September 21, 2006

Sometimes it seems it is almost impossible to open a newspaper without seeing a celebrity sporting the telltale red string of Kabbalah. But the founders of the global, money-minting spiritual phenomenon remain shrouded in secrecy. Now, for the first time, Karen Berg has agreed to talk. Jocasta Shakespeare travels to its Beverly Hills HQ to meet Tinseltown's high priestess.

The face of a bearded mystic stares down from the wall of the inner sanctum. An ancient text written in Aramaic, called the Zohar, sits on a shelf below, and the sacred 72 names of God are emblazoned in arcane formulae on its pages. The mysterious guardians of this esoteric tradition are themselves shrouded in secrecy and speculation.

In spite of the dusty tome and white-robed guru, the temple of this religion is in Beverly Hills and its followers include such celebrities as David Beckham, Naomi Campbell, Demi Moore, Roseanne Barr, Britney Spears, Paris Hilton and, most vociferously, Madonna –– an A-list that rivals even that of Scientology, whose offices are nearby.

Kabbalah followers wear bracelets of red string around their wrists, supposedly to ward off the evil eye. Although influenced in the past by Freemasonry and the magical ‘dark arts’, Kabbalah has emerged anew into the glare of Hollywood. But no one knows whether Kabbalah is a benign institution or –– as anti-cult activists and orthodox Rabbis claim ––– a dangerous cult run by charlatans. And no one knows who is really in control of this phenomenal ‘spiritual’ enterprise, with its 51 Kabbalah Centres worldwide from Rio to Bogota, and 3.5 million converts.

The Kabbalah leaders are separated from their followers by their exalted and messianic position. It is impossible even to get into the Kabbalah Centre unless you are a signed up student and have paid the £150 to join a Power of Kabbalah workshop. Even then, you will not glimpse the septuagenarian guru known as ‘the Rav’, or his wife Karen Berg in person unless you are lucky enough to be invited to join them at the dinner-dance they preside over on Friday nights in the Los Angeles Kabbalah Centre.

The leaders of this ultra-exclusive club do not appear in public –– it is only here, for the first time, that we are able to see inside Kabbalah and meet the woman who is its inspiration and controller.

Karen Berg controls this phenomenal organisation from her world headquarters in Hollywood. While her mate is assumed to be the messianic master, she oversees the day-to-day workings of the Kabbalah Centres and commands business expansion. ‘The Enforcer’ does not give interviews and, although journalists have tried to infiltrate and investigate her organisation, she has not directly answered questions or offered insight into the workings of the Kabbalah Centres.

In fact, she has hired a posse of publicists, media watchdogs and crisis management firms, as well as life coach Shore Slocum, to keep the inquisitive world at bay. While the list of celebrity followers grows and the glitterati claim Kabbalah as a spiritual tool to bring prosperity and fulfilment, Karen Berg and the Rav remain the mysterious and powerful instigators of this secret organisation.

It took The Observer a year to get this interview. Finally, Karen Berg agreed to talk about ‘the spiritual role of women in the universe’ and how she has made Kabbalah, once allowed only to Jewish men over the age of 40, accessible to men and women of all religious beliefs. But, even after months of final negotiation and checking of itineraries, when I finally arrive at the world headquarters in LA I find that a human shield of worried personal assistants and nervous media ‘hosts’ still separates me from Karen Berg. It is like visiting Cold War Russia, with my movements watched and checked by employees communicating within the Centre on closed-system mobile phones.

Waiting to meet Karen Berg, a phone is suddenly thrust into my hand. My media ‘host’ from the Visioneering Group is on the line. “They are nervous,” he says. “Your photographer is unsupervised, please keep the photographer with you at all times.” Our snapper has been waiting for two hours and is taking a turn around the inner courtyard.

Next, I am ushered into a quiet courtyard. Then, at last, upstairs into the inner sanctum of Karen Berg’s private office, where a tapestry of hunting dogs fawning upon their master hangs above a brown velvet sofa. Behind it, a fig tree spreads glossy leaves, and a faux-medieval painting of a Tree of Life completes the setting as I wait for the High Priestess of a 4,000-year-old mystery cult to reveal herself at last.

Instead a blonde, designer-clad woman with swaying hips emerges from behind a teak desk, a mug of coffee in her hand. She slumps on to the sofa facing me, lounging back against the velvet pile with one thigh resting on the cushions, the other leg stretched out in an obviously easy manner.

Karen Berg is ready to begin, but this is not what I was expecting. I was expecting a regal, icy approach and perhaps some modest ethnic garb ––– covered legs and arms, perhaps. This apparition of sexy-secretary-meets-Rodeo-Drive is disarming. She looks 10 years younger than her 64 years, with a Shelley Winters style of womanly lassitude that makes me think she must have given the old Rav a good time in his day.

