Lesson 7: Contemporary Anti-Semitism

[ With Chaim and Gilad]

 

Chaim: Hello. Welcome to Lesson # 7 or What Does It Mean to Be Jewish Today.

Gilad: Hello to all of our viewers.

[Reminders re chat, questions etc.]

Speaking of questions, we ended the last session with a bit of homework. We talked about unity and how to implement and we suggested that you try it out. We gave a few rules, we called it a workshop and we said to get together. It’s the holidays. Everybody is together—families, and what not. Sometimes it’s a very festive atmosphere but it can also be a little pressing, a little tense, so we suggested a few rules for the discussion.

No negation of what the other person says. You only add. You use an attention object. Everybody is equal. Everybody’s opinion matters; you only add to it. You don’t put down another person’s words. You only speak one at a time; that’s why you have the attention object, etc.

We also said that those rules are actually what create what scientists have found today to be collective intelligence, that it creates this social sensitivity among the participants, and people who usually burst into conversation, like I just did to you now [laughter]… So if you create that in a circle with people and go according to these rules, then you develop this social sensitivity. You’re forced, according to these rules, to listen to a person and not just butt in and force your opinion. This creates something new that people don’t usually experience.

That’s the idea, to create something new, not my opinion, not Gilad’s opinion, but something that we’ve created between us, and that something belongs to both of us equally. That something will always be something that’s common between us. Without either one of us the whole thing would not exist. That’s the beauty of it.

One of you sent us a very nice email describing an experience that he had. “I had lunch yesterday with a friend and his wife. I hadn’t seen him for eighteen years and had had no communication. Back then I was participating in the Big Brother program with him. I applied this communication trick and we had a very lively discussion about where his career is going.

“I remembered him as not being communicative. To my delight he has become a very intelligent young man who had a lot to say. By using this building technique, we developed a lot of ideas about his career, and I also had a good discussion with his wife. This is a great application of bestowal.”

Thank you for sending this. If any of you had similar experiences, maybe even negative ones, we want to hear about them. Maybe we can improve the process. Please share with us. Use the chat and tell us your stories. We will read them here. If not, send them by email—in the reply to our follow-up emails after lessons. Please send your stories, your impressions. They’re very important for us. They teach us a lot. So please do share.

Do you want to expand more on the workshop and maybe talk about some experiences. Maybe we can further on in today’s lesson or in further lessons.

I was thinking about doing a lot of that in further lessons. By the way, because we’re pretty advanced in our lessons already, I’m telling you up front… We were talking about having a Q and A lesson, right? Since lessons 9 and 10 will be more about applications, we had in mind to use lesson # 8 to really go through the material using your questions. So lesson # 8 will be a Q and A lesson. Also because chapter 8 is all about unity, a course about unity, and we’ve gone through a lot of it and we’ll go through some more of it today, but you already probably know the principle that through unity you attain everything.

As you can see, we’re adapting the course. We’re going according to the syllabus and adapting it to what the viewers are asking for and sending emails about throughout the week. We’re adapting and adding to the course according to that.

So we want to dedicate a whole lesson [to questions]. We think it merits it. So get ready and send us your questions. We are going to answer some questions now, but we have a lot of material to cover. I’m not sure we’ll have time to go through all of it, but we are going to answer some questions from the previous lesson right now.

Question: Why have we lost our unity? [assuming this question refers to the Jewish people and the unity they had through which they attained this quality of bestowal, attained what we call the Creator, and why have we lost it]

There are two reasons. One of them we’re going to talk about [later] today. But the other one, that I’m going to focus on right now, is just the fact that the ego is growing all the time. Humans are different in the sense that we are developing constantly, not just quantitatively, meaning that we want more, but we also want it in a different way. There is a famous maxim that says: He who wants one hundred, wants two hundred; he who has two hundred, wants four hundred. In other words, the minute we have what we’ve been looking for, we want twice as much.

So that’s on the quantitative level. But on the qualitative level, we also want it in a different way. People who aspire for money, for example. Once they have a lot of it, they usually move on to aspiring for power. It’s a qualitative change. They don’t just want more money. They want to use that money now in order to gain power. Not just to use the power in order to gain more money, that’s also true, and they don’t lose their desire for money, of course, but another desire is added and then they find themselves in a different activities that involve getting power, getting into power positions.

So with humans what happens is that the more our egos grow the harder it becomes for us to stay united. At some point the people of Israel couldn’t maintain their unity because the ego grew to a point where they couldn’t maintain it anymore and there’s a profound reason here. Attaining the Creator, attaining the quality of unity and through it the revelation of the Creator, isn’t intended [only] for the Jewish people. It is intended for humanity, the whole of humanity.

