III. Kabbalah Today. 14. In the Global Era

You know what Kabbalah is and how it got started, but how does it relate to today’s world? In this section we’ll explore the reasons for the global crises we are facing from the Kabbalistic point of view...

It is hardly news that the world is in a crisis. But the worst part is not that we don’t feel as happy or safe today as we did yesterday; the worst part is the sensation that we have lost control. It seems more and more difficult to make our tomorrows brighter. And that’s the real crisis. A physicians’ proverb says that an accurate diagnosis is half the cure; the entire healing process depends on it. In this chapter, we explore the roots of our crisis and the way to cure it...

When miners dig coal in China, the air in California gets polluted. When emissions from American cars dissolve in the air, the ice in Greenland melts. And when the ice in Greenland melts, the sea level rises and The Netherlands sinks. It boils down to this: we are all part of the global village, and our actions affect one another...

Remember how we started? First there was Adam, one soul. Adam was a good soul, wanting only to give to the Creator. But he misjudged his ability to give to the Creator, and that mistake cost him—and, consequently, us—heavily. He broke. His soul shattered into 600,000 pieces, which still today continue to break, hence the billions of people inhabiting our world. All of them are tiny fragments of the original soul...

There are many offshoots to the fact that we are made of one shattered soul. One of them is that if I correct myself, I also correct my part in you. And vice versa. If you correct yourself, you also correct your “you” in me. To bring it all down to earth, let’s take three separate people as an example: Jack, James, and Mary. One day, Jack begins to feel his point in the heart and begins to correct himself. Jack has a little piece of James and a little piece of Mary within him, and the two others also have little pieces of the others in them. They are “cells” in the same spiritual body, and each cell contains all the genetic information to create a whole body...

Today many already realize that man is the only destructive element in nature. The reason for it is that we are not really part of nature. Our bodies belong to the animal kingdom, but our minds don’t. Our minds are the reflection of our higher, spiritual self, which is still hidden from us...

There is a rule in Kabbalah: “He who is greater than his friend, his desire is greater than him.” It means that if Jack, for instance, has a greater desire than James, Jack’s desire is greater than Jack himself. In other words, in the correction process, we’re always one step behind our own desires...

In light of what we’ve just said about growing desires and scientific progress, we can now begin to see our current situation from a spiritual point of view. In the past, people were not as mean and egoistic as they are today...

We’re all connected and we all effect each other, for better or for worse. It is time to grow up and assume responsibility...