to understand is that once you have that level of unity then you don’t really need a ruler because you are one with everyone. And Nimrod stopped it. Abraham to him was a threat. So they split, and the problem is that when Abraham left, the rest of the Babylonians could not acquire that quality any more. They had no teacher. They had no one to show them the way.
So you have two trends developing in reality. One trend is the Jewish people that continued to develop on Abraham’s tenets up until two thousand years ago or so when the temple was ruined and Israel were exiled. Exile, internally, is not the ruin of a brick house. It’s the ruin of the unity. This is when Israel were exiled, when they lost their internal unity and as a result were exiled from the land of Israel, the place where they achieved Yashar Kel, straight to the Creator, and they were dispersed.
What happens is that once Israel loses that quality, there is no one in the world that has that quality, and yet there is a demand for that quality. That quality eventually is the quality that guarantees a good life because we all take care of each other. Not only that, we all perceive the Creator as life’s dominating force. When you don’t have that quality, you cannot understand life at its deepest meaning. And today, more than at any other time in history, we have to understand life at its fundamental level, because otherwise we see what kind of mess we’re falling into.
So the worse off the world becomes, the more it needs to understand life in order to understand how things work and how to put order into things. So subconsciously the more the world is going to demand that perception from the Jews, the only ones who have any recollection—subconscious but existing—recollection of the state of connection with the Creator and therefor the only ones who can and must bring that unity to humanity. Of course, anti-Semites don’t know that this is what they want. Very few of them express anything like it, like Henry Ford did, but this is what lies at the bottom of it. Every time Dr. Laitman meets with anti-Semites and talks to them about it, just like that, anti-Semitism is gone. They actually become friends. This is a tested method.
We have a question from the audience. So Abraham learned from other faiths and cultures and discerned for himself how to create that better world?
Maimonides gives us a beautiful description of how he learned. He says this: Terah, Abraham’s father, was an idol-worshipper. Not only that, he had a shop. He was building idols, Abraham was helping out in the family shop, and Terah was also a spiritual leader. He knew all about divinity and all about idol-worship and how to sacrifice to those idols/statues that he was building. So everyone who came to him, he counseled them, gave them advice, taught them about life and everything. He was an important figure in Haran or Babylon of the time.
Abraham grew up into that. They were very well-off. They were a respected family. They basically had everything. But Abraham was an inquisitive boy and he kept asking himself: How can this be? What’s making everything happen? And most of all he was disturbed by the fact that he himself—and he knew he didn’t know anything about life—was building, he could sell to people and tell them, ‘This has the power to give you health.’ Or, ‘This will help you find a spouse. This will make you rich.’ He knew he didn’t have the power to make anyone rich, but he made these little statues, and people bought them believing they would make them rich, that it had some kind of magical power that would make them rich.
He started asking about what’s going on here. How come so many people, everyone around him, believed it. It didn’t make sense to him. He started asking and finally he discovered, by a process that’s not described there—basically because he had a point in the heart—that it doesn’t work like that, that there’s this one force, that if you understand that there is this force of unity underneath everything, then you understand everything. That force of unity—that desire to give—creates a desire to receive, and they immediately connect because it’s plus and minus. From there on everything else starts to build. Suddenly everything made sense to him.
One day, Maimonides writes, Terah had to go and do some errands in town. And he asks his son Abraham to watch over the shop while he is gone. So his dad goes away and he stays there. An elderly man comes, fifty or sixty years old, and he says, ‘I need an idol to help me get rich. Can you sell me something?’ He looked at one of the idols and asked to buhy it. Abraham asked him, ‘How old are you?’ And he said, ‘I’m fifty.’ Abraham said to you, ‘You’re fifty, and this is a day-old idol. You want it to help you?’ The man was taken aback and he got up and left. A woman comes in with a bowl of semolina, a very fine flour, very expensive at the time, and says, ‘Sacrifice this to one of the idols. I have a problem and I want this to help me, so please sacrifice before the idol that you think I should sacrifice it to.’ He takes the bowl, puts it next to the biggest idol, and then he breaks all the other idols, everything in the shop. She is in shock and leaves.
