Lesson 6: The Roots of Anti-Semitism

[With Chaim and Gilad]

 

Chaim: Welcome to What Does It Mean to Be Jewish Today, Lesson 6. We are going to focus on answering your questions today, but before we do we want to remind you where we’re at a point where we’re talking about the Jews being different from other nations because of the role they have, and the sense that they are different exists in everyone—non-Jews and Jews alike.

Gilad: So the usual, the chat’s open and we’ll be taking our questions there. So let’s begin.

Let’s begin with your questions from last week and also questions that students have sent during the week and after last week’s lesson. Some of them already relate to this week’s chapter, but in any case, we’re going to answer all of them.

Question: Why is there so much hate toward Israel/Jews if they’re the people who contribute the most to the progress/development of the world—Nobel prizes, inventions, high tech, etc.?

That’s been discussed quite often. The problem is that it’s discussed mainly by Jews. Jews are wondering why is there so much hatred towards us if we’re giving humanity so much? We’re giving humanity such great scientists in medicine and in physics and in high tech and let’s not forget culture, with all the Jewish actors and film-makers and owners of the big studios in Hollywood, producers, writers. We have tons but none of it matters.

Why? Because all of these Nobel prizes and great contributions do not make people happier. They may make them culturally richer, may make their lives easier if we’re talking about technology, and it may make them live longer. But for what? What do they get out of a longer life? It doesn’t give them happiness. The Jews have a specific role to play and it’s not to play in a move and it’s not a role to play in medicine or science or culture or you name it. It’s in uniting the human race.

The guy who wrote the complaint about the Jews feeling superior wrote it after he read the book. He wrote to Dr. Laitman and said, ‘Now I know you are arrogant, and it’s a shame because I like your other books.’ It’s not about arrogance. It’s about something that… If everybody tells you you’re different, you need to check how you’re different, and if you look at what’s happening today, you know that Jews are being singled out all over the world.

Just yesterday or the day before there was another demonstration on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan outside a Jewish jewelry store, against the Jews controlling the finances and what not, and saying basically: Don’t buy from Jews. So Jews are being singled out everywhere and for every reason. If you’ve read chapter 6, you can see what Eric Hoffer wrote, what Martin Luther King wrote. There’s a debate about whether he actually wrote this letter to a friend or not, but even so those who say he didn’t write it, do say that the views expressed in this letter are authentic. And you can see that anti-Semitism in every generation in every period of human development takes on different robes, if you will. But it’s always the same thing.

And even now you can see how anti-Zionism changes into anti-Semitism very easily, because underneath it all is the Jews having to do what they have to do, and they’re not doing it. So the people blame the Jews for whatever reason, and the reason is something… we’re going to read it. So yes, all of these Nobel prizes and what-not that the Jews win make no difference, unless the Jews do what they have to do which is unite in order to pass on that unity to the rest of the world, the world will keep hating them. In the very least, it will keep excluding them and in the end it will turn into hatred. So that’s what we’ve got to do.

Question: Why did you first call the Jews pariahs and then medics of the world?

Because it’s both. As long as Jews are not medics of the world they will keep being regarded as pariahs. They will keep being singled-out and excluded and excommunicated and rejected by the world as long as they do not function as medics.

Question: Do you think that if Israel doesn’t exist there will be no anti-Semitism?

There has been official anti-Semitism for hundreds of years and Israel has existed since 1948, sixty-something years. Anti-Semitism is there. It’s going to be here and it’s going to stay until we do what we have to do. So there’s no connection between anti-Semitism and the existence or non-existence of the state of Israel. Before there was the state of Israel, anti-Semites said go to Palestine, go to Israel, go away from here, go to your country. Now that there is the state of Israel people say, get out of Israel, go back to wherever you came from. It’s because people hate Israel, the Jews. They have this gut feeling that Jews are causing all the problems in the world.

