Erev Rosh haShanah, September 24, 2014/1 Tishri 5775
Shanah tovah! What a joy to gather with you once again in this beautiful sacred space we are honored to share with our sisters and brothers in faith here at St. Mark’s. Our sharing helps us to thrive as a synagogue without walls, and, by so doing, we reduce Yavneh’s environmental impact on our living planet, which suffers under the press of more than enough concrete. So, again, Rector Ljunggren, thank you and your community for welcoming us with open hearts.
In Judaism there is a concept called “yichus,” which basically means lineage or pedigree. In popular parlance, the term “good yichus” describes someone with connections to a distinguished family. In even looser adaptation, “yichus” may loosely apply to the reflected glory one may claim from a connection to a distinguished person, even one you may have merely met – or been in the same zip code with – perhaps no more than once.
Until I investigated the use of yichus in consultation with the all-knowing Google, I was unaware of how much discussion it garners on certain websites. Apparently, who claims yichus and how s/he may flaunt it generates quite a bit of, shall we say, mildly judgmental commentary.
From the Yeshivah World News, I gleaned the following:
“Yichus is like a potato plant. The only good part of it is under the ground.
Yichus is like the lottery. It only makes sense if you're bad at math.
Yichus is like the law of gravity. It doesn't matter how high you started, if your current trajectory is down.
And, from the site, iStehtl (yes, iStehtl – the fiddler’s still on the roof, but with a synthesizer, I guess):
“Yichus is a string of zeros; it’s only worth anything if you have something in front of it” – which has a certain inspirational zing to it. Which might explain the otherwise (to me) incomprehensible comment: “Judaism . . . making me feel more like a supermodel every day,” signed, aseeker.
With the limitations of yichus in mind, at this confessional time of year, I admit to claiming professional yichus as a student and musmach (ordinee) of Reb Zalman Schachter-Shalomi, may his memory be for blessing. As Yavneh is one of the congregations directly affiliated with the Jewish Renewal movement he founded, I’d like to take some time as we begin a new year together to speak about him and his influence.
Beginning with the personal: back in 1998, I applied to the Renewal seminary not only to learn more of what Reb Zalman had to teach, but also because his way of being in the world as a scholar, spiritual explorer, and holy innovator affirmed so much of what my own spiritual evolution had already come to hold true. Over time, I enjoyed the blessing of a gifted teacher who also honored me as a colleague in spiritual inquiry, who took seriously my leaning into new insight, who greeted me with smiling eyes and called me Rochel Leibn.
Stories are told of rebbes of such sympathetic genius that every hasid in the room thinks each word is directed specifically to him; believe me, what I have just attributed to my relationship with Reb Zalman, every single one of his students, colleagues, neighbors, family members, and friends will also claim. He mindfully shepherded all of us, individually and in relationship to one another. At our last encounter, I was sitting next to him awaiting a presentation by Rabbi Chava Bahle, whom we have had the joy of learning with here at Yavneh. As the room began to fill up, Reb Zalman told me and the others in the row with him to go sit up front, to show Chavaleh the honor her teachings merit. Reluctant to move, I leaned into my Rebbe and said, “oh, I’d rather sit here and bask in your aura.” To which he replied, “Rochel Leibn, my aura reaches to Raleigh.” Even higher, even wider, I would say.
At the memorial weekend about six weeks after Reb Zalman’s passing, participants had an opportunity to sit in small groups to reminisce. We are taught that hearing stories about tzaddikim, righteous souls, is a sacred activity, a form of Torah study. One of the men in my group is a distinguished Jewish scholar who had once lived around the corner from Reb Zalman. Reb Zalman’s across-the-street neighbor was also an academic. One Sunday morning, Reb Zalman borrowed some tools from his neighbor to work on his car. When he returned the tools a few hours later, the neighbor was entertaining guests. Dressed in dirty coveralls and sweating from his exertions, Reb Zalman stood at the door for a few minutes regaling his neighbor with what he had learned about carburaters – with his boundless curiosity, every bit of new information was cherished and integrated with all the rest. When he departed, the guests wanted to know just how their host had managed to find such an erudite mechanic.
Reb Zalman manifested in our world as an insatiable energy field, constantly seeking out, acquiring, integrating, and reconfiguring what he had learned and experienced. Not like the Borg, for purposes of control, but as one of the best expressions any of us will ever be privileged to encounter of the human yearning for spiritual understanding.
