Excerpts and Articles

Excerpts from the article Peace in the World by Kabbalist Baal Hasulam

The Weakness of “World Reformers”

This is the key to understand the weakness of world reformers throughout the generations. They regarded man as a machine that is not operating properly and needs mending, meaning to remove its broken parts and replace them with working ones.

This is the tendency of all world reformers—to eradicate any harmful and bad in the human species… and it is true that had the Creator not stood against them, they would certainly have by now cleansed man entirely, leaving in him only what is good and useful.

But because the Creator meticulously watches over all the elements in His creation, not letting anyone destroy a single thing in His domain, but only reform it and make it useful and good, all the reformers of the above-mentioned kind will vanish from the earth, and bad qualities will not vanish. They exist and count the degrees of development that they must still traverse until they complete their ripening.

At that time, the bad attributes themselves will turn to good and useful ones, as the Creator had initially planned for them. It is like a fruit on the tree that sits and waits and counts the days and months it must still wait before the completion of its ripeness, at which time its taste and sweetness will become evident to every person.

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Good and Bad Are Evaluated by the Actions of the Individual toward Society
Before we examine the correction of evil in the human race, we must first determine the value of those abstract terms, “good” and “bad.” When we define an act or an attribute as good or bad, we should clarify with regard to whom that attribute or act is good or bad.
To understand this, we must thoroughly know the proportional value between the individual and the collective, between the individual and the collective that the individual lives in and nourishes from, in both matter and in spirit.

Reality shows us that an individual cannot exist in isolation without a sufficient number of people around him to serve him and help him provide for his needs. Hence, man is inherently born to lead a social life. Each and every individual in society is like a wheel that is linked to several other wheels placed in a machine. This single wheel has no freedom of movement in and of itself but continues with the motion of the rest of the wheels in a certain direction to qualify the machine to perform its general function.

And if there is some malfunction in the wheel, the malfunction is not evaluated relating to the wheel itself, but according to its service and role with respect to the whole machine.

And in our subject, the benefit of each and every person within his collective is evaluated not according to his own benefit, but according to his service to the public. And vice-versa, we appreciate the measure of evil of each and every individual only according to the harm one inflicts upon the public in general, and not by one’s own individual value.

These matters are crystal clear both from the perspective of the truth in them, and from the perspective of the good in them. This is because what is found in the collective is only what is found in the individual, and the benefit of the collective is the benefit of each and every individual. He who harms the collective takes his share in the harm, and he who benefits the collective takes his share in the benefit, since individuals are parts of the whole, and the whole is not worth in any way more than the sum of its individuals.

It thus turns out that the collective and the individual are one and the same, and the individual is not harmed because of his enslavement to the collective, since the freedom of the collective and the freedom of the individual are one and the same, too, and as they share the good, they also share the freedom. Thus, good attributes and bad attributes, good deeds and bad deeds are evaluated only with respect to the benefit of the public.

Of course, the above words apply if all the individuals perform their role toward the public to the fullest and receive no more than they deserve, nor take more than their friend’s share. But if a part of the collective does not behave accordingly, as a result, they not only harm the collective, but they, too, are harmed.

We should not discuss further something that is known to all, and the aforesaid is only to show the drawback, the place that needs correction, namely that each and every individual will understand that his own benefit and the benefit of the collective are one and the same, and by this, the world will come to its full correction.