As Reb Zalman taught on Rabbi Ayla Grafstein’s youtube site (cf., “Reb Zalman on High Holidays“, Parts 3 and 4): 

“What is to happen on Rosh Hashanah?  Here’s a teaching I got from my Rebbe, Reb Yosef Yitzchak of Lubavitch.  It goes something like this:

“Adon olam asher molach b’terem kol yetzir nivra / The Lord of the world, He reigned as King before there ever world was yet created, before anything was shaped / created. 

“It begs the question, since our sages tell us, and it is very clear to us too, that eyn melech b’lo am / you can’t have a king without the people [who serve], so whom did He, before anything was yet created, reign over?

“Good question.

“And this goes even deeper because the rabbis said, you must never do anything to anyone else that’s a liability to him [in his absence]. 

“If it’s unalloyed good, you can do that.  For instance, if I say this belongs to Reb Dovid and it’s unalloyed good, for instance, tax free money, then that would become yours from that moment on because zachin l’adam shelo b’fanav / we may benefit a person in his absence, the person doesn’t have to be present to take ownership. 

“But, eyn chovin l’adam shelo b’fanav / we may not disadvantage a person in his or her absence.  If it’s a liability, you can’t lay it on a person unless you have obtained consent. 

“Now follow; this goes another step. 

(more…)

Friends:

Various thoughts from Reb Zalman for this season as compiled by Gabbai Seth Fishman, BLOG Editor:

1. From A Guide for Starting Your New Incarnation, 2001, ALEPH: Alliance for Jewish Renewal, p. 1:

“You Have Wanted Holiness in your life.  This depends a great deal on taking responsibility for the maintenance of your consciousness and conscience.

“The maintenance of one’s awareness was once part and parcel of the social life of the shtetl / small Jewish town of Europe.

“Professor Abraham Joshua Heschel, in The Earth is the Lord’s, speaks about how the landscape once was Jewish.  One would speak about the falling leaves of the Fall season as if the trees were trembling before the Day of Judgement.

“In our situation today, this is not the case…  While the eastern communities of Jews began s’lichot / prayers of forgiveness at the beginning of Elul / the last month of the Jewish year along with the daily shofar / blowing of the Ram’s horn, we Ashkenazim leave s’lichot for the week or ten days before Rosh HaShannah.  Even if we do not begin to recite s’lichot until the end of Elul, it is still necessary to begin the inner work earlier, at the beginning of Elul.”

2. In our prayer services from Elul through Sukkot, we add Psalm 27.  Click the following link to hear a niggun composed and sung by Reb Zalman with words excerpted from the Psalm:

L’cha Amar Libi  (<< Click here to hear)

NOTE:  For the full text of Psalm 27 with Reb Zalman’s davvening translation, please scroll to the end of this post.)

(more…)

The following excerpt from Reb Zalman’s book, Integral Halachah, deals with the question of ways to emphasize new aspects to our practice of adding an additional day of Yom Tov outside of Israel.   Gabbai Seth Fishman, BLOG Editor

“I feel, also, that when we are coming to the issue of yom tov sheni shel golyus / second day of celebration for the exiled, people have not been taking it seriously enough. 

“When it had once looked to me that I and my mishpacha / family were going to make aliyah / immigrate to Israel, after having been to Israel a couple of times, setting things up, living there for half a year, I was on the level of daato lachzor la-aretz / knowing I would be returning there, and therefore only had to keep one day yom tov.

“And something about Jewish renewal says to me that the second day yom tov as it’s been celebrated in the past, (because we don’t know if it is yom tov, and similar things,) doesn’t sit well with me. 

“On the other hand, when I study hassidus and I read that the second day of yom tov is important in chutz la-aretz / outside of Israel because whither it has to come down, whither it has to be taken inside the nefesh / soul, I really feel that the last few times, second day of yom tov was a very important way of doing a kind of secular way of doing the same yom tov.”

{Gabbai Seth:  The view was that when one is outside of yisrael, the shefa / abundance flowing from God, effected through prayer on the holidays, has to flow further to reach us and therefore requires more effort.  Additionally, a nefesh / soul not in eretz yisrael needs more of the shefa / abundance just because they are not in eretz yisrael.}

“Like shavuos, for example:  To do the first day of shavuos in shul with all the things that one does on shavuos with yizkor at one point [is good, it’s important].  But part of shavuos has to do with outdoors, has to do with green.  It is, after all, chag ha-katzir, it’s the time when the cutting of the wheat harvest begins. 

