Description

Rav Michael Laitman, PhD discusses Kabbalah׳s popular growth in our times as the method to answer our era׳s most popular question: ״What is the meaning of my life?"

Transcript

Student: There are many people, many approaches in the world, and we see that some use crisis and disaster to try to explain, to convince people that they’re right, to try to take advantage of the pain. How is Kabbalah any different if it comes out trying to explain and convince things to humanity when it’s in pain?

Rav Michael Laitman, PhD: No, here you have… I say it like this: maybe there is no difference in me saying, you know, there is suffering in the world and there is a reason for it; everybody says it. And then they say that the reason is such and such, that this is human nature, that man must change. Everybody says that.

What’s next? Do they have anything further? Do they have something in their hand called the Upper Power, Light that brings correction, that they can change human nature with, or not? Human nature is the one thing that changes in the entire reality.

Can we apply some force that can change nature, or not? This is the difference between all other methods and the method of Kabbalah.

Student: So there’s actually no issue here with convincing?

Rav Laitman: Well, there’s no convincing at all, and it’s not possible to talk to a person and convince him or her if the person doesn’t feel that this is their problem, that their suffering is related to some higher cause, and they don’t ask themselves about the cause of their suffering.

Baal HaSulam asks in the Introduction to Talmud Eser Sefirot (The Study of the Ten Sefirot)—we have six such volumes; it’s our main book of study, The Study of the Ten Sefirot. He asks there, at the beginning, in the introduction: why is he even writing this book? It’s very deep and very difficult book to learn—so he asks, “Who’s the book intended for?”

He doesn’t say some religious people or secular people, or philosophers. The only person he says it’s for is for the person who asks, "What is the meaning of my life?" It’s a simple question. It depends only on the inner maturity of the person. He or she can be a construction worker, a shoe-maker, a professor—it doesn’t matter. But whoever begins to sense that it’s coming from within, can’t ignore it.

The person must understand why he or she is suffering—why is his life full of suffering? And they don’t ask this to escape it because just escaping it is not an essential question about life, it’s just a question about everyday survival. But the person asks about a deeper cause in life. What is life? Where does it come from, and why is it full of trouble? Meaning that the question has a deeper foundation, and a deeper foundation is already a spiritual cause. And that’s because everything in our world evolves from the spiritual world.

And there are a lot of people who come to us and they’re all different. And you can’t say at all in advance who can receive this.

Question: So what does it depend on? If a person receives a thousand blows and more and more pain and the point awakens in him? Or if they just continue to receive more blows?

Rav Laitman: The wise is the one who sees what’s coming, and that’s the whole difference.

There is a person who is beaten for an entire lifetime and just bows his head and goes on saying, “What can we do? That’s life.” Meaning that he or she still doesn’t have the brains, along with the bitter feeling, which can help him or her escape the blows, and prevent the next blow; to start to study and find out where it comes from and why, so that they can sweeten everything and change the steps of their development.

And there are those who develop along with the experience, until their intelligence begins to work on the person and the person begins to ask and evolve this way.

There is a lot of suffering necessary but I’m very optimistic because I see how the wisdom of Kabbalah is starting to take an important place in our lives. We will perform the corrections demanded of us, and to the extent that we’re able to equalize ourselves with the Upper Light, we will enter peace and eternity.