Weekly Consciousness by Karen Berg

Many of you may know that Rav Shimon bar Yochai, the author of the Zohar, lived in a cave for 13 years to escape persecution from the Romans. What you might not know is the story of when Rav Shimon left the cave and first saw his father in law, Rav Pinchas Ben Yair. As you can imagine, Rav Shimon’s body was covered in sores and almost withered away after living in dirt and barely seeing sunlight for so long.

Many times we believe that when we work very hard and we spend our lives building, doing, and getting, at the end of the road we will find happiness. We will finally feel content. Unfortunately, what happens many times is that we never get to the end of the road, and the lasting fulfillment eludes us.

Today, we enter into the lunar month of Taurus (the bull): the sign of strength, loyalty, beauty, and persistence. Over the next four weeks, we will all be able to have the fortitude to stay on top of the things that we believe in and to overcome those things that stop us from achieving our goals, which are what give us life, strength, and of course, the ability to grow.

The Bible says that when the Israelites left Egypt, Moses didn’t take them out in a direct way. Instead, he led them in such away that they wouldn’t be able to find their way back to Egypt. Because of the route they took, they experienced many hardships.

Please join us this Sunday, April 24, at 4:00pm, when we will gather at 2030 Ocean Avenue at Santa Monica beach, just prior to the holiday of the Seventh Day of Pesach (Passover). Together with our local and streaming community, we will read from the Zohar and send our unified healing energy into the sea.

Last week I had the honor of meeting with Governor Cesar Duarte of the state of Chihuahua, Mexico, on behalf of the Kabbalah Centre.

We spoke about the atrocities and tremendous challenges facing his state. In Mexico, 40,000 lives have been lost in 5 years. Many of the victims are under 18. Survivors are often left as orphans -- there are 17,000 in the state of Chihuahua alone. Towns are becoming depopulated due to violent killings, for instance, in Monterrey, where two drug mafias are locked in vicious competition.

If each incident is a word in the language of the world, what would the world be saying?

It seems from minute to minute there is some new disaster making the headlines. We're just recovering from one world-altering, paradigm-shifting event and another follows: Revolutions, earthquakes, tsunamis, animals dying en mass. We listen to the analysts who offer speculations and predictions on what led to these disasters and what future disasters will be caused by these events, but how can we understand what is really happening?

Tolerance across our differences, mutual respect because there's a spark of the Creator in all of us and shared responsibility to make our world a better place: these are values Dr. Jehan Sadat and I discussed last week in London to an audience of more than 500. Although the conference was planned more than eight months ago, given the recent uprising in Egypt, our event could not have materialized at a more relevant time.

In this time, Uranus is entering Aries and will stay there for about 7 years. Uranus is the planet that rules Aquarius, and it represents unpredictability, revolutions, and individuality. Aries is controlled by Mars which is considered to be the planet of war. What we can expect is to see even greater revolutions and more natural disasters.

Recently, I have traveled to different Kabbalah Centres around the world and spoken on the topic of Reincarnation.

And the question I asked of those who attended was…Who cares?  What difference does it make if I know about, or even believe in, reincarnation, for that matter.

I’ll tell you what difference it makes.  The difference is that if I can understand what I came back for, I can fix it.  And by fixing it, I can heal the chaos in my life and eventually do my part in healing the chaos in the world.