If we want to give children security and a correct path in life, we must educate them in the correct manner, according to the true meaning of altruism. Being altruistic does not mean distributing your worldly goods to all four corners of the earth. But rather that children will know that bestowing to their fellowman and altruism bring a person to the purpose of creation, to bestowal to the Creator, to equalizing and being in adhesion with Him. We are talking about achieving a spiritual goal through corporal life – that is a person’s purpose. If a child witnesses this entire perspective, and children pick up Kabbalah studies very quickly, then they remain in it and begin bringing it into their life. We do not really understand how clever kids are. The more they hear these things, the more they absorb them and transform them into a way of life. They begin to use this wisdom and its path to view the world.

If a child receives an understanding of why this world exists, why the world goes around, why people make mistakes, and that it is better to live in bestowal than in reception, then a child begins to see the world through this understanding. He sees completely different relationships, and this gives him a different feeling about life.

A child is different than we are. We need to receive this knowledge on ourselves against our nature, forcefully. While a child, from the moment he begins to grow, connects all the things he has heard about the true nature of the world, compared to the misleading society and everything he sees in the world, and then he compares one against the other. This builds him in a wonderful manner.

 Why is today’s youth so negative and full of anger and aggression? The reason is that we have not provided them with what they ask for or really want, or the thing they were destined for. We are simply not ready to accommodate the younger generation. We don’t provide them with what they really want and need and that is why their lives are so difficult. On the surface they appear to have everything – computers, football, TV, sweets. But they don’t have an answer to the question “What am I living for?” This erupts in them through violence and anger at the elder generation.

After all, why are we even in this situation with an elder generation and younger one to begin with? Because the previous generation must tell and supply the new generation everything it knows about life. Otherwise what is the point of having parents?

A child gets out of diapers, learns a bit how to get by in life, and then asks, “So what’s next?”, “Is this all they are giving me? Now they need to give me the wisdom of life. The knowledge of where I am, what I am living for, what the essence of my life is. And this, I am not receiving from them.”

The fact that most people do not have a clue themselves about the answers to these questions does not free them from their obligation to provide their children with answers. They must search for answers. The child feels, “they gave birth to me, brought me into this world, and sort of threw me at the world” … This is what children feel inside and why they are completely disconnected from their parents nowadays. A child comes home, has a bite to eat and has his own life. For him his mother and father are simply machines that supply him with physical needs. All the rest, what has to do with his soul and what he is missing inside, has nothing to do with them. From his perspective “Who are they anyhow? Real dinosaurs.” Just robots that are in the house and serving him. That is how parents appear to children nowadays.

All this can change once parents begin to receive a different type of education. If they do not, the situation will not change. We can see this in families where parents are interested in the purpose of life, in the question: “What am I living for and how can I achieve the purpose of life?” The moment children look at their parents and see them developing from day to day, and feel they can provide an answer to any question they may have, and even more so, can explain to them what is happening in the world and the reason for the global crisis, the reason for all these difficult problems, answer questions about the end of life and the end of the world, all the subjects that the kids read and hear. When parents can explain and include their children in the correct explanation, then the situation changes altogether.

On the other hand, if children see and feel inside themselves how truly miserable their parents are, divorcing, substance abuse, and wasting their lives away (children nowadays are smart enough to pick up on this), then they have real contempt for their parents. So there is no choice but for parents to understand that they must also educate themselves – for their children’s sake. There is no way around this.

All of the wisdom of Kabbalah is education, because Kabbalah is the wisdom of education. It is a wisdom that teaches how to educate a person so that they can reach the purpose of their life, their correction. That is the reason we teach and disseminated the wisdom of Kabbalah throughout the world.

The wisdom of Kabbalah is intended for the simple, ordinary person, for each and every one of us. It is intended to educate a person and bring him to a higher level of existence. And it is open today to all. It is the education of man, which is the significance of being a man. The wisdom of Kabbalah makes a man out of each of us, because a man (Adam) means being like the Creator, similar to the supreme force. We must acquire the traits of the supreme force and in that way continue to improve and develop. This change that a person undergoes is called “education”.

Kabbalah is not intended for the next world but rather for the person living here and now, to enable him to education himself to really be a man. A person receives his inner form according to his soul as a man – that he controls and sees, and to this person all the worlds are open. So at the end of the day, education is building a man out of the picture we call a “human being: that lives in this world. Building a man that can live in all the worlds, that will know the purpose, achieve this purpose, that won’t have to reincarnate again, that will attain the goal of creation, the goal he was born for.

The whole point is to teach people to receive, not to give. Therefore we must explain to people that there is a great wisdom about receiving. How can a person receive without stealing, taking advantage, or giving something in return? There is a great wisdom for that. And it is hidden, because man does not feel it and is not even aware of it, and that is the wisdom about how to receive, to receive everything, and with no problem. To be in a situation where you are not dependent on anyone’s agreement and you can receive anything you want.

