A Chosen People
Question: To every person, meaning the whole of mankind, not just the Jews?
Answer: Yes. But there is an order of development. We Jews, the ‘chosen people,’ have to be the first to get to know the forces that come from the upper world and use them correctly, in order to convey that knowledge to the rest of the world, and conduct the entire reality. That is the ‘choseness’ of our people. We must be the first to study it and pass it on to the rest of mankind. The progress of the Jews determines the progress of all the others, and right now we are very late, which causes the other nations to be late as well.
I did not invent these things, they are all written in all the books of Kabbalah. According to the plan of the upper world, all creatures without exception must rise from their present situation to a much higher degree, and that can be done only through the study of the upper force and the connection with it. Man can change his life while in this world. He can avoid unnecessary pains, attain happiness, wholeness and eternity. Then, there won’t be any difference between life and a physical death for man will be living in both worlds at once.
Question: How can it be that the Jews are the chosen people, while we do not even understand why, and don’t behave in a way that justifies that reputation?
Answer: We Jews have a special role: we have to find the way to rise from the corporeal, beastly life, to a higher degree; to the spiritual life, and we have to show the world how it is done. That is the only thing that we are ‘chosen’ for. In the meantime, we are not doing our job, and that is why we look so bad and unworthy.
Because we have special souls, and our souls are special, we have to be the first to work on attaining that knowledge and accordingly do what we must. We have no advantage over anyone, but only in that we have to start studying about the upper worlds, about the force, which comes from the upper world, and ‘dive’ into that work first, and after that pass it on to all the other nations. This is what all the books of the prophets and Kabbalah say.
This is something that is known to the entire world, except us. In my many journeys, mainly to North America, in lectures that I give in universities, and in radio and television interviews, I am critically asked by non-Jews: Why aren’t you doing what you’re supposed to do? They have some sort of an understanding, or at least a clear feeling that we Jews have to do something that will improve their lives too. But we don’t want to understand our goal and by that we arrest the development of the whole of mankind.
Does this part carry an exclusively spiritual nature?
Answer: I wouldn’t say that it is exclusively spiritual. It is a very practical duty that we must perform on a day-to-day basis.
Question: Does it also require the election of a political leadership?
Answer: It has nothing to do with politics. I would say to the leaders of the country that there is a great deal of unpleasantness ahead, greater than we’ve known before. The only way out of it is by the education of the entire nation and advertisement of our mission as the chosen people - in what exactly are we chosen, what should we deal with besides our daily chores, which we obviously still cannot abandon, until we come to know the upper forces and are strong enough to control them to the point that the rest of the world will follow us and all the nations will come to our help, as it says, “…and they shall bring thy sons in their bosom, and thy daughters shall be carried upon their shoulders.” (Isaiah 49, 22)
Question: What about our duties in keeping the Jewish religious laws, is that not a part of our duty?
Answer: What we know as the laws of Judaism are rules that were set by the greatest Kabbalists in every generation. They set them according to the needs of their time and the goal that they wanted to attain. The goal was to preserve the nation and the Jewish tradition in order to cross all the exiles, until we come out of the last exile and return to the land of Israel. Their only goal was that we would not forget our Judaism and assimilate in the nations. That is why they set laws and customs that preserved what we had. It is a degree called “sacred still.”
It is only thanks to those laws that we survived through this long exile and returned as Jews to the land of Israel. But since our return, our role as Jews has changed: the goal is now a lot more active. Baal HaSulam writes at the end of the Introduction to the Zohar: “If Jews do not add the spiritual practice of precepts to the practical practice, meaning the study of the laws of the upper world and their utilization for man’s development and his approach to the Creator, then we will no longer be able to exist.
The practical practice of precepts (mitzvot, the laws of Judaism), which had been important during the two thousand years of exile, was the right thing to do. But now that we’ve been given the land of Israel again, since we’ve begun to settle in it, we have begun a new era. We have to equalize our corporeal life with the spiritual laws of the land of Israel. What we refer to, as the corporeal land of Israel is in fact a spiritual, sublime value, with a great spiritual strength, that only here that we can attain.
If we continue to behave as we did in exile, we will not be able to go on living here. We will not be thrown out of here, but the assignment of the chosen people will be forced on us mercilessly and ruthlessly. The upper force, as we’ve said above, is aiming us to its one goal in the shortest and quickest way.
The Zohar promises that we are already in the last phase and after that everything will fall into place. But there is a tough time ahead of us, called the “coming of the Messiah.” During that time we must discover the upper laws in order to learn how to use them. And that can be done only as Jews in the corporeal land of Israel.