This account was sent to me via email in response to a post on Bnei Baruch I wrote in April, 2009. Aside from adding the headings, cutting out repetition and a few grammatical changes (the author is not a native English speaker) I have left the account as it stands. More background on how this story came to be published here. You can read more on this website by former followers of Bnai Baruch.
Update October 2013: I just published Part II of the Bnei Baruch victim’s story.
My Story of Bnei Baruch
I’m going to write about my experience with them, some of what happened afterwards, and my view on their teachings. I’ve been meaning to do this for a while, just never felt ‘safe’ enough. Your blog looks like the perfect place for this, so you can publish this email if you want. I’m sorry it’s so long. I started writing and just had to keep writing what’s on my mind. I could write a lot more, but I would have to remember things, and persons, and events, and phrases, and voices and conversations, and ‘classes’ and ‘studies, and I would have to remember details of their evil doctrine, and I would have to read about it or even listen to their insane words, to reference them and expose their lies, to make this letter more complete.
But I just can’t do it, primarily because of the pain and regret that remembering all those things brings to me, and also because I want to forget all this, and leave it behind, and keep it miles and miles away from me and from my home, and from my computer and specially from my mind and heart. I occasionally Google them to see if anyone has ‘debunked’ them or if anyone is attacking them, only to dismay at the fact that they will always show up with their websites among the top results, even when you Google things like “Bnei Baruch satanic luciferian cult”. The little criticism available is always old and hidden. So I’ll just write an emotional account, leaving out personal details. This will not be necessarily an accurate account of their doctrine, just what I have retained by memory. If I debate their doctrine on their grounds, it’s like they are teaching me about it again. I’ll talk about my experiences and just ignore anyone from Bnei Baruch who is arrogant enough to say something about what I’ll write, if they are allowed to comment. I won’t even read them anymore.
Also, I’m sorry if this doesn’t make much sense, or if I sound crazy. I read it and even I get a bit scared and confused and sad. But Bnei Baruch students and ex-BB students might understand this stuff more accurately, I don’t know… Anyway, I really needed to write this stuff down, so thanks for the encouragement.
The Damla person and all her posts are very accurate. The only thing this ‘kabala’ stuff will do to you is bring mental problems into your life. After my first ‘lesson’, the first live ‘lesson’ I watched online, after having read extensively about their doctrine, I cried my eyes out for hours at night, uncontrollably, without exactly knowing why. They call this ‘the gate of tears’. I am still not sure why that happened, and they don’t really have any good explanations that don’t require hours of lessons to explain, and then you are hooked. Looking back, it was not a beautiful religious experience, although it might have seemed like that at the time. It was very, very scary. I wasn’t feeling love and forgiveness from a kind ‘creator’ who wanted to bring me to ‘complete delight’. I was feeling shame, horror and frustration out of the fact that “I MYSELF” wasn’t yet a ‘god’! Sounds crazy? It only got worse after that. I never had mental problems, and I completely ceased to have any problems after separating myself from bb completely and forever, in heart and mind. In fact, it would be hard for a psychiatrist to believe now the depth I have fallen, given that now, so little time latter, I am perfectly normal and with no traces of any problem, without any treatment. I am now a very happy, social, friendly person, with plans and hopes and peace. Completely opposite to what I was while ‘studying’ kabbalah. I became a complete mess while ‘studying’ it. Anyone else would still be under psych meds after everything I went through, but all I needed was just to get away from Bnei Baruch, in heart and mind. And yet, no one ever suspects what happened to me, because I am so fine right now. I won’t directly talk about what happened to me, to preserve my identity. I’ll just talk about the conclusions I have formulated from the experiences I had.
How I Got Involved in Bnei Baruch
I’ve never been to Israel. I’ve never been among them. I’ve met very few people from Bnei Baruch in person. I only once went to meet some other local ‘students’ in my region. I was one of those guys ‘studying’ over the internet, exchanging emails and watching lessons live with others while talking on instant messaging programs, bombarding each others with hypocritical emoticons. I can only imagine the pain those guys go through, waking up at 3 am in the morning to ‘draw the light that reforms’. Can you imagine the existential horror and dread a person has to be in, to wake up at 3 am in the morning to read some texts they will NEVER understand, written by some obscure kabbalist years ago, during 3 full hours, surrounded by a bunch of men they probably hate, in the hopes that by doing this they will become GOD HIMSELF? No real explanation is ever given about anything you ask about the study material. Formally, they answer questions with more obscure stuff, but substantially, the answer is always ‘faith above reason’. Faith in what? Faith in the promise that Michael Laitman makes me that I’ll become a ‘god’ by reading nonsense and disseminating it? If you ask me to put my reason beneath my faith in you, you better be able to at least open up the red sea with your command, to back yourself up. Then I might start thinking about your request. But bb’s response to this type of questioning is that the group exists to BRAINWASH you! They mean this LITERALLY!