Giving and altruism are the means to becoming fulfilled – the means for receiving all the things that exist in the world. In order to enjoy giving, one has to love one’s fellowman. When two conditions co-exist: 1) That I love the masses, 2) That as a result I start to give, and I will derive pleasure from it.

When I am in a state of receiving, there is always someone who will not give me, someone who will not cooperate, etc. In a state of reception, there will always be that someone limiting me. But in giving we are not limited in any manner by any other person. I can enjoy it without limitation; I don’t need permission from anyone.

We are not dealing here with physical things but rather our attitude, our desire to do for others, which is what provides us with filling, and we need nothing beyond that. We start to receive such a filling from giving, that we begin to feel that we have nothing to do with receiving, are not connected in any way to this world, not connected to all its limitations. In this type of giving we begin to feel the opposite world, the spiritual world. To such an extent, that everything I feel through reception disappears, and I suddenly only feel everything through giving. Then this entire world can disappear, my body can die, and I am still feeling myself existing through giving. This may sound like a fantasy but it is really only a psychological problem in our perception of reality.

Receiving is always a problem because you are dependent on others. Giving is always not a problem because you are not dependent on anyone. In other words the only problem is with you – whether you will be able to change yourself to receive delight from giving or not. How will you enjoy from giving? On the condition that you love, so ultimately the true problem is loving your fellowman.

The whole purpose of studying Kabbalah is to attain the value “love thy neighbor as yourself”. As a result of studying a special force come to us that changes us from a state of hatred, to a state of altruism. Then a person begins to feel filled with all the delights in the world.

Everything depends on our attitude, how we approach a person. People and children nowadays are reaching a point where they are asking things like, “What is life for?”, “Why am I living?” This is a question that arises in childhood and must be given a correct explanation. It is not for nothing that we were designed this way to ask “Why do I exist?” at such a tender age. Children normally ask about the upper force, whether there is a God or not, should they pray or not, should they ask for things or not. Even people that have nothing to do with religion, that live in a completely secular country. Despite that inside, within himself, there are these questions and tendencies. We must use them, bring them out slightly, and awaken them. And in this way gently awaken children to this attitude of perfection, eternity, life and the purpose of life.

There has never been a generation like the one growing up today in our time. As Baal HaSulam, the greatest Kabbalist of our time, writes, this is the Messiah’s generation. This is a generation that must change, that must go from the level of exile we are all in, and reach the level called the ‘level of redemption’. This can only be attained through a new education, a new perspective, through a new inner development inside man. The souls descending to our world today are new souls. They are very important souls, very big souls, and we must give them the appropriate filling.

These are our children’s souls and we can see how this is being expressed through hyperactivity and all the demands and their attitude to life. Kids nowadays ask, “What for?” instead of “How?” When we were younger we used to ask how to do, how to achieve. We looked for a way to progress in life. But today’s generation does not even ask how to progress, it wants to know what it has to progress for.

These children are interested in their purpose for being here but the problem is that their parents do not know how to explain it to them. That is the reason why there is such a large gap between generations. A grandfather may ask himself, what can we do with children today, we weren’t like that at all, we didn’t educate our children like that either and what is happening with grandchildren today is unacceptable. What is actually happening in our society?

We are currently in the midst of a very big education crisis and this is a global crisis. Everyone is aware of the problem but no one seems to know what to do. Humanity has no alternative education for the younger generation apart from the wisdom of Kabbalah, which is willing to serve the whole world. Kabbalah is a system through which we can educate the younger generation today, to lead it to its development and reach the purpose man was created for, for discovering divinity in our world, for adhesion with the upper force, for an entirely new life – to no longer feel that we are at such a degrading level, in such a desperate state that we don’t even know where we are or how to exist.

All this is only dependent on the implementation of the wisdom of Kabbalah. And until we reach it, we will not find a solution. All this is because we are not giving children what they demand. They themselves also don’t understand what they need exactly, but we are the ones that should be solving this issue, not them. And it cannot be solved by giving them Ritalin. The hyperactivity problem is no longer sprouting up in individuals like twenty years ago, but rather everyone nowadays. Almost every second child today is like this, and from year to year the phenomenon is increasing throughout the world. So we must understand that the generation has been born already and is built that way, and that we must supply it with what it needs. The medicine is simply calming kids down a bit, and that is very bad because in a way we are putting inner handcuffs on these children, and this will bring about an outburst elsewhere. We are stopping their natural inner impulses and they need to come out, and later on they will come out in a sick way. With more outbursts, more violence, more terror. It will come out in many ways because it has to come out.

