Lesson 4: Evolution of the Method
[With Chaim and Gilad]
Chaim: Hello and welcome to Lesson 4 of What Does It Mean to Be Jewish Today.
Gilad: Hello. Happy to be here as usual.
[Opening comments re internet, posting questions, etc.]
Last week we talked about the evolution of the correction method. We said that it started with Abraham. He started the correction, he wrote books, and he and his wife Sarah taught what they knew to their contemporaries. And then it developed on and on through their posterity until they came out of Egypt and they needed a new method—not a new method but a new presentation of the method—so there came Moses. He received the Torah, the law, and the Hebrews became the people of Israel, those who want to go straight to the Creator.
Now they were compelled to create mutual guarantee in order to achieve spirituality, to achieve the purpose of creation. They continued to develop the method until the ruin of the temple, when the people of Israel were exiled, and since then the correction method developed in what we now know as Kabbalah. Basically it was incarnations, development of the same method that Abraham discovered. Actually Adam discovered it, but he didn’t… from Abraham’s time on there is more of a methodical development of the method.
The Kabbalists continued to develop it, starting with the Book of Zohar, right around the second century CE, and after that they continued to develop the method, but now there are two channels. One is the channel of open Judaism and the other is the channel of Kabbalah which is more concealed and in it Kabbalists developed the correction method until the Ari in the sixteenth century. He developed what is now known as Lurianic Kabbalah. What he did was to develop a more methodical, more systematic method of correction, which relates again to the Book of Zohar, and from his time onward it became more and more pressing to reveal the correction method because the world gradually became more and more needy of it.
We know about the Renaissance. People started talking about humanism. They began to realize that humans have some kind of mutual guarantee among them, that you cannot just treat anyone however you want just because you are the ruler or because you’re more powerful. Morals were taken into effect. This was not related to Judaism, of course; the Renaissance relates more to the Roman time, but it really doesn’t matter. What matters is that people are beginning to develop ideas and ideals that human lives matter and that life has a purpose beyond just a physical existence. It existed before, of course, but now in the Renaissance it becomes more prevalent, more widespread.
The method continued to develop throughout the years and eventually we end up today with it being mandatory to reveal the correction method to all of humanity and we’re saying that the Jews have the role of revealing this method to everyone. That’s what we’re doing to focus on today. This is why we call this lesson and this chapter in the book “A Nation on a Mission.” We’re going to talk about exactly what that mission is and why it is so important today.
Before we continue I have a question. What is that method of correction?
We know about human nature already, that we’re all very nice people, at least naturally. But underneath that niceness it is written, ‘Evil crouches at the door.’ In other words, as soon as we’re born… if you look at children you’ll see that they are not that nice. They’re cute, they’re beautiful, they’re lovely, but children are about reception. Human nature is about reception. With children it is not yet egoism. Children act very naturally. It becomes egoism when people begin to exploit one another. That’s when the corruption comes in.
When Abraham began to discover that his people were beginning to be corrupted, that they were beginning to use one another, is when he began asking those questions and when he discovered the correction method. This has been the aim of the correction method all along. In other words, it’s a method to correct human nature. Correct in what sense? In the sense that you use the will receive not in order to gain for yourself, because eventually it doesn’t work, but in order to fulfill who you are, realize who you are, for the common good. Why? Because a) everyone benefits and b) you benefit.
Just as every cell in our body wants to sustain itself but works in order to sustain the whole body, that’s gaining both its own health and the awareness, consciousness of the entire organism, not just its own existence, just so when we work in order to sustain ourselves. But in order to maintain the health of the entire organism or humanity, we gain the awareness, the consciousness of the whole of existence, because the whole of existence supports… when you work in this way you become synchronized with the operating system of reality.
You gain the awareness that exists, the consciousness or the frame of mind, that exists in the whole of reality. By so doing, you become aware of what the thought that created existence is aware of. You become Creator-like. This is what becomes corrected and this is the purpose of the correction method.
Let’s look at slide 1 and see how everything is, from the get-go, intended to correct the entire creation, the whole of humanity, now just Jews.
