Lesson 5: The Role of the Jewish People
[With Chaim and Gilad]
Chaim: Welcome to another lesson of What Does It Mean to Be Jewish Today, or actually maybe we should ask what does it take to be Jewish today. In the previous lesson we talked about: a nation being on a mission, the role of the Jewish people and what it means to be Jewish, what it takes to be Jewish, the assignment that the Jews were given at the foot of Mt. Sinai to be a light for the nations, and what it actually means in terms of changing human nature and change of being a role model to society, and how anti-Semitism is rooted in the Jews not doing what they are intended to do and therefore arousing on themselves pressure from the nations, which now more than ever require us to unite and to be a role model to humanity.
That was the gist of the message, not just the last lesson, but all of the lessons so far. It is the gist of the message of the entire book.
We also had great questions…
Gilad: And also we invite you today to write in the chat any questions you have about the lesson in general. We’ll be happy to answer them as much as we can. We have some questions from last week.
I’d like to go back to a couple of the questions from the last lesson that we didn’t get to answer.
Question: Is that human nature to dislike everyone else? I see no fault with anyone unless they commit a crime. Why can’t we just be nice?
Let me give a little background. The conversation was about how we all have to unite and through unity discover a higher force or a higher principle, paradigm, that exists in the universe. Being nice is good. Why can’t we just be nice? We can and actually why not. That would make things a lot nicer. Except it wouldn’t work in the long run. Because in the long run more and more of our natural egoism is coming into the surface and we have to deal with it. We’ve had the moral of being nice for many years now—being courteous, being good to other people—and it held our society for a long while, but now it’s not working.
The reason we can’t simply be nice is because we can’t. The fact is that people are becoming more and more alienated and narcissistic and they’re becoming not nice to each other. In short, our society is falling apart and there’s a reason for it, that egoism is growing and now we need a new way to overcome it and unite above it. Niceness just doesn’t cut it anymore; it just doesn’t work anymore.
And when we do unite above the growing egoism, then we’ll discover what lies underneath it all, what the people of Israel discovered back then. That’s the idea. So it’s not just about being nice or not nice, it’s about how the purpose of humanity is to become like the Creator, to learn the law of bestowal that stands at the bottom, the foundation, or reality and attain it. When we unite above the growing egoism, that’s when we attain it. So there must be egoism and we have to unite above, and then we achieve the purpose for which we were created.
It’s interesting what you’re saying about the ego, and if you look at history you can see that ten or twenty thousand years ago, people had a very small ego. They didn’t really want much. They were satisfied if they had a family, a place to live, a spouse. That’s it. They were satisfied. They didn’t chase after anything else. And we see history evolving. If you look a few thousand years ago, in the time of Babylon especially when trade started developing, that was a time when trade started becoming what we know today. Then people weren’t satisfied any more just by having a house maybe and a family and so on. They started looking for greater fulfillment. They started trading and wealth came into play. The ego was growing.
Then if you look further along in history, you see that that wasn’t enough either. It wasn’t only wealth, that people had this desire. It became common not to only be rich but also to be powerful and that became something more approachable not just to people who were born to a king, but people that from their wealth got into power positions.
And if you look further on you see that used to be something very unique and just for individuals who were intellectual scholars and philosophers and so on, that started becoming in the last hundred years something that everyone’s going after. You can really see how the ego is growing, that it once used to be satisfied—like an animal actually—just by having a family, a place to live, it could be a cave even. We can then see how the desire began growing into desire for money, for power, for knowledge.
The interesting thing today is that deep down inside people are beginning to realize that these things aren’t fulfilling them anymore. They get money, they’re not happy. They get power, they’re not happy. They get knowledge, they’re not happy. And it seems like there’s something rooted—actually as you were saying—that inner desire to become like that force of nature. It seems like that’s rooted deep into humanity, somewhere inside, and now that people are beginning to realize, now that we seemingly have everything…
We talked about the fifth level, right, that there’s still, vegetative, animate and speaking—that’s us in this world. And then there’s this spiritual thing, there’s some intangible thing that people are looking for.
