A third election round has been announced in Israel for the first time in history due to our inability to form a government.
What can I say? All I can say is that we need something to shake us. I’m sorry to write such words, but it hurts when you love the people of Israel and the State of Israel. After all, it is my home.
I have lived on this land for decades and never once thought about leaving. However, I see no positive future if we continue business as usual, without a thorough scrutiny and decision to change the way we go about our lives.
It is our duty to provide every citizen with the method that initially connected us as a nation, and which would grant us an undeniable right to live in this land. It is as Kabbalist Rav Baruch Shalom HaLevi Ashlag (Rabash) opened the first of his many writings on how a society can make the shift from division to unity: that we have gathered here to establish a society in order to rise and become human, in the fullest sense of the word (the word for “human” in Hebrew, “Adam,” is also the word for the collective soul that we discover when we unite according to nature’s integral laws).
In other words, the purpose of our gathering in one place is not to merely continue living mindlessly in the currents of life here instead of in the diaspora, but to realize the method we were given: to unite and pass the force that unifies us to humanity.
Today’s divisive atmosphere in Israel is a sign that we will be unable to find peace among each other if we fail to understand and implement nature’s integral laws. It is what unified us in the first place, i.e., an inclination to unite upon the divisions of the ancient Babylonian society from which we emerged as a nation.
It is our purpose and role in the world to reach such unity, and without moving in that direction, our purposeless squandering, where we each focus on building our lives at the expense of others, brings about the opposite: social division.
Our disunity then receives a negative reaction from the nations of the world. That reaction is known as anti-Semitism, and its widespread awakening today is because we are in a developmental stage where we need to make a step toward uniting as a single nation, according to the tenet that brought us together in the first place: to unite (“love your friend as yourself”) above divisions (“love will cover all transgressions”) in order to spread this unifying tendency to the world (to be “a light unto the nations”).
According to the laws of nature—integral laws of interconnectedness and interdependence—the people of Israel have a key role: to spread positive connection among humanity. We were given a method to do so, the same method of connection that Abraham guided us with in ancient Babylon, and which has undergone upgrades over the generations to suit us in our time.
Essentially, it is a method of how to actualize connection between us to the same extent and quality as nature’s connectedness, gradually discovering the immense unifying force of nature the more we connect.
Also, our revelation of nature’s unifying force spreads among humanity’s collective consciousness, inverting our current increasing divisive tendency—where we behave like cancerous cells taking as much as we can for ourselves at society’s expense—to a unifying, peaceful and loving tendency that benefits humanity.
I will never leave Israel. I will remain here and do everything in my power for its success. However, its materialistic achievements as a startup nation is no sign of success to me. Success for the people of Israel can only be spiritual: that we realize our role to be a conduit of unity for the world.
Ever since our ancestors achieved the sublime unified state under Abraham’s guidance some 3,800 years ago, our role has remained unchanged. We have since detached from that awareness, but as explained by Kabbalists, the time has come where the need for unity is not only pressing on us within our current borders; it is also expressed worldwide as a growing divisive tendency increasingly tearing societies apart. Thus, not a day goes by where I cannot speak or write about this phenomenon, as a peaceful or painful future depends precisely on the people of Israel’s unity or lack thereof.
Once we clarify and establish our exalted, spiritual and eternal goal to ourselves, our lives will then shift in a positive direction. The shambles we find ourselves in today is due not to a few politicians who failed to form a government, but we—the entire people of Israel—are responsible for it.
Therefore, we must lift our heads out of the water, recognize that we are all one family, interconnected and interdependent, and we must all address the problem together. In the meantime, not only do we suffer, the entire world suffers as it depends on our inner spirit to rise as a united people of Israel.
I thus hope that we will start feeling the great responsibility upon us, to ourselves and to the world, and start implementing the method of connection that we have at our fingertips.
Featured in The Times of Israel