After that first night, I kept ‘studying’. I would download every lesson. I would make sure I could watch them live, to my own loss, to the loss of my sleep and health, and to the loss of my other personal affairs. It was normal at that time to cancel meetings with friends and family to watch their broadcasts. Because of the time zones, my schedule had to be significantly altered. This makes you wonder… they make a big point about watching the thing live, because by this you will ‘draw more light that reforms’ by ‘connecting all your points in the heart at the same time’… This doesn’t give them a profit, on the contrary, I’m sure it’s very expensive for them! Would the real Creator of the universe need us to gather over the internet at the same time to change our hearts? Not Him! He could do it anytime. But bb worships something else, something limited, who only calls itself ‘creator’, and needs us to gather like sheep at a specific time, do devour us all together…
I listened to the lessons on my mp3 everyday. I didn’t think about anything else. I woke up and put on my headphones, I went to sleep with my headphones, listening to Michael Laitman through an interpreter. I wanted so badly to achieve ‘equivalence of form’…
How Bnei Baruch Makes You Crazy–Literally
Then bigger problems started to appear. I started to hate EVERYTHING and EVERYONE. I disagreed with everyone, and constantly picked arguments with people over meaningless things. People were surely annoyed by me. Deep down in ‘my’ soul, I felt this enormous hate for everyone. I wanted to kill everyone. I would have gore images flashing in my mind, amputation, death, horrific images. They all looked like they were my own imagination. It didn’t look like hallucinations. No, they were just very vivid imagery. Like, if I say the word ‘elephant’, you will think of an elephant. But the elephants I was seeing in my mind were all monstrous and ugly, and they stomped people, and tortured them in many different ways. And I really enjoyed this. I enjoyed the hate. I would walk in the streets and parks and imagine everyone around me being crushed by evil things, and electrocuted by lighting coming out of my body. I felt so much hate. And those imaginations were very vivid, yet at the same time they looked like my own imagination, it looked like I was just imagining those things because I wanted to, out of fun or boredom. I rarely associated those things with Bnei Baruch or kabbalah. Everyone around me was seen by me as just an egoist, and all the things I had to do, my work and other affairs, all that was just hindering my progress of uniting with, and becoming, the ‘creator’. So I hated everyone, even the ‘group’ and ‘friends’, because they were doing such a poor job and ‘disseminating’ and ‘uniting’. The world was a stumbling block to my progress.
I became careless with my affairs. There was much loss during this period, things I will never recover. Time wasted. So this nonsense ‘study’ is not ‘free’ at all. I became obsessed with some specific people. I wanted to teach them what ‘real love’ was (as if I knew), as opposed to the ‘egoistic love’ they had. Many relationships were lost, and never recovered. I had some very intense urges and desires that are too embarrassing to share. I was turning into a psychopath and I knew this was happening! After all, the ‘kli’ had to grow large enough to contain the ‘light’. I was always evil like that, I thought, I just never noticed it because there was no ‘light’ shining on my mind to show me my evil; my ‘ego’ was just growing because of the influence of the light. This is what they will say to you. You have to think carefully about this: what ‘light’ would make you turn evil? Who would shine this light on you, and why?
You really start to believe all sorts of crazy things trying to understand what are the spiritual things they are talking about. Like people in red are out to get you. Or all sorts of crazy stuff I won’t mention, but that just go way beyond the weirdness meter. I believed I would wake up and everyone would reveal to me that the world was just a show, that everyone was the puppet of the ‘creator’, they were pretending to live, and could read my mind. Very weird behavior came out of this. Very weird thoughts. Very weird visions and imagery. Very weird concepts. Nothing ever made any sense anymore from then on. This is why Bnei Baruch always insists that people don’t change their habits and jobs and clothes and that they just behave like normal people, not because they are normal, but because it is important to give a positive image of Bnei Baruch (like when they asked students not to smoke in public…)
They have a story about some kabbalist named ‘Shimon form the market’. I have no idea if this is a real Jewish story or just a kabbalistic one, and I don’t care. Essentially, this guy Shimon, they tell, after devoting himself for a long time to the ‘god’ of the kabbalah, just had a psychotic break and went around in the local marked doing stupid things he would never do. This is understood to be a sign of amazing progress! They’ll even sing about this, wishing it happens to them! He ‘crossed the machsom’ that day! I don’t know the details, and I really don’t want to research this stuff at this time, but HAVING A PSYCHOTIC BREAK IS THE PURPOSE OF THE KABBALAH! The whole deal of ‘crossing the machsom’ is about this, you ‘cross the machsom’ when you have your own, personal psychotic break. When you lose track of what is real. This is why you have people fainting in the congresses (they wont film or talk about that, but people know and see this often). This is why people often ask Laitman if they can study while taking psych meds. I’m sure things much worse than fainting happen after those congresses, in the privacy of peoples houses and even publicly sometimes… A few unfortunate people are always ‘chosen’ for those horrible experiences, and they think, afterwards, that they have entered the ‘spiritual world’.