[Speaker reads passage.]
In other words, from the get-go, Jews were intended to correct not themselves, but they were constructed as a group of people intended to pass on a correction method and thus in that to be a light for the nations.
However, in order for that to happen, because human nature is what it is, you couldn’t begin with correcting the whole world. There’s a very well-known story about how God took His law, the Torah, and tried to give it to all the nations. But all the nations refused, except for the children of Israel. It’s an allegory; what does it mean? It means that every person underneath has a sensation that life has a purpose, but until you are ready to pursue it, you pursue other goals, have other desires, have other things in mind. ‘I’ve got to make some money first. I need to take care of myself and my family. Or first I want to learn, there’s so much to know about life’s purpose, it’s great, it’s very important and everyting, but I have other things in mind right now.’
There are all kinds of desires. When your biggest desire is to discover what it’s all for, then it’s considered that your point in the heart has awakened and you are ready to receive the Torah. What does it mean to receive the Torah? To receive the law, to become aware that there’s an underlying law behind everything that exists and you want to become aware of it. So those people who were ready to acquire, to become aware, to develop that awareness in them, became the people of Israel. That’s why it’s written that God went to Israel first. As we said before, Israel is not some kind of a clan or a nation that existed in and of itself, it’s just people with points in the heart from all the nations that existed at the time—primarily in what we now call the Near East, today’s Iran, Iraq, Syria, Jordan, and eventually Israel which was then Canaan—so all those people who were interested in life’s purpose eventually became the people of Israel.
The Israeli people are corrected first, but it’s like a deposit. They still have the obligation to pass it on to the nations as soon as the rest of the nations are ready. Here’s where the problem comes in. Once a person is ready to receive the correction method but doesn’t get it, that person becomes uncomfortable, dissatisfied, and begins to develop an underlying and unconscious sense that not only is something missing in life but that there’s someone who’s hiding it from him. And that’s where anti-Semitism comes into play. It’s not a conscious thought process. It’s a feeling, built into every person, that there’s a higher purpose to life and that someone knows about that higher purpose but is hiding it from me. So the more developed, the more ready people are becoming to know life’s purpose, the more anti-Semitic the world is becoming.
We have to be aware of it. It’s a process that goes in synch with the purpose of creation, with evolution of desires. So we cannot expect anti-Semitism to diminish as long as we do not provide the answers to life’s questions, because people are becoming more and more ready to get those answers. Those answers that they don’t have are what’s missing in their lives whether they know it or not, but the answers have to be available.
Science today is coming closer to that understanding. All the new fields like positive psychology, network science, behavioral economics, all these new fields of science are actually beginning to examine the true nature of human beings. They’re finding that on the one hand, like you said that the child is born with this ego, but on the other hand you look at the human body on the biological level, you see that our physical body is wired for positive connection. We’re happy when we’re connected; we’re more successful and more creative when we’re connected; we’re our better selves when we’re connected.
So it seems like there’s this gap between what our bodies are actually built to do—you look at an animal and see that there is no conflict; an animal is built in a certain way and he acts in exactly that same way. Human beings’ bodies are built for social connection. If we’re in good connection with other people our body emits oxytocin which is a love hormone, and if we’re in negative relationships, then it emits cortisol which is the depression hormone.
So on the biological level it seems like we’re built for that positive connection, but there’s this gap between what we’re built for biologically and chemically and the way we’re actually behaving. It seems like what you’re saying here is that that’s exactly what the Jewish people—they’re called Jewish, in Hebrew Israel, Yashar Kel—they actually found that law of nature that covers that gap. That’s why exactly now seems like the perfect time, because humanity is already finding the need for that kind of method, that on the one hand we realize the way we’re working now isn’t suitable even to our biological being, on the other hand, there’s no real solution to it.
Exactly. We talked in previous lessons about the pyramid—the levels of reality: still, vegetative, animate and speaking—and the only difference between the animate level, which is our bodies that work through positive connections and feel best when they’re positively connected to each other, to the rest of nature…
…which is in complete contradiction to the way the world is working today.
