This Chanukah, It Is Time To Finally Break The Chains Of The CCP And Their Global Partners

The world around us is in chaos. Old norms are buried, new ideas abound, and the tools purported to help us discover new avenues of abundance are now at our fingertips.

But what happens if all of this fast paced, information saturated global culture, is just a weapon wielded by a godless enemy determined to build a world based on a society where only the collective matters – not the individual.

This is the war we are fighting now. The antagonist is the Chinese Communist Party – a godless machine whose goal is global control. They are aided and abetted by big tech, big pharma, Wall Street, legacy media, and many in academia. The war is about money and control and it appears to those who have not been swayed by their guile that the CCP and their friends are winning.

So how do we defeat an enemy who uses so many different weapons to fight us?

It starts by having pure and simple faith in G-D. However, simple faith is not enough to hold back their full power. We must learn to activate this faith as a real tool, because part of the enemy’s strategy is to force us into a corner by our own hands. Faith that remains latent, is faith which is equivalent to light without a vessel and that in a way gives the enemy “territory.”

Rebbe Nachman teaches that our faces can be likened to the Menorah, the seven branch candelabra in the Holy Temple. We too have seven places that have a potential to shine light and in the same vein they can show nothing but darkness – it all depends on what we take in and express.

Our faith is the light of G-D and it is this faith that requires vessels to contain it and shine it to others. This is why the CCP and their partners around the world work so hard to create so much information that our senses are overloaded. This is meant to first distract and then to overtake the seven openings in our face (two eyes, two ears, two nostrils, and one mouth), thus dimming our pure and simple faith – extinguishing the Menorah within

This assault on our senses has been going on for a long time. It has taken the form of entertainment – meant to destroy our moral fabric. We have grown in our disdain for tradition and yet cannot pinpoint the exact reason why. All the while, we fill the growing void caused by our lack of faith with cheap products made by CCP run China and pushed on us by global corporations in order to distract us while making them richer.

We are now at the crossroads. We can fall deeper into the darkness or turn around and jettison the “slave masters” from our midst. The Greeks were able to gain control of the minds and the will of most of the Jews in the Land of Israel until one family stood up and led an uprising. It is true, the war was about freeing the Jewish people in the Land of Israel from Greek control, but ultimately the Jewish people needed to overthrow the Greek control over their minds and hearts to truly be victorious.

The light of faith was represented by the rekindling of the Menorah by the Jewish people. The seven branched candelabra burned for a miraculous eight days. Today, we can overthrow our enemies and relight the Menorah, but we must choose to see the enemy for who he is and recognize how much he has penetrated deep within and by doing so nearly extinguishing our soul.

Like the Maccabees of old, each one of us can lead an uprising within and by doing so, defeat the army of darkness that appears to be so close to winning. There is still time and always plenty of faith no matter how dim the light appears.

Replacing Mourning With The Song of Joy

We are constantly mourning our predicament – Our yearning for completion, for living in a world of strife and shifting to a world of redeemed purpose. Yet, we have been mourning our loss of connection and lack of clarity of purpose for so long we know nothing else but mourning.

Redemption lies within. It lies within the song that moves us at our core, the song of creation, jubilation, and joy. This is the song that the Tzaddik plays to call us home, to move back to ourselves.

The challenge though is that in the two thousand years of exile we have lost will to search within and are caught up with the comfortability of mourning that which we can fix by simply letting go of the sadness we have built.

Exile is a mindset. It is a cycle of external wandering in hopes that we can find solace and time to think about who we really are. Now our wanderings actually led to the place that we dreamed of. Yet, we have faltered and stayed mourning for a loss of connection that we feel fail to recognize that the very place we are now in can help us recover who we are.

We are home. We have returned to the Land of the Lost Princess, the Land of Israel, of the Divine Presence. All that there is left to do is recognize that we no longer need to mourn.