But you see, there is no ‘spiritual world’ in the sense of kabbalah. There is just hell on your mind. And the promise of becoming ‘god’ afterwards. Of course, this promise is the carrot in front of the donkey.
Israel has always had idol worshipers in its history. What is an Idol? It is, essentially, something that stands between you and the true God. Well, that’s the function of the ‘massach’, or the screen. In the kabbalah, they have volumes upon volumes talking about this thing. There are only 3 things in the universe, we are told by the kabbalists. The ‘light’, the ‘vessel’ and the ‘screen’. That is, the Creator (light), the creature (vessel) and… something else. This screen is the magical sixth sense that the ‘creator’ will give you if you read the writings of Baal Hasulam with a big enough desire with the correct group and intention everyday for 3 to 5 years. (By the way, isn’t there a more appropriate nickname for a ‘rabbi’, other than ‘Baal’? Aren’t there other Hebrew words that also mean ‘master’?)
The ‘massach’ is something that ‘covers’ the ‘kli’, and in fact becomes the new ‘kli’. The ‘kli’ is, in fact, you. Technically, the ‘kli’ is your desires, but since kabbalah understands that we are just pure desires, with even our reason functioning as a slave to our desires, the ‘kli’ is, in fact, you. But they can very easily say that it is something else, given that there are no real definitions for anything in kabbalah. 2+2=5 works very easily in kabbalah. So anything I say here they can say I’m wrong, and they will be right in their own sense, because, by their own definitions, they are always right, even when they are wrong. Everything is backwards in kabbalah, they call this the principle of ‘inverse relationship between lights and vessels’. That is, white is black and black is white, evil is good and good is evil. But anyway, the screen is the most desired ‘spiritual gift’ you can receive. It allows you to start ‘climbing the ladder’ that ultimately will lead you, and all the ‘friends’, and all humanity eventually, to become GOD. You receive it after your psychotic break, I mean, after ‘crossing the machsom’.
So this thing, this massach, stands between you and the ‘light’ of the creator. Its function is to reject the ‘light of God’. That is because, according to kabbalah, you have to REJECT THE REAL GOD before you can start to work on BECOMING A “GOD”. This is the real meaning of their evil, evil, deceitful doctrine. They teach this story to every new student: The story about the host and the guest: imagine God invites you for dinner. The most perfect dinner ever, right? A normal person would enjoy the meal and have much fun, it would be perfect, or at least an immense honor. Not for the kabbalist! They just feel frustrated that they are not the host, that they are not God. So they throw a tantrum, and reject the food, saying to His face that they will only eat unless the host makes them a “god” too. This intention and attitude is the ‘massach’, or screen is the essence of kabbalah. It is the REJECTION of all the blessings of the real God. It is the rejection of all reality, the belief that everything is just an illusion of our minds, that one day we will all have power over it, when we unite as one mind. The ‘massach’ is like a thick shell that keeps you separate from the real world, and gives ‘you’ a space to ‘create’ your ‘inner light/reality’.
After rejecting God and reality, you can start to correctly receive the ‘light of hochma’, or light of ‘wisdom’. It is the light that will give you understanding and open your eyes, and turn you into a god… The name is interesting. They butchered the meanings of the creation story of Adam and Eve, and in fact, they ask you not to read the Torah (because it is a very old book that was not written for our generation, and we cant understand that when it says ‘donkeys’, it is really talking about some sublime spiritual thing, that is much better explained in the writings of Baal Hasulam). But anyway, isn’t there a story in the Torah about someone who rejected God while craving some tree of ‘hochma’, that would turn you into a ‘god’ too? They have drawings explaining this story… They will draw rectangles divided in the middle, or concentric circles with lines cutting them, or whatever, always quoting their beloved Baal Hasulam, and will explain to you that those things in scripture are all spiritual things, not real things, so Adam and Eve, Abraham, Egypt and all those stories become ‘zat the binah’ or ‘gar de binah’ or the ‘light of adam harishon’ or whatever! And Baal Hasulam has already explained them to us. If they get you to believe that those abstract spiritual things are real things, they can supply you with tons of nonsense articles and books and videos trying to explain them to you and how to ‘contact’ or ‘perceive’ those things. You don�t understand the books and articles and videos? That’s because you are not supposed to understand it, you are supposed to ‘feel’ those things, like you feel your hand, so have some faith above reason and a lot of desire, and they will be ‘revealed’ to you.
