Kabbalistic Insightsby Thiago Moshe
Monica Berg on desire, regret, and the life happening now
Monica Berg opens with a question that sounds simple: who defines a meaningful life? Watching her son Josh play guitar without worrying about talent or outcome, she sees how much of our joy has been surrendered to the need to turn everything into an achievement. Rosh Hashanah calls us back to the source of desire and to the life already here.
Desire belongs to the soul, but an unfulfilled desire does not have to become failure. Monica Berg teaches us to release the exact form we imagined while preserving the living energy within it. That energy can fuel another door, another act, and another way to love.
Monica Berg begins with a question we tend to answer too quickly: who decides what makes a life meaningful? Culture offers familiar measurements, including recognition, talent, milestones reached at the expected age, and admiration. When Josh was born, she also viewed his future through those lenses and through fear.
Twenty-four years later, Josh's life reveals the limitation of those measurements. His value does not depend on how he is perceived or on a list of accomplishments. He creates meaning through the presence, curiosity, and joy with which he meets people. The important question changes from “What have I achieved?” to “What do my thoughts, words, and actions awaken in life?”
Josh plays guitar with his whole heart even though he does not master the chords as his sister does. For him, the experience already has value because it makes him happy. Monica then recognizes a limitation in herself: she avoided activities unless she could be good at them, succeed, or build a career.
When competence becomes the condition for participation, we reduce life to the territory in which we already know how to win. We lose the space for discovery, play, and expression that has nothing to prove. Doing something because it awakens life within us is also an outcome. It may be one of the few outcomes we can receive while the experience is happening.
Painting quickly produces a question about selling. Singing makes someone ask when it will be posted. Writing seems to require a book. Monica Berg describes a culture that converts expression into production and measures even joy by the outcome it can generate.
The story of King David offers another image. He dances before the Creator, despite Michal's contempt, because his joy needs somewhere to go. The act does not require approval, an audience, or usefulness. There are moments when singing, dancing, painting, or writing return movement to the soul. When every pleasure must justify its existence, we forget that being alive is already a reason.
Monica Berg teaches that kabbalists identify desire with the soul itself. A baby wants everything it sees because it has not yet learned to narrow that force. Over time, we begin directing it toward objects, outcomes, and images that may not serve us. The energy is real even when the destination we chose for it is too small.
Feeling a lack, therefore, does not mean there is something wrong with our capacity to desire. Lack may reveal that powerful energy has been placed where it can no longer circulate. The work is not to destroy desire. It is to ask what the desire was seeking in essence and allow that force to find a wider expression.
Monica Berg uses the image of the Creator as a mountain and each soul as a small stone that belongs to it. As we follow our own path, we forget the source and begin experiencing our desires as signs of separation: this is missing, that was lost, and what should have happened has not yet arrived.
Rosh Hashanah offers a return to the source. Bringing desire back to the mountain means placing it before the goodness and abundance to which the soul belongs. Desire stops being an accusation against life and becomes a point of connection again. Its form may still be unclear, but its source no longer needs to be forgotten.
Calling to the Brazilians in the room, Monica Berg finds in saudade a word for desire that remains even without an expectation of fulfillment. The story she tells contains pain, but also sweetness. What did not happen continues to reveal a capacity to love.
Not every unfulfilled desire is a failure, and longing does not always need to disappear for life to continue. Saudade can become fuel when we separate the energy from the form it lost. Love can still care. Creativity can still make something. Tenderness can still reach another person. The object does not return, but the quality of soul held within the desire remains available.
Monica Berg shares that she returned to a lost opportunity and did everything she could in the physical world to recover it. She gave her one percent and moved through anguish and pain, but the desired result did not occur. The effort revealed that her deepest regret was not merely losing the opportunity. It was not having trusted the Creator when she made the decision.
She could not reopen the past, but she rebuilt a relationship in the present. Regret stopped being a verdict on who she was and became a passage into trust. We do not always receive the chance to repeat the same choice. We can, however, build now the consciousness we wish we had brought to that choice.
We can spend years watching a closed door and use its absence as a condition for postponing joy. While we wait for life to return to the form we imagined, other doors, relationships, and possibilities appear without receiving our attention. The singer in Monica's story wanted to dance. An injury closed that path, but the music she had recorded opened another.
Looking at the view does not erase pain or turn deprivation into an ideal. It is the choice to remain present to what still exists. Monica closes with small scenes: sunlight on the face, a child, a book in the yard, and the water before someone who owns almost nothing. Life does not begin after the outcome. It is asking for our presence now.
If I released the old form, what could this energy create now?
Source: Monica Berg's Rosh Hashanah 5787 welcome lecture, broadcast live from New York by the Kabbalah Centre on September 11, 2026. This synthesis in Thiago Moshe's own voice is based on the original English transcript and the approved Brazilian Portuguese subtitles. This page is not a transcript.
The centerpiece uses two standard Hebrew forms chosen by the editor to represent the lecture's movement. Ratzon means desire; simcha means joy. They are not Hebrew quotations from Monica Berg.
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