"The purpose of terrorism is no different from the purpose of every 'evil' element in our world: to force us away from complacency when we are inclined to be idle, and to force us to re-examine our situation." In the article Fighting Terror the Right Way, Rav Laitman uses the wisdom of Kabbalah to shed light on a problem spreading fear and worry throughout the world: terrorism.
Rather than focusing on terrorism in and of itself, and rather than going through the many examples and names we have associated with terrorism, Rav Laitman instead focuses on the very cause of terrorism: that before we encounter political, national, racial or monetary concerns, we have our perception of all of this, and this perception is self-centered.
"Re-examining our situation" means precisely to search for the most basal cause of the problems. The problems aren't in the terrorists, or in the actions we see which give rise to the terrorists' actions-the problems are that
- we are self-centered,
- we make all of our decisions based on this self-centeredness, and
- we are constantly growing more self-centered.
Rav Laitman explains, in the article, that "From a self-centered perspective, it is perfectly justified to drop an atom bomb on America if I don't like its president, put a bullet through my neighbor's chest if his dog poops on my lawn, or murder dozens of innocent college kids because I got up on the wrong foot today."
The argument is then raised that no matter what we do to satisfy ourselves, while being self-centered, it will not make us happy. In order to be happy, we need to rise above our self-centered perspective of the world and enter into balance with the laws of nature: altruistic laws, opposite to our nature.
Rav Laitman states in the article that terrorism is one of the many forms of pain intensifying in our era for the purpose of giving rise to a new, spiritually-awakened humanity: one where we come to realize that it is only our self-centered nature causing all of our problems and that only it has to change. Moreover, through this change we have to realize the altruistic laws governing our universe-that happiness is achievable solely through such a change of our very nature.
Related Material:
- Kabbalah.info - all concepts presented in this article were learned from the free materials and resources available at the Bnei Baruch Kabbalah Education and Research Institute - www.kabbalah.info
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