“The Creator Speaks Through the Teacher”: How Laitman’s Sadnaot Turned Agreement into a Tool of Submission

At Bnei Baruch congresses, the so-called sadnaot were presented as a practice of unity. But the structure of these circles worked not to test an idea, but to fix it in place. When participants are seated in small groups, taught to speak one after another, forbidden to break the common line, and expected to contribute only in a positive direction, the leader’s words stop being a thesis for discussion. They become an assignment.

That is exactly the context in which the following fragment, preserved on video from a congress lecture, is heard:

There is nothing besides this.
The more deeply you go into this subject.
I go deeper because I ask the Creator.
Because the Creator awakens such feelings in me.
Right now He speaks to me through the teacher.
That teacher, too, is a conduit of the Creator.

What matters is not only the sentence itself. What matters is the format into which it is inserted. This is not a private conversation and not an argument in which the listener retains distance. It is part of a congress practice organized by Laitman’s own system. And if the teacher is presented as a conduit of the Creator inside an environment where disagreement is preemptively removed by the rules of the circle, then the group receives not an invitation to think, but a ready-made scheme of submission.

Not a lecture, but a managed exercise

Inside Bnei Baruch, sadnaot were built as small circles, often of ten people. Everyone had to speak. Formally, this was called unity, inclusion in the friends, the building of a common desire. In practice, it meant something else: you were not supposed to come into the circle with hard negation, disrupt the proposed thought, or bring cold skepticism into it. You were allowed to add, agree, reinforce.

Inside such a frame, any controversial phrase changes function. If Laitman had said these words in an open debate, a listener could take them as a religious metaphor or as a personal theological idiom. But in sadnaot, the phrase that the Creator speaks through the teacher stops being just a statement. It becomes a formula the group is expected to experience together, repeat, and strengthen.

That is why this fragment cannot be read as a stray mystical remark. It is part of a procedure.

The teacher between the human being and the Creator

In this scheme, Laitman is not simply asking for ordinary respect toward a mentor. He places the teacher between the human being and the Creator. If the Creator speaks through the teacher, then a question directed at the teacher starts to be felt not as a normal doubt, but as a flaw inside the disciple.

This logic fits closely with what has already been documented in the entry point to the investigation: inside the movement, the participant is expected to give up independent thought and submit to the “opinion of society” set from above. The video fragment from the congress shows how this principle worked not only as ideology, but as a live technique of influence.

The same movement appears in Katya Sukhova’s testimony, where dependence is built around a formula: Laitman is the only one who can bring her to the Creator. There, that idea is used for sexual submission. Here, it is used for collective tuning of consciousness. The surface is different. The base is the same: the spiritual path is tied not to truth as such, but to unconditional passage through the figure of the leader.

Self-programming disguised as unity

The most precise word for this format is not discussion, but self-programming. A person hears the thesis from Laitman. Then he sits in a circle and has to restate the same thought in an approving register. Then he hears the others repeat it in almost the same words. After several such rounds, the formula no longer sounds like an external command. It starts to feel like one’s own inner understanding.

That is the strength of the circular technique. It does not crush resistance with a crude order. It dissolves resistance in the collective rhythm. Each participant confirms the previous one. Repetition begins to look like spiritual unity. In reality, that unity is built on pre-filtered speech, where disagreement is simply not included in the acceptable range.

People do not merely listen to Laitman. They help each other fasten the required thought in place. And that is precisely what is later called advancement, unity, common work.

Why this matters beyond one congress

This kind of fragment matters not as an exotic detail of internal jargon and not as the oddity of a single lecture. It helps explain a broader contour that runs through the entire investigation.

In the article on the “Global Garden”, the language of spiritual trial and inner unity was used to divert attention from checkable facts about violence, humiliation, and danger to children. There too, ideological language worked as a means of self-defense for the leadership. The sadnaot fragment shows where such susceptibility is formed in the first place: people are trained in advance to experience correctness as agreement with the frame set from above.

When a disciple spends years in a system where the teacher is not an interlocutor but a conduit of the Creator, complaint begins to feel almost like a spiritual offense. Disagreement is easily translated into egoism. Doubt becomes weakness. External verification becomes destruction of unity. In such a structure, it is no longer necessary to persuade a person anew every time that he should not trust himself. That work has already been done earlier, in the circle, in the ritual, in the collective repetition.

Not theology, but a technology of power

Laitman did not need to tell his disciples outright, “treat me as the Creator.” For stable dependence, something else was enough: to place himself in the position of a channel through which a higher will supposedly passes, and then to place the followers in a format where that position cannot be checked or disputed, only reinforced.

That is why this fragment should be read not as abstract theology, but as a technology of power. From the outside, sadnaot may look like harmless workshops on unity. Inside, they work as a mechanism for aligning consciousness. A person learns not to seek truth, but to tune himself to it in a ready-made form. The group helps him mistake that for his own spiritual experience.

In that sense, Laitman’s phrase that the Creator speaks through the teacher matters not only in itself. It shows how an environment was built in which the leader’s words gradually stopped being the words of one man and began to be experienced as something standing above ordinary verification.

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Read next: Michael Laitman and Bnei Baruch: where to begin reading this investigation — how independent thought was methodically suppressed inside the movement; Katya Sukhova’s testimony — how spiritual dependence was turned into sexual submission; the story of the “Global Garden” — how the language of “spiritual trial” was used to protect the system in a moment of crisis.

Sources

This article is based on a video recording of a fragment from a lecture by Michael Laitman at a Bnei Baruch congress, held in the editors' archive. The quoted block above is reproduced from that recording.