And exactly that intangible thing that right now is beginning to awaken in people. On the one hand we have everything. Once if you wanted food you had to go out and hunt it. Now you go to the supermarket and just buy it. Having a house is no problem. People can easily get their basic needs met today, unlike ten thousand years ago. It seems like humanity’s rate of happiness is going down. We mentioned last week that depression…
We should have been the happiest generation.
We should have! We have everything. Everything is so easy. We have a computer here. We can access the entire world, but still there’s a sense that something’s missing. I think that’s exactly what you’re talking about. It’s that sense built inside that years for this connection, something higher maybe, something that’s more meaningful.
And through connections people attain that higher fulfillment that they’re looking for. It’s very interesting. Let’s go to another question. On a completely different topic, at least on the surface.
Question: The Torah says that seventy went down to Egypt, Jacob’s descendants, and a multitude emerged. Why does the Bundle of Reeds book imply that Abraham’s other followers, the first corrected people went to Egypt. That is misleading, is it not?
First of all, as we said in the beginning, I don’t want to relate to all the sources that we are using here so much on the historic level, or whether it was Abraham’s family or Abraham’s students or whatever, of whether Nimrod lived at the same time Abraham lived, or not exactly. What we’re dealing with here is processes that explain exactly what we were just talking about, the growth of the will to receive, the basis of our own existence, of who we are and how to work with it and what the role of the Jews is in the process.
Abraham’s descendants went down to Egypt. That’s true. In the spiritual sense, a descendant is also a spiritual continuation. Maimonides speaks very clearly about how Abraham’s sons and descendants developed his methods further. Abraham, Isaac and Jacob took the method and continued to develop it and continued to teach and gather students. All it took to join the family of Abraham, or the group of Abraham, in those days—in order to convert, in other words—was just that you sympathized, that you subscribed to the idea that they were teaching, the idea of correction through unity. So the fact that they grew doesn’t mean that they all grew by natural, biologic, multiplication. They also grew by accumulating more and more people who sympathized with the idea.
Maimonides describes beautifully how his group grew as he went from Babylon into Caanan. Along the way he and his wife Sarah were teaching people, and those who liked what they were saying joined their group and went along with them. So let’s take it on that level and it will be less confusing.
So now we have a very interesting situation where we have a world that is completely oblivious to the purpose for which it was created, and we have a group of people who are aware of why everything happens. There is no real clash between them at this point, because most people just don’t care about why the world exists. They are busy living, surviving. Then you have the clashes between the Greeks and the Jews. These are more ideological clashes. We are talking about Hannukah.
There’s a spiritual meaning to the clash between the Greeks and the Maccabees at that time. The Greeks had an ideology of self-indulgence and the Maccabees wanted to preserve the Jewish tradition of unity and thus attaining the Creator, attaining life’s creative force. And they knew that if they went into self-indulgence they would lose it. But at the end of the day the ego kept growing and so the Greeks won. Today everybody’s culture is Hellenistic. Hedonism prevails everywhere you look and that’s what we are about.
You could ask if there’s still a point to what we’re doing here. And the point is that now, after so many years of following the Greek tradition—that’s what the Renaissance is about really—and because the ego is continuing to develop we are discovering that following our egos doesn’t lead us anywhere good. So people are searching for more. The more developed a country is the more depressed is the nation. The depression rates go higher and higher the more developed the country is. When you’re busy surviving, you have no time to be depressed. You’re busy trying to survive. But when you’ve got everything, then you start asking the deeper questions.
Depression is an emotional thing, a mental thing, that points to the person’s search, even if it’s just an initial search, for life’s purpose. Here’s where you are starting to tap into the purpose of creation and here’s where the Jews come into play. This is why throughout all those years, although the Greek self-centered paradigm won, the Jews didn’t go away. They did not assimilate like all the other nations. It’s because it’s their role to survive and when the need arises to deliver the goods which today is an ability to unite—a method by which to unite—and rediscover life’s purpose.
Slide # 1.
You see here that Goethe is not just talking about the Jew’s tenacity, but also about the goal that they have to achieve. Most people don’t realize what that goal is, but a lot of sensitive individuals, both Jews and non-Jews, do sense that there’s a reason why Judaism exists, why it persists through all those years and hardships. It’s because there’s a reason for its existence, a reason that defeats any attempt to assimilate, on the part of the Jews, or to destroy Judaism on the part of the anti-Semites.