She fixes me now with green eyes and says, “I couldn’t have done it without him: he has the knowledge.” Her clothes may be designer LA, but her voice still has its New Yorker’s twang. She winks at me, conspiratorially: “The fact that I’m talking to you now means we probably had an encounter in the last lifetime." This is Karen Berg, 64, Kabbalah Queen, head of a global ‘spiritual’ enterprise and Madonna’s soul solution. Should I be flattered?

Platitudes fall from her lips –– her favourite subjects are reincarnation, star-signs, clothes and boys –– or ‘talking about relationships’. She has inspired a new ‘technology for the soul’ that shifts shed loads of DVDs and books called Divine Sex and Becoming Like God, as well as red-string wristbands costing £17 each and ‘blessed’ Kabbalah water costing nearly four pounds a bottle. But her perfectly manicured nails and blow-dried hairdo, her assumption of casual intimacy and tea-lady’s laugh suggest a happy housewife rather than a mystic muse.

It is as if the Wizard of Oz had suddenly revealed himself to be nothing but a little bald man with some good props. But her props are better and there is something fascinating about this Kabbalah powerhouse in the flesh. In her book God Wears Lipstick she says that what most women want is ‘to eat chocolate, party, have sex, dance,... We want those diamond earrings and Jimmy Choo shoes’, and the mundane nature of her desire is her charm. She is warm and friendly and I can’t help liking her.

These days she lives a millionaire lifestyle, surrounded by servants and adored by beautiful and powerful celebrity icons. Her manicures are no doubt better than they used to be, but her values have not changed. Unlike her female followers, Berg herself wears a beautiful diamond bracelet as well the cheap red string thing. Housewifely common sense has its compensations.

But it only goes so far. Berg says she met the Rav in a past life. “In my last life, I was in the Spanish revolution. I was with the Rav and he refused to change his religion. I scooted off and left him [she winks again, to punctuate this girltalk moment]. I didn’t have what it took to stay because the Spanish would have killed me and he said, "I’d sooner die than change what I am," and I said, "No, I’m leaving." I ask how she knows this to be true and she shakes her head and laughs: “Because you couldn’t have the kind of chalk-and-cheese relationship we do and have so much love between us unless there was some kind of karma connection that happened before, you know?”

In this life, Karen met the future Rav when she was 16 years old and worked as his secretary in an insurance firm in Queens, New York. “At first I didn’t like him,” she says now. “He was a different person.” Karen left the insurance firm to marry a builder at the age of 17 and had two daughters, Leah and Suri. Eight years later, when she was divorced, Karen met Gruberger again and felt ‘strangely flustered’ when asking him ‘a little breathlessly’ about his Kabbalah studies.

They met for dinner and, she says, “I have to tell you, at that meeting it was all over. We knew instantly that we were meant for each other.” Gruberger abandoned his wife and children soon after this meeting with Karen and reinvented himself as ‘Dr Philip Berg’.

Karen does not refer to her husband’s first marriage or children in her books and, until now, her Mills & Boon-style account of the romance has been offered as its own justification. Now she says for the first time that their affair was the working of a higher power. Her fate was proven by a dream she had in which Gruberger’s Kabbalah teacher appeared and spoke to her in Hebrew.

The study of dreams is offered as a Kabbalah Centre workshop and it is as if Karen’s own psychological struggles are reflected in the course studies of her followers. It is tempting to say that Kabbalah is the manifestation of Karen Berg herself –– plus a little Aramaic intoning from her bearded beloved.

Kabbalah is Karen’s invention: vast money minting, non- profit, tax-exempt ‘charity’. She has claimed copyright to the name ‘Kabbalah Centre’, retails the Zohar at £420 a set, and has successfully repackaged a 4000-year-old Judaic tradition. And so the Kabbalah Centre –– and the Rav himself –– was created.

After marrying Karen in 1971, Philip Berg began calling himself the Rav (‘the Receiver’). He had set up a learning centre in Tel Aviv, and this was followed by another in New York. Now, 35 years later, Karen looks wistful when she remembers those early years: “I had more then, than I do now: l had him, we had the girls, then we had our boys [Michael and Yeruda] and we had time to take them to the park, read stories, spend family time together.”

Here in Hollywood, the Rav has been welcomed as a messianic purveyor of the ‘Light’ –– the Kabbalists’ source of grace. Elizabeth Taylor endorsed his teachings as ‘a light to lead me through the darkness’, Winona Ryder wore a Kabbalah red-string bracelet during her shoplifting trial and, on her last tour, Madonna used Kabbalah’s ‘72 names of God’ as part of her set design; her teacher Yitzhak Sinwani performed a rap for the song ‘Isaac’. The rumour that Madonna is splitting from Kabbalah is firmly refuted and advertising by celebrities has boosted income.
 

Although no one knows exactly how much Karen Berg is now worth, tax documents filed between 2000 and 2003 show assets of approximately $60m for five of the non-profit entities controlled by the Bergs and, last year, the Kabbalah Centre in LA alone grossed $27m. Philip Berg also sold the intellectual property rights to many of his writings and audio-tapes to his own Kabbalah Centre for $2.5m. His wife is certainly able to live in swanky style, with an exclusive second home in Manhattan, suites in Hilton hotels when she travels overseas, real estate in nine American cities and, of course, the designer clothes. She is waited on, cooked for and cleaned for by 40 full-time volunteers called chevra. “They look after my lifestyle,” she says. “Which is great for me!”

