Masters of Our Destiny

Tonight, almost four thousand Kabbalah Centre students from our global spiritual community will meet in Anaheim, California, for Rosh Hashanah. From a kabbalistic standpoint, Rosh Hashanah is not a religious holiday meant for one particular group of people. Rather, it is a window in time when all of humanity has the opportunity to reboot and receive a clean slate for the year to come. From a spiritual perspective, the chaos in our lives is the accumulation of our many lifetimes of negative actions and reactions. In effect, when we perform an action today, it may take a long time before we experience its consequences. It could be 20 or 30 years before we find ourselves saying, “Ech! How could this happen to me?” Rosh Hashanah is a reminder that we are the masters of our destiny and that, by transforming our consciousness, we can alter the future that we ourselves created in our past lives. Rosh Hashanah is the time when, through our spiritual work, we can nullify any negativity that we injected into the cosmos over the past year. I’m sure you’ve heard about the Holy Temples that were destroyed in Jerusalem. But what you may not know is that the reason it was destroyed was because the people didn’t understand the concept of having kavod for each other. Translated from Hebrew to English, kavod means honor or respect; in other words, the destruction of the Temples occurred because people were not able or willing to extend human dignity to their fellow beings. For those of us who really want to make a lasting difference in the world, we need to learn how to create a union with one another—a union based on acknowledging the spark of the Creator that is within each one of us. There’s no question about it. We are living in difficult times and there is a lot of pressure on us. But to create a lasting peace throughout the world, we need this pressure. We need this upheaval. We need it to be able to clear the lines, the veils, the energies of the negativity that have existed for so long. And we are there. Now is the time. We can create an everlasting peace. It’s like taking a piece of coal out of the earth and using it for fuel. But if we take that same piece of coal out of the earth and put it under tons and tons of pressure, then, and only then, do we get a diamond. Everything that is happening in the world today is happening simply to get us to this key moment, to this place where all people will understand that they must to open their minds and their hearts and embrace a consciousness that we, all of us, need to change—not to change who we are and what we are, but rather, to be who we really are, and to recognize and joyfully accept the opinions of our dearest foe as long as they are in harmony with human dignity and sharing.