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What Goes Around Comes Around

Life shows us that we cannot survive without a sufficient number
of people around, to serve and help provide for our needs.
Humans are social beings, and society is like a machine where
each individual in like a wheel, linked to other wheels. A single
wheel cannot move by itself. However, it joins the motion of all
the other wheels and helps the machine perform its purpose. If the wheel breaks, the
problem is not the wheel’s
problem, but the problem of
the whole machine because
the broken wheel stops the
machine from running. It
turns out that we are not
evaluated for who or what
we are, but for the kind of
service we do for society. A “bad” person is only as bad as he or
she harms the public, not because he or she didn’t perform up
to the level of some abstract value of good.
Good and bad attributes and deeds are good or bad
according to whether they benefit the public. If a part of the
group does not contribute its share, those individuals not only
harm the collective, but they, too, are harmed. This is why a
negative society harms the individual.
Likewise, a good society benefits the individual. Individuals
are part of the whole, and the whole is not worth more than
the sum of its individuals. In Kabbalah, the collective and the
individual are one and the same.
One of the key ideas to understand about Kabbalah is that
people will come to see that their own benefit and the benefit of the collective are the same. As people realize that, the world will
be much closer to its full correction.
Kabbalah explains that our experiences are personal, but
they are described in general terms that apply to everyone. For
example, we all agree that blood is red when we look at it, but we
each experience it very differently. Some people faint at the sight
of blood, some say “Cool!”, and some say “Ugh!”