Unity Is Israel’s Shield Against Existential Threats
Amid anxiety of a looming attack on Israel from multiple fronts following the assassination of Ismail Haniyeh, my students asked me in relation to the verse from Jeremiah, “Out of the north the evil will break forth,” which Baal HaSulam mentioned in his letter that we read in the daily Kabbalah lesson.
Israel indeed faces a persistent existential threat, which is not limited to a breach solely from the north, but from all directions.
However, I am not afraid of the evil that is becoming revealed today, whether from the north, south or elsewhere. What we, the people of Israel, need to understand is that as long as we are united, we are strong. We must be confident in this. All we need to do is unite and pray, and with this strength, we will get through everything.
In Baal HaSulam’s letter, after mentioning how the evil will breach from the north, he writes how “the anxieties must be collected in one place” as a step toward reaching a harmonious solution where “the whole will slowly become more than the broken.” If we focus on our unity and wish to discover our point of unification as a single point, we then connect this point of unity into our desires and build a tower filled with goodness.
On one hand, we need to be concerned and to work on the situation at hand, but on the other hand, there is nothing special about Israel’s current plight. That is, we have always faced existential threats, ever since our beginnings as a nation. What is important for us to internalize is that if we unite, then our enemies will disappear, that everything depends on the relations we cultivate among each other. Division, hatred and discord among each other gives birth to our enemies. Think of it like our negative attitudes to each other generate evil spirits that dress into people’s minds and bodies around the world, who then successively wish for our destruction.
The persistent existential threat that we face ebbs and flows throughout history, and today it is at high tide once again. In times of increased pressure, we have nothing to do but unite. We should never think that the situation is out of our hands, and that we have no choice in what happens to us. We need to understand that we are first and foremost in an inner war: that we wish for human consciousness to rise, that we would discover how we are one with the integral laws of nature, which evolve us ultimately to reach a harmonious, eternal and perfect existence as a unified whole.
In that stride to a more unified state, we ourselves need to pioneer relations of mutual consideration, support and encouragement among each other — up to a point where we will start discovering a newfound love for each other emerge as the revelation of an immense new positive force. This force will then reorganize human society according to an upgraded unified human consciousness.