Science supports this now in so many ways. It’s like saying the obvious now. Humanity is one entity. The fact that we don’t feel it is because we’re so self-centered. But underneath everything humanity functions like a single organism and what one person does affects the whole organism, but we are not aware of it. Animals and plants and even minerals all function instinctively as parts of a greater organism, and therefore the balance is maintained. That’s why we call it eco-system. Nature naturally controls the populations, the balance, the climate, everything, keeping it in balance. With humans, because we are intended to attain it consciously, before we attain it consciously, we are unconscious of it. As a result we don’t function as a single entity. You might say if we function as a single entity and get this awareness, at the end of the process we will be like animals. So what’s the point of being human in the first place? That’s not the idea. The idea is that by gaining this awareness you become like the Creator, you become Creators. You, meaning, everyone, the whole of humanity.

We talked about the cells, how their collective awareness makes them an organism. We talked about this is how evolution developed—from unicellular creatures into cell colonies into multicellular organisms, where the cells need to get sustenance for their existence, but they are constantly aware of the organism. Their own lives don’t matter anymore because they are aware of the organism of which they are a part. That’s what we’re going to gain, and by gaining that, we transcend life and death.

Just like cells don’t exist as separate entities, but continue to exist as an organism, even if a single cell doesn’t exist anymore. The organism exists and the cell is aware of it. It’s part of it all the time. When we attain that awareness, we will become immortal, in the sense that our bodies will not be the only thing that we’re aware of.

Rabash, Dr. Laitman’s teacher, told him that it’s like getting to a point where if your body is about to die, for you it is like taking off a dirty shirt at the end of the day and putting on anew clean one the next day. So the idea is to not only to become like the Creator, but in every sense of the word, to do so. So you attain eternity and the perfection of the Creator, the perfection of nature, the omniscience of nature, everything. You become like the Creator and that’s the purpose of the existence of humanity.

As perfect as we are going to be at the end of the process, we are imperfect right now. Baal HaSulam, Rav Yehuda Ashlag, Rabash’s father, and author of the Sulam commentary on The Zohar, compared it to an apple. When it’s ripe, it’s sweet and beautiful, but as it grows, it’s sour, unhealthy and there’s no beauty to it. That’s where we are now, but we can either grow and get to that ripeness in an adventurous, fascinating, good and quick way, or we can get there through wars, through suffering, through a lot of pain, just like if you have to go through school, you can either get through it willingly or unwillingly, while enjoying what it has to offer or not. The choice is ours.

We’ve lost our unity because our egos have to grow in order for us to finally attain the Creator do it consciously. Now is the stage where we have to do it consciously. Because we have to do it consciously, it cannot be done by one, two, three, three thousand, three million people. It needs to be done by all seven billion of us or however many people there are in humanity. Therefore, the Hebrews, the Jews, whatever you want to call them lost their unity and dispersed.

The idea is to disperse to main ideas. 1) There is only one force. We call it monotheism today. There’s only one force, one Creator, that’s the force that exists, that’s the force that manages things. And that’s what we want to look up to. What we lost is the goal, to be like it. 2) Love your neighbor as yourself. That’s the means to get there.

Those two fundamental concepts have, since the dispersion of the Jewish people some two thousand years ago, spread throughout the world. That was the idea. Now is the time of the in-gathering of the nations, when people are becoming aware that the self-centered trend we’ve been marching on for so many years has exhausted itself. We have to start looking for a new paradigm. We need a new paradigm now because we cannot be selfish and still sustain ourselves and this planet for much longer. And everybody is aware of it.

It’s similar to research we talked about a couple of weeks ago. We spoke about the evolutionary biologist thesis on the development of evolution. Every state of unity has first this state of separation, then conflict and only after there’s conflict there can be negotiation to create a high level of unity again. I think that’s exactly where humanity is right now.

Everybody understands it. You have an Inter-Governmental Panel for Climate Change (IPCC), a huge body organized and managed by the U.N. It doesn’t get more formal than that. We are in trouble. The idea is to invoke this new paradigm that we are one, that there is mutual responsibility among us whether we like it or not, but we need to implement it positively, but we don’t know how.

