The gospel according to Shari
Tycoon owner of Bank Hapoalim baffles business community with new book detailing her abilities to communicate with the beyond. 'It's going to take people another 10 years to understand me,' she says
"All my life I've had visions and gotten messages. I've tapped into many of my past lives like that," businesswoman Shari Arison told reporters at a launching of her new book "Birth".
Arison is an Israeli-American businesswoman, who owns several prominent business, the largest of which is Bank Hapoalim. She is also a constant feature on Forbes Magazine's "Richest People in the World" list.
"You can do business while benefiting your surroundings," she said. "The past few years have taught us that an economy that considers the environment makes a financial profit. I've been privileged to be given a vast business stag which allows me to get through to people in the business and spiritual world and set a personal example."
Arison is very candid about her sense of vocation, spirituality and incarnations, and about her experiences with visions and messages from beyond. Her vision, she said, appear in various forms, sometimes taking the shape of images and dreams, other appearing as voices speaking a biblical language.
The messages began years ago and "over time I realized I had to start trusting what I see… that's way I'm saying it is important for people to read this book. Our future is in our hands… and each and every one of us should assume the responsibility and decide how they want their future to look."
Tapping into her past lives, she continued, helped her realize that the temporal existence is like "having the soul go to school for a while," and that "riches are really just props."
'God gave me this gift to do good, not so I can turn a profit.' Arison (PR photo)
All about the karma
When asked how her knowledge affected her everyday life Arison speaks of the circular nature of things: "If you leave things unresolved – it will come back to you. If you do wrong – it will come back to you, no matter the lifetime. People relay energy to one another… it made me change my entire behavior."
The change came with a price, which according to Arison was more than worth it, since after years of anguish, she is finally happy and serene.
The prospect of being seen as arrogant for publishing a book that presumes to tell people how to live their lives does not escape her: "Of course some people are going to say that it's pretentious, and that's fine. I did it because I care. As a Jew, I believe the Jews' role is world improvement. I do my part and I can suggest others to do theirs."
But what about Bank Hapolaim? After all, it is one of Israel's leading financial institutions. Arison says the bank's core philosophy is the same. Businesses must be profitable, but they have to be about more than the bottom line: "The added value of the bank stems from its financial knowhow. So why not take these tools and give them to people so they can grow? A strong bank versus a weak client is a disaster. That's why people hate banks."
In good company
Confronted with the fact that speaking of financial freedom is easy when you happen to have a lot of money, Arison replies by saying that having money does not exempt you form responsibilities: "Even someone like me has a lot of loans and I have to be responsible for them. A person has to know what his limitations and his options are and make the right choices."
In her book, Arison claims to have predicted various things, like 2004's Indian Ocean tsunami which left over 225,000 people dead, 2005's Hurricane Katrina, which left New Orleans all but decimated, the rocket fire on southern Israel and even the global financial crisis.
When asked why she did nothing if she foresaw the recession, she said that "God gave me this gift to do good, not so I can turn a profit. I knew it was coming, I just didn’t know when. I asked what to do and the answer I kept getting was 'seek your truth.' This is a very inner truth. It is the essence of every one of us."
Arison is not the only one to turn to spiritual advisors and mediums. Nochi Dankner, chairman and CEO of IDB Holdings, consults Rabbi Yaakov Ifargan, nicknamed "the X-Ray"; Israel Salt Industries' Alon Dankner also consults a rabbi regularly, as does Jacky Ben Zaken, head of Manofim Israel Finances.
She accepts the fact that most of us do not understand her vision. "People," she said, "Won't get where I'm coming from for another 10 years."
Ofer Petersburg and Tzach Spitzan contributed to this report
