We study the role of men and women based on the system of spiritual worlds because examples can only be drawn from there, and not our world.

There are a million theories in our world, and we see that even today we still do not know the proper role of men and women; therefore, our world is so imperfect.

In the spiritual world, there is the quality of Bina, bestowal, and we must become equal to this quality. To do this, we must unite in such an integral way to be able to connect with Zeir Anpin, and then he will raise us to Bina.

This is a very complicated system with many different elements. It controls us; it emits all the signals to the souls; it launches us, and in our turn, we ascend toward it.

According to this system, there are two forces in the world: feminine and masculine. It is impossible to ascend just through one of them. Only the proper use of both of them creates the necessary conditions sufficient for ascent.

The feminine inclination forms an enormous desire. But this desire cannot be realized independently since it is just a desire, which does not have the power to realize itself.

And next to that is the next force, the masculine force.

A woman provides the need to ascend. It pushes the masculine part. It creates an enormous desire out of itself, inspires, directs, prays, and forms. It pushes men forward, like a mother sends her children to school and her husband to work. She creates the efforts, which enable them to advance, otherwise they would not have moved. Due to these efforts, the masculine part takes the feminine desire, begins to realize it, and ascends forward.

The woman is the lack of fulfillment, an enormous desire, without which nothing can exist. And the man is the force, which already turns this lack into the moving force and attains the Creator. He attains the Creator with the help of the desire he has received from the feminine part; he raises this desire, and together, they realize it.

This is the way things initially were in our world: Once a man went hunting and brought his prey home, and today he goes to work and brings home a salary. This is the way the family exists; this is the way the world is.

In our group we cannot break these natural conditions, otherwise we will not correspond to the higher structure. We must constantly be like the upper Partzuf.

Therefore, we need the women’s desire, their enormous effort, their prayer from the depth of their hearts. Women can influence men with their silent desire in such a way that men will feel like the women are screaming at them, even though in reality, they don’t say a word, but simply want.

Men have the ability to perceive the desire of a woman in such a way that he will want to realize it. He must realize it; this is the way we are made. If we will direct our common desires the right way, we will absolutely reach our goal.

It is impossible to move forward without women. They start this movement; they are the first to react to the changes in the world, to our method. And men must connect between them and realize this method. Why? Because the power that pulls us forward is the power to bestow. Women need to provide the lack and the need, and men, the creation of the power to bestow.

We build our groups based on this principle.
[75174]
From the Vilnius Convention 3/23/12, Lesson 2

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Question: How important is women’s practical work? For example, how important is it for women to also take part in seminars on integration instead of doing their own thing?

Answer: Men will not be able to do anything on their own. Absolutely nothing!

They can get together, stand around, and sing as usual, these are good things, but it is just preparation. The real work cannot be without a strong women’s part generating its aspiration towards the same goal at the same time. It cannot be any other way! We see this everywhere, always. There are many examples in history. This comes from the structure of the upper Partzufim, the upper worlds; if we do not raise this desire to Malchut, it does not form, and without it, nothing happens. So women must take this very seriously.

First, I direct my attention towards the women’s part because everything starts with it. I really ask you to understand that here practically everything depends on the woman. Men can be “launched,” they can be manipulated, and women know this very well. The right way of manipulating men is based on seriously directing them towards the goal; a woman can literally do this with her desire alone, with just one word, with anything she does. It is very easy for her, and for men, it is very difficult, basically impossible, to advance on their own.

This is why there has always been a law in Kabbalah that unmarried men are not taken as students. This is because without the desire of a woman near you thinking about your succeeding, you will not be able to advance seriously.
[75171]
From the Vilnius Convention 3/23/12, Lesson 2

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According to our nature, the nature of a created being, connection exists only among men. Women don’t connect among themselves because their egoism is of a special kind. That is neither good nor bad.

It is important to work in our original nature without trying to damage it. It is important to work with the material we have been created with and understand that we’ll reach the goal only by using our nature properly.

By putting men and women into one group, in the process of working together we feel a different connection among men than among women.

It is not felt as much in real life as in our integral methodology lessons. Literally, in a half an hour to an hour of common studies, the men’s part starts feeling that their nature is ready to go forward and be connected with everyone while women’s part feels incapable of working toward getting closer to each other.

The best result is achieved by women supporting men with their intention and efforts while men get closer to each other.
[75180]
From the Vilnius Convention 3/23/12, Lesson 2

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Question: All of us, men and women alike, are looking for ways to ascend to the next degree. How can a woman come to the correct understanding of it? After all, the men unite and discuss these questions in the groups, while a woman doesn’t participate in this process?

Answer: A woman is the vessel that a man needs to fill with his work towards the Creator. What does he fill this vessel with? With the Creator. Here a man acts only as a means. This is what we call a screen and the Reflected Light. This is the men’s work. And the women’s work is an enormous desire for the revelation of the Creator.