Then there’s the human level, the speaking, where… if you look at animals, basically what do they want? They need food, reproduction and shelter. We call it in human terms food, sex, family. But then there’s the human level. We want power, wealth, knowledge, information to know…
All the things that are related to the connection between human beings, because knowledge and power are irrelevant for person living on an island alone.
But here, because it related only to human nature—as we said before, ‘sin crouches at the door’—then what happens is we misuse them. We take this and use it for our own benefit. Why? Because we have the sensation of uniqueness, that there’s only me. People talk a lot about the me, me, me culture, and that’s what need to correct. Here nature has left room for us to work out of free choice. It doesn’t force us to become positively connected, on the one hand. On the other hand, since we choose not to become positively connected, but we are connected nonetheless, then we are negatively connected. Then cortisol comes in and all those bad sensations, and then we have human society looking as it does.
How do you fix that? You can fix everything only when you look at things from the top down. You cannot study yourself. This is why there are all these arguments about whether or not psychology is a science, psychiatry is a science, all the human, social sciences are not regarded as exact sciences. Why? Because [as] you examine human behavior, human behavior changes according to genes, to the environment, from the social environment to the situation, many things, and there are no absolutes. So people are basically groping in the dark, until we go above it, until we develop perception that gives you a higher perspective, where you see everything from the perspective of the underlying force that creates everything. Then you have an outlook, you can see everything from above, and then everything becomes natural and obvious. Then you can examine human nature and you know how to correct it. It’s exactly the correction method.
Above the speaking there is a spiritual level. It exists in each of us, but we all have to develop it. Not all of us will have to become scientists of that correction method, or course, but we will all have to know how to implement it. Just as we don’t have to be say electrical engineers in order to know how to operate a microwave, but we all have to know how to operate a microwave to be able to cook today.
May I test your theory? Can you pass me the remote control for the air conditioner? Let’s see if it works. [operates remote] Yep, I’m not an engineer and I can change the temperature of the air.
Let’s read a few excerpts. Slide # 2.
Ramchal was a Kabbalist who lived in the eighteenth century in Italy. The Orthodox Jews of his time didn’t like him very much, to say the least. They excommunicated him and they basically gave him a hard time. But he had a good notipn of what life was about. So here’s what he wrote.
[Speaker reads passage.]
You see that Kabbalists throughout the generations pushed toward that. Jews have to be corrected. Why? In order for the whole world to be corrected. Let’s look at slide # 3.
[Speaker reads passage.]
So again we see that the directin is one of morals, one of human relations, that through improving human relations, not for the sake of improving human relations, but for the sake of becoming synchronized with the trajectory, the vector, of creation. If we work accordingly, then we are in synch with the purpose of creation, and everything falls into place. Let’s look at slide # 4.
[Speaker reads passage.]
Here it makes the connection, and this is from about 200 years ago. He makes the connection between Abraham—who broke all the idols if we remember, the statues of his father, and discovered the singular force of reality—and today’s situation, two hundred years ago. We can realize how belated we are today.
Question from the audience: I know the job of the Jew is to repair the world. But I want to ask you how this can be done in situations like we see between Israel and Palestine, and with a regime like the Islamic state which seems to be bad, if not worse, than the Nazis in many ways. I know Jews and non-Jews as well who did a great deal of good during the Holocaust, so I know it is possible under the most difficult conditions. I want to hear your thoughts on this.
First of all, regarding the Holocaust… There were warnings before the Holocaust that something like that would happen. Rav Kook warned about it. Rav Ashlag not only warned about it but he was born in Poland and he realized that bad things were going to happen. So he started to explain to people, and he was in a good position to explain. At that time Warsaw was the capital of European Jewry, and he was a judge in Warsaw, so when he said something—and he was considered a genius—people listened.
He started saying that things are going to get worse here in Europe. He started explaining about the role of the Jewish people and what they have to do and he started talking about unity and everything, but at the time most of the Jews would not listen. So he gathered around him those who would listen and told them, ‘Let’s go to Palestine,’ today’s Israel. ‘This is the land of Israel; this is where we need to build our unity; this is where we can fulfill our vocation; if we go there we will succeed and we will also save ourselves, because the world is going in a bad direction and the only way we can change it is by uniting.’