And it’s true, because all the problems in the world derive from the lack of unity between us. It’s because we’re all so self-centered we can’t control ourselves, and we’re destroying our own societies. And the people with the solution to that narcissism, to that self-centeredness, is the Jews. They don’t know it, but it’s within them. So they have to rekindle that sense of unity, they have to learn how to unite again, and then pass it on. It’s as simple as that.

Question: What is redemption?

Redemption was mentioned several times in the book and this merits an answer. People think of redemption in religious terms, in terms of God coming down and delivering all of us from… what? There is no God sitting up there behind the moon, behind the solar system, above the Milky Way somewhere out there in space. There is no such thing.

There is a very simple principle that reality functions through the interaction of two forces, if you will, two tendencies, two vectors. One is toward receiving, the other is toward giving. All of nature, all of reality has those two vectors intertwined and because there’s no free choice, nature balances itself out. So it exists. All animals, all plants, everything in reality feels it and functions accordingly. It’s the law of life.

Humans are the exception. We’ve been given only a sensation that we want. That’s all we are. Why is so easy to turn us into these voracious consumers that devour everything we see, especially in others? It’s because we are born with this tendency to only want to receive. We don’t have the sensation that there are two forces at play here and that everything is one system. Why is that? Because when you have that awareness, then you become aware of the whole system, and the human race are intended to attain that, to perceive that, to grasp the balanced interaction, the existence of those two forces, those two vectors, and how they interact. We need all of us to come to a point where we have complete perception of it. Therefore, we know how everything works. The ultimate goal of humanity is to become like the Creator, omniscient.

The only way to do it is to have us born ignorant of it and develop that awareness by ourselves, and then we know that everything works this way, just like we develop the radio, which receives the radio waves, and then we know what’s around us. So we have to develop the tool that perceives what’s around us and the way to develop it is to develop those two vectors within us. We’ve got plenty of the desire to receive, so now we have to develop the other desire, the other vector, to give. We do that by working on our unity. That’s what Abraham discovered. That’s what he was trying to teach. It’s been phrased in different ways throughout the generations, but it’s always about the same thing. You develop unity, you perceive the vector of unity, the vector of giving in reality, then you perceive the whole of reality, then you become like the Creator, etc. It’s called by different names in Hebrew—Dvekut [adhesion], equivalence of form, whatever. You do it through uniting, and that’s the secret. That’s the big secret. Now, we told you. It’s not a secret any more. That’s the big secret of the Jews and that is what they have to tell the world.

I want to add to that. It’s a secret, but really if you look at nature, if you look at development for thousands even millions of years, then you can see it’s really not such a secret. There have always been these two forces in nature. All the development comes from these plus and minus forces. You look at an atom, the electrons and protons, if you look at anything there’s always these two forces that lead to development.

What you have basically been saying is that we have this one force which is greatly increased, that ego, that desire to consume, not just to consume material goods, but to consume everything, even people, even emotions. Everything we want to consume. So adding this unity, this additional force of a plus, is basically just balancing out the system. We talked about gravity as a law, and whether you like it or not, if you walk off a roof you’ll fall and you’ll crash. And what we’re doing here is simply beginning to understand this tendency of nature and how if we begin to adapt to that—if we begin to add unity or try to increase our desire for it, try to create an environment that supports this unity by simply balancing out these two forces in nature then anything—if you’re going with the force of nature you are bound to succeed.

That’s the thing. It’s very true what Gilad is saying. When you look around you, like yin and yang, it’s been known for ages that these two forces exist. What we don’t know is how we can develop this force, this vector, within us. We are consuming animals. We’re the only animal that consumes more than it needs and that is basically focused on consuming. All other creatures in nature just take what they need in order to survive, period, and not an ounce more than that. We consume everything we see around us. The more the better. And it’s not so.