That’s when the Jews step into the picture. They need to re-kindle in themselves this unity, this method for attaining unity, and to spread it out for everyone. Dr. Laitman and his team have been working with UNESCO, as well as with the General Assembly. He met with the Director General of the UN General Assembly, and we were made an official consulting agency to the UN. [This was] in 2012 when the focus for the year was education. We’re working toward that but it has to be something that each one of us does. It cannot stay on the top level only. It has to trickle down to everywhere, to the whole of humanity. That’s why we’re doing this course.

I’d like at this point to go into the lesson and talk about something very important. I’m not sure how much we’re going to do today, but I’d like to really focus on one thing—on the dispersion of the Jews throughout the world. You can see a very typical characteristic way in which they disperse. What happens is that the Jews lose their unity, so they constantly tend to disperse in their host nations. However, the role is to disperse unity.

But because they are now broken, meaning self-centered, what they’re aspiring for is to disperse, to mingle, to assimilate just like they did in the First Temple. But now they can’t. Now they have to eventually become the role model. So you have to have the Jewish people. The ten tribes that assimilated after the ruin of the First Temple don’t exist anymore as Jews. They are part of the nations now. But we need a Jewish people that will re-kindle unity and offer it to the world.

So what happens is, you can see a way that whenever Jews get to a certain place they are welcome there, they try to mingle, they mingle to an extent, and then they are persecuted. [This is because] when they are persecuted, they are forced to unite. That’s why we say that Jews are united only when they’re persecuted and it’s true. When you’re broken, that’s exactly what it is.

Before the ruin of the temple the Jews were working on it all the time, regardless of persecutions. They had quarrels all the time, but those quarrels were only revelations of disunity that were used to enhance unity. Now they don’t have that. They don’t aspire to unity in the first place, so they need an outside force. It’s interesting to see what’s happening here. Every time they are persecuted, two things happen: a) they reunite and b) they are chased to other countries. As a result their expansion increases.

We were talking about the interconnected world and we’re saying that we have to reveal the connection among us. The connection is there regardless of if we turn it into something positive or not. But right now ____ negative. Can we have a look at the computer screen.

The World Economic Forum has a yearly report of global risks. They map the highest risk factors every year. [Technician can’t show screen.] I’m looking at a map of global risks. The interesting thing about this map is that these risks—climate change, data fraud, corruption, terrorist attacks, cyber-attacks, income disparity, food crisis, liquidity crisis, and so; there is a list of fifty crises here—are completely interconnected. There are 529 connections tying these crises together. So one crisis automatically affects another one, which affects another one… So you can’t isolate one thing, and we can see that…

And these are only the connections they’ve found.

Yes, these are just the connections they found. They are all intertwined with other things as well. There’s no end to it. So the fact that everything is intertwined and that everything today has been found to be hyper-connected—that’s already a fact. The question is: What do we do with this hyper-connectivity that we’re discovering today? Do we turn it into this form of positive connections? Or are we keeping it as it is right now which is mainly an interconnection of global crises which are following one after another.

We can see it. We have crisis after crisis after crisis. Some are more, some are a little less, but they’re happening constantly and they’re all affecting one another.

It only stands to reason that if I act negatively toward another person or toward anything, then I am immediately negatively influencing the entire system.

Exactly, because you’re in the system and that’s a fact. Every single person is tied by a thousand connections. There’s that research on 6 degrees of freedom, that every person is connected to every other person in the world through six people. It’s found to be less than that due to Facebook. So now it’s 4.74. So basically that means that. I’ve been reading that among the Jewish people it’s even less. That basically means that every one of you viewers at home are connected to Chaim and to me through less than five people. There’s a link of five people that we can link to each other, so you know someone, that knows someone, that knows someone, that knows someone, that knows Chaim.

That’s a fact, meaning everything we do creates these ripples and, as Chaim just said, if we create these negative ripples, then that ripples out. Can we elaborate on that a little bit?

Why not? I’m enjoying this.

Actually, that’s the topic of my thesis. I’m doing a thesis on Distribution of Positivity in a Network.

You’re not going to do a whole dissertation right now, right? [laughter]

I’ll just give you an abstract. Basically, in that thesis, I’m examining… First of all, it’s based on research called “The Tipping Point,” which is a very interesting research that shows that you need only ten percent (10%) of the population to be dedicated to an opinion—but you have to be dedicated to it, not going back and forth—for the opinion to spread very, very quickly to the entire population. It was published in “Scientific American.”

The question is: Right now it seems that our viewers and the people that understand the need for a paradigm shift are less than ten percent. So what do you do?

So we only have to convince seven hundred million people that unity is the way and that’s it. We’re good to go!