Slide # 2.
That is exactly the question. A lot of the stories ask that question. How can it be that through so many attempts to annihilate the Jews and destroy Judaism altogether, it doesn’t go away. We have to realize that there’s a purpose for the existence of Judaism and it’s not to observe physical commandments. It is to offer, to present the nations, with a viable solution for the survival of the human race [and also for] humanity’s achieving of its purpose which is to become Creator-like.
We need to realize that as long as we procrastinate and avoid doing what we have to do, the pressure on the Jews will continue to grow. Take a school kid. You have two children, they both go to school. One loves to go to school and to learn and another doesn’t like it. Both have to go to school, but for one child it’s joy and for another child it’s a torture. But they both have to do it, to go through school.
We’re in that position. We’re the bad boy. We’re the boy who doesn’t like to go to school. We have a task and it needs to be done. Now we can get to it either by doing what we have to do or by avoiding it. But if we avoid it we will be forced to do what we have to do. That’s basically all there is to it.
Slide # 3.
In other words, we talked about what happens to a cell when it becomes part of an organism. Initially unicellular creatures were self-sufficient units. All of life on earth was called the “primordial soup” by scientists, i.e. all kinds of chemicals and unicellular creatures. Eventually cells began to realize that by creating cell colonies, where each cell does something else, they benefit. Instead of fighting each other to death, they started supporting each other, and then each cell could begin to excel at a specific task and do that for the whole colony, and in return the colony would provide for all ther others of the cell, on which it was now not focusing. It wasn’t taking care of itself in the full sense of the word, because it was taking care of the whole colony. It was doing a specific task very well, so the whole colony was benefitting from it, but it was neglecting its own needs. So the whole colony compensated for that. All cells started doing different things.
Differentiation began to emerge and now the cells had to stick together; the result was that cell colonies became more susvivable than stand-alone cells. From here the road to creating full-grown organisms was very short. So now the cells have awareness of themselves as living units, but they also have to, in order to maintain the viability of the colony, of the organism eventually, a complete awareness of the entire colony. They know where they’re getting the rest of what they need. They realize their dependence on the rest of the colony for their survival. They become keely aware of the well-being of the entire colony.
They develop a consciousness that’s beyond their own existence. This is what we humans don’t have, but what the rest of nature has at its very foundation. That’s how nature works. It doesn’t work in individual units. It works in systems, eco-systems. Every animal is aware of the well-being of its eco-system. Every cell is aware of its own eco-system, of the organism.
We are not aware that we are a global eco-system. We’re not aware that there’s a force that maintains the well-being and the health of that eco-system and that by working just for ourselves we are destroying that well-being. Since the eco-system is what provides for our existence, just like cells in the organism, we’re cutting off the branch on which se’re sitting. So we’re damaging ourselves.
The reason we were denied this is awareness is so that we can develop it ourselves, because when we develop it we become like the Creator. That’s the abundance that Baal HaSulam writes about. We become aware of the universe. We become the universe. That’s why we talked about omnipotence and omniscience. That’s what every human being is intended to achieve. This is what Abraham achieved. This is why Mainonides keeps talking about how he realized that there is only one force in creation, that force makes everything tick, and that’s the only force you need to worhip. You need to sympathize with and perceive this force. If you have that, you worship nothing else; there’s nothing you don’t know any more. You’re aware of the entire system. You don’t need to learn because you know already.
So what you’re saying… you said that connection is built into nature and humans are lacking this. That’s correct, but it you look at humans on the biochemical level, it’s fascinating to see that our body—if you look at the body like an animal—it’s built into it.
Because it’s the animal level.
Right, and we’re happy when we connect. We see that we’re most successful that way. I’m just doing research on positive social relations and it improves every effort of your life. You become more creative, more productive, more intelligent, healthier, wealthier, basically…
So why aren’t we aware of it?
I don’t know, because…
…because if we were aware of it naturally, then we’d be like animals.