So what can replace it? If we stop receiving we’re going to be miserable because it’s against our nature. So what we have to do is to develop another nature that rejoices not in just devouring but in being like the whole of nature, that enjoys it, that sees it as the purpose of life. Then it replaces many of the cravings we have today. We’re still going to want to eat and have a normal life, of course, but we’re also going to have a goal, something to attain that is far, far greater and better and richer than anything you can imagine right now.

The great secret of the Jews wasn’t that reality functions on two vectors. It’s that they knew how to become like that. They knew how to develop themselves into being like that. This is what people need, because we can see that we’re the only element that doesn’t work this way and we’re the only element that’s destroying its own habitat, which in our case today is not like the Babylonians four or five thousand years ago. In our case it’s the whole planet. If we keep being who we are, we are going to destroy the entire planet, in the sense that we will make it uninhabitable to ourselves. So it’s an urgent matter now.

We can’t expect anti-Semitism to decline until we start actually providing a method for relinquishing self-centeredness and nurturing… I don’t know if altruism is the right word, but balanced existence in the sense that we ourselves become balanced.

Question: I am pleased to read that a lot of people think positively about Jews. But that was a long time ago, because nowadays it’s the opposite when I read the news. How do you explain such admiration and such hatred together and how did it become so violent in the twenty-first century?

First of all, it’s been violent for quite a few centuries. If you read Jewish history, it’s a history of escaping from one place to another due to violence. In one of the slides today we’re going to mention ____, the Ukrainian leader, something probably many don’t know about. In the nineteenth century within about two years or so—he was a Cozak leader, afterwards he was the prime minister or president of the Ukraine, a Ukrainian leader—under his leadership more than eight hundred pogroms took place in the Ukraine alone, in which more than 150,000 Jews were murdered.

So it’s not like violence began today. I’m specifically mentioning him in order to avoid mentioning the obvious inquisition in Spain and the Holocaust. The Jews have a history of being persecuted and destroyed and murdered wherever they go. First they are welcome, then they help improve the economy, and then they are accused for overtaking the economy, and then they are persecuted and then murdered, and then they run away to another place.

What does it all give us though? These persecutions cause Jews to become more and more dispersed throughout the world and this dispersion subconsciously also disperses the idea that Jews represent even when they don’t know. The idea is that unity is the solution to the problems. Because for the past two thousand years Jews do not know the meaning of unity—meaning the secret that Abraham had and taught and his posterity taught to the Israeli people for fifteen hundred years or so until they lost it completely because the ego grew to a point where they couldn’t maintain unity any more—but that root exists in the Jews still. So wherever they go they pass it around. What does it do? It subconsciously prepare the people for the notion that unity is the solution. This quality of unity, many people actually sensed it…

Let’s look at some of the slides. Look at slide # 6. Winston Churchill, the British Prime Minister during WWII had a thing about the Jews. He was very curious about them. Look what he noticed about them.

If you want to take it from the negative angle, you have Hitler talking about unity of the Jews when they are in trouble; many people talked about that. Even we Jews talk about: How come we only unite when we’re in trouble? That’s because we are broken, in that sense of the importance of unity, that trait that keeps us united, the quality that keeps us united is broken within us, it doesn’t exist within us. It’s not working. What is working is the sense of unity that we use in order to help ourselves. And that invokes hatred and antagonism and eventually anti-Semitism. So we don’t need to relinquish unity. On the contrary, we need to pass it on, to develop it in ourselves to the point where we use unity not for ourselves but in order to pass it on to everyone else. That’s when things will change.

Let’s look at what Henry Ford wrote, slide # 4.

Henry Ford, the founder of Ford Motor Company, was a great industrialist. He also invented this terrible thing called the assembly line. He did a great deal of good for American industry and for industry elsewhere in the world as well, and he hated Jews. He wrote a book called The International Jew: the world’s foremost problem. In it he explains why the Jews are the world’s foremost problem.