Shortly after, his father comes in, sees the mess in the shop, and asks, ‘What happened here?’ Abraham tells him, ‘This lady came in with a bowl of semolina and she asked to sacrifice before one of the idols, so the big one grabbed the bowl, and it took a hammer and broke all the other idols, and now it has the semolina for itself.’ Terah asks him, ‘What are you talking about? These are idols. What do they know?’ Abraham asks him, ‘Do you understand what you just said?’
That’s the point where they split. Terah belongs to the old school, the one that believes in idol-worshipping. Abraham is the new school, the one that perceives the real forces of life and follows them. And they couldn’t stay together any more. From there on Terah takes him to Nimrod, there is the famous conflict, etc., and Abraham splits with his group.
Another question pretty much continues. Soo then are the Jewish people Israel? Are the Jewish people chosen? If yes or not, then who is Israel?
It’s written, ‘And you will be unto me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation.’ Who were the priests in previous times? They were teachers. What does it mean to become a kingdom of priests? What does it mean to become holy? In Hebrew the word Kodesh, holiness, means separation or dedication to something else. When a man and a woman marry, the woman becomes Nekodesh, dedicated to that man. We also say that a person dedicated himself to a certain task or goal in life. When you dedicate yourself to something, you Machadesh [sp?] yourself. You become Kadosh, you become holy in that sense.
Israel’s role is to be a role-model of unity. They are the heirs of Abraham’s school and they are the ones who have to set an example of unity and show how it’s done. Actually, by simply uniting, it’ll give such an example that the rest of the world will follow. Whenever Dr. Laitman says it, people come and say, ‘How can you be so arrogant/ You think you’re so special.’ It’s not a question of choice. It’s not a question of being arrogant. It’s a question of duty. It doesn’t matter whether or not others perceive it as arrogance, because it’s not. A parent’s job, for example, is to be an educator and a provider for the child. It doesn’t make the parent arrogant. It’s done out of love. We certainly can’t provide for the whole world, as Jews, but what we can and must do is set an example of unity. That’s all they need, the nations. You can see.
How many Jews have Nobel prizes? How much have Jews contributed to the world in terms of economic development, cultural development, scientific development? Every field of knowledge, every area of life, Jews have contributed tremendously. And nobody cares. Most people hate Jews, at least subconsciously. Now it’s becoming more and more conscious, and we can see. Why are they so angry? Because the one thing we have to give to humanity, we are not giving. And this is unity, love of others. It’s very simple. This is why Hitler wrote in Mein Kampf that the Jews have this quality that they hate each other’s guts unless they are pushed, and then they unite. Then when the trouble stops, they become dispersed again. That’s why Haman, in previous times, from the Bible, from the Esther story, says we can kill the Jews now because they are not united. What did Mordecai do? He assembled all the Jews.
Why is there anti-Semitism? Because when there is pressure on the Jews they unite. But if the Jews unite without the external pressure, there is no need for the external pressure, and everything comes down, including anti-Semitism. Then people will follow the example of the Jewish people and will unite as well. And this will be the end of all troubles.
To follow up on your statistics, from all the Nobel prizes that were handed out more than 20% of them were handed out to Jews. Although Jews are less than 0.2% of the world’s population.
Just to show you what I mean, I want to read something that explains the dedication of Abraham to spreading the message, so we know that this is not some kind of a whim that Dr. Laitman has or that other Kabbalists have, but this is the legacy of our people.
Slide # 6
This was written in The Zohar. In Dr. Laitman’s book it’s on page 44.
[Speaker reads passage.]
Once he discovered it, that knowledge exists. Now we just have to tap into it and implement it in our lives. That’s what’s missing. I think it’s pretty obvious that if we all had unity, there would be no problems.
Question from the audience. Israelis are known to be rude, and religious people tend to feel superior. How does that work with the sense of unity of humanity as a whole, how does that fit together?
It doesn’t. Today’s Israelis have no idea about unit, no idea about their role as Jews, as Israelis, but they do tend to feel superior.
Because of all their noble —- ??
