It is increasingly difficult to ignore the widespread problems in the world. Open a newspaper, switch on your television, click on the internet, or walk out your front door: Everywhere you look, you find problems. Just to name a few, there are wars, diseases, violence, pollution, global warming, pain, suffering, depression, drug addiction, alienation, disintegration of families, and the list goes on.
There is also a long list of proposed solutions. People conduct numerous investigations, extensive and intensive surveys, and propose governmental and social policies, but in the end, these all amount to nothing more than external, outward solutions. All of those avenues, as we witness, offer only a plethora of tried and tired, ineffective possibilities.
Is there anything we can do to really make the world a better place? The ancient wisdom of Kabbalah says that if we want to offer people more than "a small band-aid," to do more than scratch the superficial surface of the problems, we have to realize why they are happening and address them at the source.
Kabbalah explains that all our pains are happening for a purpose: They are intended to illicit questions, to encourage us to ask, "How can the woes of the world be ameliorated? Is life really a sentence of pain and suffering interspersed with a few fleeting pleasures?" And most importantly, to bring us to the question, "What is the meaning of life, and the purpose of my life in particular?" The very process of asking these questions helps us start to sense (correctly!) that a remedy and an answer must be available. In other words, these questions about one's purpose and place in the troubled world are already a start in improving it.
As one begins to seek the answers to these questions, his quest grows broader and deeper, and more focused within. And it is here, during this inward analysis, that the quest for the true solution begins. That is when one comes across the real answers, the key to solving the world's woes – in other words, one discovers one's purpose in life. Kabbalah calls it "spirituality," which means: A sensation of perfection and eternity, existence on a qualitatively new level. It's when our perception broadens and we begin to feel the dimension of our higher existence, beyond the physical world, beyond the boundaries of time and space, life and death.
Perhaps this sounds utopian, disconnected from our daily reality. But in fact, it comes down to something very simple: realizing the age-old principle common to all of the world's wisdoms, "Love your neighbor as yourself." The great 20th century Kabbalist, Baal HaSulam, wrote, "… all our actions will be only to bestow upon our fellow person to the best of our ability… And if all the nations of the world agree to that, there will be no wars in the world, since all the people will not care for their own benefit, but for the benefit of their fellow persons."
Therefore, in Kabbalah, the purpose of life – spirituality - is identical to caring for others. "Bestowing upon our fellow persons" is the method for each and every person to find the key, the means to attain spirituality – the feeling of perfection and eternity.
$100 can help make this method, the authentic wisdom of Kabbalah, available to more people who are looking for it. The money might help publish and dispense authentic Kabbalah books that could reach someone in India or in a remote, rural village in Chile. Or, the books might be translated into yet another language to give entire nations the opportunity to answer the question "What is the meaning of life?"
This is why bringing the wisdom and method of Kabbalah to those who need it, providing the teachings for those who want to discover and realize the purpose of their lives, is the best way to make our world a better place.
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