Author and photographer Alan Briskin posted the following remembrance on his blog:
“I met Reb Zalman when I first interviewed him for the Collective Wisdom Initiative in August, 2000. We met at his home in Boulder, and I still recall the instant connection that was made when he first began speaking. Well, maybe not instant. He was telling me a story that began 300 years ago about the Age of Reason, and I wasn’t sure we would have enough time for him to get to the point.
“I was about to interrupt him when he sensed my impatience and held up his hand. ‘Wait,’ he said. I paused, gathered myself, and had something like an epiphany. He was telling me a story that was critical if I was to have any direction for the work that was still to unfold for me. I still have my notes from that session and his words read like poetry:
“We have not learned much in our
current conventional morality
and politics about togethering.
“The last century with the
[emphasis on] scientism sought to see everything
in the reductive form. We wanted
to get to the atom and beyond the
atom, to the smallest part.
“But even in the atom, the nucleus
and the electrons that dance
around it are in relationship with
each other.
“We believed we couldn’t know anything
until we got to the smallest
component, and so we forgot to seek
“WHAT BINDS THINGS TOGETHER” – as we will see, a main theme in the evolution of Jewish Renewal’s theological orientation.
At my first face-to-face meeting with my rebbe, when I was beginning my rabbinic studies, he greeted me on the way to dinner after a kabbalat Shabbat service with a hug, took a step back and touched my birthmark, saying “You know how to dance with divine providence!” I probably squeeked out “thank you,” all the while wondering “in what universe could that true?” It took me a while to unpack that message, so, in Reb Zalman style, we’ll come back to it when it fits into a larger context, but, suffice it to say, the import of this quick encounter contributes to the many ways I am bound to my teacher, in whose lineage I gratefully serve this community
Permit me to point to just one of the ways Reb Zalman’s curiosity, erudition, loving-kindness, and holy yearning have influenced not only the Jewish Renewal movement that arose around his teachings and those of his students, but the entire Jewish world.
After the Shoah, the central question “why be Jewish?” ceased being primarily about living as a minority in a majority culture, instead, it confronted skeptic and believer alike with apparent evidence of divine abandonment. The deep wounding suppressed the necessary emotional processing into near impenetrable silence. Reb Zalman spoke aloud what many others avoided: the fact that after the Shoah, many Jews were suffering from “post-traumatic God syndrome.” And so, he turned his attention to renewal instead of restoration: if a Jewish world had been destroyed in the mid-20th century, then what could we learn from the last time that had happened, when the Romans destroyed the institutions of biblical Judaism in 70 C.E.? What could we bring forward from our rich spiritual past to nurture a Judaism looking toward a transformed future, seeking its growing edge?
Jewish Renewal responds to these questions by providing a trans-denominational Jewish home for the previously disenfranchised, the doubters, the secular and the learned who needed to get far enough out of the head to rediscover the heart, the ones who didn’t know Judaism has an ancient and inspiring mystical center, the ones who had been kept at a distance (including women and non-Jews, from whom many Jews imagined we had nothing to learn). Reb Zalman cultivated in himself and others a deep and holy curiosity about how Judaism and other faiths can nurture our capacity to live fully, transparently in the Divine Presence.
And, he encouraged us to discern in our spiritual practice, in our study, in our community-building, reasons to continue along a Jewish path and to create a future together. To feel, accept, and learn from everyone; to find comfort, laughter, and joy in the tradition as it transformed. He modeled for us how to do the soul’s work over a long life-time, including how to turn age-ing to sage-ing; he even modeled for us how to meet death, how to roll our individual wave gracefully and gratefully back into the great ocean of being. He showed us how to find our individual sense of deployment in service to the Holy One and to one another; how to claim our empowerment, to stoke our spiritual fire, to feel our ritual gestures in our bodies. He taught gratitude as foundational practice, famously reporting that he begins each day saying, “Good morning, God. Thanks for godding through Zalman for another day – I’ll do my best to give you a good ride!”
During his lifetime, Reb Zalman’s students took great pleasure in the energy of what we call a neo-hasidism. After all, we were invited to immerse ourselves in the spiritual riches of the Hasidic masters and of the mystical tradition that inspired them, and we had a beloved Rebbe sitting before us, just like all the other Hasidim. Our Rebbe, however, while enjoying the energetic exchange and the reciprocal love inherent in that model, knew that what he was bringing into being was not a hierarchical lineage, but an organic, distributed, and wide-ranging lineage. On many instances, he would rise from “the Rebbe chair,” move over one seat, and absorb the “rebbetude” of whoever took his place. And then that one would move over, and someone else would teach.