So where do you see a small role of a woman if she is actually the very desire without which a man has nothing to do? This is why unmarried men were never accepted into Kabbalah. What’s there for him to do if he doesn’t have a wife? This is called “half a body.” There is such a concept in Kabbalah: An unmarried man is half a body. With only half a body you shouldn’t be coming to study.

This is why we need to understand what the role of a woman is.
[73951]
From the Vilnius Convention 3/24/12, Lesson 3  

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Question: All my life I have been looking for connection with the Creator. And now I am feeling it; I understand that the Creator sends me serious disturbances. There is an internal dialog with the Creator. I need to understand what He wants from me. How can I understand this, how can I feel Him?

Answer: Everything related to the revelation of the single upper force, the Creator, also applies to women. Only women lack the ability to create a detector, a sensor, a sense of perception of the Creator.

Men cannot create this detector if they do not have women’s support. We work together. Women have to create an environment around men: to push, persuade, help, support in everything they can, but the main thing is their desire. Your desire should influence the men. Like a wife who sends her husband out of the house, let him work and bring home income because the family has to survive.

Without this, men would be playing with their “toys” all their life. It is because of women’s desire that the world develops in our world and in the spiritual world.

The woman is better suited for dissemination. If she is engaged in dissemination, this is her function: She gives birth, she expands. In doing so, she works much better than men. I believe that this realization is the most true and correct.

In addition, she must support the men’s group, take care of it as a mother does her children so that they do not argue and fight, to settle and soothe them. The women also should agree. If there is a good, correct agreement between them, the men inside will not be able to argue. Try it.

Men always feel a little bit of a mother in the woman; it remains with them for life. If you create such an even, good atmosphere, the men will feel that in this environment they have to behave differently. If you begin to further their unity, your desire will suddenly start working towards their connection, that is, their spiritual advancement. Can you imagine, what work you are doing, and what you cause!
[73962]
From the Vilnius Convention 3/24/12, Lesson 3

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In the News (from ScienceDaily): “When it comes to intelligence, the whole can indeed be greater than the sum of its parts. A new study co-authored by MIT, Carnegie Mellon University, and Union College researchers documents the existence of collective intelligence among groups of people who cooperate well, showing that such intelligence extends beyond the cognitive abilities of the groups’ individual members, and that the tendency to cooperate effectively is linked to the number of women in a group.

“That collective intelligence, the researchers believe, stems from how well the group works together. For instance, groups whose members had higher levels of ‘social sensitivity’ were more collectively intelligent. ‘Social sensitivity has to do with how well group members perceive each other’s emotions,’ says Christopher Chabris, a co-author and assistant professor of psychology at Union College in New York. ‘Also, in groups where one person dominated, the group was less collectively intelligent than in groups where the conversational turns were more evenly distributed.’ And teams containing more women demonstrated greater social sensitivity and in turn greater collective intelligence compared to teams containing fewer women.”

My Comment: But the level of unity depends only on men, although women push them towards it. It turns out that men form a group, but it is activated by women’s desires. In Kabbalah, desires belong to the feminine gender, but the force of their connection to the masculine.
[72909] 

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Question: What do you have in mind when you talk about life outside the body?

Answer: Even now we are living a life outside our bodies. I live in my feelings, desires, and thoughts received from the environment. They are not mine but obtained by me from the surrounding environment. Of course, they exist within me, but I call them “out of body” because I live by interests received from others who impress upon me and advise what’s worth living for, what to think about, and what to feel.

I don’t even realize that if I lived in a forest, my understanding of the world would be completely different from the one I have right now. It’s as though the environment gives me a different view of the world and forces me to perceive it one way and not another. And indeed, this is a big problem.

Suppose my environment makes me think that being a cannibal, or killing people, or taking advantage of them is normal, while you see life completely differently. You have a completely different attitude to animals, yourself, the world, and family. We live within the model of perception that society instilled in us throughout our development, and accordingly, this is the way we see the world.

When I travel to a different country, sometimes it really strikes me that people think completely differently there and gravitate towards different values. Thus they have another way of looking at things, and they don’t see what I see. They judge people differently than we do. And if we get acquainted with history books or law codes of different countries, we will see just how different we are.

I’m not even talking about cultural differences or specific cuisines. I am interested in a person’s worldview and not in what he likes to fill his stomach with. What’s important is a person’s understanding of historical events, of human life, of good and evil, his or her attitude to reward and punishment, to what one should achieve, and what kind of life one wishes to build for oneself.

Some people are prepared to spend day and night playing cards and enjoy having others serve them, while for others it’s important to make their contributions wherever possible, to take interest in achievements of science, and to reveal something new for themselves. The outlook on such things can fluctuate from one extreme to another.

We see that the problem of society is that we don’t understand each other. What do wives usually complain about to their husbands? “You don’t understand me!” And this is actually the case because we really didn’t receive an upbringing about how to live in a family.

When I was an adolescent, I wasn’t educated about what a woman is. Is it some living creature that exists by my side? Does she have certain demands, a unique personality? What vision of life does a woman have as opposed to a man? A woman is a completely opposite world, not dependent on anyone. Do I understand her? Do I wish to understand her? Do I take her into consideration? Am I capable of doing this?