There’s so much science backing this up. It’s interesting to see how the Jewish sources that have talked about this for thousands of years, are now being validated by science. There’s a researcher called Elizabet Sahrtouris who is an evolutionary biologist. She explains the process of evolution through how cells develop.
She says everything—and she was explaining about cells, but this is also regarding humanity—starts on a certain level of unity. If you look at humanity in the past, humanity was united. There were small villages; people basically got along. In the process of development there’s a state called individuation. So what was once united, what was once like this one thing, was now beginning to be broken apart in different pieces. What happens when people are broken apart into different pieces? They begin to reach a state of conflict.
What was once one and now is broken up into separate pieces, now every piece wants something for itself. They’ve lost the sense of unity, of inter-dependence, that your fate is mine and vice-versa. So there begins a state of conflict.
So I begin to feel that the existence of the other is actually against my interest.
Exactly, against my interest. So if I want to succeed, then I have to take advantage of you as much as possible. I have to exploit you because that will make me better off. Forgetting that if we were once this one cell, and although we’ve been separated, we’re still on some level connected; forgetting that we’re actually built to be connected.
So that’s already the stage where we lost the sense that we are part of one system.
That’s in the individuation. The conflict is when we completely lose the sense that we were once connected, we were once one. What happens after conflict? Conflict is war, crises, hunger, famine, depression, every bad thing within the world today.
So people start to make alliances.
They start making alliances. They start figuring out how we can improve that situation. Then there’s the state of negotiation. How can we start putting the pieces back together again? The incredible part is that after this negotiation, there comes another level of unity, but it’s not the same level. It’s unity on a much higher level. It’s unity that forms a much more sophisticated being. That’s actually the entire evolution, that every time something develops to a higher level…
It’s a lack of awareness of what happens when you’re in conflict.
It’s like cells when they already have been through these states of individuation and conflict and negotiation, and above that they create this unity, it forms a higher being, a higher level, a higher state. Although she speaks about development of biological cells and about the biological level…
This is exactly the process that humanity is going through.
This exactly fits humanity. I think right now we’re in somewhere in between the state of conflict and the state of negotiation.
I was hoping we were climbing more from the negotiation stage towards the unity.
That’s definitely what we’re aiming for, but unfortunately, looking around the world, we see that most of the world is in conflict.
That’s the prevailing culture…
…and it seems like the only thing they’re lacking is the method to enable them to negotiate correctly. The next stage after conflict is negotiation. But it’s not working because people don’t know how to negotiate, how to start creating these good positive connections. They know and feel it’s better for them, but they’re lacking in the method to do so. That’s exactly what we’re talking about here.
And that’s exactly where the Jews come in. It’s not like the Jews know about this method. They don’t, but because at some point they did, and because we’re talking about the evolution of desires [lesson 2], then like an unconscious memory of that method and of the existence of that state of unity, remains within the Jews. So they are the closest ones to rekindle, to revive that connection, and therefore that perception. We need to understand that today humanity is so powerful that it can destroy its own habitat, its own eco-system, our ability to exist here. So we need to find that new ability to unite for our own survival.
Because all of humanity is one system, all the cells in the system, all the people, sense which cells have to be the first to start the new trend, the new paradigm, to develop it, and to offer it. All the cells in the body know where the brain is, what it does. They serve the brain, or the heart, or whatever function is required. But all the cells in the body serve one another. The only cells in the human organism not serving humanity are the Jewish cells, because their only task is to provide a method to unite.
Everything else is fine. It’s working. We’ve got plenty of food, industry, robots can do our jobs for us. Everything works great. The only problem is we hate each other’s guts and no one can do anything about it except the Jews. So for everything to function properly you’ve got to start there by uniting the whole system, creating cohesion and solidarity within the system, among all the cells, and then everything will work like clockwork.
Slide # 4
In slide # 4 I want to show that really there’s no difference between those who persecuted the ancient Hebrews and anti-Semites today.
[Speaker reads passage.]
