There is no question that there has been a significant rise in antisemitism recently. Today the world is passing through a very special stage in its social and political development, and naturally many painful questions arise, about the relation we Jews should have to what is happening, about Israel, about the world, and especially about the growing phenomenon of antisemitism. According to the wisdom of Kabbalah, this rise in antisemitism is neither accidental nor merely political. To understand it, we must begin much earlier, from the very root of human development.

According to the plan of creation, all of humanity must evolve until it reaches the revelation of the broad, eternal, complete reality in which we already exist, though at present we feel only a tiny fragment of it. This fragment is what we call “our world.” The goal of human development is to open this limited perception and discover the full reality, together with the force that governs it, which in Kabbalah is called “the upper force” or “the Creator.”

This process first became apparent in ancient Babylon. At that time humanity experienced a profound social crisis, symbolized in the Torah as the Tower of Babel. In the midst of that crisis there appeared a Babylonian priest named Abraham, who discovered that the crisis could be solved only through connection above egoism. He gathered around him those Babylonians in whom there awakened a tendency toward this higher discovery, and he led them toward what later became the Land of Israel. From them he formed a group of people who learned how to discover the upper world and the upper force while still living in this world. They lived, so to speak, in two worlds at once, with their bodies here and with their inner awareness in the spiritual reality.........

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