>     CNN is reporting that according to Jeffrey Sachs, Director of the Columbia University Earth Institute, the “biggest story” in the world is the escalating price of grain and the resulting riots taking place from “Haiti to Bangladesh to Egypt.” The story further goes on to say that Robert Zoellick, President of the World Bank, says that “soaring prices could mean seven lost years in the fight against world poverty.”
    I am struck by the Zoellick quote as it’s a mere five days until Passover, the Jewish Holiday that commemorates the Exodus from Egypt. Remember, that nation where Joseph, a Jew, ruled as Viceroy to Pharaoh because Pharaoh had a dream that only Joseph could interpret. His interpretation? Seven years of plenty followed by seven years of famine. His suggestion? Stock up while the gettin’s good. It was later in that same unfolding of history that Passover commemorates the going out, the Exodus, from Egyptian bondage to freedom in the Promised Land.
    Now I may be mixing some apples and oranges here…or not. But it seems to me that while history often repeats itself, so do spiritually based events where we have failed to learn the higher lesson.
    So here’s my take on all of this.
    We, the United States, the World, had it’s “seven years of plenty” and instead of stocking up, we super-consumed or squandered our plenty. Now, it looks like seven years of famine and the granaries are empty. Or maybe the grain is just being controlled by those who profit off of such matters.
    The point is that reliance on the “Egypt” of today, all those oil rich countries to which we pay homage because we’re addicted to “the way we’ve always done things” has created the mess that is now unfolding around us. Kabbalah, mystical Judaism, teaches that the Egypt of the Old Testament was not an actual nation but rather a “level of consciousness” to which the people had descended in their obsession with ego and materialism.
    If we are there again, what can each of us do if we’re not Bill and Melinda and have no charitable foundation from which to throw billions at the problem? Well, maybe not much in the way of dollars. But the problem didn’t happen overnight and neither will the solution. So work with what you have.
    You have compassion, prayer and the ability to change the way you value, and therefore treat, the planet, it’s resources and it’s inhabitants. You have the freedom to want less and use less. You have to think about whether that next purchase is necessary or habitual. Before you throw something away you have to first ask if someone else might need what it is you’re discarding and if the answer is “likely yes” then you have to take the time and make the effort to get that item to where it can be of help. You have to change the way you are living to consume less and contribute more.    
    Not more money. More conscious behavior around the idea that we are All One and what is happening in Haiti or Bangladesh or Egypt is happening to a part of You.
    Change the way you look at things and the things you look at change. It’s not just a cute self-help phrase. It’s physics. And we live in the physic-al world. So we really can make a difference by how we see things and how we act upon that vision.
    I’ll be celebrating Passover this weekend. Judaism demands that every year we treat the Seder meal as we recount the Exodus from slavery to freedom, as if it’s actually happening to us in real time. The last line in the Seder that’s repeated each year is “Next Year in Jerusalem.”
    Here’s a new twist.   
    This year we can be of higher consciousness.
    This year we can avoid past mistakes.
    This year we can trade in ego and materialism for compassion and service.
    This year around the world.

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