Here’s where anti-Semites come into play. Dr. Laitman always insists, ‘I have nothing against anti-Semites, because they don’t choose to be anti-Semites. It’s not like they’re out to get me personally. It’s that Jews have a role to play and if they don’t play it, then the system itself—just like the immune system in the bodm—creates a mechanism that pushes the body into action, into a healing action.’ Anti-Semites play that role. They are pushing the Jews toward, as Rav Kook writes, toward redemption, that is toward unity, and through unity, attainment of the Creator, and subsequently provision of that attainment to the rest of humanity. That’s why anti-Semite’s main argument is that the Jews are causing all the problems in the world. They are saying it in a million different ways, but it’s always the bottom line. They’re saying, You guys are guilty. Of what? Of everything that’s wrong. And they are right. As long as we don’t unite and show an example of unity to the world, everything will be wrong in the world. Once we do, everything will be right.
I can already hear the questions because I get them here an elsewhere. Why do you think that everybody is looking at you, everybody is just waiting to see what you’re going to do, and everybody’s going to follow your lead, what makes you superior, what makes you so arrogant? Well none of it is true. We’re not superior, we’re not arrogant, we just have a job to do and we’re not doing it. The reason why we think the world is focused on the Jews, is that the world is focused on the Jews.
If you look at U.N. resolutions, throughout the years and especially in the last couple of years, they focus 90% or more of the U.N. Security Council resolutions on Israel and what they’re doing wrong. You see world leaders, heads of state, constantly talking aobut Israel. Now they’re also talking about the problem of anti-Semitism, saying, We don’t have anti-Semitism.
Look what’s happening in France, in Germany, on campuses all over the U.S., in Brooklyn. It’s there and it’s intensifying. Now leaders have to say, It’s not happening. It’s a natural result. It’s denial. But that’s not going to help. It is happening and the more we ignore it the worse it’s going to get. It’s there and everybody is looking at what Israel is doing, what the Jews are doing. Everybody’s checking into how much money Jews have, what positioins Jews hold in the movie industry, in the banking industry, in culture, in technology. Everywhere you look you see people looking at the Jews.
We needn’t ask if it exists or not. We need to ask why is everyone focused on the Jews? We see that despite everything that the Jews are doing, and most of what they’re doing, forget about politics for a minute, I’m talking about science, culture, banking. The Jews have a great ability to do good, and many of them are doing good. You have more volunteers in all kinds of charity organizations percentage-wise from the Jewish people than from any other nation, any other religion. All of that doesn’t change one bit, because the bottom line is this is not what the world nees right now. It needs for the Jews to unite, and because the world is already looking at the Jews, they’re going to take this as an example.
They’re already following the Jewish example. The banking system is controlled by the Jews, at least in America, in most countries by and large. So if the Jews portrayed another paradigm of banking, for example, then everyone else would follow. Not everyone is following what the banking system in the U.S. is doing. If you look at the banking system, the leaders are mostly Jewish. So maybe we should just kill all the Jews and get rid of the problem. That’s not going to work because humanity has a purpose, it needs to become Creator-like, and the Jews are the ones who have to lead it there.
So instead of trying to kill the Jews, we need to push the Jews to do what they have to do. And since not enough people are aware of what the Jews have to do, people are just getting angry and frustrated at the Jews, and there you’ve got anti-Semitism.
We can go on this path two ways. We can either get there by becoming aware of what it is we have to do, in which case all we need is to start uniting and everyone will start to join in, because everyone knows that if the world were united things would be much better. Or we can avoid it. We can keep trying to see only to ourselves, we can stick to the negotiation and the conflict stages that we’ve been through for thousands of years, and we can let nature take its course, forcing us to unite even more, forcing anti-Semites upon us to push us even harder, maybe invoking a second holocaust, but doing what it takes to force Jews to eventually unite and do what they have to do.
Look what The Talmud, written almost 2000 years ago, writes. Slide # 5.
Meaning what? It’s an offer you can’t refuse. That’s what it is. We can either do it willingly or unwillingly. We can be the good boy or the bad boy. Either way we’re going to have to do what we have to do, to do our task and unite.
Slide # 6.
Again, this is in The Babylonian Talmud, written almost two thousand years ago. It’s not like we have a choice. The choice we have is whether to it pleasantly—and it is pleasant once you start going that path—or unpleasant.
