In the News (translated from CloudWatcher): Over the last few decades, not many were interested in seeing themes of solidarity and mutual help on TV. The media wanted glamour, blood and violence. But today, because of the crisis and its influence, the most in-demand, urgent topics are none other than mutual help and self-sacrifice.

My Comment: The crisis cleanses people. One Kabbalistic text says, “Meat is cleansed by salt, and people’s desires are cleansed by suffering.” But there are two types of suffering:

• Involuntary suffering, which lasts for a long time, making people wise up against their will in order to avoid the suffering. But gradually, people start to recognize the reason and purpose of the suffering,

• Conscious suffering is when a person learns about the qualities of the Upper World by studying Kabbalah and compares himself with these qualities. He then suffers because he is not similar to these qualities. And as soon as he feels this kind of suffering, he is immediately corrected and filled with goodness.

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In the News (from The New York Times): “Job Losses Pose a Threat to Stability Worldwide” Laurent Wauquiez, France’s employment minister, said, “The thing that is new [about the crisis] is that it is global.”

Worldwide job losses from the recession that started in the United States in December 2007 could hit a staggering 50 million by the end of 2009, according to the International Labor Organization, a United Nations agency.

High unemployment rates, especially among young workers, have led to protests in countries as varied as Latvia, Chile, Greece, Bulgaria and Iceland and contributed to strikes in Britain and France.

In emerging economies like those in Eastern Europe, there are fears that growing joblessness might encourage a move away from free-market, pro-Western policies, while in developed countries unemployment could bolster efforts to protect local industries at the expense of global trade … increasing the likelihood of protectionist trade battles.

My Comment: What kinds of losses will the current economic slowdown in the United States lead to in the entire world, and how soon will it echo in the whole world? Frankly, we don’t know, and the reason it’s impossible for us understand the crisis is that it is global.

Fear and hopelessness will cause the politicians and economists to look for new ways of solving the problem. However, in the meantime, everyone will just blame America for everything, saying that everyone suffers because America isn’t buying their products.

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In the News (from New Scientist): “Born believers: How your brain creates God” An experiment published in Science supports the idea that religion is a natural consequence of how our brains work. …Humans can anticipate future events, including their own death. “You’ve got to figure out a solution, otherwise you’re overwhelmed,” says anthropologist Scott Atran of the University of Michigan. When natural brain processes give us a get-out-of-jail card [religious faith], we take it.

My Comment: All the belief systems in the world (over 3800 of them) were invented by people. However, the three main religions – Judaism, Christianity and Islam – originated from Kabbalah, when the people of Israel fell from the spiritual level (the sensation of the Creator through the quality of bestowal and love) to the level of our world (where the Creator is concealed because of people’s unfounded hatred to each other). Because people lost their perception of the Creator, the Temple became destroyed and the Jews were exiled from their land, which happened 2000 years ago.

When the Creator became concealed, so did Kabbalah, and people’s perception and understanding of the Creator was replaced by faith in Him. That is when Kabbalah was replaced by religion – Judaism. And later on, two more religions or branches originated from Judaism: Christianity and Islam.

In our times, people will once again begin to feel the Creator by attaining the quality of bestowal and love. Therefore, all the belief systems and religions will disappear, as it is written, “For they will all know Me, from the smallest of them to the greatest” (Yirmiyahu 31:33). The beliefs and religions will remain only as traditions.

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Two questions I received on virtual connections:

Question: I am living in Malaysia (a part of South East Asia) and here there is no physical group I can connect to. The only means for connection is through the virtual group, which is what I am doing now. But it is difficult to participate virtually due to time differences. How can I change my environment to influence me towards the goal?

My Answer: It’s enough to be virtually connected with us and to attend a Congress when you have the opportunity, such as the one that will be held in Philadelphia on May 15-17, 2009.

Question: Lately I have been finding people who think like me in different social sites on the Internet. Can I consider them a group? My problem is that the nearest Kabbalah center is 70 km away from me.

My Answer: Of course. If you connect with them because you are advancing together toward a common goal – similarity to the Creator, then you would be a group even if you had no Internet connection. The technological connections in our world were developed only in order to correct the inner connections between people, which happen “from soul to soul.”

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In the News (from Times Online): “Kapital Gains” What with the humbling of some of the world’s grandest banks, the world has been moving in mysterious ways. But few as mysterious as the current climb up Germany’s bestseller lists of Karl Marx’s Das Kapital – a book which tends to be more bought than read. … Marx’s German publisher says sales have been soaring.

My Comment: It’s obvious that our generation is still not morally mature enough to adopt the system of equal and fair distribution according to the rule, “from each according to his ability, to each according to his need.”

Marx also recognizes that only “…at advanced levels of the collective society, once people’s primitive hierarchy of the distribution of labor disappears, and together with it, the contradiction between the physical and mental work, when the work itself will become the primary need instead of the means of existence, when along with the comprehensive individual development, the forces of production will prosper and all the sources of public happiness will spill in their great abundance – then once and for all the narrow bourgeois views will be rejected, and the society will write on their banner: ‘from each according to his ability, to each according to his need.’”

