Archive for 2009

Reb Zalman’s Offerings Through Aleph Store

Tuesday, July 28th, 2009

The ALEPH Canada Web Site, https://www.alephcanada.ca/catalogue, offers Reb Zalman’s books, CD’s and DVD’s as digital downloads. Prices are in Canadian dollars.

Here is the current listing:

* Credo of a Modern Kabbalist (with Daniel Siegel) ($18)

* An English Siddur for Weekdays (temporarily unavailable)

* First Steps to a New Jewish Spirit (with Donald Gropman) (available from Amazon)

* Gate to the Heart: An Evolving Process (edited by Robert Esformes) (available from Amazon)

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For Tisha B’av: After the Hard Drive Crashed

Friday, July 10th, 2009

Dear Friends:
Every zeitgeist, every paradigm, has embedded a particular understanding of how things work.  We draw upon our paradigms and emerging technologies because they effectively express what’s happening from our perspectives at a point in time.  In the following piece, Reb Zalman uses the paradigm of the computer, to talk about The State of the Jewish Mythic World.  He sends this as a meditation for Tish’ah B’av, (“How doth the city sit solitary that was full of people” – Eicha 1:1), which occurs this year on the evening of Wednesday, July 29th, 2009.  Gabbai Seth Fishman, BLOG Editor

After the Hard Drive Crashed
Meditation:  On The State Of The Jewish Mythic World
“After the Hard Drive Crashed”
 by Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi

My hard drive and mother board crashed. If you ever experienced such a breakdown of this “extension of your memory,” the holder of your information, you will understand what I went through as my invisible, cyber, world support became inaccessible to me.  It is a kind of computer-related depression and a grieving for the files I failed to back up, now forever lost. And as I remembered what I had lost, I set out to do whatever it would take to restore everything to the status quo ante quem so that my life would continue uninterrupted. And in these cases, we try to do just that.

Now imagine it was old DOS, or system 6 Mac that crashed, and as you pursue the restoration, you are told that a Pentium motherboard, a faster netsurfing modem, and the latest of Windows or newer Mac OS are available; that in fact, you can improve your situation by building a new, broader platform for your information base. 

Before you upgrade, you will first have to satisfy concerns about whether the new system will be able to handle the old software applications you will need to re-establish and whether the back-ups and restores will be able to help you work your backed up information back in. In other words, while you are interested in using the best you can get together at this time, your new system has to be downward compatible.

Speaking of time:  In the time dimension, after a computer crash, I am tapping into the workaholic in me, and I am devastated because of time commitments. The frustration blocks everything but frantic casting around and my desire to get it all fixed and back to where it had been.

But now, Shabbat comes and, I realize I can’t do anything about it.  So for the next 48 hours, I must make a shift.  As I get in touch with dimensions of time and beyond the market-place, work-place mentality, I suddenly become aware of this as a gestalt of my weekday calamity, and I awaken to a perspective of this situation in a larger field.

I enter into the world of the Mashal Haqadmoni / the mythic world, the Primal Myth, (cf., Rashi on Exodus 21:13),  I begin musing on Jewish History and on mythic dimensions that hold our world together and allow the sparks of kabbalistic light to illumine the field. 

Here is what arose for me:

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Shalosh Seudos Time and Weekday Davvenen

Thursday, June 25th, 2009

The following is a transcription of Reb Zalman speaking at the recent Shavuot retreat.  Please scroll to the bottom for a copy of Reb Zalman’s singing translation of Yedid Nefesh.  Gabbai Seth Fishman, BLOG Editor

“The last few years, I’ve felt that it is important to draw back from leadership so that I can really put my energy in highlighting what’s most critical: 

“In terms of the innovations we’ve made in the Jewish services, we are doing good Friday nights.  ‘We give good Friday night.’  People come and they dance and it’s freilach and they love each other and ‘v’ahavta l’rayacha kamocha’ / love thy neighbor as thyself and Shema Yisroel / Hear Oh Israel.  And we did pretty good with Shabbos morning, because everywhere, little by little, the notion of not calling up the ‘Mr. Goldberg-s,’ i.e., the ones who would give a big donation to the shul, (he gets this aliyah and this one gets that aliyah), has been replaced by saying to people, ‘We’re going to read in the torah about such and such a thing.  Do you feel this deep?  Then you come up to the torah here.’   So we’ve done something remarkable with shabbos morning too. 

“What we haven’t yet done well is shalosh seudos.  This means the Shabbos afternoon time.  Also, I’m still worried about us not doing enough weekday davvenen.

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Reb Zalman Book Review

Thursday, June 18th, 2009

From the The Jewish Daily Forward, here’s a review of two books recently published by Reb Zalman.  Gabbai Seth Fishman, BLOG Editor

Reb Zalman’s Ah-ha Hasidism

A Heart Sutra for Pashute Yidden

By Alan Brill

Published June 17, 2009, issue of June 26, 2009

Ahron’s Heart: The Prayers, Teachings and Letters of Ahrele Roth, a Hasidic Reformer
By Zalman Schachter-Shalomi and Yair Hillel Goelman
Ben Yehudah Press, 150 pages, $14.95.

A Heart Afire: Stories and Teachings of the Early Hasidic Masters
By Zalman Schachter-Shalomi and Netanel Miles-Yepez
The Jewish Publication Society, 384 pages, $45.00.