“Psychological Rape”
Can you see the psychological RAPE that is believing all this stuff? If you can’t see it, I can only pray for you. Oh, wait, kabbalists don’t pray like everyone else. A prayer, for them, is just the desires in your heart. Poetic, isn’t it? There is no point in worshiping anything, just in desiring very strongly that we will be spiritually sucked and ‘lifted’ by ‘galgata’, ‘ab’, ‘sag’, ‘ma’ and ‘bon’ into the spiritual world, so we will become like ‘them’. Those are not ‘demons’ or anything like that, they are ‘partzufim’, spiritual entities with no self will, created by the ‘creator’. They are like robots, really… Just like (fallen) angels…
I also did a lot of ‘dissemination’ back then. I was once trying to explain to some guy about kabbalah. He showed some interest in it. He was a voodoo practitioner, among other ‘black magic’ stuff he studied and ‘practiced’. He asked me what kabbalah is all about. So I told him the story that I heard from Michael Laitman, about the chariot rider and the horse. The ‘creator’ is the chariot rider, and we are the horse. Kabbalah, I said, quoting Laitman, is used to turn us into the chariot rider, while still being the horse. So we will guide creation and our own destinies the way we want, and in the same direction this ‘creator’ wants, while we feel we are ‘him’, too, while still living in this earth. That’s interesting, he said. My voodoo teacher has this story, very similar, to explain voodoo: evil spirits use humans for their own profit, as cattle, as if to ‘plow the fields’. Voodoo is used to put us in the place of the farmer, and the evil spirits in the place of the cattle, to change places, so evil spirits will do our bidding, and harm other people for us.
So you see, voodoo and kabbalah are basically the same idea, except that in kabbalah, the ‘evil spirits’ already proclaim themselves to be the ‘creator’, and you never get to be the ‘chariot driver’ anyway, you just ‘feel’ like him, you are still the horse! And you don’t have to say you study kabbalah because you want power to harm others, you just do it because ‘you love the others’, and want to accelerate the ‘path of suffering’ of the world… This guy started to study kabbalah because he thought it was more cool than voodoo. It is interesting to note that you get an immense desire to harm others with these supposed ‘semi-divine’ powers you’ll undoubtedly have, before and after you ‘cross the machssom’. Before you ‘cross’, you just think you’ll have those powers… After you ‘cross’, you really think you can change reality with your mind… Every crisis and earthquake, every plane-crash, every murder… You start to think that those things are the ‘spiritual attack of the creator’ and of the kabbalists, sending pain to the world until it realizes how evil it is… kabbalists really enjoy disasters and crisis and wars for this reason, they feel it will draw more people to them.
Bnei Baruch Is a Cult
I know for sure now that supernatural entities do exist, and they can, through organizations like Bnei Baruch, be very evil and deceptive, and will harm you in ways you won’t imagine. Bnei Baruch is a cult, but not just about money or political influence. It really is spiritual sabotage. They say they have a real secret doctrine that came, passing from teacher to student, from Adam and Abraham to Baal Hasulam, and us… But really, their metaphysics and cosmology is no different than voodoo! All this stuff about light, really reminds me of ‘Lucifer’… Even after separating from them, and trying to forget all this, I still had night terrors, and depression, and anxiety, and suicidal urges, and I wanted to run away, and scream, and I feared everything. I carried around a lot of Xanax pills, and I took it daily, many times a day, or else I could not go out of the house because of the fear of…. something. I could not move. I picked up smoking again, witch I had previously quit before Bnei Baruch (they smoke and drink copiously, specially on the ‘congresses’, ‘in order to bond’). I was sexually impotent for a time. I still have a rare auto-immune disease with no apparent cause, which showed up during all this ‘study’. I think the Baal Hasulam died of, or, at least, had arthritis, witch is when your auto-immune system attacks yourself. Maybe his body realized he was no longer human… I think it makes perfect sense for kabbalists to have auto-immune diseases, given how much they hate their own bodies and their own self’s (believing they are all just rotten egoists).
All this suffering lasted a long time, even after separating from Bnei Baruch. Given that I am so well and happy now, far away from them, with no traces of problems, I truly believe they were the cause, and there isn’t anything wrong with me. I used to think I had some mental problem, specially after all that stuff… But I really don’t, or else I would still be very bad. I’m now the complete opposite. But right after turning my back on them, all the problems actually got worse! I thought that those were ‘curses’ from the ‘creator’ because I had given up kabbalah!
They will make you addicted to their ‘light’. In a sense, it’s like sex. Bnei Baruch even calls it that! We are supposed to have ‘zivug’ with the ‘light’, and the ‘seed’ of the light will grow inside us, and we will give birth to a new ‘kli’. They even say that there is ‘violent zivug’, and ‘consensual zivug’. In a sense, spiritual rape. Both seem to be important. ‘kli’ means ‘vessel’ or ‘desire’, right? No. It means ‘instrument’. Think about that. Do you want to be the ‘instrument’ of this spiritual thing, witch may or may not be the ‘creator’? Do you think that the real God needs Michael Laitman to speak for Him? Do you want to join the ‘world instrument’ of whatever is it that moves the tongue of Michael Laitman? He has suggested in numerous occasions that it is not him that talks, but a ‘spiritual’ thing that he calls ‘creator’ that talks during the lessons, through him.
