Press
Change Yourself, Change the World
IS there something that you want to change in your life? Have a smaller waistline, find a better job, or have a closer relationship with your kids or your husband?
Or maybe you want to change the future of the country? You want your kababayan to get out of extreme poverty, have jobs here at home instead of slaving abroad under foreign bosses, and have their families just be able to eat three square meals a day and have a roof over their heads?
Yehuda Berg, codirector of the Kabbalah Center International (yes, the one that Madonna goes to), says change happens when we start believing that things don’t have to be the way they are.
“I’m a believer in the idea that if we change ourselves, we can change our world. It starts with the belief that things can be different. It sounds simple, but you can talk about this country. You know with all the potential, it’s in an earthquake zone, in a typhoon zone, [facing] all these potential catastrophes that are ready to happen. Then you have the socioeconomic divide that exists. You think, let’s see what it looks like now, and then let’s see how it looks in a hundred years. Will it be different? That’s where the change starts to happen. You can look at our life, see what’s different and how much of our lives are exactly the same. Are we going to be different? The answer to all that starts with a decision: yes, it can be. And then, you believe that it can be different.”
Yehuda, an acclaimed author and Kabbalist, and voted one of the top rabbis in the US by the magazine Newsweek in 2007, was in Manila recently to talk about change, and promote his latest book, Kabbalah, The Power to Change Everything. He sat down for lunch with a handful of journalists to discuss his book, expound a bit on the Kabbalah, the path to wisdom, and how to be agents of change, and, yes, talk shop not only about Madonna but also, who else, Manny Pacquiao! (He is a fan of the Pacman and rues the cancellation of the fight with Floyd Mayweather Jr.)
While the Kabbalah may have become popular recently because of Madonna, raised as a Catholic and now a follower, it would be a mistake to think that this is some new pop psychology or New Age cult movement. The Kabbalah is over 4,000 years old, and is basically a system of beliefs or teachings meant to explain man’s connection or place in the universe, his creation, his connection/relationship to the Creator, or, if you will, answer the “Who am I?” and “Why am I here?” questions. Its origins are steeped in Judaism esoteric thought, and were thought to be knowledge handed down directly from God to Adam.
That being so, for centuries, Judaism’s elders actually forbade the teaching of the Kabbalah except to the very select few; at one time, rabbis were supposed to share this path to universal wisdom with only one student each. Of course, this also meant that women were forbidden to learn the Kabbalah, and to this day many traditional rabbis still believe this, which is why Madonna’s studies became highly controversial in the Jewish community.
Of course, since Barack Obama’s run for the US presidency, all this talk about “change” has become some sort of a limp call to arms. Needless to say, there also has been little explanation how this will actually be achieved.
“The Kabbalah has always talked about change. Change is something people run away from. People are afraid of what’s different. In the past, people were happier to stay the same because they were afraid of the things they didn’t know. But things have gotten to the point that now we’d rather take a risk on the unknown and, hopefully, things will get better than the present. And so, yes, it can be a slogan, but it shouldn’t be.”
Addressing the current political events in the US, and, in a way, touching on our own upcoming presidential elections, Yehuda continues: “Change isn’t something you can vote for. Change isn’t something that’s external to us. Change is something that’s internal, not somebody that can do the job for us. You build a road and something will happen. Or as Americans are experiencing today and hopefully you won’t have to undergo here, promises of change, if it’s not a partnership with the people and having real leaders who represent the people, won’t yield much. If individuals don’t change, no one will be a messiah for us.”
So what about Madonna? Isn’t the Kabbalah supposed to teach us about ourselves and how to better handle our relationships with other people? I ask Yehuda why he thinks her marriage with film director Guy Richie fell apart.
“First of all, not everyone’s supposed to be with everyone. Sometimes there’s more positivity in being separate than in being together. Just like there are people looking to find the right one, there’s a bunch of people with the wrong one that are afraid to be alone. I’m not here to judge who should be together or who shouldn’t be together. But there’s no question she’s a better person today than she was 10 to 12 years ago. Twelve years ago, she was doing [the book] Sex. Now she has a charity helping children in Malawi and all this stuff. In her personal life, if you ask her, I’m sure she’ll tell you that her personal life’s great right now.” (Of course, I quipped, maybe even better for Guy; he did score a hit recently with Sherlock Holmes.)
Aside from the Kabbalah explaining how and why things are the way they are, it also teaches its followers not to be judgmental. “We believe in tolerance for others who do not believe in what we believe in—whether it’s what jeans to wear or somebody has a different path. That’s OK; there are many paths to God...and just because someone is not following our path exactly doesn’t mean we can or should judge him. We believe we’re responsible for our life, and there are certain things that happen which you can explain, and there is a reason everything that’s in my life is in my life. If you go through all sorts of terrible experiences and still exist in this world, and you find your voice, you can use that to help others. Sometimes we’re just channels to help others remove their suffering.”
“Sometimes we make the same mistakes over and over, and the same things seem to be happening again and again. How many elections have you had where it’s just the same thing?” asks Yehuda. “But there’s a portion of the population that believes things can get better. It is not only the decisions we make that influence our lives, because our indecision or not making a decision is also a decision. Just like accepting things as they are is also a decision. It’s like that movie Die Hard. Many people go about in this life-as-usual bubble. Nothing extra happens. They see things happening around them, but they don’t go out and decide to save the people in the building.”
“At some point,” he stresses, “you just have to jump in and do something.”