The future looks Bright: Zalman Schachter-Shalomi making Hasidism more widely relevant to the Jewish community.

Contemporary American religion is filled with quests for inner happiness, a direct sense of presence and charismatic gifts. The quest ranges from spontaneous drum circles to the Dalai Lama’s Westernized talks on happiness, and from Eckhart Tolle’s New Age wisdom to Sarah Palin’s Pentecostal exorcisms. In this landscape of emotive spirituality, Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi serves as one of the major guides for contemporary Jews who seek the path of the heart.

Schachter-Shalomi, called Reb Zalman by most, is the cherished teacher of the Jewish Renewal movement, which seeks to create a trans-denominational neo-Hasidic spirituality.

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Reb Zalman on the Web

Monday, June 15th, 2009

Rabbi Ayla Grafstein (http://www.youtube.com/jewishrenewal) and others have been putting snippets of Reb Zalman on YouTube.  Here is a current index of what you will find.  Gabbai Seth Fishman, BLOG Editor

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Diversity and Ahavat Yisrael

Friday, June 5th, 2009

Last week, I was one of the hundred plus participants at the wonderful Shavuot retreat at Isabella Freedman (Elat Chayyim).  At the closing circle, a question was posed by another attendee: 

  • For those of us who came here from a place of more traditional observance, do you have any advice for how we can integrate what we’ve experienced and learned here with those traditional places of worship?” 

I’ve transcribed Reb Zalman’s response below.  Gabbai Seth Fishman, BLOG Editor

In the booklet called “Gate to the Heart,” I make the following point (cf., Stages of the Path, pp 6-8): 

When a person first gets caught in “Oy! How wonderful it is to be a Jew,” they are in the land of “Milk and Honey.”  This is like the Oral Phase in Freud’s Psychosexual Stages of Development, (NOTE:  Referred to as the Rung of Love in “Gate to the Heart”).  “Oy is it good, geshmak / delicious, it’s beautiful.”  

And after a while, following the Freudian model, the progression has their Judaism moving to the Anal Phase, which is to say, “Now I need to learn some discipline,” (NOTE:  Referred to as the Rung of Power in “Gate to the Heart”).

But if someone doesn’t want to move on, saying, “I don’t want to go for a practice with discipline, I want to go back to the original belief that I had,” then they are like one fixated on the Oral Phase.  And if they get fixated on the Oral Phase, they will go from guru to guru and from system to system and say, “Because I love to be ‘love-bombed’ by the people to whom I come and bring my soul and they love me and I feel good, I will stay here.” And so, they will be going in this kind of incestuous way from one place to another trying to recapture the good feelings of the Oral Phase. 

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And On Shavuot

Thursday, May 21st, 2009

Shavuot is associated with Gevurah (strict justice, judgment, discipline, self-control, Yitzchak) in the counting of the yom tovim as we find it in The Ten S’firot in Sacred Time available from Aleph.  Blessings to you on this special day.  Gabbai Seth Fishman, BLOG Editor

And On Shavuot
excerpt from Yishmiru Daat
by Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi

And on Shavuot, the Sefirah of Binah is illuminated in 50 portals within the attribute of the Gevurah giving Torah – from the mouth of the Gevurah / Almighty we heard, (Eruvin 54b), b’Tzimtzum / with contraction of the divine light from the central point of perfection outwards onto stone tablets upon which were tzamzem / condensed ten commandments, (tanchuma vayakhel 7), and tzamtzem / condensed His Shechina / in-dwelling between the two staves of the ark.  And also the expression “atzeret,” (meaning both concluding feast, i.e. Shavuot and also he squeezed), points to the tzimtzum / contraction and the limiting of this yom tov to only one day – and two in the diaspora – (and there are hidden expansions [on this day] up to a full week’s worth, but you will have to look to find them).  And we who stood together, (Exodus 19:17, and cf. Yalkut Shimoni, B’reishit chapter 22 remez 101), at the foot of the mountain, like Yitzchak, our father, in his bindings, we with our cautions, (Shabbos 88:) and our souls flew out of our bodies with each and every utterance.  And they are united with the souls of King David may he rest in peace, and with the Baal Shem tov, his soul is in Eden, and with the ger tzedek of Vilna, may God avenge his murder, having publicly sanctified God’s name, whose souls were drawn back on Shavuot into the body of the King with the kiss of Hir mouth, May S/He be blessed.

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Malchut week

Thursday, May 21st, 2009

In his lecture on zman / time from the Yishmiru Daat dvd available from Aleph, Reb Zalman says:

“We don’t have the sense of noticing the tides of time anymore, because what has happened is that commodity time has been taken over….  The sense we once had that we were working so we could have ‘being time’ is gone.” 

Chaplain Gloria Krasno helps us to do the work needed for this season, to help us to focus on counting the Omer and the associated combinations of Sefirot.  Here’s her mediations for Malchut.  May she be blessed for her holy workGabbai Seth Fishman, BLOG Editor

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Yesod Week

Friday, May 15th, 2009

Only two weeks left.  Thank you Chaplain Gloria!  Gabbai Seth Fishman, BLOG Editor

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Hod Week from Chaplain Gloria

Thursday, May 7th, 2009

Many thanks to Gloria Krasno!  Have a wonderful Lag BaOmer, y’all.  Gabbai Seth Fishman, BLOG Editor

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