This notion, of having sex with spiritual stuff, is also in the bible… Just look for the whole ‘nephilim’ story, Genesis 6 I think, and what happened after it…
The only thing that permanently removed all those problems (except the disease, I’m still treating that, although it has greatly improved) was my religious faith (Christian). I urge anyone involved with Bnei Baruch, or thinking about joining, to just go back to their traditions, in their society and in their family or any real friends you still have left (they DO encourage you to abandon old friends and just be friends with the people in their group…) I tried to explain to people that I was ‘studying’ this kabbalah because I just wanted to know the purpose of my life. They laughed at me and asked me ‘why don’t you just go read the Bible?’ I thought they were stupid, but they were right! There is a curious sentence in one of Baal Hasulam’s articles, in the ‘there is no else but him’ article, about how sometimes your ‘soul incarnates in the body of a pig’. The instructors at Bnei Baruch take great care to make sure we won’t interpret this literally. They say it means that you will sometimes feel ‘dirty’ or something while studying kabbalah… But there is a story in the New Testament about how Jesus commanded demons to come out of a possessed guy (maybe he studied kabbalah too), and the demons asked permission to go inside of pigs! “And they said to him, Send us into the pigs, so that we may go into them. Mark 5:12”. They made the pigs jump off a cliff afterwards. Maybe Baal ha sulam was referring to this…
Speaking of other religions, there are a lot of Muslim tariqas and Sufi doctrines that are the carbon copy of what Bnei Baruch teaches. A teacher, a book, a group, uniting your soul with the essence of Allah, all this stuff… Bnei Baruch says that this is because Abraham taught kabbalah to the Arabs too, but in an incomplete way. The same with Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism, Shintoism, etc… All those religions where a creation of the students of Abraham, but they are incomplete. I never heard him talking about Christianity, except indirectly, like saying that to ‘die for something you believe in’ is the most selfish thing a person can do, and that “turning the other cheek” is ‘foolish’…
Bnei Baruch and Politics
Bnei Baruch also has some interesting political innuendos… I remember listening to Laitman saying that if he had total control over the media, Israel would be at permanent peace in a few days… Those things are recorded and archived, although, good luck trying to find them… You’ll have to watch hours of video to find those things among all the other junk… He loves to bash the Americans every time he can. He says that the people studying at Bnei Baruch are at the top of the spiritual pyramid of the world, the ones with the most powerful thoughts, and, one day, at ‘gmar tikkun’, (perhaps when people go out in the streets screaming ‘arvut arvut artu!’) they will rule the world. And not everyone will need to study kabbalah for the world to be completely corrected. Just like brain cells are only a small portion of the body, Bnei Baruch only needs very few people to rule the world. They started to ‘disseminate’ in China, and said that they don’t really need to translate all the ‘Jewish stuff’ about Moses and all that into Chinese to have students from there, they only need to translate the technical stuff the Baal Hasulam wrote about ‘partzufim, sephirot’ and all that incomprehensible garbage. I heard him saying that it was a good thing back in the Soviet Union when the police caught people on the streets to put them to work, that the kabbalist state will be something like that, only more spiritual…
They are always saying that they are not communists… But he often quotes Karl Marx! Just search his blog and you’ll find it. The only problem with Communist countries and ideologies, they say, is that they are not spiritual, so the ‘creator’ doesn’t bless them… ‘Muslims are not bad too, we should pray 5 times a day like them, it is an interesting habit’, I heard Laitman saying something like that once. They want to have one world government with one world religion – all other religions will be folkloric traditions, and kabbalah will be the official, common sense religion. That’s their project. People will only need a few apples and fruits, and very little to be happy, they will learn what they need by collectively watching videos, and most people won’t have to work, their ‘job’ will be to study kabbalah and attract the ‘light that reforms’ on others. We won’t have selfish desires, just our necessities will have to be provided, everyone will have everything they want and want everything they have, we will be all happy with the ‘light’, to each one according to their needs, from each one according to their capacities…. We are really all just cogs anyway, we just need to unite and spin together. But wait! kabbalah doesn’t talk about this world! Just talks about spiritual stuff. You see, they are completely separate, the spiritual and the real, and have no relation to one another… Except that the spiritual supposedly controls the real down to the last detail… They have spent countless hours trying to explain this.
