From Hatred to Love: The Path of Jewish Connection
In the beginning of my book, Jewish Self-Hatred: The Enemy Within — An Overview of Jewish Antisemitism, I explained how the Jewish people harbor both of the two opposing forces in nature, the altruistic force and the selfish force, which, if not balanced by the other, leads to self-hatred. This is why we constantly experience an inner conflict and restlessness, a never-ending contradiction within ourselves and with one another.
In other words, we are torn between a desire to receive and a desire to bestow. The purpose of our development is to explore, understand, and know the nature from which the two forces emanate and to cling to their origin. As Jews, we can only feel complete within ourselves when we adhere to the absolute source of those forces.
However, in order to do that, we first need to achieve the love of others. As it is written,
“Come let me show you that the love of your friend is interlaced with the love of the Creator, for the immenseness of the obligation to love the friend is for the sake of loving the Creator — to remember that he is made in the image and semblance of the upper one, and the part of the soul in him is a part of God above. This is why we are called the ‘assembly of Israel,’ for we are all assembled and unite in His uniqueness.”[i]
The Talmud clearly refers to the stubborn nature of our people and the challenge it poses to the implementation of the tenet “love your neighbor as yourself.” It is written, “Two are holding a Tallit (prayer shawl). One says, ‘I found it,’ and one says, ‘I found it.’ One says, ‘All of it is mine,’ and one says, ‘All of it is mine.’ One will swear that he owns no less than half of it, and one will swear that he owns no less than half of it, and they are disputed.”[ii]
We are unable to budge even an inch from our position, and we are incapable of balancing the internal split in us by ourselves, by our own means. We must ask for help from the power of nature that created us this way. It is the absolute source that controls everything in reality, which we may call God, Creator, or simply nature since Elokim (God) and HaTeva (nature) are the same in Gematria (numerology).[iii] Therefore, it is not necessary to think of the Creator as something limited; He is a force that includes everything in Himself.
As RABASH writes,
“How does He help a person? Through a holy soul, called ‘upper light’ that is revealed within man, so he will feel that there is a soul within him that is ‘a part of God above.’ It follows that according to man’s ability to overcome, he increases the disclosure of the light of the Creator. For this reason, the Creator has made the hardening of the heart, so that man will be unable to overcome the evil in him and will need the Creator.”[iv]
Whether we want to or not, nature guides us all to a state of absolute love — nature’s fundamental quality. By aligning ourselves to love others, through building a supportive environment, we will be able to overcome the rising hatred and spare ourselves much suffering.
Even the strongest hatred can turn into its opposite and vanish in an instant. The reason for hatred suddenly disappears when a higher desire comes into play. This is how we are built as human beings. Our actions are determined by the desires that we consider more important in our eyes.
The fact that our emotions can suddenly change from one moment to the next shows us that any unity we create should not be based on our feelings, but on an idea. That is, if we were to spread the idea that it is necessary to unite as the most desirable state we can achieve, then we would have a strong foundation for unification.
The basis of this idea lies in a higher root, which is that humanity was originally created as a single unit that went through a process of fragmentation and dispersion until we found ourselves in a reality where we perceive ourselves as separate from each other.
While we are in this state of separation, we go through a process of evolution until we reach a point where we begin to realize our unified state again. That is, we go through a process of reckoning when we begin to feel that we are contrary to our most desirable state, that we have suffered enough in our separateness, and as a result, we develop a new desire for a great change that will bring us back to complete unification.
We will learn how to make our lives successful, experiencing firsthand how all of nature works, only when we develop the quality of goodness and love, the opposite of hatred.
Jews inherited the method of connection that can be implemented in order to build supportive ties and direct ourselves to love one another. We can already start connecting positively and accelerate the revelation of the source of our hatred — the ego that dwells in each of us — within a more powerful envelope of love and positive connections that we construct with the method’s guidance.
In a nutshell, we are sent hatred so that through our active efforts in building a society that aims itself at loving one another, we could repair the hatred, cover it with love, and by doing so, experience a new sense of harmony and bliss that will spread throughout society.
[i] Rabbi Isaiah ben Avraham Ha-Levi Horowitz [The Holy Shlah], Proofreading on Shaar HaOtiot.
[ii] Babylonian Talmud, Baba Metzia, 2a, https://halakhah.com/pdf/nezikin/Baba_Metzia.pdf.
[iii] Yehuda Leib HaLevi Ashlag (Baal HaSulam),”The Peace,” The Writings of Baal HaSulam, vol. 1, trans. Chaim Ratz (USA: Laitman Kabbalah Publishers, 2019), 68.
[iv] Rav Baruch Shalom HaLevi Ashlag (RABASH), “What Is the Measure of Repentance?” The Writings of RABASH, Article №1 (1989), vol. 4, (USA: Laitman Kabbalah Publishers, 2018), 14
Based on the book, “Jewish Self-Hatred: The Enemy Within — An Overview of Jewish Antisemitism” by Kabbalist Dr. Michael Laitman. Written/edited by students of Kabbalist Dr. Michael Laitman. Photo by Jonny Gios on Unsplash.