You can look at it like a ripple effect as well. You only have to convince ten percent of people in different hubs and from those hubs it will start spreading to the rest of humanity. The question is what happens if you have less than ten percent? Then it takes infinite time to spread. So here we have two options.

Either people go through enough suffering and then they begin to understand that they have to change their way of thinking, adapt to this new paradigm shift, or the other option—and this is exactly the topic of my thesis—is you have to create an environment that supports these positive relations that we’ve been talking about throughout the course. If you’re able to create such an environment, then perhaps you need even less than ten percent. I’ll tell you the answer when I find it what percentage that is exactly.

That’s basically what we’re talking about here. If we’re able to create this kind of environment that we’re talking about—if we’re talking about why are we doing this online course, we’re inviting everyone, we’re doing it for free…

It’s exactly that reason.

So we’re actually just trying to create this environment everywhere we can, to distribute these materials as broadly as possible, and even that workshop method that you were talking about. It’s a method that we’re developing and we’re trying to get into educational systems, successfully actually get into educational systems, into different organizations, and start creating these positive ripples in humanity.

[Discussion of technical problems.]

Let’s show Slide # 3 about the spreading out of the Jews.

That’s because the idea is that the Jews will end up being a role model of unity. So there has to be a distinct group to which the world looks for answers, and they have to provide those answers. Therefore, the Jews cannot disappear now. But if they don’t do what they have to, if they don’t provide any answers, then they suffer. They are afflicted and persecuted and what not.

Look at Slide # 4 about what happens if Jews try to assimilate too much, try to disappear.

What’s wrong with being loyal to the country you live in? Nothing, of course. But you cannot be disloyal to your task, because your task is what you eventually have to fulfill. This is what you owe the world as a Jew and unless you do it, you cannot be… This is what Churchill said: I believe a Jew cannot be a good Englishman unless he is a good Jew. Meaning if we provide unity to the world, solidarity, mutual responsibility which the world so badly needs today, we are welcome everywhere. If we don’t, we are rejected everywhere. There’s this universal quality to what the Jews have to provide. A lot  of people talk about the universal nature of Judaism.

Let’s continue with Dr. Gerber’s quotes, slide # 5.

Slide # 6.

Notice how similar this is to what is happening today in the global Jewish community, and notably in the American Jewish community, in the U.S. especially.

Slide # 7

In other words what she’s pointing at is that there’s only so much you can assimilate, but in Spain it was still a matter of the continuation of the dispersion. Many Jews were killed, but they weren’t destroyed as a people. Instead they were expelled. They were chased to other countries in Europe and they were chased to the Ottoman Empire where the emperor Bayezid II was delighted to receive them. He welcomed them. He even laughed at King Ferdinand saying: How can he call himself a wise king if he sent away his best citizens? So he welcomed them into Turkey and that was a continuation of the dispersion.

We can see very similar forebears, harbingers of what happened in Spain in twentieth century Germany. The difference is that Nazi Germany tried to destroy the Jewish people instead of trying to disperse them. Why? Because since the beginning of the twentieth century we’ve come to a point—Baal HaSulam wrote about it in the 1930s—that we were so interconnected that now we were functioning as a single unit—humanity—and therefore the final correction of uniting humanity had to already start being implemented. That’s how late we are, by about ninety years, maybe even more.

So now the Germans were not trying to disperse the Jews, to send them away, but simply to destroy them. Of course they failed—they succeeded to a great extent—but they did not destroy Jewish people. Notice that today’s anti-Semites say that they’re going to finish what the Nazis didn’t. So again, now the Jews are not being told you are not wanted here. Now they’re being told you’re not wanted anywhere. You’re not wanted on this planet. You’re not wanted in existence, in the universe. Anywhere. So we need to realize there is no escape. We have to do what we have to do and just go ahead and do it.

Comment from the audience: These lessons are the highlight of my week.

If you have stories, encounters you had when you tried the workshop method, and we are encouraging you this week to try it as well, please share.

And we have one: I was having a holiday lunch with my husband’s family, using the rules. Everything was going wonderfully and everyone was happy until my father-in-law started talking about a problem with the police and protestors here in the U.S. He had a view totally opposite to my own and I exploded. It was like I was watching myself speak. The rules went out the window leaving me feel very upset and angry.

That’s a great discernment, but you know if the reason why you were able to watch yourself… that’s because of the rules of the workshop. The minute you put them into effect, you are basically forced—without trying, this is what happens—to come out of yourself and begin to watch this system and you begin to observe yourself as part of a system. So you watch yourself explode. That’s a beautiful discernment.