They also need tithes. You see, they need to bring the ‘science of correction’ to all the peoples of the world. They have at least 3 hours of daily video archived EVERYDAY, since at least the year 2000, on a private server! That’s a lot of data! Why do they need this? Who pays for it? They also have their own TV channel now in Israel. Soon one in the US too? Those guys in the lessons pay for this with tithes? Why the massive archive? If you ask about watching older videos, they will tell you not to do it, but to join in the present lessons, because there is more ‘light’ there… Also, the stuff they said a few years ago is very different from what they say now, and even though they acknowledge this, its best not to watch the old videos. They change their teachings all the time ‘because people need to be led step by step, like babies’, they will say… Maybe one day they will reveal they were worshiping Satan all the time, who knows…
Bnei Baruch and Jewish Teachings
I also remember them saying that they only observe Jewish religious customs to ‘lure in’ (aka, fool) religious Jews, because those things really have no meaning in themselves… The important thing is the ‘intention’ (aka, the screen, or masach… The screen IS the intention. This screen is the thing I was talking about above, whose function is to reject God…). 613/620 commandments? No, they are actually 613/620 desires, or ‘klis’, that have to be corrected!… So you have to put a ‘masach’ on each of them? Isn’t that interesting? You have to reject ALL the commandments of God, in your intentions, in order to reach the ‘125th step of the spiritual ladder’, and ‘become a god’! Don’t believe me? They arrested a kabbalist a few years ago, he had satanic rituals going on in his basement, even killed children in it. I’m sure you’ve heard about it. Just Google the story. Bnei Baruch said he was not a real kabbalist, of course. To my knowledge, they don’t do this type of stuff. But they ALWAYS talk about doing SPIRITUAL ATTACK during congresses. They do believe in ‘evil eye’, they just say they don’t do this… I personally believe that this is what makes people go crazy… In a sense, it is worse than homicide… The body stays alive, but the person inside slowly dies… And is replaced by… something else…
Anyway, they say that their interpretation and explanation of the Torah, this idea that each commandment is a ‘kli’, is what was originally intended to be understood by the original scribes…. And when we reach the 125th step, we will have telepathy, among other powers! Wonderful, isn’t it?
You’ll might have to dig very deep on their video ‘lessons’ to find some of those things. Sometimes it is just a short comment like that during a whole week of lessons, so its very hard to paint a picture of what they really believe and teach, unless you know what they are talking about when they use ‘the language of kabbalah’. It is an esoteric teaching. All those abstract spiritual concepts probably have real meaning for the people ‘in the know’, and are probably no different than voodoo stuff, like I said. And they are always changing what they say anyway. They will ask: ‘where did you read this?’, and, if you find it, they’ll just smile and say that you misunderstood the words, and they will come up with some other deceitful nonsense to explain it.
Anyway, what’s the point of all the archived lessons, if there is more ‘light’ on the live ones? Laitman once answered this. Someone said that he only felt ‘happiness’ while he was listening to the lessons, and asked what he should do about this. Laitman said that he should listen to him all the time! 24 hours a day! 7 days a week! This huge archive is there to brainwash people like that. Listening to a lot of lessons in your free time… Laitman says the ‘spiritual light’ is still there… At least that’s what I once heard, they probably already changed their opinion about this…
There is still more I could say, like their crazy approach to free will, which is, essentially, the view that we are all robots, except when we are OBEYING the orders of Bnei Baruch (they use a very authoritarian tone privately). Or that the so called ‘point in the heart’ is not a ‘desire for love and peace and union with the ‘creator”, it is in reality the WORST part of yourself, an evil that gets amplified by joining Bnei Baruch and their activities… But I already wrote too much. It is my belief that this stuff has nothing to do with Judaism or with God or with good intentions or with altruism. It is a brain-washing cult. Their congresses are meeting places for demons to feast on the pain of miserable people. Their objective is none other but to drive THE WHOLE WORLD INSANE. The more miserable you feel, the better for them. They are all deeply insane themselves. Their doctrine came directly from the devil. They are the most vile thing on the internet.
But you know what? I try not to hate them. They will have their punishment in due time. They want you to hate them, and to disagree with them. I just reject them completely. If you hate them, they can come and say, ‘let us correct you’. If you disagree with them, they can come and say ‘let us explain it to you’. And then, you are hooked on their ‘system’ again. Its like an annoying music that keeps playing in your mind. Every detail of your life, every question you have, every joy and every problem, every idea, everything can be related and explained by kabbalah… But the ‘answer’ is just another more confusing question… To the point where you spend hours thinking and abstracting if the ‘light of nefesh’ is responsible for you feeling cold when you get in a room with an air-conditioner, and if your ‘love for others’, in the sense of ‘receiving from them in order to bestow’, has anything to do with it… Maybe I’m a special case, but reading some other posts on your blog, I just had to share all this stuff.
Conclusion
Like an annoying music, its really hard to forget kabbalah. It is much easier to replace it with a better song. In my case, it was Christianity. I hope other people find somewhere else the happiness they are desperately seeking in kabbalah. Because kabbalah will give you just some very euphoric moments, where you will believe you are the ‘creator’, and you are bonding with others… In fact, you are bonding with something else… And its not the creator… All you’ll be able to, and want to do, will be to destroy things, not create, destroy your life and the life of everyone else around you, and those euphoric moments will be surrounded by complete despair, those moments of ‘illumination’ will be collected from you as very heavy price afterwards in the form of total emptiness (they even have articles talking about this, and how this is a good thing, how it is good to suffer to ‘pay’ this ‘creator’…). Its hard to believe that an organization that only talks about love and friendship could be so destructive, but this is the stuff suicides are made off.
Thanks for the opportunity for sharing this with you, and thanks for reading such an enormous text.
All the best,
Thank you for sharing your story. I know the feeling that you just need to get it all out. I hope that Hannah’s site will be safe and that it may help other people, and in that way your time will not have been wasted.
