Foundations of Neo-Hasidism

THE GOD YOU DON'T BELIEVE IN

The Tibetan Buddhist lama Chögyam Trungpa (1939–1987), founder of Naropa University in Boulder, where I teach, told a group of us one day that his son had asked him, “Daddy, is there a God?” “No,” Trungpa told him. “Phew,” the little boy sighed. “I was scared there for a while!” Trungpa was looking over at me, trying to bait me a little—he was known for provocative behavior. So, I looked back at him and said, “The god that you don't believe in, I don't believe in, either.” We all have images of God that the past has bequeathed to us, and sometimes these images get in the way. But these images are not God: they are just images of God. “God language” can be of great help to us in relating to the Infinite, but we should not confuse it with the real thing. If we are to have some hope of regaining the wonder that inspired our ancestors to invent the word, if we are to gain any possibility of having “God” be our vehicle and partner in our search for meaning, we need to clean the word up a bit in our own minds, to scrape off a few of the barnacles of ages.

Or N. Rose. Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi: Essential Teachings (Modern Spiritual Masters) (p. 31). Orbis. Kindle Edition.

G-D: EIN OD MILVADO

I thus insist on the centrality of “Creation,” but I do so from the position of one who is not quite a theist, as understood in the classical Western sense. I do not affirm a Being or a Mind that exists separate from the universe and acts upon it intelligently and willfully. This puts me quite far from the contemporary “creationists” or from what is usually understood as “intelligent design” (but see more on this below). My theological position is that of a mystical panentheist, one who believes that God is present throughout all of existence, that Being or Y-H-W-H underlies and unifies all that is. At the same time (and this is panentheism as distinct from pantheism), this whole is mysteriously and infinitely greater than the sum of its parts, and cannot be fully known or reduced to its constituent beings. “Transcendence” in the context of such a faith does not refer to a God “out there” or “over there” somewhere beyond the universe, since I do not know the existence of such a “there.” Transcendence means rather that God — or Being — is so fully present in the here and now of each moment that we could not possibly grasp the depth of that presence. Transcendence thus dwells within immanence. There is no ultimate duality here, no “God and world,” no “God, world, and self,” only one Being and its many faces. Those who seek consciousness of it come to know that it is indeed eyn sof, without end. There is no end to its unimaginable depth, but so too there is no border, no limit, separating that unfathomable One from anything that is. Infinite Being in every instant flows through all finite beings. “Know this day and set it upon your heart that Y-H-W-H is elohim” (Deut. 4:39) — that God within you is the transcendent. And the verse concludes: “There is nothing else.”

Green, Arthur. Radical Judaism: Rethinking God and Tradition (The Franz Rosenzweig Lecture Series) (pp. 17-18). Yale University Press. Kindle Edition.

Here we necessarily open ourselves to a broader question. To what extent are all our humanlike images of God projections from the realm of human experience? The inevitable answer is that they indeed are, and the theologian does best who admits fully that such is the case. Of course, the person of faith is tempted to turn the picture around, suggesting that the complexity of human personality simply reflects our own creation in God's image, and that it is God, rather than humans, who is to be seen as the primary figure of this similitude. The hall of mirrors may indeed be approached from either end, as the mystics have always understood so well.

But the ancient rabbis already seem to have admitted that our images of God change according to the needs of the hour. When God appeared to Israel at the Sea of Reeds, said the rabbis, as the people confronted the advancing Egyptian armies, “He appeared to them as a youth.” On the day of battle one has no use for a tottering old God. But at Sinai, in giving the Law, “He appeared as an elder.” Who wants to receive laws from a mere youth of a God? On the day of lawgiving, only an elder would do. The word “appeared” (nire'ah) in this Midrash of perhaps the third to fifth centuries, is a passive form, and it is tellingly unclear whether the text means that God willfully changed His appearance in accord with the people's needs or whether they just saw Him in multiple ways, reflected in the variable lens of their own needs and desires.

Green, Arthur. Radical Judaism: Rethinking God and Tradition (The Franz Rosenzweig Lecture Series) (pp. 44-45). Yale University Press. Kindle Edition.