Now she wants to defend her enormous wealth: “How much money does the Church have? How much money does Harvard University have? Of course, the Centre has money, but do you know of an organisation that functions without it?”

But what about the three mini-mansions built in Beverly Hills last year, using money donated to the Centre? One is now Karen’s, and her sons, Yeruda, 34, and Michael, 33, were also given one each. If Kabbalah is a charity, Karen and her family are receiving more than just spiritual grace and favour.

The next time I see Karen, she is presiding over the local Kabbalah community of about 400 people, which shows itself off at its most exuberant during Shabbat on Friday nights. This is the moment when the Rav is required to perform as a messianic focus for this extravagant weekly event. Kabbalists add wild singing and dancing to this usually solemn Jewish ceremony, as well as an intention to receive what they call ‘energy’, which is a mix of personal good fortune and unexplained cosmic powers.

Families are already spilling out on to the street in joyful abandon when I arrive for this extraordinary Kabbalists’ hoolie at eight o’clock in the evening. The entrance of the Centre is lit like a beacon in the Californian twilight as fathers carrying children on their shoulders come prancing out of the temple, where a huge stained-glass window depicts the 10 dimensions of the ‘Upper’ and ‘Endless worlds’.

Inside the temple, Rav is projected on to a giant screen for all to see. He is 76 years old and wears his kippah, spectacles and a long beard. A little doddery after his recent stroke, he intones the start of ceremonies in a melodic voice.

The dining room seats 200 people, each table laid with fan-folded purple napkins and a vase of sweet peas. Dinner costs $30 per head and we sit down to a feast of fish followed by beef and chicken with chocolate tiramisu for dessert. When the Rav enters, flanked by his sons and male associates, everyone in the room stands and applauds. He sits down with his family: Karen on his right hand side in a newly scrunched hairdo. Queen of this lavish occasion, her courtiers look longingly towards her table where she sits smiling happily.

Once the food has been cleared by the chevra, we begin what Esther calls ‘getting an elevated consciousness’, which means singing, jumping up and down, clapping and staring at the projection of an ancient Kabbalist’s tomb.

During a lull, talk around my table turns to the Kabbalists’ favourite subject: star signs. Suddenly there is silence and everyone opens palms to the ceiling, as if testing for rain. There is a noticeable decrease in sparkle as women’s hands, bearing an array of diamonds, are turned downwards. It is approaching midnight and babies have fallen asleep on their mothers’ chests. Finally, the Rav and the family leave the room and the chevra begin relaying for lunch the next day.

The speed with which the room now empties reminds me of one of Karen Berg’s more bizarre beliefs: “The best time for sex is Friday evening after midnight.” This is when ‘the purest souls waiting to incarnate sit around God. They are watching the couples as they copulate’. If they like what they see, the new souls ‘come down’. It may not sound arousing, but she says, “It’s perfectly natural to enjoy it.”

It is true that the Kabbalah Centres make many people feel very happy and fulfilled. In the spiritual supermarket, Kabbalah is one of the less toxic products: a psychotherapeutic study on the individual level, with courses that teach self-awareness, responsibility and the need to contribute to society.

But perhaps the happiest and most fulfilled Kabbalah convert is Karen Berg herself. She has built up an enviable family business and, while her husband is faltering, she has reached the apex of her own powers. Now in her prime, she is not about to abdicate her position.

“I think that where I am at the moment is where I’m going to be for the rest of my life. Kabbalah is not a job. I don’t play golf, not tennis. Because in the evening after five o’clock, we have meetings with the teachers, I will invite the girls over and we watch a movie together –– with the chevra ––– we have time to become friends. My children are next to me today. Nobody has left.”

And yet, I am left with a feeling of Karen Berg’s loneliness now that she has reached the zenith of her ambition ––– watching her favourite movie Groundhog Day again, at night in her private apartment with a handful of volunteer workers for company. So might any Roman Empress have felt, before the fall.

Last year, the Rav suffered a massive bilateral stroke and what most people most want to know now is ––– who is going to inherit his title and his power? Karen’s sons Michael and Yeruda have dedicated a lifetime of work to help build up the family business.

When asked who will inherit the Rav title she smiles and answers vaguely. “Not Michael... and not Yeruda,’ she decides. Not the girls ––– they are very sweet, but they come from a different place.” She mentions a teacher, Eitan Yerdeni, as a possibility. But could there ever be a female Rav? “Sure!” she says, almost too quickly. “Since the Rav has been sick I have taken on many more roles, wearing more hats, I’m stronger now than I ever was.” If nobody has realised who is really sitting on the Kabbalah throne, they should wake up and smell the incense.— Dawn/Observer Service

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