But Henry Ford was a smart fellow and he didn’t just hate the Jews, he explained why, and you do want to look at some of his scrutinies, which are very profound. [They] give you something to think about and to see that he wasn’t just hating the Jews. He was basically trying to convey a message that if Jews do what they should they will not be hated. They will be admired. Actually he writes it in several places in the book. Let’s take a look at two of these excerpts.

He’s basically telling us: Just do what you have to do and we will embrace you! How? It doesn’t get more obvious than that.

Let’s look at another one, Slide # 5.

Now you ask about Jewish arrogance? We just have to face it and start working. There is nothing to be arrogant about. On the contrary, there is much to be ashamed about—that we’ve been neglecting our role for centuries. And now it’s time to get going.

If you have any questions on that, please ask them now in the chat and we will stop and answer. In the meantime, let’s continue.

We have a question on this. How do we put into practice the law of bestowal that is contrary to our inner self? Is unity like a lab where you can practice giving/bestowal?

Unity is not a lab in itself. It’s a purpose. First of all, what we’re doing now is already changing you. If it makes you ask questions it is already changing you. You don’t need to create something out of nothing. The vector of unity, the positive vector, the one that emits rather than attracts, exists in reality. We just need to tap into it. The minute you start thinking about it, it starts influencing you. Let’s use a medical/physical example.

In our brains there is something called mirror neurons. What do they do? Nothing. But when you look at someone doing something, these neurons seemingly do the same thing with that other person. So when you want to do the same thing, you then already have at least some knowledge of how to do it, because at least part of your brain has already done it. Now it’s just projected into the organs that actually do it. This is how we learn from others. Similarly, the minute you start thinking about giving, about uniting, you start developing in you the mechanism that makes you like that.

I’ll add to that. If you look at the entire world like one system, and that’s already evident today, that everything is interconnected. There is no single part of the world that is completely isolated. [References to the example of how many it takes to make a pencil from a prior lesson.] If you’re looking at the entire world as a system, and that each and every one of us is part of that system, it makes a lot of sense. There are questions here about how do we do this in practice? How can we change the world, the people of the world? These questions make sense. For example, the questioner is only one person, and there are a few other people here.

But if you think of us as an entire system, every part of the system that begins to adapt itself to this new direction is taking, that begins to add this element of unity, it’s immediately influencing the entire system. It’s not just changing the questioner. If you start getting into that mind-set, if you begin to start understanding that unity is really the solution, you aren’t just changing yourself, you are influencing the entire system, because everything is interconnected. So you might be influencing the other side of the world for all we know, and not only individual connections, but the entire system itself is being upgraded.

I’d like to add something for homework. I’m not sure you can do it, but if you can, check this out. Get some of your friends together—three, four, five of your friends—get together for an evening. Have some coffee, something nice to eat, have a beer, whatever—a good feeling, a friendly feeling. Then… this is something you all have to work out. I’m going to give you a rough line-out, like a basic layout of what you’re going to do in this meeting. Then you tell them, We are here in order to talk about something. Choose something not very controversial, but something you’re going to have diverse views about. You’re going to tell them this, We’re going to talk about this topic but we’re going to do it following a few simple rules.

1. No one interjects into someone else’s words. In other words, if you are speaking, no one else is allowed to speak at the same time. [When we practice these things we usually have something called an “attention object,” like a pencil or something you’re holding, and that means you’re the speaker. No one else is allowed to speak at that time. Everyone else must listen to you. But you also can’t take all the time in the world. Take up to a minute to talk, then pass it on to someone else.]
2. When you speak you do not use any negation of someone else’s words. You do not disagree. Even if you do internally—and you probably will because the ego tells you you are right and they are wrong—you don’t say it. You can only add. You add another angle, another line of thought, or maybe tap into the other person’s idea and you add to that idea; you develop it.

