From Creation to Consciousness to Service
“Finding my voice was only the beginning.”
It took me years to understand that.
For a long time, finding my voice felt like the destination. My journey through music, healing, creativity, and consciousness had been deeply personal. I had experienced what could happen when a person begins to hear herself again, when something that has been silenced or hidden finally has permission to come forward.
Then, in 2004, something changed.
I had given birth to my son and finished the first draft of the story that would eventually become The Road to Malchuta. I had spent years exploring voice, empowerment, and healing, and suddenly keeping those experiences to myself no longer made sense.
I wanted to share them.
I began giving workshops, particularly with women who needed a place to be heard. I created a performance that brought together story, music, dance, and participation. I wasn’t interested in performing at people. I wanted to create an experience in which something could happen within them.
Looking back, I can see that this was a turning point.
Creation began as a way to discover and express myself. Slowly, it became something else.
It became service.
And with that came a different question.
Finding your voice matters enormously. But eventually we have to ask:
What is your voice for?
I have been thinking about this question again as I write this series and consider the extraordinary technological transformation we are living through.
We talk constantly about what artificial intelligence will be able to do. What jobs it will perform, what problems it will solve, what it will create, how intelligent it will become.
But perhaps capability isn’t the most important question.
What will all this new capability be in service of?
Human beings have always been creators. We create paintings and songs, but we also create families, businesses, schools, technologies, communities, economies and political systems. We create stories about who belongs and what matters. We create ways of living together.
In other words, we don’t only create things.
We create the conditions in which life happens.
That realization changes the conversation for me.
Technology can give us enormous power to shape those conditions. Artificial intelligence can help us solve problems, accelerate research, remove repetitive work and make knowledge available in ways previous generations could hardly have imagined.
But technology cannot decide what all that power is for.
That remains a human question.
And perhaps this is where consciousness becomes so important.
I don’t believe the purpose of becoming more conscious is simply to become endlessly fascinated with ourselves. Inner work matters because it changes what we can bring into the world.
At some point, Who am I? becomes What am I here to contribute?
Healing becomes empowerment. Empowerment becomes responsibility. And our gifts, whatever they happen to be, can become a form of service.
In the Jewish tradition, I return again and again to an ancient idea: Tikkun Olam, the repair of the world.
I don’t experience this as a command to go out and heroically save humanity.
For me, it is something both humbler and more demanding. It is the understanding that the life I cultivate within myself eventually has to meet the life around me. Whatever consciousness, creativity, courage, compassion or wisdom I develop can become something I offer.
Perhaps our gifts are not only ours.
Perhaps they are also our particular way of participating in the world.
When I look at the civilization we have created, I see extraordinary beauty and ingenuity. I also see fear, scarcity, cruelty, loneliness, poverty and war. I see a planet under enormous pressure, and societies in which too many people never have the safety or opportunity to discover what they are capable of becoming.
I believe we can imagine something beyond that.
I imagine a civilization that understands our profound interdependence while still cherishing our differences. A world in which cultures and traditions can flourish without needing to dominate one another. A world in which the Earth is cared for as the living home
we share.
I imagine societies where prosperity is not built on someone else’s suffering, where elders remain part of community, where creativity is considered essential rather than decorative, and where technological progress is measured partly by whether it actually improves human and planetary life.
Most of all, I imagine a world in which every child is protected and cherished, and every woman and man has the possibility to discover and develop what is uniquely theirs to give.
Is that idealistic?
Of course it is.
But every civilization is built first around an idea of what is valuable.
And this is why I find our technological moment both challenging and enormously exciting.
If intelligent machines can eventually take over more of the work that drains human time without developing human potential, what could we do with the freedom they create?
Could we spend more time caring? Teaching? Making? Mentoring? Restoring ecosystems? Growing food? Creating music? Building communities? Sitting with someone who is lonely? Solving problems that have seemed impossible?
Could greater technological intelligence actually give us the opportunity to cultivate greater human intelligence: emotional, relational, creative, embodied and spiritual?
It won’t happen automatically.
Technology can amplify consciousness, but it can also amplify unconsciousness. It can connect us or isolate us. It can distribute knowledge or manipulate attention. It can free our time or simply give us new ways to fill every remaining second.
The tools cannot make that choice for us.
We do.
Perhaps that is why this entire journey has brought me back to Queen Sheba.
When I first began writing her story more than twenty years ago, I thought I was writing about a young woman preparing to become a queen.
Today I understand the question underneath her journey differently.
She wasn’t simply learning how to lead a kingdom.
She was becoming someone capable of being entrusted with one.
That, to me, is Malchuta.
Not power over others, but the inner sovereignty that makes service possible. Not building a kingdom for ourselves, but becoming conscious enough to ask what kind of world our choices are helping to create.
And perhaps this is also the question before us now.
We are acquiring extraordinary power.
But are we becoming people capable of being entrusted with it?
That may be one of the defining questions of our time.
Because crafting the future isn’t something that happens in laboratories, technology companies, or governments alone. We participate in it through what we value, what we teach our children, what we reward, what we automate, what we continue to practice ourselves, how we use our attention, what we create and what we choose to serve.
The future isn’t simply approaching us.
We are practicing it.
Every day.
Perhaps crafting the future begins with crafting ourselves. But I no longer believe it can end there.
Creation led me toward consciousness.
Consciousness led me toward responsibility.
And responsibility keeps leading me back toward service.
I don’t know what artificial intelligence will be capable of in twenty years. None of us does. But technological capability alone cannot tell us what kind of civilization is worth building.
That question still belongs to us.
So at the end of these five chapters, I find myself not with an answer, but with a question I want to carry forward:
Who must we become to create the civilization we want to inhabit?
And perhaps there is an even more immediate one:
What are we creating today that helps bring that civilization into being?