Since we haven’t received any internal models of what a woman is, what type of mentality she has, and how she sees the world, we don’t have an ability to take her into consideration. A man truly doesn’t understand her, and this is why each of their meetings abound with mutual attacks. They try to get along somehow, yet they aren’t capable to actually understand each other, that is, to become included in one another. And this is a big flaw in our upbringing.

Statistics on divorce rates and on those unwilling to even start a family attest to this. We see a similar situation in child education: We don’t know how to approach a child correctly. We all know that there is an increase in child abuse cases, and it is all because parents don’t understand them.

In regards to my own children, I have sensed just to what extent I don’t understand them, how unprepared I am for being a father. After all, a father is an educator, a creator, someone who shapes the child for their life to come. But I wasn’t able to do that due to the fact that neither the feeling nor understanding of everything that pertains to children was developed in me at all, while it’s absolutely necessary to teach that.
[66726]
From KabTV’s “A New Life” Episode 3, 12/29/11

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On March 6, the Arvut (Mutual Guarantee) movement held a round table in the Knesset, the legislative branch of the Israeli government. The round table was attended by women parliamentarians and prominent public figures: Deputy Minister Gila Gamliel, deputies Ronit Tirosh, Orit Zuaretz, Dr. Rachel Adachi, and Yulia Shamalov-Berkovich, businesswoman Galia Albin, Ola Najm, lawyer, “Women Against Violence,” Vered Sweid, Director General of the Authority for the Advancement of the Status of Women in the Prime Minister’s Office, Yifat Zamir, Executive Director of the organization “We Power,” and Ilanit Trabalsi, a representative of the Arvut movement.

The participants addressed questions related to the status of women in the modern era and discussed suggestions on how to improve the situation of women. The discussion covered a wide range of topics: law, politics, business, religion, community, cross-sectoral communication, and society in general. The discussion was attended by dozens of activists from the Arvut movement and graduates of the course organized by “The Strength of Women” association.
 [72153] 

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Question: When a man is going through unpleasant states, we recommend that he connect to the group and solve his problem there, through the integral connection with others. What can we recommend to a woman in a case like this?

Answer: Male instructors, who teach groups of women, must notice these things and help women. Several men must work with women’s states, and not just one man. Moreover, constant work with the group leads to women overcoming these states.

Question: What do you mean when you say that male instructors need to work with women?

Answer: Support, explain things, have individual talks with women.

When several male instructors see that a woman really is in a very difficult state, we must work with women as well even though this happens very rarely; women usually overcome these states on their own; it is much harder for men to do.

Usually at least two instructors should be speaking with a woman. And if we have a husband and a wife studying in separate groups, then by temporarily putting them into one group we can influence the wife through her husband, and vice versa.

Question: What do you mean by “influencing?”

Answer: Support, for example, if the man has fallen or become weaker in his integral development.

Question: And the other way around? We can influence a woman through a man?

Answer: It can be done in a family. We can tell the husband to support his spouse, but he must not tell her that he was instructed to do it. Naturally spouses decide everything between them. In every situation, we advise one of the partners how to unassumingly give the other partner the importance of further integral advancement, and show that this makes him or her greater in the eyes of the other partner, and he or she is valued a lot.
[71845]
From a “Talk on Integral Education” #11, 2/16/11

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Question: We have observed the psychological phases of splitting and integration and noticed that men manage to reach integration and women usually do not. Is this somehow connected to the laws that you are speaking of?

Answer: Of course. We already discussed the characteristics of men’s and women’s groups. The women’s group concentrates on the men’s group, it exists around it in the form of help, support, as the part that obligates men to advance towards unity. Then the unity that men attain also expands to the women’s part.

This is why work in a women’s group is completely different. It is seemingly directed towards the external part, the men’s group. And women connect between themselves only to influence it. It is best that they understand the efficiency of their mutual work, the purpose of which is to influence the men’s group.

But this is a fairly complicated problem and it cannot be solved very quickly. Only after many special events, when women begin to taste unity, which the men’s group attains and which emanates to them, only then do they become ready to somewhat unite in order to bring on the next ascent of men and receive some fuel from them. They develop this essential need. It is not corporeal or inherent—it stems from the integral level.

This is why under the influence of unity of the men’s group, a new demand for unity arises in women, even for unity between them. In other words, emptiness—the desire to unite—appears in them. First of all, they begin to feel their personal participation in this unity, and every one of them receives her own fulfillment from the men’s group. And then, the more they connect, the more they rise above their female essence and become able to unite between themselves into a single women’s part, a single image of a woman.

Maybe I express my thoughts in a somewhat complicated way because these are quite advanced degrees not suited for beginner groups. All this manifests better in practice. For this reason, this should not be discussed with women theoretically since initially this is against their nature and only antagonizes them.
[71848]
From a “Talk on Integral Education” #11, 12/16/11

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