I guarantee you, the next time you try, it won’t happen. There will be other problems, but they teach you the minute you come out of yourself—through these few and simple rules—you become like a student of life. You watch it from above and it unfolds underneath you. You gain this bird’s eye view of yourself, of your surroundings, but you’re not attached emotionally. You exist on both levels. And you learn as you go, from your mistakes. You become more experienced and learn to avoid mistakes. You see them coming. That’s beautiful. I have no doubt this was a great disillusionment—probably with yourself more than with anyone else—but this is a great learning experience.

It’s good also because people say: I don’t need these rules. I’m always like that. But it’s not the case as we know from discussions we see on television and in personal experiences. It’s good that you saw that very quickly. You experienced that a) these rules completely change the dialogue and when you throw them out the window things explode, and b) that it’s not that easy to speak to them. That’s also an important thing.

Because the ego keeps stepping in.

Exactly. It’s like a muscle. You have to work on it, you have to develop it, you have to invest in that thing.

Question from the audience: How would you explain what’s happening to the Jews in the USA. They’re acting like the Sephardic Jews in Spain.

I’m hesitant to say it because they will disagree, the majority of them. Let’s put it this way, instead of me saying, I’m going to refer to something that’s been on the news for about a week now. You probably remember that Sony’s computers were hacked into and a lot of things leaked. One of the things that leaked was a correspondence between a producer and several actors. Some of them are Jews. And there was a conversation in that correspondence about anti-Semitism and the conflict in Gaza. The producer wanted the actors’ support. He was saying the world is anti-Semitic and what-not. One of the actors asked: Why are you dragging me into this debate? I don’t want to be part of it. I don’t want to take sides. I didn’t ask to be on this email list. None of that.

So the producer wrote in reply: If you look at what’s happening today, in the U.S. today, you can see that many of the conditions of the Jews that exist now in the U.S., also existed in Germany prior to the rise of the Nazi regime and even after the Nazi regime rose to power. So that producer is afraid of the situation, and he adds very bluntly: If you don’t think this could happen again, I think you’re wrong.

So there are people who find a lot of similarities. Dr. Laitman himself talks about it quite often. If you’ve watched his shows “Like a Bundle of Reeds,” he speaks about it very openly. I know that many Jews don’t see it this way, but if you talk about the acculturation of Jews, you find a lot of similarities to what happened in Spain and what happened later in Germany and what is happening now in the U.S.

Dr. Laitman speaks very openly about the possible return of the Holocaust. Baal HaSulam speaks very openly about the possible recurrence of a world war—a third and fourth—he even mentions a fourth world war. And he says that the relics will still have to implement the method and unite and discover the Creator. But the question is do we want to go through two world wars? And he also says there will be nuclear wars.

So there are similarities, but today we are a lot more aware. The method for uniting is out in the open. Anyone can tap into it and implement it. It’s not like we don’t have an antidote. We do, but we do have to use it. You’ve got to take your pills; otherwise you won’t be healthy.

Acculturation is one thing and I’m not sure it’s negative, but it cannot come at the expense of offering unity to the world. Personally I don’t see anything wrong with freedom of speech and all those good things that give the American constitution has. Actually the workshop rules are about freedom of speech, but they are used in order to enhance unity. That’s the key point. We don’t need to change anything in our lives. We just need to add unity to what we do and spread it out. That’s it. Whether you’re a Jew or a non-Jew spreading unity always does good to anyone around you.

Question from the audience: Why do you tell people with points in the heart they don’t have to leave their churches? Isn’t that assimilation?

I think what she means is that we were saying a person with that desire is considered Israel. If that person has a desire for the Creator, and he is considered Israel, then going to a church would be assimilation. I think that’s what she means.

We are at the final stages of working on Baal HaSulam’s writings of The Last Generation. It’s going to be available on line pretty soon. There he talks about what happens today. That’s why I talked about the in-gathering of the nations. We’re in a stage in our development where people’s points in the heart are awakening, meaning their desire to discover the Creator is awakening. And it’s not just happening in Jews. It’s happening everywhere. Actually, I think it’s happening more in non-Jews than in Jews.

Baal HaSulam says very clearly that people will not have to change anything about their religions. They will develop a mega-religion or a principle that overlaps everything else, circles everything else, and that principle is one very simple thing—love your neighbor as yourself. Period. When you love someone else you don’t care if he’s Christian, Muslim or a Jew or whatever. You don’t care about his skin color, about anything. That’s why it says: Love covers all transgressions.