Question from the audience: Is humanity’s ego is so powerful as to be able to destroy itself for lack of a correct method, meaning to negotiate instead of fight against each other?
We had WWI, we had WW II, and Baal HaSulam writes that we could easily have WW III, and he talks about WW IV as well. He says, ‘The relics that remain will still have to do the job, will still have to unite, and will still have to attain the Creator.’ There is a purpose to creation. All of humanity will not be destroyed, but we can do it as a happy seven billion people in humanity or we can do it as a happy seven people in humanity who will be happy only after they unite.
Einstein says: “I don’t know what weapons WW III will be fought with, but WW IV will be fought with sticks and stones.”
And even sticks and stones can kill.
It seems like that caught your eye before, I think slide number five, the one about either being a good boy or a bad boy, that God will punish or something like that. It seems like we are already in that state to some extent, like we are already not following the natural development of nature. That’s leading us toward hyper-connectivity, showing us how everything is interdependent, and we’re becoming on the one hand more connected, and on the other hand we’re disconnected. Nature is pushing us to become more connected.
Our ego is pushing us the other way around.
That’s the exact conflict. So it’s interesting to see how science on the one hand, and on the other hand the Jewish resources, the authentic writings of The Talmud years ago, and they fit perfectly.
We also talked about it and provided numerous examples of how this is happening, nature vs. the ego, in Self-Interest vs. Altruism.” You’ll want to read it. Dr. Laitman wrote it in 2009 or 2011. It talks about the evolution of the desires where nature is pushing us toward greater and greater connection, and human nature is pushing us toward greater and greater disconnection.
We had a question. She asked if the world ego is so powerful that it will destroy itself.
No. We’ll destroy each other. It’s like cancer. It causes us to be more and more alienated but eventually we’re going to have to unite. The problem is that there are going to be too few people to enjoy it. We don’t want to go that way. It’s not a pleasant route.
Question from audience: What’s the first step, practically speaking, to start doing what we’re supposed to do?
A couple of things. First of all, watch this course. Second, bring your friends to watch it. Third, read the books. Read this book if you haven’t read all of it, read it, and read books like Self-Interest vs. Altruism. There are other books that talk about it. Fourth, toward the end of the course we are going to provide you with the link to a new internet environment. There will be an online environment that helps people to unite. Fifth, we are and we will be teaching courses that teach people how to unite in their communities, in their workplaces. Sixth, help us disseminate, circulate the ideas, video clips, from this lesson. In other words, become engaged in helping people to unite.
The more we create around us an environment that supports the idea of unity, the easier it becomes to unite. Right now the prevailing mind-set is one of selfishness. If you are not selfish, if you are a giving person, in many cases you will be considered weak, vulnerable, or naive. It’s not considered something noble, something good, something worthy. Look at the people we admire—the pop stars. What are they singing about? Who among them sings about unity? But love of others, unity for the sake of unity, not to mention for the sake of a higher goal. It’s the me, me, me culture. That’s what we are admiring so that’s what they’re singing about. We need to change from within and then the culture will change from without.
You can look at an example. Think of a machine, because I’m sure someone is saying, if I watch the course, is that going to change the world? If I get my friends to watch it, will that change the world? There are so many people in the world. How could that influence it? Think of a machine that works with thousands of pieces inside. Think of cogwheels in a machine. It’s enough that you have just a few of those pieces that are not working properly for the whole machine to malfunction. If you take those pieces that are crucial for the proper functioning of the machine, and those pieces begin to start working properly, according to the way the machine is built. Then the entire machine starts working properly as well.
That’s exactly what we’re talking about now. We’re talking about beginning to adapt ourselves to the natural development of nature. We’re talking about [sitting?] ourselves to the where the world is going today. It’s not just a matter of you watching the course and your friend watching the course. It’s a matter of parts in that system, which are crucial parts as well, that are beginning to fit themselves to how the system is actually built, and that obviously influences the entire system.
The system is not corrected by us. There’s the course of nature, the power of nature, and this is what puts things in order. We didn’t build the universe. There is a force that puts everything in order. It is the power of bestowal, the power of connection. If you’re not giving, you can’t connect. Through only receiving, you can only disconnect. So there’s a balance between those two forces, and that interaction between these two forces—one that takes for itself in order to maintain the self—and another that connects. If you lose the balance, you are only disconnected and things become disintegrated.