OUR ROOT METAPHORS AND MASKS FOR GOD

Once, William James (1842–1910), the psychologist who wrote Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), came to a town in New England and asked one of the wardens of a church: “Who is God for you? In front of what do you place yourself in prayer?” The warden said, “An oblong blur.” He was talking to a New England transcendentalist who was not inclined to think in terms of a form. But while the head may know that there is no form, the heart needs a root metaphor. I can be in a monist in my head, but I can't be a monist in my heart. In my heart, I have to have an other whom I love. That is where I am in the I-Thou relationship. In the past, people used to think of God as a King. We say Avinu Malkeinu, “Our Father, Our King.” Sometimes we speak of the Shekhinah as our Mother, and this is wonderful. But the one I have the best conversations with is the one who sits in the passenger seat when I'm driving—my Friend. I can talk to my friend. I don't have to hide. I am not opaque to God. I do not want to hide anything from God. I can't hide anything from God anyway; but I do not want to hide anything from God. I am transparent; but I also want to talk to God. Part of the divine grace is that God will wear any mask that will allow me to communicate. H. G. Wells (1866–1946) wrote a novel called The Invisible Man (1897), which was later made into a movie. But the question was: how were they going to make an invisible man interesting on the screen? Their solution was to wrap him in something; you wouldn't see his body, but you would see whatever he was wearing, and this gave a visible shape to him. In the same way, we provide God with masks. Sometimes they are terrible and terrifying. But I prefer a more motherly God. Then there are other times when I need to have a romance with God. The Sufis often speak of God as the Beloved. Sometimes this is precisely how I need to address God. Our own mystics were full of the same imagery. They had a romance with God. When you say, “Who is it that you come before?,” check out the images that allow you the most heartful exchange with God.

—The Gates of Prayer, 112–13

PRAYER: FRESH OR PACKAGED

If you have ever tasted an apple plucked right off a New England tree, you will know the difference between a supermarket apple and a real apple. A supermarket apple has been washed, waxed, refrigerated. Vital parts of its chemistry have ebbed away. But an apple plucked from the mother tree—a mehayyeh (enlivening or refreshing). Tastes like a living apple! Prayer is the same. Many who live their lives as Jews, even many who pray every day, live on a wrapped and refrigerated version of prayer. We go to synagogue dutifully enough. We rise when we should rise, sit when we should sit. We read and sing along with the cantor and answer “Amen” in all the right places. We may even rattle through the prayers with ease. We sacrifice vitality for shelf-life, and the neshamah (soul) can taste the difference. True prayer is a bursting forth of the soul to God. What can be more natural and more human than turning to God's listening presence with our thanks and our burdens? Prayer is one of the simplest and easiest of practices. It's always right there. The act of speaking directly to God, of opening our hearts to God's response, is one of the ultimate mystical experiences. Like great art and great music, prayer brings out the poetry of soul. Some of our most beautiful writings can be found in the pages of prayer. Without true prayer, on the other hand, a very deep yearning that we have goes unanswered. We try to satisfy that hunger for God in other ways. We mistake the yearnings of soul for the cravings of body. We feed them with food and drink, drugs and sex, money and power, but these things just inflame our appetite further. We might seek higher things, intellectual pursuits, or artistic accomplishments. Even these do not touch us in that loneliest of places, the place that longs to be filled with God. That's why prayer, to me, is not a luxury but a necessity, a safeguard for our survival and our sanity.

—Davening, xi–xii

THE FREEZE-DRIED PRAYER BOOK

Now, what about the prayer book, the siddur? I want to say, the siddur needs “cooking.” The liturgy in the prayer book is really “freeze-dried prayer.” What do I mean by that? Well, you can simply read the words of the prayer book, of course, but don't you wonder sometimes, “Who wrote these words?” You have to realize that someone actually wrote down and expressed what they had experienced in prayer as a prayer! Or someone else wrote it down for them… Imagine you are hungry. You come for lunch and I serve you freeze-dried or dehydrated soup! I say, “Eat!” Looking perplexed at the dehydrated soup, you say, “Perhaps you could add a little hot water to it?” That is exactly the situation with the prayer book. Feelings are the “hot water” you have to add to the dehydrated experience of the siddur. All prayer that is devoid of feeling feels unanswered, because it was not really asked. King David says, “My heart says it is for You that I am looking” [Psalm 27:8]. If the heart has not said that, I will not feel that it has actually gotten to God's heart to be answered. That is a very important part of this then, to get into the heart.