I suppose. Totally unjust. So I guess what they needs is for the world to hate them so that they will start asking, ‘Why do you hate me?’ And eventually they’ll start asking themselves, and they’ll start asking for the answer, and when they start looking they will find the answer. Then instead of rudeness and arrogance, there will be humility and true love of man. They will start understanding what they really have to be like and will start becoming Israel, not just Israelis, but really Israel.
Question from audience. So many Jews in Israel, and in the diaspora, seem not to have a point in the heart and also seem frequently to be anti-Gentile. How does a Gentile, with a point in the heart, with that desire, help those actual Jews?
There are two questions here in one. Let’s start with the first part. Many Jews seem not to have a point in the heart. That’s very true, because they don’t on the surface. Underneath, we have to understand that the development—the evolution of desires—continues. So once a point in the heart appears, it cannot disappear. It can only be covered with more layers of egoism. But it’s there, underneath, like a pea under layers of mattresses, and when the princess lies on the top mattress, she feels something bugging her. Something is not quite so perfect as it should be. If you know the story…
And that’s what Jews are like. They have that point, but it’s buried deep down under all those layers, and they have to rekindle it one way or the other. Either they’ll do it because they’ll start looking into their past or into their heritage or into the meaning of being Jewish, and then they’ll discover it. Or they’ll discover it because people will keep telling them: we hate you, we hate you, we hate you, and they’ll keep asking why, why, why, until they start asking from within why, why, why, and then they’ll discover it. They’ll come to us, they’ll start learning, and they’ll discover.
So everything that’s happening, especially anti-Semitism, is in order for us to find that point in the heart, but if we search for it, then there’s no need for anti-Semitism. So even before, everything is perfect and in order, as soon as we start searching for the meaning of life and for our role as Jews, our inherited role as Jews. If we start searching for the meaning of being a light for the nations… Most Jews today deny that they have a role, any role. They say, ‘We’re like everybody else. We’re just people. We don’t even want to be Jews.’
But that is not going to help because today the world has to discover that power of unity that’s underneath everything, and there’s no other way to discover it unless Jews unite in order to share that unity with the rest of the world, so that the rest of the world discovers that force.
We’re probably going to come to that in further lessons, but I’m still going to ask because I’m thinking again…
Being anti-Gentile is that arrogance that we talked about in the previous sentence. Many of them also feel inferior to Gentiles, to non-Jews, because they feel like they owe something. So there’s this split that I think every Jew feels, because underneath we know that there’s something different about us. We do have a role to play. You have to do it.
The second part of the question. How does a Gentile with a point in the heart […who is actually Israel] help those actual Jews?
By telling them. They may not want to listen, so you need to say it in diplomatic ways. You need to find the right ways. You need to reach their hearts. They are like kids, ignorant kids. You have to coax them into understanding, because a Gentile with a point in the heart is more ___ than Israel without a point in the heart. When you know something, and you want another person to know it, and that other person doesn’t want to know it, then you find other ways to tempt that person into learning about it. If they don’t want to learn, then don’t. You can’t force it. You cannot force anything like that. Try to offer links, videos, maybe some texts. We hand out booklets; maybe that will help. Refer them to certain sites like bundleofreeds.com, to this book Like a Bundle of Reeds. If it helps, great; if not they will discover it anyway , but in a less pleasant way.
Question from the audience. He wants to clarify this matter of biological Jews and non-biological Jews. He’s confused. He thought that Jew and Israel were spiritual states or desires, but now it sounds like we’re talking about that Jewishness is something biological. He continues, even if a child is born of a Jewish mother, but he grows up with no point in the heart, how can we expect anything of them since they’re not spiritually Jews.
You can’t expect anything of them, but they will have to become spiritually Jewish. I’ll explain.
There is a pyramid. Underneath you have the desire of the still. This is the pyramid of desires. Then you have the vegetative, then animate and finally speaking. Let’s ignore the fifth level for a moment. The speaking is the spiritual level. Within each of us are all of these four levels. In each person, a different level is dominant, but in each person all four levels exist. Today’s Jews contain all those levels—everybody contains those levels…
I’ll get into something I didn’t plan to get into, but I don’t have a choice. [I’ll explain it differently.]
