Do You Think Jews Have Made Themselves Odious to the World?

We Jews need to shape ourselves into a people who live in the quality of mutual love, care, and unification. This is how we will begin to resemble the higher nature of love, bestowal, and connection. When we reach this state, the positive force in nature — the force of love and bestowal — will be able to flow through us to the world.

This higher force that we can attract to ourselves and pass on to the world is nature’s very own vitalizing force. When we channel this force through ourselves, all people, and through them all levels of nature — animate, vegetative, and inanimate — will receive it, and we will discover ourselves living in a whole new harmonious and peaceful world.

Without drawing the positive force in nature, then it is like the world lacks spiritual oxygen, and spiritually suffocates. There are laws of nature guiding this process. While human nature is self-serving, the laws guiding the process are not built on self-serving egoism, but on the opposite quality of love, bestowal, and connection. This is the very force that we need to attract and pass on to the world. If we fail to do so, the world will still demand it of us instinctively and unconsciously, and eventually very tangibly.

Continuing business as usual, trying to live solely according to our egoistic impulses, i.e., our desires to enjoy ourselves at others’ expense, will proliferate suffering throughout humanity and nature, and we will appear increasingly odious to more and more people.

So, why don’t we change? To rub salt into the wounds, we are a people who do not even consider changing. Rightly so, we are described as a stubborn, stiff-necked people. No matter how many antisemitic crimes and threats we have lived through, no pogrom or even the Holocaust has awakened us to our fateful role in the world.

But within this stubbornness lies a strange paradoxical hope. It could very well be that the mounting pressure on us will compel us to recognize our role: to unite (“love your neighbor as yourself”) above our divisive drives (“love will cover all crimes”) in order to pass that unifying tendency on to humanity as a whole (to be “a light unto the nations”).

Maybe it could be possible for everyone pressuring the Jews around the world to do so not out of hatred but with an expectation for us to serve the positive unifying force in nature to the world. Our unity and attainment of that force granted us the name “Jews” to begin with (the Hebrew word for “Jew” [Yehudi] comes from the word for “united” [yihudi] [Yaarot Devash, Part 2, Drush no. 2]). That pressure, if we respond correctly, would become our salvation. We would then stop appearing odious and instead garner the world’s appreciation.

A moment needs to emerge that will bring us to reckon with ourselves and with the unbending laws of nature — integral laws of altruism, interconnection, and interdependence. We will see that we have no one to lean on but the very positive unifying force that dwells in nature. No army, technology, or politics will bring us any lasting solutions, but only our direct inner connection with the positive force in nature. Such connection must be built through mutual love, giving, support, encouragement, care, unity, and responsibility. That is our sole mission, which we will have to fulfill, and I dearly hope that we will do so sooner rather than later, sparing much suffering to ourselves and others in the process.