So he started uniting people around him—around the idea, just like Abraham, not around himself. The leaders of the community in Warsaw objected more and more strongly. He was excommunicated and people were told not to listen to him. So he gathered those that he could who would listen to him, and together they ordered from Switzerland wood houses to be shipped to Palestine. [There were] three hundred families. He planned for them all to move together to Palestine and establish a settlement there and live together to create unity and begin the correction process. So there were three hundred families ready to go to Palestine.
The community leaders of the time—there is documentation about all of it—spoke to each of those families and told them, ‘If you go with Rav Ashlag, you and your families will be excommunicated. We will completely ignore you. We will not let you marry anyone from our community. You will not receive any support, moral, financial of any kind, no services, nothing. If you go with him, to us you are not part of the community, you are not Jewish. ‘So all three hundred families went back on the idea and stayed in Poland and didn’t go with Baal HuSulam. He went there with only his family.
The result we know. It’s very sad, but again, if we look ourselves in the eye we cannot blame anyone. We Jews have a mission, a role to play in humanity. There is a good reason why all people are so focused on the Jewish people and on Israel. People who aren’t aware—less educated people, non-Jews who are less educated normally, who have never seen Israel on a map, for example—usually when you show them on the map where Israel is they’re amazed. They think that Israel is this huge country, that it’s a super-power. When you tell them it’s a little dot on the map, they can’t believe it. Why? Because naturally every person in the world is focused on Israel. Israel serves as an example in whatever it does.
Whenever it does something good, it immediately radiates throughout the world. Whenever it does something bad, or not so good, negative waves are projected throughout the world and everybody accuses Israel of everything. When Hitler said that if European Jewry drags Europe into another war it will be the end of Jews in Europe, he didn’t say it as propaganda. He said it because that’s how he felt. Every non-Jew has sense inherent within, unconsciously, that Jews hold the key to the world’s better life.
I’m not sure if I’m answering the question, but that’s in relation to the Holocaust.
So we cannot bad things not to happen to Jews unless they do what they must. It’s a natural law. You cannot expect to jump off a ten-story building and not be hurt, and the fact that half way down you’re still fine doesn’t mean you’ll stay fine when you’re at the end of the drop. It’s a natural law, just like gravity. We just have to be aware of it and act accordingly.
Please repeat the question.
The job of the Jewish nation is to repair the world, but how can this be done in such difficult situations like Israel/Palestine, the holocaust is given as an example as well.
The problems between Israel and Palestine, Israel and every other country in the Middle East—even with Egypt, with whom we have a signed peace treaty; Egyptians don’t like Israelis, with every other nation in the Middle East and actually with most nations in the world—is the same problem. If you look at the U.N. Resolution from 1947 that gave the Jews an independent state, you will see that the majority of the world was in favor of Israel. Why? Not just because they felt guilty about the war, but because subconsciously they know that the Jews should be in Israel. In what sense? In an internal sense. That those who are in Israel have a role to play in relation to the rest of humanity.
Since then that support has been completely not only erased, but inverted, and today every single country in the world is critical of Israel, and it is not so much a political matter, as it is a spiritual matter. It’s the sense that Israel is causing harm in how it behaves. And it’s true. What they don’t realize is that the behavior they are relating to is not on the physical level, but on the spiritual level. I’m not saying that there are no problems with Israel’s behavior on the moral level, but that’s not the issue. The issue is that Israel has to bring to the world unity, and until we do everybody is going to hate Israel and justify anyone who goes against Israel. The whole reason there is a conflict in the Middle East is because we’re not doing what we have to. The minute we begin to do it, the conflict will be resolved.
How it will be done politically? It makes no difference whether it will be one state for all the nations, or there will be an agreed-upon border, it doesn’t matter. Everyone will feel happy and content and healthy and well taken-care-of and everything will be okay as soon as we begin to do what we must. We have proof of that.