That’s basically it; that’s all it takes. After half an hour or an hour, stop for a minute and see where you are, how you felt at the beginning and how you feel now. What has been created among you? That’s the idea. This exercise, called the workshop, creates something new, because it’s not your own view anymore, because you couldn’t disagree with someone else, you couldn’t make your view triumph over all the other views. Instead you will have created something that’s common to all of you that you all not just agree with, but embrace and that didn’t come from any specific person. That something is the unity that we’re looking for.

If you do that and it worked, you will not be able to hate any of the participants in the workshop. We have done this hundreds of times with people who are not—I told you not to take something too controversial—we’re done this with enemies, with Jews and Arabs, with people who have been in conflict for years, in neighborhoods where people could not get along and the neighborhood was in ruins, and in each and every case, people came out of their after an hour of discussing saying beautiful things about all the other people in the workshop. They started What’s App? groups and Facebook groups and took each other’s phone numbers and everything, and they could not stand each other before that. They vehemently hated each other before that.

It’s very simple and it works. What I’d like you to do is try it out, those of you who can, and write to us and tell us how it went, and we’ll read it here next week.

They can write to us on the Facebook group Like Bundle or Reeds or after the lesson were going to send an email that they can reply to with questions and anything else, so they can write it there.

What you were describing, that round table, actually has been found in research a few years ago at MIT that this is something that creates collective intelligence. It was found that there is a factor called ‘collective intelligence,’ and this factor is found in a group of people who are together and the amazing thing is that this collective intelligence is not correlated with the average intelligence of the group. In other words, if you have a group of people that are very smart, with very high average IQ, it doesn’t necessarily mean that they will be a smart group.

Probably because of their egos!

Exactly. The research found that what makes a group smart is not the individual IQs in the group, but how sensitive they are to each other, called social sensitivity. They also found that equal distribution of speech in that group is what makes the group smart. So it’s interesting to see that, here again, you can be socially sensitive in a group and that doesn’t just influence your interaction with every other person in the group, it actually raises the entire collective intelligence of the group itself.

So the group becomes like its own entity.

The group becomes its own entity. They don’t really know how it works. There’s really no explanation to how there is a factor that is not related to the individuals of the group, but it’s only related to the group itself, with its dynamics, with everything included in it. They just know it does work that way.

It’s an example of how the workshop and those rules of the workshop are something that really create this positive social atmosphere. Second, it’s another example of how if I change my approach, my attitude, I’m influencing the entire system. I’m boosting the level of the entire system.

That’s another important point. You don’t need to suppress your opinion, or to adopt someone else’s view. There’s no struggle here. The only struggle is not to say that you disagree, but do add your own, so you remain who you are. That’s very important. You don’t cancel yourself out because that will not work in the long run.

We’re in it for unity, not for uniformity of…

Exactly! We’re not trying to make people the same. The idea is not to make you all the same, not to oppress your minds or your views or who you are. On the contrary, your difference, your uniqueness, is what you contribute to the group. The more diverse the group is, the richer and more qualitative is the unity that they produce.

More research: A meta-analysis by Johnson and Johnson, two researchers in the field of education. They researched different methods of learning for the last sixty years and they found that collaborative learning is always more beneficial and gives better results than individualistic learning or competitive learning. On the one hand it makes sense. On the other hand, if you look at all the schooling systems, they’re still aiming at competitive strategies, and that’s completely off. We might think that being competitive gives motivation and so on, and to some extent it does. But collaborative learning is shown to not only produce higher marks and better scores and better learning habits, it also gives higher confidence…

It also goes beyond the school hours They talk about how it affects students’ personal lives and everything. They become more confident.

Social life as well. Regarding what you said, it’s not that a person cancels himself out, but on the contrary—that’s what this research found—when a person is engaged in collaborative study he has much more confidence to be himself, to express himself. His resilience rises. He’s less likely to conform to the group and cancel his own uniqueness. So in a collaborative environment is where a person can really feel free to become himself.

You want to check this out. It’s called “Social Interdependence Theory.” There’s extensive mention of that research in Self-Interest vs. Altruism, Dr. Laitman’s book from 2009. He does mention it there. It’s just another proof. They went over a thousand research papers done over one hundred years. It’s been proven scientifically. So why don’t we use it?