(Based on Likutey Halachot Pirya v’Rivia Halacha 3, Story of the Seven Beggars – 6th Day)

The Temple Is About Restoring Our Eternal Memory

Tisha B’Av is once again upon us. So many of us wonder why we are still laboring to keep it. After all, we have returned to Israel, the galut is seemingly over.

Yet, the Temple, was more than a national symbol, it is our own eternal memory, because it is the memory of the World to Come. Tisha B’Av is about recapturing that memory and propelling ourselves forward towards the final redemption.

AN END TO EXCESS: We Must Return To Ourselves

Coronavirus has come. It has swept across the globe in such stunning fashion that it has laid waste to not only lives and economies, but to our preconceived notions of who we are.

I grew up in the age of globalization. It was drilled into me from high school onward that we were heading towards a borderless world that was only an air flight away. Even with my turn towards traditional Judaism and my move to Israel, I still believed to this to a certain extent.

The problem with globalization is that it is based on an infinite amount of resources and cheap products that essentially just turn traditional cultures and communities into carbon copies of one another.

How was the world meant to be built? China. The authoritarian regime would help produce this new world of anonymity, phone addiction, and infinite consumer products. Of course all of us have played along nicely.

The coronavirus pandemic destroyed all of this. It has blown out the idea that one can build a perfect world on the fulfillment of desires by using cheap slave labor in a far away land. Rather than a perfect word, the pandemic has revealed just how bankrupt these notions have been all along.

We have been trying to fulfill our ambitions for products and money and by doing so we have destroyed forests, ruined top soil, and assigned whole populations to a life of factory and wage slavery.

None of this has been holy work – it has been about giving into our base desires.

So much of what we experience and grapple with can be traced back to that initial decision of Adam and Eve to taste from the forbidden fruit of the Tree of Knowledge. It was simply about fulfilling a want versus focusing on needs.

We are constantly tripping up over the same challenge and it is about time we have learned from our mistakes.

Rebbe Nachman teaches in the 24th lesson of Likutey Moharan that one who lives in excess eventually falls into depression. In a sense, what Rebbe Nachman is saying is that the more each of us lives a life oof excess, the more the collective world falls further away from what it is meant to be.

We are meant to be G-dly beings – to repair the broken world that exists around us and within us. We can do this. We can return to our authentic selves, but we first must exit the world of desires and excess.

The coronavirus has taught us that we can in fact live on so much less than we thought we could. Will we continue on this path or return to our lives of excess once the world opens back up?

The choice as always is before us.

After Corona, Are We Ready For A New World?

The world is changing. Oil is in negative for the first time ever. The US government has taken over large parts of the economy. Joblessness is souring. Global Depression appears to be on our doorstep.

The coronavirus or COVID-19 has changed us. Yet, deep down inside to most of us who have been warning about the excesses of the Western world, none of this is surprising.

There was bound to be a black swan event, one so big that it would knock down the mirage that is the West. After all, how many more Netflix shows can one watch, or feel fulfilled by cheap Chinese products?

The West has nothing to it anymore. There is no vigor of inner yearning or civilizational direction. The excess has been a drug. All of it designed to fulfill base desires and promising nothing in return. Yet, none of this – the pleasure filled dreams of a millennial generation, fed to them by the hi-tech priests of Generation X is real. Most importantly none of it is sustainable.

The world as we know it, is gone.

For me, all of this has been foretold. Most importantly as the West falls something must take its place.

We must construct a world that is truly sustainable. This new world must leave behind the false desires that are based on nothing else but our own inner whims. In many ways, we must leave the virtual and return to the Earth that has been Created for us. It is this Earth that is waiting to be redeemed and it us who are meant to be its redeemers.

Until now it has been used – a place that is merely a production engine for the products that were meant to fulfill us. We have run after the illusions of our own making – the false dreams and the promise of fortune.

Now we must change course. We must leave behind the “gods of gold and silver” and replace them with truth.

The coronavirus is the trigger for the collapse of the world of falsehoods – the world of truth lies within us. Its holistic melody yearning to break free. Are we ready to step forward and reveal it?