—The Gates of Prayer, 4–5

The Kabbalists chose to occupy themselves with a series of contemplative exercises that both described and taught one how to traverse an increasingly complicated realm that divided the fragmented consciousness of this-worldly perception from the unitive reality of God. The notion of four “worlds,” each of them conceived in the same decadic structure, was one vehicle for this more richly elaborated cosmic picture. So too was the notion that each of the ten sefirot was itself divisible into ten, containing by implication all the others within it. This led, especially in the most fully articulated system of Rabbi Moses Cordovero (1522-1570), to an essential symbolic “grid” of some four hundred combined entities, rather than ten sefirot. Devotional exercises and interpretation of prayers all had to be fitted to a particular locus within an increasingly complicated cosmic map. This complicating of the contemplative system or “filling up” of cosmic space went much farther in the new Kabbalah promulgated by the disciples of Isaac Luria (1534-1572). Luria was a bold and innovative mythical thinker, one who focused devotional attention on the process of tiqqun, or the repair and restoration of the broken universe (or the exiled shekhinah), with much greater specificity than any previous Kabbalist. As his system came to dominate, this delineation of multiple cosmic realms and inner stages of “maturation” in each of these led to a virtual atomization of the spiritual universe, each step in the uplifting and restoration of the cosmos associated with intensive concentration on devotional exercises attached to the prayer book, to the commandments, to alternative spellings and vocalizations of the divine name, or to particular moments on the Jewish religious calendar. The mystical oneness of God that underlay the whole system, flowing through and nurturing the cosmos, was largely obscured by the “crowded” heavens and the great attention the worshipper needed to pay to the particular details underlying each “unification” of the upper realms. The essential insights of Kabbalah, soon to be weakened from within by mystical heresies and challenged from without by the rise of modern science, also partially collapsed under the weight of their own overelaboration.

Green, Arthur. Radical Judaism: Rethinking God and Tradition (The Franz Rosenzweig Lecture Series) (pp. 66-67). Yale University Press. Kindle Edition.

Ramban (Nachmanides, c. 13th century) on Deuteronomy 11:22

The verse warns man not to worship God and a being beside Him; he is to worship God alone in his heart and in his actions. And it is plausible that the meaning of "cleaving" is to remember God and His love constantly, not to divert your thought from Him in all your earthly doings. Such a man may be talking to other people, but his heart is not with them since he is in the presence of God. And it is further plausible that those who have attained this rank, do, even in their earthly life, partake of the eternal life, because they have made themselves a dwelling place of the shekhinah."

A parable from Yaakov Yosef of Polnoye, Ben Porat Yosef - disciple of the Baal Shem Tov

There was once a great and wise king who magically created the illusions of walls and towers and gates. He commanded his people to come to him by way of these gates and towers, and had treasures from the royal treasury displayed at every gate. There were some who went as far as the first gate and then returned, laden with treasure. Others proceeded to gates deeper within the palace and closer to the king; but none reached the king himself. At last, the king's son made a great effort to go to his father, the king. Then he saw that there was really no barrier separating him from his father, for it was all an illusion.

Tzava'at Harivash 22

Whatever you see, remember the Holy One, blessed be He. Thus [when seeing an aspect of] love, remember the love of God; and with [an aspect of] fear remember the fear of God, as this is elaborated in various sources. Even when going to the privy have in mind “I am separating the bad from the good,” with the good remaining for the Divine service. This is the concept of yichudim (unifications). Likewise, when going to sleep think that your mental faculties go to the Holy One, blessed be He, and will be strengthened for the Divine service.

Tzava'at Harivash 127

Whenever you are afraid of something, or love it, you should consider: “From where does this present fear or love come? After all, everything derives from [the Holy One], blessed be He, who put the [aspects of] fear and love even in bad things, such as wild beasts. For at the time of the ‘breaking [of the vessels]’ (ha-shevirat) something fell from all the attributes. The fear, therefore, is from [the Holy One], blessed be He. Why, then, should I be afraid of a single spark of His which is [vested] in that bad thing? It is better to attach myself to the ‘great fear’! The same applies to love, and so, too, with all the attributes, to extract the spark [of holiness] from there and raise it to its root. For this is the ultimate desire of our soul, to raise [the fallings of] the ‘breaking [of the vessels]’ to their source.”

The same applies to your speech: do not think that it is you who speaks. Rather, it is the vital force within you, which derives from the Creator, blessed is He, that speaks through you and raises the speech to its source. This [attitude] compounds also the [notion of] equanimity, because the faculty of speech is the same in another as it is with you, for all derives from Him, blessed be He.

Likewise when eating, your intent should be to extract the vitality [from the food] to elevate it to Above through the service of the Creator, blessed be He. And so, too, with everything else. Your intent in everything should be to effect that you attach yourself to Above.