What Should One’s Life’s Work Be?

Michael Laitman
3 min readAug 28, 2024

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Since we are parts of a collective soul, like cells in a human body, then our main work is to connect everyone through us. Doing so creates an integral connection among the soul’s parts.

In conducting this work, there are no changes in the connection itself, similar to how there is no change in our use of our nature that we work with, the desire to enjoy.

Where, then, is the change? It is solely in the intention.

Imagine a system that either turns off or on depending on the intention: an intention for self-benefit turns off the system, and an intention for others’ benefit turns it on. To activate the whole system, we thus need to keep our finger on the button as much as possible, holding onto the intention to benefit others.

When we cannot activate it, as is the case today, we feel ourselves existing in our current shattered state with ever-increasing problems, pains and crises.

In order to activate this connecting tendency, we need to first understand how we do not act on our own accord, but we are acted on by impulses from nature. That is, nature sorts, forms and gives us certain thoughts and tasks, and we try to carry them out.

Ultimately, nature is evolving us to a perfect, harmonious and peaceful connection with one another. We would thus be wise to feel what nature wants from us and fulfill its demands. Our work should thus be to align ourselves with nature’s connecting trajectory, to support and encourage each other in our common unifying tendency, and to show each other examples of positive connection.

What Does It Mean for Someone to Be Pure?

There are two cases in which we can be pure.

One is that our desire to receive is very small, and then we are pure similar to little children. That is, human nature is a desire to receive enjoyment, and this desire grows individually and throughout humanity — from smaller individual desires for food, sex, family and shelter, through bigger and bigger social desires for money, honor, control, and then even bigger desires for knowledge and spirituality. Therefore, we can be pure if we host a very small and undeveloped desire, which is similar to the innocence and purity we see in little children.

However, we can also be pure with a large desire to receive. How? It is via the work of developing an intention to bestow upon it.

In order to work on developing an intention to bestow upon our innate desire to receive, we need to attract the positive force of love and bestowal that dwells in nature. Doing so gradually acts on us and lets our intention shift from an impure egoistic one, where we aim solely to benefit ourselves at the expense of others and nature, to an altruistic one, where we intend to benefit others and nature.

The latter purity requires work, and Kabbalah is a method that guides such work. It is for those people who feel that they have a big desire to receive, and who feel a need to work with it in order to better navigate the impulses that constantly act on them.

With the method of Kabbalah, we can attract the positive force of love and bestowal in nature, which is called “attracting the reforming light,” impact a major shift in our intention, and learn how to become pure in a world where an overblown desire to receive increasingly spoils more and more people’s lives.

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Michael Laitman

PhD in Philosophy and Kabbalah. MSc in Medical Bio-Cybernetics. Founder and president of Bnei Baruch Kabbalah Education & Research Institute.