“There is something so ecological about the yom tovim that we need to do the second day yom tov for ecology, to tie them to the natural seasons, and to find celebrations to be able to do that.  And to do it with the kahal. I’m not saying it should be just a picnic.  Rather, I feel that the second day of shavuos should be a kind of outdoor davvenen with the picnic afterwards, that the davvenen part is important in the way of doing it.

“Then the chagay hashana k’efsharut l’chaven tikkunim l’ripui hateva / we want the holidays of the year as enablers to effect repairs to the health of the environment, to do the second days in a way similar to  the ways we think about tu b’shvat when we plant trees.  I think we need to create more such opportunities for doing things for the ecology. ” 

Dear Friends:  For your Shavuot celebrations, please read the following, Gabbai Seth Fishman, BLOG Editor:

From Reb Zalman
Date: 2008/05/30 Fri PM 12:48:11 EDT

With Shavuot coming next week, we have been preparing for receiving the Torah, and I have been occupied with some concerns I want to share with you.

Professor Heschel taught that the Torah is an answer to our questions. This is a wonderful way to look at it, emphasizing that it’s not just one-sided, with God sending down.

So the questions we bring are important.

Alas, I fear we have forgotten what the questions were.

One of the ways we traditionally prepared for the questions was by reciting the catalog of Written and Oral Torah during the night of Shavuot, called a Tikkun of Shavuot / Repairing of [our condition at this time on the planet through receiving Torah on] Shavuot. It included a digest of a few sentences from the beginning and the ending of every Parshah of the Chumash, then the same from the rest of the books of the Tanakh / Scriptures, and then Mishna, Talmud and Zohar. This was our preparation for the questions.

The story is told of Rabbi Aaron of Karlin: After having spent a night doing the Tikkun of Shavuot with his Hasidim, he announced to them from the pulpit, “Now deliver the goods,” as if to say, “Enough at the catalog.   Now, we have studied Torah and must fulfill what the Torah said.”

The reciting of this Tikkun Shavuot was intended to stimulate receptivity for those parts of the Torah that need to come down.

So we need to be sure we are in touch with the right questions for our time.

(more…)

From Reb Zalman’s 1994 Elat Chayim shiur, “The Next Rung,” Reb Zalman discusses the Patah Eliyahu which you will find below along with Reb Zalman’s translation. Happy Lag B’Omer! Gabbai Seth Fishman, BLOG Editor.

“The Patah Eliyahu is taken from the Tikuney Zohar and is the first point in that book which references the ten S’firot. The Sefer Y’tzirah talks of ten S’firot, but they are a different set than the one here in Patah Eliyahu. So this is the first source of the ten S’firot to which Kabbalah makes reference.

“The author of the Zohar has heard the secrets from the prophet Elijah of how God emanated ten S’firot. The implication is that if one hears it from the prophet then it is a transmission of truth. 

“In any Siddur which has been influenced by Kabbalah, the Patah Eliyahu may be found in a T’filah Kodem Hat’filah / a preparation for prayer in the beginning of the book, and/or before the Minha service on Friday afternoon.

“Once the S’firot are seen in the body, one understands them. As an idea alone, there’s no understanding. In the body, it becomes clear how a thing is held.”
 

(more…)

We are the Pharaohs of the environment,
And we live in the time of the current plagues

A kavvanah for the Marror

Blood, frogs, vermin, …, goes the catalogue of the plagues of Egypt.

Polluted earth, water and air, —  goes our catalogue —, Ozone holes, Acid rain, Argon gas, meltdown, genetic flaws, dead rivers and lakes, dying oceans and extinct species.

We are the Egypt; and we are the Pharaohs whose hearts have been hardened and who refuse to let our Mother, the Earth, heal.

We must shout a Dayyenu — Enough – No More! to that — and begin to act.

I feel ashamed as I look at the seder plate, its signs of life, the egg, the green, the salt water of the seas.  It all tastes bitter, and the Charoseth does not sweeten it enough.

As we are fastidious about the laws of Pessah, we must become fastidious about what is helpful to Earth, and like Chametz on Pessach, we must avoid what destroys her.

Chad Gadya‘s domino effect is no longer funny. The Angel of Death is at the penultimate end.