Marx maintained that the society develops by means of colliding forces in it, advancing from one state to the next through cause and consequence. As the negative force increases, it destroys the current state, and then the positive force forms a better state. And this goes on until the positive force is revealed in all its perfection.

But a question arises: should we then just wait for the negative force to bring our society to the best possible state? The problem is that the development by means of the negative force’s influence is lengthy and full of suffering. However, humans, unlike animals (which aren’t able to influence nature), can use the power of thought (the mind) to learn from nature about how to act on our own. We can thereby escape the influence of the negative force, and start controlling our development.

For example, when a person has to produce many chickens, he does not sit and wait for the hen to hatch the eggs to get the necessary quality and quantity of chicks. He instead creates an incubator that produces the chicks at the necessary time and in the necessary quantity and quality.

The same thing happens in the realm of general human development: Man can observe and track Nature’s actions by looking at the process of social development. He can then find an efficient, convenient method that will enable him to reach a happy final goal in the shortest time and with the least suffering.

This is what Marx was trying to attain through his tactics.

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In the News (from The Guardian): “Biofuels more harmful to humans than petrol and diesel, warn scientists” The study shows that corn-based bioethanol, which is produced extensively in the US, has a higher combined environmental and health burden than conventional fuels… With biofuels, the problems are caused by particles given off during their growth and manufacture… Before we dedicate major resources to new biofuels, we should be trying to quantify other likely impacts to society – water quality, biodiversity and so on – and put all of those into our analysis.

My Comment: There is only one way to avoid harm, which is to aspire toward similarity with Nature. The knowledge we will gain when we aspire toward bestowal and love will enable us to change correctly. We will understand how to change our social relations, how to build our trade and financial systems, which industries to develop, and so on.

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In the News (translated from Elementy): Research done on followers of the six major religions shows that people who regularly attend services are more prone to religious fanaticism and hatred for followers of other faiths, and are more likely to justify suicide bombers.

Collective worship is a powerful way to strengthen people’s devotion to “their own kind” and hatred for “outsiders.” The phenomenon of suicide bombers is an extreme form of parochial altruism: people sacrifice themselves for the sake of “benefiting their own kind” (altruism), and their attempts to annihilate the outsiders (parochialism) are seen as “good deeds.”

My Comment: Religion is opposite to Kabbalah in every way (there is a verse that says, “The opinion of the Torah is opposite to the opinion of the egoists.”) Kabbalah directs everyone to attain love for all people. It explains that everyone is “of the same kind” – we are all cells of one body.

Religion, on the other hand, generates hatred for “outsiders,” even to the point of self-sacrifice, which is done for the sake of killing those who are not “of your kind.” This is why religion will disappear when people will reveal the quality of “love for one’s neighbor.” Religions will then be reduced to folk culture or popular tradition.

In other words, religion will let go of all the aspects that regard the Creator, the Upper World, the after-life, and reward and punishment. This will happen because the revelation of the Creator will expose religion’s emptiness and lies about these questions.

This explains religion’s strong hatred of Kabbalah. However, Kabbalah tells people that they can keep their religion as their tradition, and in addition, supplement it with the revelation of the Creator. Still, the religious leaders will then lose their main bargain chip, “reward in the afterlife,” and will become leaders of folk culture and popular tradition.

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In the News: (from Times Online): The Vatican has admitted that Charles Darwin was on the right track when he claimed that Man descended from apes. A leading official declared yesterday that Darwin’s theory of evolution was compatible with Christian faith, and could even be traced to St Augustine and St Thomas Aquinas. “In fact, what we mean by evolution is the world as created by God,” said Archbishop Gianfranco Ravasi, head of the Pontifical Council for Culture.

My Comment: No one originated from anything other than from their own Reshimot – informational genes. The Reshimot unravel like a chain, from small to big, giving rise to everything that exists.

However, since we do not see the chain of Reshimot, we see a picture where the species originate “one from another,” whereas in reality they originate “one after another.” Kabbalists have already explained this thousands of years ago – see Part 3 of Talmud Eser Sefirot.

The world was created by the Creator, and every creature was created by the Creator or Nature as well. The only matter of creation is the desire, which develops and expresses itself by creating an outward appearance (a bodily shell) according to its qualities. However, we do not perceive the forces of the desire and only see the external shells. This is why we think that they come from one another.

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In the News (from Newser): “Obama tells Congress economic crisis will become catastrophe if rescue bill isn’t passed” Warning that a failure to act “could turn a crisis into a catastrophe…,” Mr. Obama said in an eight-minute speech before taking reporters’ questions, “I can’t tell you for sure that everything in this [stimulus] plan will work exactly as we hope, but I can tell you with complete confidence that a failure to act will only deepen this crisis.”

My Comment: These actions won’t produce any results other than waste the last resources. The catastrophe is inevitable.

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Every Thursday at 7:30pm Israel time, our television channel YES 66 airs a live broadcast of the show, “Ask the Kabbalist.” The show is simultaneously translated into English, Spanish and Russian. I invite everyone to watch it and to ask questions at 1-700-509-209 or at www.kab.tv/eng

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