We Jews are people with an augmented ego, which lessens our feeling of others, and increases our feeling of ourselves.
Where does this augmented ego come from?
It comes from us Jews having once experienced heightened states of unity, starting from Abraham’s diverse group of Babylonians who discovered the law of nature together (“love your neighbor as yourself”), which granted us the name, “Israel” (“Yashar Kel,” i.e., “directed at the single force of love and bestowal dwelling in nature”), and having since fallen from that sublime unification into deeper layers of the ego than other nations.
Therefore, feeding the ego with the enjoyments it demands becomes our primary concern, just like anyone else, but with a naturally more intensive self-aimed direction than others, lessening our sensitivity toward others in the same vein.
It’s important to understand that we’re discussing a natural phenomenon, describing the natural characteristics of a certain people—a quality that emerged specifically due to our ancestors having once experienced heightened states of unity, harmonized with nature—and since we were in higher states of love and giving due to our connection based on an idea of unification, we have since lost consciousness of that unity, and have now sunk into deeper depths of the ego.
Another way to describe this augmented ego is that we once felt greater pleasures than this entire world has to offer, spiritual pleasures, and since we detached from spirituality, we now seek heightened pleasures, but locked off from spirituality, in our corporeal desires for food, sex, family, money, honor, control and knowledge.
Therefore, after years of being dispersed among other nations, we feel ourselves today in the State of Israel as in our own fortress. We feel as if we’ve returned home, secured ourselves with a strong army, and we hope it remains calm enough as it is now, and don’t want to hear about anything else.
It’s a problem, because with such an attitude, we simply put shields up around ourselves as best as we can, and ultimately wait to be attacked in order to start uniting against any threats to our illusory calm.
By doing so, we fail to acknowledge that there are certain laws of nature acting, which have their own demands: that human society starts taking active steps toward uniting—positively realizing the interconnected and interdependent form of nature itself—and we Jews hold the key to a new positive direction to such unity, since we have attained unity before in history, amid times of social division similar to today.
As Israelis living in Israel don’t feel anti-Semitism, Jews abroad also don’t see the many signs pointing toward another Holocaust.
Continuing along the same lines we’re currently treading on won’t help. Today, we can see clear historic patterns showing how we’re on another path to widespread tragedy.
It is all up to how much we Jews will want to open our eyes to see that a transition to a harmonious future, or an ongoing decline into a cataclysm, rests in our hands. Until we will wake up to what makes us Jews—our unity (“love your neighbor as yourself”) above division (“love will cover all transgressions”), in order to be a conduit for unity to spread worldwide (“light unto the nations”)—no positive shift will take place.
Just as the greatest Kabbalist of the 20th Century, Yehuda Ashlag (Baal HaSulam), called out to the Jews in Warsaw in the 1930s to leave Poland, because he foresaw the carnage that was coming, and they refused to listen to his advice, thinking that everything would turn out alright (they ended up in the Holocaust), and moreover, they forced him out of Poland… so it is today.
However, the difference between the rising anti-Semitic sentiment of the 1930s and the modern world is that today’s anti-Semitism is global. Today, even countries with basically no Jews have strong anti-Semitic tendencies, like North and South Korea.
Thus, it all depends on how much the final solution to anti-Semitism awakens in human consciousness: where we Jews will understand the deep-rooted cause of anti-Semitism, and start adjusting ourselves to more unification among each other. A little awakening of our duty to unite, and we would already see the start of a major positive shift in human consciousness.
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