Everything we see in our world is a manifestation of desires, as we explained, because initially all you have is a desire to bestow and a desire to receive. They build on themselves, they start uniting, they start creating atoms, molecules, organisms that develop into plants, into animals, into people and into spiritual people, people who perceive life’s force.
On every level of reality, these levels manifest—just as I drew in the pyramid—and they manifest in a way that reflects the spiritual structure. So Jews, in our physical world, the one that we perceive here, reflect the spiritual level of desires. Again, this is very subtle here. It may be interpreted as if I am saying the Jews are spiritual and the rest of the world is not. I’m not saying that. Kabbalistically-speaking, nobody is spiritual. Spirituality means knowing the Creator, perceiving life’s forcing and living accordingly, and that doesn’t exist anywhere.
The idea is for everyone to have that level. The reason why you have physical Jews, people who were born to a Jewish mother, is because those levels of desire exist. That’s how reality is built. So as a result, the human race also divides into nations and peoples and the Jewish people too, which in our world reflect that level. So if you approach a Jew, or if you were born Jewish, then it means in terms of the structure of the pyramid, that that person is in some unconscious, dormant way closer to uncovering that last level of desire.
What happens as a result, going back to the pyramid, is that if Jews—here at the top you have the Creator which everyone must discover. Everyone aspires for the Creator, everyone but the Jews. Everyone needs unity today and the Jews are not united. So they are at the top of the pyramid in the sense that they are the closest to reflection of the quality of bestowal in our world, but they don’t want to unite.
So they are blocking the rest of humanity from perceiving the Creator. They are blocking humanity from finding the one solution that will put everything in order. And this is very important. It’s not like everyone will become religious or Jewish. That’s not the idea. The idea is for everyone to become mutually responsible for one another, caring for one another, loving one another and thus discovering the Creator, the creative force of life. And the only ones stopping it—although unconsciously and inadvertently—are the Jews. And everybody senses it unconsciously.
So they’re saying, ‘I don’t know what it is about Jews, but I can’t stand them.’ Why? ‘Because they’re causing all the troubles in the world.’ But they’re not, look at them. What can they do? This guy’s a businessman, that guy’s a shop-keeper. He’s Jewish, but so what? ‘Yes, but there’s something about them.’ People don’t understand and they can’t express what it is. They can’t articulate their angst, their anger at Jews. But this is it. It’s like you have a bottle with pressure from inside and the Jews are the lid stopping it from releasing the pressure. Everybody wants up to the Creator and the Jews are in the way. We’ve got to make the way. We’ve got to unite and allow everyone to discover the Creator.
Let me strengthen what you’re saying about how the Jews are in the way. Someone sent me an article of research that was done in Germany, not too long ago, maybe a few years ago, and they had 2,500 people to express their agreement or disagreement with the following.
“What Israel is now doing to the Palestinians is not really different from what the Nazis did to the Jews.”
And 61% of the people agree with that statement. This was in Germany. In Norway 38% agree, 50% or Switzerland’s population sees Israel as Goliath.
Let me just remind everyone that what the Nazis did is gas Jews to death. This is not exactly the situation in the Gaza strip. If this were the situation, the population wouldn’t quadruple itself. It doesn’t make sense. It only proves that people are blaming Jews for all the troubles in the world, for everything. It’s not going to go away until we do what we have to do.
A statement from the audience. Abraham’s story proves every human being contains these levels regardless of his being biologically Jewish or not.
Absolutely! So now we just have to show the way and everyone will become Abraham.
I want to add one last thing. In a prior lesson I told you about how I spoke to my mother and her immediate response to all these anti-Semitism issues, she gets really frustrated, what are you going to do, and she wants to start writing letters to TV channels and things like that. I don’t know if we answered exactly what you can do, but I think we’re getting closer to that. We’re understanding that according to the structure that you’re telling us about here, it’s more about the change we have to make, not pointing to someone else to make that change, but the change that we, as those who have that desire, that awakening, if we make that change then things will change on the outside as well.
We will delve into that a lot more from a lot of different angles.
The next lesson will be about The Development of the Correction Method.
Thank you a lot for being with us. We really want to see you next week and we’ll continue to talk about how we can make this world a better place. Until then, let’s all unite!