It is hard for me to hear you use the term “Kabbalah” when what you mean is the twisted teachings of Benei Baruch. There is real kabbalah out there. Most of it should be reserved for mature Jewish adults, particularly those already learned in Torah, Talmud, etc. However, there are many teachings based on kabbalah (true kabbalah) that are accessible to everyone. They teach about loving G-d, loving your fellow man, getting closer to G-d, and very interesting teachings about the body, soul, and the universe.
Just like the warning that you should only start a diet or exercise plan after consulting your doctor, it is best to study kabbalah with the help of a competent, Orthodox rabbi. And just like diet and exercise go hand in hand, if you really want to better your soul, you will need to actually practice the teachings of the torah… keep kosher, being kind to your fellow man, etc. Learning Kabbalah should in no way take time away from learning Torah and talmud, but it is real and it is beautiful.
Rabbi Shneur Zalman of Liadi, the “Alter Rebbe” of Chabad-Lubuvitch Chasidim, wrote the Tanya, published in 1797, a sort of handbook for spirituality and Jewish observance based on Kabbalah and Chassidic mysticism. It is a Chabad custom to study a small section everyday along with the daily portion of tehillim (psalms) and Torah. Here is a link where you can learn more about it and read the actual text and explanation. http://www.chabad.org/library/tanya/default.htm
Please be careful how you use the term kabbalah. If you allow people to believe that the “teachings” of Benei Baruch are kabbalah, you are helping BB. It is what we call a “chilul Hashem,” something that brings shame to the belief in G-d or the holiness of the Torah.
Thanks, Yosefa. I was going to say the same thing. This doesn’t sound like Kabbalah. It sounds like a twisting of certain elements of Kabbalah.
There are rules about who may study kabbalah, and for good reason. Kabbalah has many elements and a person needs to be mature enough and grounded enough before beginning.
If not, they can be dazzled by the idea of power and forget that self-actualization is achieved by harmony with the creator and nature, harmony with our fellow man, and inner peace.
Remember what Hillel said to the man who wanted to be taught Torah while standing on one foot – Do not do to your fellow man what is hateful to you. The rest is commentary. Go and learn.
Anything that goes against this core in Judaism is not Jewish, no matter what guise it comes under.
Hi Leah,
I think another thing we can learn from Hillel’s response is that people must be taught in a way that is appropriate for them. Part of a good teachers job is to make sure the students are absorbing the learning properly and in the right context and not going crazy!
Thank you for speaking out. I am sorry you suffered so much.
7 Commandments were given by G-d to Noah and his descendants for all mankind.
10 Commandments were given by G-d to the Jewish Nation at Mount Sinai.
Adherence to these G-d given Divine Laws, are the basis for all society.
1. One of the 7 Noachide Laws is
‘Do not worship false gods’ i.e. to worship the One G-d, who is Infinite.
2. To look inside the Torah:
Moshe Rabbeinu (Moses our Teacher) tells the Israelites in the Parsha of Shoftim (Judges) (18:10-13)
“Among you, there shall not be found anyone who
passes his son or daughter through fire;
who practices stick divination;
who divines auspicious times;
who divines by omens;
who practices witchcraft;
who uses incantations;
who consults mediums and oracles (who inquires of Ov or Yidoni);
or who attempts to communicate with the dead.
Anyone involved in these practices is REPULSIVE to Hashem (Literally: THE Name, G-d)….You must therefore remain TOTALLY FAITHFUL to Hashem YOUR G-D.”
As an example: it is against the Torah and forbidden, for a person to have her/his ‘palms read.’
These kinds of people all deny the Sovereignty of Hashem, the One G-d, and Creator of the World.
3. What do we say every morning?
“Modeh ani lefanecha, MELECH, Chai, Vekayam….”
“I give thanks before You, LIVING and everlasting KING….”
Hashem is our Living King. And so we must look at His words of Life – which are to be found in His Torah.
I have read the above article and I am very sorry that you have suffered so much. It appears that you have completely misunderstood the message of Kabbalah or any other esoteric school. What seems even more disturbing is that you seem to have been taught by people who also failed to understand the message. This is what Jesus said about the blind leading the blind. I am not a Bnei Baruch person, and do not know that much about them, but I am very interested in esotericism and have studied various approaches to it. I have started reading one of the books of Michael Laitman (I forget which one), and found it very heavy going and highly philosophical. Unless you have some previous knowledge of esoteric theory, you would probably have difficulties understanding it. The true teachings of Jesus were actually quite esoteric, and I personally believe Jesus to have been the first Kabbalist. Most of his true teachings have actually been removed from the New Testament, for example the teaching of reincarnation which was removed in the 6th Ecumenical Council (366 AD I think). All bibles were burnt and new ones distributed. 2 popes were murdered over it as they did not wish to remove the true teachings of Jesus. This happened throughout Christian history, starting with the false teachings of Paul of Tarsus and continued by the Catholic Church, the fruits of which were things like mass murder in the Spanish Inquisition. I am very sorry to hear that you are now following the false religion of Christianity which basically just consists of a pack of lies. Personally I am converting to Judaism because the Jewish writings have been preserved as they were and not been tampered with, and are therefore the best thing to go by. If you want to find the true teachings of Jesus, you are better off reading the gnostic gospels. As Jesus’ teachings were falsified by the Christian Church, the true teachings went underground. I personally believe that they surfaced again in the Zohar, as the Zohar seems to date back to Jesus’ times, and also some of it went into Islam. The Koran is by some thought to be an early Christian writing which has then been falsified to add all the horrible things that Arab men liked to do. Mohammed, according to research, never existed. If he had existed, he would have been mentioned by non-Islamic writers as records were kept at that time. Nobody had heard of Islam before Saladin started to conquer the Middle East which was at the time mostly Christian, and made everybody convert to Islam at the point of a sword.
