Archives: VOD
How to Achieve World Peace in 60 Minutes
World peace seems like a utopian fantasy when we look at our current world. What is peace? Is it simply the opposite of war, or is there more to it than that? When we look into the word “peace” from the perspective of the wisdom of Kabbalah, we find a different definition to how the term is commonly conceived, and we also receive a method on how to achieve it. The term “peace” in Hebrew (“Shalom”) equates to “completion” or “perfection” (“Shalem”). Is it enough that we have an absence of war in order to experience perfection? Of course not. If we look deeper into the word “peace,” we arrive at the common root of our nature, before we divided into different genders, races, species, and diverse nations. In today’s world, where we find ourselves among a rapidly rising global population of billions of people, we perceive ourselves as separate from each other, and often not at peace. Moreover, our lack of knowledge on how to reach peace is our main problem. The wisdom of Kabbalah describes how nature develops us toward a state of total world peace. Approaching peace, however, requires recognizing that nature is an interconnected and interdependent system and that we humans are the only disrupters of the sensitive balance in nature. More specifically, the human ego, which is a desire to enjoy at the expense of others, harms us, the world, and nature. How, then, do we achieve world peace? Achieving world peace requires a long-term comprehensive social form of education that aims to raise us to discover a state of completion and perfection, and this is where the wisdom of Kabbalah, which describes nature’s causes, plan, and functionality, can be of assistance. Kabbalah describes how we can impact self-transformation to change our egoistic nature to an altruistic one—a necessary change in order to reach a state of peace. As part of this transformation, we learn how to rise above our divisive drives that bring about separation between people and nations. Similar to a couple that makes up after an argument, uniting above division is what strengthens our connection. Rabbi Nachman of Breslov explained, “The essence of peace is to try to make peace between two opposites” (Likutei Etzot, “Peace”). Also, it is written in Proverbs (10:12) that “Love will cover all transgressions.” Nature also contains a plethora of opposites working harmoniously as a single common system: light and darkness, heat and cold, sweet and bitter, and so on. A process that leads to world peace thus depends on the development of inclusion between opposites up to a point where a new feeling of the world emerges. Instead of feeling “them and us,” we come to feel a common whole in which we are all important parts. Moreover, the wisdom of Kabbalah explains that we are all headed to a state of world peace, and Kabbalah is a method that lets us achieve this state faster, more enjoyable and with growing wisdom, knowledge, and consciousness of nature, we all share.