Paradigm Shift and The New “Orthodoxy”
Saturday, January 17th, 2015A precious teaching from Reb Zalman alav hashalom on Paradigm Shift. (It has been transcribed from the Spirit of the Desert Production DVD, “What’s New in Jewish Renewal, 2006”, disk 2.)
The Talmudic heritage says that we can make changes, but the changes have to be done in a very specific way.
For example: In the scriptural statement about Shabbos it says:
לא תבערו אש בכֹל משבתיכם ביום השבת / Do not burn any fires on the Shabbos in all your dwelling places.
which means that before Shabbos, you’d have to go around and douse all the fires that are there. “Lo tivaru aish b’chol moshvoteichem b’yom hashabat” it means that all fires are out.
Now, you are an agrarian people, you are a shepherd people and Shabbos comes, bah shabbat, bah menuchah, you settle down, you go to sleep when it gets dark.
By the time we are with the Rabbis after Yochanan ben Zakkai, we have a different milieu.