On September 11...
Message from the Kabbalist Rav Berg
Things are not as they seem... or are they? Kabbalah teaches us to look beneath the surface of our world: to see the great in the small, the end in the beginning, and the spiritual essence concealed in the most mundane aspects of everyday life. Kabbalah does not, however, teach us to see good in evil. Darkness and Light cannot co-exist. Regarding the events of September 11, 2001, and those that followed, this was chaos, negativity, destruction. But as we go on with our lives in the aftermath, it is not enough to simply express our horror at what has happened and of what may lie ahead. We can choose to learn from even the darkest happenings, and to live in such a way that darkness will be displaced by Light. We can make this choice, and indeed it is our responsibility to do so.
The world has changed since September 11, and these changes are taking place in every dimension of our lives. My immediate concern here, however, is not with large-scale geopolitical events or the intricacies of international relations. Let us instead examine the changes that are so evident in the way we talk to one another, and what we talk about; the way we feel both on edge and unfocused; the way the activities of life seem more difficult because a positive outcome seems less assured.
In exploring these changes, let me refer at the outset to the idea that "it all happened so suddenly". The world that existed on September 10 was one day later abruptly transformed into a previously unimaginable new reality. It was literally a "bolt from the blue." Yet Kabbalah teaches us that nothing happens suddenly. The seed is always present before the full-grown plant appears, whether it's a poisonous nightshade or a fragrant rose. If we look back to earlier this year, or last year, or the year before, can we not recognize seeds that were planted and that germinated into malignant expressions of negative energy?
In asking this question, let me re-emphasize the fact that I am not referring to anything on the large scale of human affairs. When I speak of seeds of negative energy, I am not calling to mind some international agreements that might have been broken or any terrorist threats that might have been received or carried out. Instead, I would ask you to examine the events of your own life. I would ask you to consider what you could have done differently in order to diminish the presence of darkness and brighten the force of Light.
Some will find this absurd. Some will ask, "How could my actions have contributed to events completely outside my sphere of influence? How could my behavior have an impact on the lives and deaths of people I didn't even know? Is this really what the Kabbalists tell us?" And I would answer that this is precisely what the Kabbalists teach. The world as a whole will not change for the better until each of us embraces the fact that everything we do is important -- especially if it seems distinctly and unquestionably unimportant.
The literature of Kabbalah abounds with tales of people who could have brought about the final redemption of all mankind if only they had performed a single, small, seemingly insignificant act of kindness or humility. A wise person is one who sees the truth in these tales, and lives accordingly. For those who doubt this truth, I would invoke a principle of contemporary science so widely accepted that it hardly needs repeating: "The flapping of a butterfly's wings in China can amplify into a tornado in Kansas." Can we truly learn to apply this principle to human affairs, and even to small human affairs? When this happens, the world will be transformed. And until it happens, we will have to deal with the kinds of events that so trouble us now.
What's more, we may have to deal with those events with diminishing intervals in which to recover. I have tried above to assert the kabbalistic teaching that everything we do matters -- that the law of cause and effect is always operative, and that small causes can give rise to large effects. There are some important corollaries to this principle that pertain directly to the period in which we live.
Time, the Kabbalists explain, exists for a very fundamental spiritual purpose. Time gives us the opportunity to exercise free will. Time is the element in our lives that allows us, for example, to doubt that all our actions are important -- because cause and effect are separated by hours, days, or perhaps years. If time did not exist, if there were instant and demonstrable repercussions for everything we do, human beings might indeed change their behavior accordingly, but it would be the kind of change that occurs under a military dictatorship or other totalitarian regime. A laboratory rat that receives a strong electric shock as soon as it touches a button will quickly stop touching it, but this could hardly be described as an example of free will. The behavior is enforced rather than chosen, largely because cause and effect are so closely joined in time.
Today, as the twenty-first century begins, we are going to find the intervals between cause and effect growing shorter and shorter. Drawing on the example of the laboratory rat cited above, one might expect this will bring about changes in our behavior. However, the actions that precipitate the results -- and precipitate them ever more quickly -- are not as obvious as an animal pushing a button. Let me repeat: we are always intensifying the darkness or revealing the Light, regardless of whether we are aware of this fact or oblivious of it. What is new in our time is that the process is taking place more quickly than ever before. Please notice that the so-called "butterfly principle," invoked a moment ago, makes no mention of how long it will take for a wing flapping to become a whirling wind. Unquestionably, it will take quite a while. But suppose millions or even billions of butterflies were to flap their wings all at once. Suppose this large number of tiny causes were in fact combining and accumulating at an ever-increasing rate. The tornado would occur sooner rather than later. But if the vast number of participants in this process were unaware of its operative principles, the storm might very well seem to have come out of nowhere. Regarding this, I hope the relevance to our present circumstances will be clear.
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