That’s what the course is about to some extent. We’re trying to figure out why we’re not using it. I think that naturally, we have this kind of desire in us—call it survival instinct or you can call it an ego, or you can call it the very same thing that led the people in Mesopotamia to start dispersing and separating—that’s pushing us away from each other. It’s leading to development of what we’re seeing today, complete chaos—consumerism, narcissism that leads to depression. We see that these systems are not working. So why aren’t we doing it? Because we don’t have an environment that constantly reminds us. We have that automatic survival instinct that says, There’s you, there’s me…

All animals have a survival instinct, and they’re not ;like that.

This takes us back to the lesson before. Maybe you can revise that again, about the desires that we have in us, the ego.

We are born with only one vector, to take for ourselves, and the more the better. Another problem is that we’re always envious of the other person. What’s the point of having millions in the bank if you cannot talk about it or if you cannot show it to other people. If nobody knows you’re rich, what’s the point of being rich? The whole point of wealth is to feel superior to others. We have this inclination within us not to just provide for our sustenance, but to satisfy our desire for superiority.

It’s a good thing because the human race is intended to be superior over the whole of nature. But how? By becoming consciously aware of how nature works, and not just doing it instinctively. By denying us the awareness of the other vector, nature forces us to develop that awareness within us. It’s like nature is telling us to create ourselves, to create that part in ourselves that’s missing, and thus acquiring the understanding of how the whole of nature works.

And when you do that, you learn how to run yourself and how to run reality and how to stop the chaos from happening. And then you become like the Creator; that’s the whole point. It’s not a mystical thing. It’s a very down-to-earth, practical perception that a person gets. It’s like his whole being expands and perceives the whole of reality all at once. How do you do that? Precisely by, not annulling your uniqueness, but going above it, just like you do in a workshop. That’s why it’s such an important exercise.

That’s how you get to it and this is why all those theories that have been known for at least a hundred years now, that working together works better than working alone. That’s why we can’t see it, not at school, not at most of our workplaces. Even when people collaborate they still have this negative competition because within us we haven’t developed that other nature that we must. The Jews have to lead the way toward it because within them there’s this seed of previous experience of that, so they have to water it and make it grow and spread the unity all over the world. How do we water it? By creating an environment that nurtures and supports it. The right environment is the water and the sun and the fertilizers that this seed needs. We have to create it. Otherwise it won’t be rekindled.

You were saying that when a person is born he has just one vector of maximum pleasure for himself, to receive as much as he can. That’s true on the human level, but if you’re looking at the animal level of the person, meaning this body which is no different than any other animal—if you look at different animals, they have different biological structures—and we’re the same. We have a ____ structure. If you look at an ape we’re pretty much the same on that level, where I already have this preparation to connect.

So, as you said, if we create this positive environment, on the one hand our human level has a resistance to it. I don’t want to connect to anyone. I don’t want to unite. On the other hand, our body when we do it, it feels good. It releases oxytocin, the love hormone. It has a whole series of positive effects the moment we do create this positive connection. It’s like the system is already prepared for that to happen and it only depends on us on the human level to start creating this and making it actually happen.

That’s very important because it means that even we humans are almost entirely ready for connection. All that’s missing is the transformation of the human part in us, because the human part in us is the part that doesn’t want to connect. Everything else about nature and about us is ready for connection, except our desire for it.

Question from audience: I hope the understanding of Israel is accomplished and that Jew is not just a religion or an ethnic group. Maybe you could address this again.

Israel, the internal meaning of Israel, has nothing to do with the physical body or being born to a Jewish family or even being born in Israel. It has to do with a specific, not even a desire, but a vector, a direction in which you are developing. Israel comes from two words, Yashar Kel, straight to the Creator. When a person wants to reach the Creator, in other words when a person wants to develop both vectors of life and perceive the whole of reality, that person is Israel. It may be  Muslim, a Christian, a Jew, a Buddhist or whatever. You may be born in Israel in the U.S. or in Iran, wherever. You’re Israel.