(Words of Kabbalist Michael Laitman)

A great sage once wrote that if his generation had listened to him they would have begun teaching The Book of Zohar to kids at the age of nine. And it really does not really matter what they understand or don’t understand because even adults do not understand what is written in the Zohar. But when we begin giving a child the correct education, he receives supreme inspiration; he receives strength from nature, because he is learning about things that are part of nature, but hidden. And in this manner he begins to fill himself.

Why don’t children want to be taught nowadays? Why are they so attracted to calming themselves down with drugs? Why are they attracted to movies like the Matrix? Because they have inner hollows, that only the as of yet unrevealed education can fill, and that will allow them to progress.

Precisely because this is a very special generation, there are many children today suffering from depression and confused, mainly where people are completely ignorant of the wisdom of Kabbalah. We must begin explaining to both parents and children, but first we must explain to education authorities. That only through the wisdom of Kabbalah is it possible to stop the wave of drugs and all the outbursts, the terrible behavior in school, and the violence. We must explain to them in a manner that they can take small elements and implement them to see how they work, discover how well and how much they work in a wonderful way.

Children who study these elements understand why they are living, what nature is and how they operate in nature, the process they need to go through and the purpose they are living for. Kabbalah has nothing to do with religion or beliefs or rituals that a person has to carry out. It is rather the study of life, and through one’s life a person sees how real this learning is. Kabbalah is truly about research, and not religion or faith.

Education is about connecting us to a bigger system, through a process called life. So what would really interest children who are aware of this bigger system would be exploring concepts such as; where did this system come from? Why does it come to us in this way? Where is a person’s choice in life? What is the upper force, nature, demanding from us? Why do we exist in a state like this? What point is there to life?

We learn that nothing inanimate or vegetative was created for nothing and that everything has a reason and result. So how is it possible that the greatest natural phenomenon of all the world’s wonders – a person – how can we say that he was created for nothing? Of course we cannot but we simply do not see this yet.

If we show this bigger system to a child he will not want to go anywhere else. He will see that nature is obligating us and how the moment he goes off track and does not agree with nature, he will immediately receive a blow. Just like any other place, if a person carries out some of nature’s laws, he enjoys them and learns how to make better use of them for his own good.

If a person does not carry out the law of nature, he gets into a conflict with nature and receives a bad response in the form of blows. Just like any other law, if for example we put a hand into a fire or fall from a high height, if we act incorrectly against the law and use it incorrectly, we will suffer.

If we show a child the clear laws of nature, norms of behavior between man and his environment and how he can ensure his good existence, what could be better for our little ones that are just starting out in life? An education like this puts a little one on the right track from early on. And when he sees this wisdom in others, he wants to stay connected to such an educator, because he sees the educator belongs to a generation that he can rely on and continue forward with, that he can really teach him something. Any other type of teacher is not considered an educator in his eyes.

The goal of education is to provide a person with the clear understanding and perception of which stream of life he exists in, within which laws. He comes to the world, is born, and in 15 years he will be an adult, but at this stage he still has his whole life before him and needs to be shown how life is built like a pipe with an ending. If we show an ending of death, then right from the start we have eliminated his entire development, and from that point he does not care, he just wants to get by in life, take advantage of everyone and success as it is said, “Eat and drink because tomorrow we will die”.

But if we show him the inner laws of nature that he is already in, he will have no choice, nowhere to run from them. And if he will know how to use them, then his life will become eternal, and he will go through life with a feeling of eternity and elation. He will open a new world for himself, not only here in this world in this physical body he occupies, but will rather start to feel a new perspective of reality.

The younger generation is yearning to feel this. The series of Matrix movies are a wonderful example of this. Why do they have such a yearning for these types of movies? Because they want to know, according to their nature they want to know. Fifty years ago we did not have movies to go to but nowadays children want to know about the true dimension of their lives. They feel that their lives do not end and even do not begin in a person’s boy, but rather something beyond that.

If we only give children life in this world and they aspire to more, they will need to be tranquilized and silenced with the help of drugs and alcohol, and outbursts that allow them to forcibly forget what attracts them more. Children today are much more developed than what we have to offer them.

Children absorb everything from us, because a child learns through examples, by behavioral models that he or she picks up from their parents, and later on from the environment at large. If we knew how to give them the proper example from the day they were born, along with the ego growing in them from day to day, we would supply them with the means for correcting themselves above this ego and in that manner they would be in perpetual progression.

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Education means giving children the means to be above their own nature, to control their own nature. This of course includes educating the parents to enable them to pass on to their kids the proper behavior.