The basic message of esoterocism is actually quite simple. God is the light, a spiritual entity which contains the universe, i.e. is omnipresent. Our sin separates us from the light and therefore we can’t see it. We need to get rid of the sin by suffering for it and bettering ourselves. We do this over many lifetimes. Books like the Torah give us some good advice on how to live to achieve this. Once the sin is eliminated and we are free from it, we can join with the Spiritual entity of God, and in theory become divine as we are pure enough to merge with God. I believe that Jesus had achieved this, which is why is was described as divine. Unfortunatley Christianity misunderstood this and worships him now like a God. Most esoteric schools describe ways of speeding the development up. All the horrific things you are describing were meant to be such ways. Unfortunately the people who were teaching you had misunderstood them with the result that you misunderstood them and had the horrific experiences you described. If you are looking for esotericism, maybe one of the Christian gnostic schools or buddhism might be better. I would not follow the orthodox Jewish schools (Hasidism). These are just another form of orthodox Judaism, which is the same to Judaism as Catholicism to Christianity, i.e. more about politics than about spirituality. I believe that the movement started with Kabbalah, but over time a lot of the kabbalistic teachings have been taken out of it and replaced with orthodox Judaism. Paganism is also quite esoteric and teaches basically the same message, providing you dont start worshipping the hundreds of pagan gods, but limit yourself to either no or one God.
I could go on for hours, but I hope this helps a little. I actually emailed Bnei Baruch today and questioned their idea of tithing, pointing out that most people have not got 10% of their income left after paying basic living expenses. If you wanted to join them you would have to get into debt. Surely that is not God’s intention. I think that anybody who starts asking for money like this probably is a cult.
Wow… Initially that was about as thoughtful as this comment was going to be. Quite simply Kabbalah, from all of its core texts is not a school of esoteric mythology. Nor can one say that “Torah” gives good advice about how to live a Kabbalistic life. Kabbalah is Torah, Torah is Kabbalah. Thousands of years of Kabbalists have borne this out in their countless writings. What is Kabbalah? I think I will borrow a Metaphor from Rav Yaakov Hillel, in discussing the differences between prayer of non-Kabbalists and that of Kabbalists.
If we call prayer a vehicle, like a care. A normal wants to drive from Jerusalem to Tel Aviv. They get in, turn the ignition, and generally operate the vehicle via various pedals an controls. Their entire concern is about getting the vehicle to do what they want it to do. Now let’s say a car engineer/mechanic is to make the same journey. Running through his mind may well be the various operations of which the average person knows nothing. He knowledge may in fact enable him to handle the vehicle slightly more efficiently. Though at the same time, an expert driver would do the same through basic intuition. However, at the end of the day, they both achieve the same goal… arriving in Tel Aviv.
The Kabbalist, and the simple humble pious Jew… there is very little separating them. For both their avoda is pure and accepted. The Kabbalist just has the knowledge of what is going on under the hood so to speak.
I’m sorry but you sound like a very ignorant person. I beleive you miss understand the message from BB completely . Never do they try to sell something about becoming god or a god. This is obviously somthing that you were interpreting through your own ego. The word kabbalah means receiving , and you obvioulsy were un worthy of reciving the wisdom in it’s true form. Your interpretation of the organization could not be more skewed. I’m sure you feel much more comfortable with christianity that suits you.
I am an orthodox Jew who found bnei baruch through internet searches for select kabalistic quotes. Within 5 minutes of watching their videos I easily understood this is neither kabbalah nor Torah and most probably a religious cult. The simplest reason is that they discourage learning the real Torah (bible). The giving of the bible at Mt Sinai was witnessed by 2 Million people and is the only publically witnessed revelation of God in history. That Bnei Baruch denounces the book as confusing should be an outrage for all of humanity. Bnei Baruch also rejects commandments openly and encourages intermarriage. It shoukd be noted that any “kabbalah” without Torah is a recipe for total disaster. I highly encourage people who have a deep desire for truth to find how the laws of Noach apply to their own religions . There are 7 simple laws that are most likely already available to them from common sense.