In Israel there is a social movement called Arvut, Mutual Guarantee. They had what we can call a social experiment. During all of the summer of this year, 2014, they had what are called discussion circles in Eilat which is a resort in the south of Israel, where people come for vacations. People would be invited to join into those discussion circles and they would have discussions following certain rules of discussion. You cannot object to what another person says. Only one person speaks at a time. You can add to what the other person said or you can express your own opinion, but you cannot negate someone else’s view. And that was it.
They were given topics to discuss, sometimes very sensitive topics, even political topics, and the people who joined into those circles—you couldn’t choose them; any one was asked; so you often had Jews and Arabs sitting together in those discussion circles and talking. In not one of those discussion circles did it happen that the atmosphere was bad, that the sensation of unity did not prevail over anything. People forgot that they were enemies, and if they didn’t forget, they said stuff like, ‘It’s the first time that I can see the human behind the Arab, or the human behind the Jew.”
People started exchanging emails and phone numbers. People wanted to connect, to stay connected. Sometimes the host would leave and move on to another discussion circle, and the people in the circle would stay and create a workshop group and whatnot. The minute you start uniting, the idea of animosity dissolves. So we just have to implement it; that’s all there is to it.
Question from the audience: What Jews are blamed for mostly is the chaotic economic situation in the world. Whether it’s true or not, that’s the propaganda you her in the media. Do we have to respond with our dissemination or programs like this one?
Before Chaim answers, I want to read something from Professor Michael Curtis of Rutgers University. He wrote this in 1987.
“The uniqueness of anti-Semitism lies in the fact that no other people in the world have ever been charged simultaneously with alienation from society and with cosmopolitanism, with being capitalistic exploiters and also revolutionary communist advocators. The Jews were accused of having an imperious mentality, at the same time they’re a people of the book. They’re accused of being militant aggressors, at the same time as being cowardly pacifists. With being a Chosen people, and also having an inferior human nature. With both arrogance and timidity. With both extreme individualism and community adherence. With being guilty of the crucifixion of Jesus and at the same time held to account for the invention of Christianity.”
It’s completely irrational…
It goes to show that the reason lies underneath all of that. It’s this or that or any of that. It’s under all of that. There’s this hatred that’s looking for a channel to express itself. Today you can see most overtly in hatred of the state of Israel. But basically it’s all the same hatred from way back, thousands of years now.
We talked at our last lesson about all the Jewish Nobel prize winners, and probably you’ve seen that video that’s called “Boycott Israel,” that’s like a parody. It says, ‘You want to break with Israel?’ then it shows all the amazing Israeli inventions that were made, and that if you want to boycott Israel you have to stop using them, like a Mac Computer, all sorts of medical appliances. It seems like no one really cares.
Even though the Jewish nation have won all these Nobel prizes, and all these inventions… it really seems that that is not what the world is expecting from us, to make another invention and to be more creative or something like. It seems like there’s that inner sensation that we owe something…
We need Mac Computers…
…and they can be used in a very positive manner…
But we also need to be a light for the nations
Exactly, and I think that’s the root, like you were saying, that’s the root of all those contradicting claims and completely irrational. It’s like if you have this resentment for someone you can just blame him for different things, it doesn’t even matter, because inside you have this thing for them.
I heard Dr. Laitman explain it in this way. Just imagine you have a neighbor and you have this constant gut feeling that this neighbor is constantly plotting against you. He’s very nice to you. Really, he’s a generous person, he’s very nice to you and your family, whenever you need something you can go over and knock on his door and he’ll try to help. But you have this gut feeling… I don’t know what it is, but I have a feeling… there’s something about him; something’s wrong with him, and it’s turning against me. That’s how non-Jews feel about Jews.
Where does it come from? After the ruin of the second temple, about two thousand years ago, Jews were becoming more and more dispersed—actually it happened after the ruin of the first temple too; that’s when it started; the majority of the Jewish people already stayed in exile and started spreading out. It continued and expanded even more in the assimilation of the Jews after the ruin of the second temple. We are told that the reason this happened was that through the assimilation, not of the Jews but of Jewish ideas, the world would be corrected, so the Jews had to be scattered all over the world so those ideas would be corrected. But since the Jews at the time were already corrupted—egoists—those ideas were spread, but in a twisted manner.