Look at a mother’s love for her child. Whatever he does he’s always perfect and righteous in her eyes. It’s natural. But we don’t have that natural love for each other. When we develop it, we attain the purpose for which we were created. That’s why we need to do it consciously. That’s why we need to develop it. This goes way beyond any religion. Going to church is fine, going to shul is fine, going to a mosque is fine, practicing whatever you want, but just remember that unity, love of others, is what gets you to the purpose of life, of existence. Everything else is fine, but if you add to it that spice, then you will be going in the right direction. That’s why today people’s points in the heart are awakening. They are searching for that spice, for that addition that will give life meaning.

Going back to the point that the nations have no choice but to afflict Jews whenever they don’t do what they have to, look at this interesting quote:

Slide # 8

Slide # 9

Slide # 10.

So it was not the king’s choice, but it’s the Creator’s work. In other words, it is embedded within nature, the Jews will do what they have to do. If they don’t, then they are forced into it.

Slide # 15. I want to read it to you because it’s very similar to what we just read.

In other words, he believed that he was doing what the Creator wanted him to do. That’s exactly the point. That’s why oftentimes Dr. Laitman says that the Jews don’t have a problem with anti-Semites. They have a problem with themselves. They have to do what they have to do or nature itself will force it upon them through anti-Semites. It always happens through anti-Semites. Nature creates it. The system of reality has to force-correct the Jews unless they do it willingly. I’m sure this will evoke many questions.

Question from the audience: What’s the difference between the workshop rules and the U.S. Constitution? In other words, what is the difference between the intention to encourage freedom and the intention to encourage unity?

There’s nothing wrong with freedom; unity doesn’t mean lack of it. On the contrary, the unity we’re talking about here embraces and encourages every person’s uniqueness to be used to the utmost. Imagine the kind of closeness that the participants could feel if they overcame that conflict that emerged in that dinner that they had. [see above] The more different we are, yet overcome it, not by suppressing our differences, but by creating something that’s common to all of us, that’s made of the differences among us that we all put into this… Imagine you have this big ball in the middle of the circle. You’re all in the circle and you’re all contributing yourselves into the ball. You create this new entity that’s made of all these difference. It’s so volatile, so colorful, so different from anything else, so complete because each one is different. But that new thing in the middle is complete because it’s made of all the differences. We all contributed our own different angles and made it a lot more complete that we are alone. So imagine that all seven billion of us contribute our differences to the center of the circle. That will be the perfect entity.

So really there’s freedom of self-fulfillment only when there’s unity. That’s when it is truly realized. The freedom in the U.S. Constitution allows for every person to become yourselves, to be who we are. But because we are so selfish today, that freedom to be who you are happens at the expense—and we can see it in life—of the others who also want to be free and deserve to be free. And none of us, including those who think they are winning the war, will be happy unless everybody is free and everybody fulfills who they are. So they only way to fulfill who we are is to be united. By just sticking to freedom according to the Constitution we end up with ruthless competition that destroys everyone. Eventually even the winners.

Slide # 11. Rabbi Hillel Tzeitlin wrote this.

The Jews, as you can see, will never be treated or viewed as equal, in the sense that they will always be at the center of attention, they will always be judged. We’re talking about allowing everyone freedom and all that. The Jews don’t have freedom; they are judged constantly. In that sense it doesn’t matter if you’re a Jew or an Israeli because a lot of people make a distinction between anti-Semitism and anti-Israelism. At the end of the day there have been claims against Jews for I don’t know how many reasons. The Jews are not hated just because they are Jews but because of their money and because of their race and because there were blood libels. There are all kinds of reasons to hate Jews.

Now it’s because of occupation or political reasons or what-not. The point is that, Baal HaSulam writes it, there is no justification for the existence of the state of Israel unless we implement what we have to implement here—the unity which we are to spread out to the world. And the same goes for world Jewry. So as Tzaitlin writes here what we need to establish is unity for the purpose of internal ascension and invocation of corrections. In other words, spreading out the correction of unity and through it the revelation of the Creator throughout all of humanity. That’s the purpose of the whole process of our evolution as humanity. When we do that, we will achieve happiness. Until we do that, we will go from bad to worse. And the Jews have to start.

Of course, non-Jews are welcome to join. Everybody’s welcome. Everybody has to be there. But everybody is looking at the Jews anyway… We’ve been through that. You know the story.

That was today’s lesson.

[Comments on next lesson, sending questions, trying the workshop, etc.]

Next lesson will be a Q & A session.