On the outside you can doing what you were doing before, and you can continue belonging to whatever religion you were born to. Religion has its own role—cultural, social—and it keeps society in order. But internally, when you have that desire, you are Israel.

Question: Why are the Jewish people so proud of being Jewish, but try to escape their mission like Jonah the prophet?

First of all, speaking for myself, I was never proud of being Jewish. There’s nothing to be proud about. There is no room for pride or shame or anything. It is a system. We are all parts of the system. We’ve got to function like the properly working parts of a machine. Just like parts of a machine don’t feel superior, even if it’s the CPU of a computer—the CPU doesn’t feel superior to the memory, for example—then we just have to what we have to do.

Why do they try to escape their mission? That’s a different question. They try because it’s uncomfortable, because they’re not aware of the mission they have, because that seed is not sprouted yet. So for many reasons. Either because they’re simply oblivious to it; they have no idea that this is what it means to be a light for the nations. Even those who have an idea say, yes but…

After Dr. Laitman wrote his New York Times article, he got this message from a Jew saying: ‘What you’re saying is true and I know you are right. But you cannot say it. People aren’t ready for it. You can’t say the truth.’ You have to. The world is in a stage where it needs to hear the truth. It is hard to accept, it’s uncomfortable, we don’t have any other choices. We are going to ruin our planet pretty soon if we don’t hurry up and do what we have to do.

Question from the audience: Why do Jewish people feel ashamed for the hateful philosophy of Henry Ford. I’m so hurt. These ugly words make new recruits on the internet. These words have haunted me much of my life and has the vile statement that the Holocaust is something the Jewish people brought on themselves.

In the previous lesson we talked about Baal HaSulam’s warnings. Slide # 1.

Here’s what Rav Kook, the first Chief Rabbi of Israel writes. I think he wrote this in 1907. Look at what he said then you tell me what you think about the Holocaust.

Slide # 2.

At this point he was also talking about how we shouldn’t expect anything from the West and it’s not going to be any better there. He died in 1935, before the Holocaust, but he saw what was coming. We need to realize that in that sense I suppose you could say the Jews brought this on themselves—of course not intentionally, not knowingingly, obviously—but we need to realize that all of the problems the Jews are suffering is because we are not doing what we must. We cannot blame anyone. It’s a law of nature that when you have a dysfunctional element in the system, the system tries to fix it. That element never feels good about it. It’s never comfortable; it’s never pleasant. And the harder the element resist, the harder means the system uses to correct it.

I’m not saying Hanry Ford was a Jew-lover. He had a lot of bad things. If you read this book you’ll see how much animosity, how much hatred he had for the Jews. But read at least those excerpts—there are many more in the book similar to what I read just now—and you’ll see that he’s not just hating the Jews. He’s telling them what they have to do. It’s one of the few anti-Semites who actually was thinking not just about how he hates Jews, but why he hates Jews. And we need to listen to what we’re being told, and then things will be okay.

Rav Yehuda Ashlag, author of the Sulam Commentary on the Zohar, wrote about this problem. He was actually trying to get the Jews out of Poland. We talked about it. He was excommunicated by the Jews, so he left for Israel, which was then Palestine, alone. He is the only one from the three hundred families that he originally gathered to come to Israel who survived because he didn’t stay in Poland. He said that this is what will happen. Look what he writes. Slide # 3.

By Nazism he also talks about Facism, every form of Fascism, but what he’s saying here is a warning that if we don’t do what we must we cannot expect anything good to come to us from the world. The world will demand from us to do what we have to do, and if we don’t, it will consider us expendable.

For the next lesson, try to do the workshop we talked about today, and read Chapter 7.

Announcements on next lesson, etc.