What do you get out of that? Two very, very important tenets, used in completely the wrong way. One tenet is ‘love your neighbor as yourself,’ which becomes the basis of what we now call the Abrahamic religions, and for a good reason because the idea initially came from Abraham, which is ‘love your neighbor as yourself.’ Meaning what? Christianity and later on Islam. Both religions as we know originate from Judaism, but already in its uncorrected form. That’s one thing.
The other thing is monotheism—the idea that aren’t many forces, but just one that’s guiding and leading everything. Eventually those two concepts are correct, but when you misuse them what you get is religion at its worst. Here all religions, including Judaism, are completely corrupt in the sense that they do not lead a person to change one’s nature. On the contrary. How are they egoistic? Because they tell you if you pray and if you devote yourself to the one force, then you will be rewarded either with heaven, or with seventy virgins, or with wealth in this world, and certainly wealth in the next world, and power and success, and health and what not, as long as you are a devout Jew, Christian, Muslim. That’s totally the wrong idea about spirituality.
Instead of saying if you discover—you don’t have to devote yourself to anything—that singular force, then you will change your nature from receiving everything for yourself, having all this health and wealth and everything for yourself, and you will all love each other. And then you will be happy and wealthy and you will be omnipotent and omniscient and all those good things you wish for yourself. But first you’ve got to change your nature. So now we have to learn how to make that twist, how to help everyone else make that twist. They don’t have to change their religions in any way, they just have to add that spice. The Torah is called a spice which is how you use everything, how you use human nature.
So the assimilation of the Jews throughout all the nations was very important, because now everyone has the idea that there is one force and that correction happens through ‘love your neighbor as yourself.’ This is how we come to perceive that singular force. Let me read you a few excerpts. Slide # 5.
Johannes Reuchlin, who was one of the founders of the Renaissance, was a political counselor to the Chancellor. He wrote in De Arte Cabbalistica… notice how the progenitors, the people who established the Renaissance, were immersed in Kabbalah. Not just him, Pico della Mirandola too, actually Mirandola mostly. He wrote this:
Slide # 6:
Oration on the Dignity of Man is the seminal book for the Renaissance. He [Mirandola] wrote this:
[Mirandola] connects between what Moses discovered and Kabbalah. He studied with Elia del Medigo who was a Jewish scholar, expelled from Spain. He moved to Italy and started teaching in Padua. Pico della Mirandola studied with him for two years. He was strongly influenced by his idea and he integrated many of them into his Oration on the Dignity of Man. Again you see how Jewish ideas, Kabbalistic ideas, become part of what later is the basis of the Renaissance and humanism,
Slide # 7.
So you need to be a saint, in other words corrected, in order to be able to implement justice—social cohesion, mutual responsibility.
Slide # 8.
As we see, those ideas begin to spread out, but they become twisted, because in order to perceive them correctly you have to change your own nature. So everyone understands that being together, caring for each other, is good, but we think of it as being good because it gives us the good life. That’s basically Communism. It doesn’t work. We’ve tried it. What you need to do is change human nature so that you can perceive the whole or reality and if you implement social cohesion for that purpose, then you get both that expanded perception of reality and social cohesion and a good life for everyone. The world can support everyone plentifully. We just have to want everyone to enjoy it and we only do that when we perceive the whole of reality and not just our own little cubicle of perception
Question from the audience: How do we get people to see the truth? Before that he said Jews are portrayed as corrupt, and African-Americans as inferior. Is there a correlation between the two? He says these are views he has heard. They are not his views but is aking how we get people to see the truth?
We help them discover it, just like we’re doing here and just like we encourage everyone, all of you, to help out, and we start implementing it. We’re going to talk about method for implementation toward the end of the course. AT the moment Gilad is also part of a team that’s helping to create an online environment that helps people unite and experience unity and thus achieve the correction that we’re talking about. We have to help people see the truth; otherwise things will not go in a positive direction.