We must redeem it with two Zuzzim we must move-zuz from our present way to a new and eco-redeeming way. 

     by Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi     (Pessach 5749 / 1989)

The following is from “For Arnold Jacob Wolf’s Festschrift” Gabbai Seth Fishman (BLOG Editor)

Reb Zalman says:

“In the early 1960’s, before I had fully realized I was a post-Triumphalist, I wrote a sliding scale concerning participation in other religions and Kashrut / degrees of permittedness from a Jewish perspective.

“For example, it had Sufism on the same level as eating a salad in a non Kosher restaurant served on a glass or paper plate and Satanism on the same level as eating pork on Yom Kippur. Non-iconic forms of Vedanta, Quakerism and Buddhism came out closer to the Kosher side, like a vegetable soup in regular china with non kosher flatware, while high iconic Christianity and Hinduism were more like eating non-kosher beef.  It was a pretty good attempt that still may have some mileage in it for triumphalist restorationists.

“Then and now, I believed in the workings of Divine Providence, in the way Hassidism teach it, Hashgachah pratit / a specific Divine Providence, one that ordains even how a leaf falls.

“So I had to also entertain the idea that this same Divine Providence had produced a Buddha, a Lao Tzu.

“Could I say that just as we consider our own Rebbes to be N’shamot Klaliyot / exalted souls encompassing the souls of many, that these were not the same?  Were they just accidental oops-es of God?

(more…)

These questions are pulled from a Roundtable at a Vancouver, BC gathering in which Reb Zalman participated along with  Professor Shirin Ebadi, the Dalai Lama, Archbishop Desmond Tutu and Dr. Jo-ann Archibald.   You can see a description of the gathering by clicking here.  You can see the video by then clicking webcast, and then roundtable video.  To skip to Reb Zalman, Fast Forward to 01:06:15.

Gabbai Seth Fishman, BLOG Editor

Reb Zalman says:

We want to amplify an urge from above and from below that wants to birth itself, a push of our Earth’s need of healing and a pull of a vision of organismic health.  We want to wake up others and wake up ourselves to even more awareness.  We need to break the habit of only finding easy or immediate answers and instead, we need to learn to sit with the questions, to deal with the anxiety they may produce.  Easy, immediate answers won’t stave off the impending disaster of the ever accelerating global dying.

These are some of the questions with which we need to sit:

• What ideas of cosmology do we have to have in order to approach the healing of the planet?
  • We need new blueprints of the mind, reality maps pointing to possible harmonious life-matrix points.  We must be creative in such a way that we do not repeat precedent, in ways that are daring, playing with the least probable possibilities, to be open to ways that are more weird and spiritual where we might find answers, a new way to understand the map of reality.  We need to co-create with the integral planetary mind, the cosmology we have to have in order to approach the healing of the planet.
• What is the basic health ethic arising from that new cosmology?
  • The cosmology we seek to find should produce, first and foremost, an ethos that honors harmonious biological health in the individual and in the matrix of our environment.  In order to create this cosmology, we can no longer rely on an individual mind.  The complexity, and with it, the responsibility of what we have to mind in the world and in life is far too great to be left to one person.  The only way to get it together is together.
• What are the uppaya the skillful means which are needed to lift the cultural trance and launch the awareness of this emerging cosmology?
  • We must do the miraculous work of altering the awareness of millions of people by going deeper and deeper into regions where we cannot use the effort of muscles or of logic, regions where only awareness can shift awareness.  We need to update the inner resources of our spiritual traditions that once worked well, but which were associated with flesh-rejecting monastic asceticism. We need to look for that which works of the old techniques and enhance their yield by learning to attune our consciousness to optimal transformational power.  We need to hear the choral symphonic music of a sacred common dream.  We must figure out how to access it, how we could empower it, how it can empower us.  We are not on the top of the chain of being.  We need to have a means as spiritual people for accessing the waiting helpers from higher planes.  We need to design the needed education of heart and spirit.
• What advancements in psychology, anthropology, biology, physics, medicine, philosophy, political science, theology, spiritual technologies, economics, the arts, communications and most of all, the ethics that we need in order to heal the planet?
  • The current state of the disciplines of transpersonal psychology and transpersonal sociology are too primitive to handle our crisis.

For a complete transcript of Reb Zalman’s remarks, click the link to view the rest of this entry below.  You are invited to share your comments at the end.

Gabbai Seth Fishman, BLOG Editor

(more…)