The secret of death
and the invitation to become a fanatic for eternal life
This page is a synthesis of Michael Berg's Shabbat lesson on the Pinchas portion, a map to help you return to the source. Behind stories that seem disconnected, Pinchas's spiritual rise, the sacrifices, the request of Tzelofchad's daughters, the Sefat Emet reveals a single truth: the time has come for the awakening to come from within us.
Michael Berg repeats, like a refrain, the words of the blessing we say over the Torah: chayei olam natah betocheinu, "He planted eternal life within us." Death can never touch what is truly alive. If we still feel pain, loss, and darkness, it's because we placed that spark of eternal life in places where it was never meant to be.
The Pinchas portion gathers events that, at first glance, seem to have nothing to do with one another: Pinchas's spiritual rise, a long discussion of sacrifices in the Tabernacle, and the request of Tzelofchad's daughters, who stand up to say that the law, as it stood, made no sense, and they were right. Read literally, it looks like just another ancient story among many.
But the great kabbalist Sefat Emet teaches something different: what happened in that moment keeps happening, now, in the energy of this Shabbat. And that energy, says Michael Berg, carries one of the most fundamental teachings of Rav Ashlag, founder of the Kabbalah Centre, and of how Rav Berg and Karen Berg have led the Kabbalah Centre to this day.
In the first forty years in the desert, Moshe was the one who led: the Light shone from above and he guided the Israelites on how to receive it, what kabbalists call awakening from above. But the Sefat Emet teaches that, with Pinchas, something shifts: now it falls to the Israelites to begin the awakening on their own, without passively waiting for Moshe to show them where the Light is shining.
That's why it isn't Moshe who rises up in this portion, but Pinchas, and why it's Tzelofchad's daughters, not Moshe himself, who bring the right idea. Moshe himself didn't know the answer, because this wasn't a question about the law, but a generational shift in how each person relates to the Creator's Light.
Until Rav Ashlag, spiritual transmission always ran in a single direction: from teacher to student. Rav Ashlag set off a revolution, not because he had an idea and put it into practice, but because, as Rav Avraham Azulai teaches, there are moments in human history when a shift occurs in the spiritual realm, and someone has to open a door for that shift to take hold.
The same is true of Rav Berg and Karen Berg in the 1970s: they didn't decide, on their own, to change something, the change was already underway, and they chose to align with it. Michael Berg shares that, in a recent gathering with Kabbalah Centre teachers, he sensed things are shifting again, and it's exactly that willingness to sense and open up that he asks of each of us.
Michael Berg is direct: if today you're doing exactly what you were doing ten, twenty, thirty years ago, something is wrong, not because the old path was false, but because the spiritual realms never stand still. What was the right path in the first forty years became the wrong path in the next forty. The same tool that once served us may, today, no longer be what spiritual reality is asking for.
That's why he insists: without belonging to a community that asks, together, what the spiritual need of this moment is, and without asking the Creator that same question, we risk continuing to do, with all the best intentions, yesterday's work.
Michael Berg recalls the blessing we say over the Torah: chayei olam natah betocheinu, the Creator planted eternal life within us. Kabbalists teach that death can never touch what is truly alive. If that's true, why have almost all of us already felt pain, illness, darkness, and, in the end, death itself?
The answer, he says, is the secret: death only touches the places where a person put their eternal life where it shouldn't be. A simple example, which Monica Berg brought just before this lesson: when someone gives a speech and worries about what the person in front of them is thinking, that person is taking a spark of their eternal life and placing it exactly where it doesn't belong.
Here's the turn. Whenever we place our spark of eternal life somewhere it doesn't belong, there's a protection system: the Creator, as a favor, separates that spark from that place, and keeps it safe, until we can reclaim it away from the falsehood where we had planted it. For anyone still believing the illusion, that separation feels like pain, embarrassment, illness, or loss. But in truth, it's a renewal.
That's why every experience of pain is, underneath, an experience of life: a reminder that we invested where we shouldn't have, and one more step toward what kabbalists call Olam HaEmet, the world of truth. The pain stops being only suffering and becomes an invitation too.
The Torah calls Pinchas, and later Eliyahu, kanai, a word used to name someone radical, who takes things to the extreme. Tradition teaches that Eliyahu never had to die, because day after day he eliminated every investment in falsehood and in the dark places of his own life. He lived, and lives, forever: b'chayei olam.
But Michael Berg is clear about where that radicalism lives: nothing outside me. It's not being a fanatic toward anyone or anything external, it's being radical inside me: no longer tolerating my ego butting in, no longer allowing myself to care what people think of me, protecting, with fanaticism, the eternal life already inside me.
Michael Berg closes the lesson by gathering five fundamental ideas: life can never be touched by death; the secret of death is that the Creator, as a favor, separates our eternal life from the dark places where we put it; whoever lives attached to the ego thankfully needs to go through that separation; whoever does the daily work of recognizing the illusion becomes a true fanatic, and simply experiences life; and the world will only transform when enough people are internally fanatic about protecting their own eternal life.
The invitation he leaves is simple and demanding at once: make your own list of everything, people, opinions, outcomes, where you keep investing time and energy while knowing, underneath, that it's illusory. And decide, today, and again tomorrow, not to risk your eternal life in those places anymore.
Today, where am I placing my eternal life, in truth, or in illusion?
About this page: free synthesis, in Thiago Moshe's voice, of Michael Berg's Shabbat lesson on the Pinchas portion (July 19, 2025). The teaching about awakening from above and awakening from below is attributed by Michael Berg to the Sefat Emet; the Hebrew passage cited by the Sefat Emet in the lesson wasn't available in the transcription and was therefore omitted from this page.
The reading of Pinchas and Eliyahu as kanai and the five fundamental ideas about death are attributed by Michael Berg to the kabbalists and to Rav Berg. The example about worrying over others' opinions is attributed to Monica Berg. The highlighted phrases are paraphrases of the teacher's words.
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