I’m still troubled by the idea that African-Americans are inferior, because of what?
He didn’t say they’re inferior. He said they’re viewed as inferior like the Jews are viewed as corrupt.
There is hatred all around. Everybody hates everybody else. Why? Because when I’m corrupted, I naturally think that I am better than everyone else. I cannot think otherwise. It’s against my nature to do that. And if I do think that some is better than I at something, then I will find ways to justify myself. The worse criminals in the world—look at ISIS, look at what they’re doing—they feel that they are righteous. They truly believe it. They believe that what they are doing is good, is in terms of humanitarian values, justified. You end up with such distorted ideas about what good is that you can commit the worst crimes and still feel that you’re doing the right thing.
It’s because of self-interest, because of egotism that has developed to the point where our whole society has become completely warped and distorted, where you’re so narcissistic that we’re losing the ability for proper judgment. The only way to do it is to unite. Why? And here we come again to the principle of equivalence of form. When we unite we become similar to the power of unity, to the singular force that sustains the whole of reality. Then you realize that you are part of the whole of reality and then you sympathize not just with yourself, but with reality as a whole. You inflate yourself to include the whole of reality but in a way that doesn’t make you exploit reality, but embrace reality.
It’s even more than feeling that your kids are part of you. You feel that everything is you and you are everything. You perceive everything just like you can instinctively feel yourself. What do you need to do in order to become like that? First of all, start uniting. It’s this mantra that you have to keep repeating because it’s so against human nature that we forget it. As soon as the lesson is over we forget it because it is against our nature. If we keep repeating it to ourselves, and if we have an environment that keeps repeating it, then it begins to sink in, little by little, until we all realize ‘how could we think otherwise?’ So don’t ever think that someone else is inferior to you. Just think about how can I unite to that someone, so that through it I can discover what life is really about.
I want to add something. A lot of questions here are about how can we do it practically and people don’t want to listen, and it sounds utopian and so on. As you were saying that we need to practice this, to repeat it and so on, we’re looking for the results on that external layer, meaning on that layer of symptoms. It’s important to understand that we live in a world of laws, just like Chaim was saying, and it’s very simple.
If you aren’t taking a certain law into account, then you’re bound to fail. If you build a machine and you don’t take gravity into account, or if you’re trying to grow a plant and you don’t take the laws of biology into account, you don’t put it in the right soil, then it won’t work. And you can start explaining it by a million different explanations, but the bottom line is you simply are not following the rules of nature.
It’s the same thing here. If we’re finding that the rules of nature are indeed built for human connections and what we’re saying is the people that found out this law first are the people that were called Israel, Yashar Kel, straight to that force, then the fact that you already are beginning to direct yourself in that law, that already is putting you in line with the laws of nature. That already itself is creating change on the most fundamental level.
So, it’s not only looking at the results—I’m trying to explain to them about unity, they don’t want to listen, maybe it’s not working—that’s just looking at the symptoms on the outside. But on the inside of the system, the second you start getting into that mindset of unity, of the foundation of real Judaism, then you’re starting to put yourself in line with the laws of nature and that already is suiting yourself to the system. Then you might not see the results directly here, directly there. The system has to adjust itself. But that is already definitely leading the world to a better place… and yourself.
As we said before, the word Jewish, Yehudi in Hebrew comes from the word Yechudi, meaning unique or united. It all relates to that single purpose, that singular entity that lies underneath everything. We need to understand that now that the idea of ‘love your neighbor as yourself,’ meaning unity, and the singular force have spread out throughout the word, it should be to us a sign that the world is ready for correction. We don’t need to change those concepts. All we need to do is learn how to use it correctly. Let’s read about happens when we implement everything correctly.
Slide # 12.
Everyone eventually will become Israel in the internal sense. Not that they have to convert to Judaism, but they become Israel, straight to the Creator, perceiving the singular force. Ball HaSulam also writes:
Slide # 13.
So this brings us into the topic of the next lesson.
Lesson preview and closing comments.