That balance exists on every level and this is what built the universe. Humans are the only ones disrupting that order, so we have to start instilling the notion of the balance that must exist in humanity in order for it to start functioning properly. It’s going to spread because it’s in line with nature. We just have to stick it into the system.
Let’s look at slide # 7, and you’ll see how it works.
This is the current state of Judaism. People are aware that the Jews have a role, that they have to bring redemption, and even if they’re not consciously thinking about it they feel it in their guts. Were not providing what we’re supposed to provide—redemption. They don’t know what redemption means. They may think of it in religious terms or in all kinds of mystic terms. They don’t realize that it’s only about unity and thus creating a place where we can discover the power of unity. They know that the Jews have the key to it, so they’re angry at the Jews. They just feel it.
Slide # 8.
We cannot really expect anything good to be directed toward us until we do what we must. And don’t think of redemption in religious terms. Think of it as the good life, being able to talk to your neighbor, to unlock the door when you come in, maybe unlock it when you go out. Think of it as going out to the street and meeting every person on the street and actually feeling warmth toward them, better yet, actually knowing how they feel, connecting on an emotional, mental, deeper level than we can imagine. We can do that if we only begin to work on our unity.
Question from the audience: Is this the same as the ripple effect, meaning if we create goodness, and will it provide a positive outcome?
It’ll provide a very positive outcome. The ripple effect? Perhaps. I never thought of it this way. It will echo for sure… big time.
It’s like what you were saying before. It’s not just the fact that that person is changing himself, it’s that he’s suiting himself to the laws of nature. He’s becoming similar to that force which we see governs everything. That’s the true positive outcome. That’s the real influence on the system. It’s not one person taking an old lady across the street. That won’t improve the world because if everyone does that in the same mind-set they’re doing now, nothing will really change here. People will do it; the next day they won’t do it. The next day after we’ll have greater wars and so on.
If that’s what you’re saying, then that goodness and trusting and so on. If a person does that not only to feel good about a certain action, but he understands that that is suiting himself to where nature is going, to where nature is developing, then I think that’s the true positive action.
That’s why everything works in nature. Let’s look at technology. How do you measure something? How does a radio receive whatever it receives. It creates the same frequency inside of it and this way you can hear what is on the outside. Otherwise you can’t hear it because you don’t have the instrument. The minute we unite, we create between us the same frequency that already exists in the universe, that is the foundation of the universe. So we begin to perceive that unity and once you perceive it you don’t lose it.
You realize that this is how everything works. And it makes it a lot easier for other people to tap into it, to connect to it, and because we’re all connected, we’re all one system, you already have parts of the system that are connected, so it makes it a lot easier for other parts as well, and also discover it, and once you discover it you don’t lose it again. That’s it. You change forever. Now you’ve become aware. It’s like you’ve opened your eyes.
A blind person doesn’t see the world, but he knows that the world exists on other dimensions than what he sees, because he has other people telling him that. When we open our eyes we discover that it’s as if we were blind. We discover it. We need to have more people around us telling us that there is that level, that we’re currently blind, we’re lacking another sense, another type of perception. When we get that, we don’t lose it again.
Slide # 9.. This is what Leo Tolstoy who wrote Anna Karenina said about the Jews.
In the next lesson, we’re going to focus on what happens when we don’t do our job. We’re going to focus more on anti-Semitism from the Renaissance onward, what is happening today, where and how things have developed into such a state that when we don’t do what we have to do, then anti-Semitism arises.
We have time for another quick question: I believe that when Israel re-takes her temple [mount?], all things will improve for humanity. What are your feelings and practical thoughts on this concept?
The temple has to be built within us. Forget about those bricks and stones. They represent a spiritual state. The old temples represented a spiritual state of unity. When we lost the unity, the temple was ruined. Don’t worry about bricks and stones; worry about the unity in our hearts. Whatever needs to happen on the physical level will happen naturally and in the right way only if we unite in our hearts.
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