We adults are quite lost nowadays. We were educated incorrectly and we need to correct ourselves. We will be the first generation to correct itself, but it is just as crucial for us to make sure the generation following ours is a corrected one. It is up to us to create a situation where our children recognize the solution to all the problems and troubles in this world. Even from a very tender age when they begin being capable of absorbing things. That they will know how to rise above it all and attain not only a disconnection from the troubles we have here, but to reach a happy, eternal, complete and satisfying existence full of all the fillings imaginable.

All this is in our hands, and it has never been done before. We are the first generation that must set the correct educational foundation for children.

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The problem is that we have yet to acknowledge this process and learn how to cope with it. We will only be able to change the poor state of today’s youth by adapting our education system to the level of evolution (egoism) of our children.

The message of the wisdom of Kabbalah should be adapted to suit each generation. The message can be conveyed through movies, games or stories. If we begin to explain to children how things work beneath the surface, they will feel that they are being taught how to succeed and how to better understand their own world. They will feel that they are being exposed to new channels and new avenues in life.

You do not need to talk to them about spiritual matters or about abstract issues, but simply hand them the right approach to life, teach them how to see life on a slightly deeper level. They will get the message naturally and easily. In truth, it is not at all difficult to explain that behind the scenes of this life lies something hidden from our senses, that there are subtler forces at work in our world than the ones we perceive, and that we should consider them. As they live their normal lives, children will begin to sense the existence of an inherent tie to nature, one which we, adults, have grown accustomed to overlook.

Children will still live their normal lives, except now they will know that there is a higher, systemic order, and this will provide them with a fuller consciousness, a broader outlook on life. They will no longer be frustrated and disoriented, and they will not need pop stars as role models. Instead, they will grow up finding their own paths to self-fulfillment.

The current education system was developed over thousands of years. Throughout all those years it was adjusted to suit our varied systems, philosophies, historic and politic development, and so on.

Over time we managed to gradually set up some sort of system. That is how we arrived at the state we are in now with an entire system for training teachers, creating content, and preparing kids in nurseries for when they go into school. 

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Obviously a process of change cannot take place from one day to the next but must rather be over a number of years. As a society we must agree to work on bringing about this change in a diligent manner. Mankind has never succeeded at solving anything overnight.  

The beginning of the change requires us recognizing the evil within us, meaning our lack of understanding for the younger generation, which will allow us to solve the problem from the root and prepare for change. 

The change could be brought about by dedicating hours of national television coverage to the subject with all the concerned parties seated at a conference table to discuss the solution. This must become the most important issue on the public agenda and this will allow us to educate the children, parents, teachers and education authorities together.  

All other systems provide filling for the growing ego but in this generation we will see that along with the ego increasing its demands will not be to fill its ego but rather to achieve something beyond it, to fill himself with something beyond our life. That is why we will need to give this generation filling that is not in this world, that is what the younger generation yearns for– spiritual filling. That is the only way it will feel full and satisfied. 

Out of lack of choice a child will go to a psychologist or psychiatrist that will give him medication but when that does not help he will turn to drugs to shut his mind down and forget. But the precise thing that he wants, right before he drowns himself in his sorrow and turns to a psychiatrist and drugs – is spiritual filling. This is precisely what is happening in this generation. That is the generation’s demand. That is why they are restless, hyperactive from a very young age and sometimes older.

Only the wisdom of Kabbalah can provide a solution. It is possible that the student has no idea what is happening but inside he is demanding a higher filling than anything he can get in this world.

We are living in a world where parents work very hard and are often not with their kids for most of the day. Children spend much of their time in front of TV or computer screens and are essentially getting their values from society and not from their parents. Apparently, the kids are not too thrilled with this state of affairs.  

How did we end up in this unpleasant situation? Fifty years ago we were taught in school that in fifty years parents will have much more time to spend with their children, because they will have so much spare time on their hands. In those days parents worked eight or nine hours a day and thought that they would eventually cut down to five or six hours a day; that more time would be devoted to the family, to education, to culture, and building the child’s personality. 

They also spoke of a change in child education, that it would be more interesting, integrate more examples, that they would take groups of children to an airport for example and all sorts of interesting places and allow them to come face to face with the richness of society.  

Those fifty years have gone by and what have we done? We work for longer hours, the family unit is disintegrating, the father does not want anything to do with the mother, there is no connection between parents, the children are disconnected from the parents and even their grandparents. The only means of communication they have, the internet and TV, completely isolate them from their parents, and they do not receive their education in school but rather from many other types of sources. 

As we can see, school is not intended to provide a person with an education and build him. There is not some special character that we expect to see upon a child graduating, but simply that he received a basic education, to prepare him somewhat for a profession he will learn in the future. After completing their studies every child will make a living according to their character, and a lot is left to chance. No one is talking about the “person” that has to come straight out of the oven with a whole collection of values and tendencies.