This willingness to move away from centralized spiritual control in order to make space for many other teachers – and for their students and the students of their students – this wisdom has bequeathed to Jewish Renewal robust institutions and a healthy future, free of dynastic wrangling and accustomed to innovation, creativity, and responsiveness. Part of this wisdom might be attributed to something Reb Zalman said he learned from Christian monks: to sit still and let God love him.
So what about this dancing with divine providence I’m supposed to know how to do? Six months after receiving this message via Reb Zalman, I asked him why he had said that to me. He replied that he didn’t know, that sometimes he was impelled to transmit something, and he had learned to do so without massaging the transmission into something that made sense to him. So, he said, perhaps I should seek the counsel of Chana Rochel of Ludomir, a woman called by her community to serve as their rebbe, even though such a thing was “unacceptable” 200 years ago in a Ukrainian village. From Chana Rochel – who adapted her holy service to fit the constraints of her times – from my Rebbe, from my family, friends, and community, in the years I’ve been blessed to serve as a spiritual teacher, I eventually recognized that I too had learned to accept the responsibility to receive and to share, to trust my kishkes, to do the work without thinking it’s mine alone.
The foundational theological teaching of Jewish Renewal arises from an understanding shared by all mystics and certainly by our Hasidic masters: all being emanates from a single divine Source, and all forms of being manifest inextricably in relation to all others. When Rabbi Burt Jacobson interviewed Reb Zalman for an essay about the Baal Shem Tov, Reb Burt asked: “What does the BeShT have to teach us now?” The response: “That God so loved the world that She gave Herself to be the Earth.” And, this evening, as we celebrate another year in the life of our beautiful blue ark of a planet, I remind you of what our Rebbe loved to say, “The only way to get it together – spiritually, practically, environmentally – is together!”
Keyn y’hi ratzon, so may this be our will and God’s, and may the soul of our teacher, Reb Mesullam Zalman Chiyyah ben Shlomo haCohen v’Chaya Gittel be bound up in the bonds of eternal life. Amen.
Shanah tovah! What a joy to gather with you once again in this beautiful sacred space we are honored to share with our sisters and brothers in faith here at St. Mark’s. Our sharing helps us to thrive as a synagogue without walls, and, by so doing, we reduce Yavneh’s environmental impact on our living planet, which suffers under the press of more than enough concrete. So, again, Rector Ljunggren, thank you and your community for welcoming us with open hearts.
In Judaism there is a concept called “yichus,” which basically means lineage or pedigree. In popular parlance, the term “good yichus” describes someone with connections to a distinguished family. In even looser adaptation, “yichus” may loosely apply to the reflected glory one may claim from a connection to a distinguished person, even one you may have merely met – or been in the same zip code with – perhaps no more than once.
Until I investigated the use of yichus in consultation with the all-knowing Google, I was unaware of how much discussion it garners on certain websites. Apparently, who claims yichus and how s/he may flaunt it generates quite a bit of, shall we say, mildly judgmental commentary.
From the Yeshivah World News, I gleaned the following:
“Yichus is like a potato plant. The only good part of it is under the ground.
Yichus is like the lottery. It only makes sense if you're bad at math.
Yichus is like the law of gravity. It doesn't matter how high you started, if your current trajectory is down.
And, from the site, iStehtl (yes, iStehtl – the fiddler’s still on the roof, but with a synthesizer, I guess):
“Yichus is a string of zeros; it’s only worth anything if you have something in front of it” – which has a certain inspirational zing to it. Which might explain the otherwise (to me) incomprehensible comment: “Judaism . . . making me feel more like a supermodel every day,” signed, aseeker.
With the limitations of yichus in mind, at this confessional time of year, I admit to claiming professional yichus as a student and musmach (ordinee) of Reb Zalman Schachter-Shalomi, may his memory be for blessing. As Yavneh is one of the congregations directly affiliated with the Jewish Renewal movement he founded, I’d like to take some time as we begin a new year together to speak about him and his influence.
Beginning with the personal: back in 1998, I applied to the Renewal seminary not only to learn more of what Reb Zalman had to teach, but also because his way of being in the world as a scholar, spiritual explorer, and holy innovator affirmed so much of what my own spiritual evolution had already come to hold true. Over time, I enjoyed the blessing of a gifted teacher who also honored me as a colleague in spiritual inquiry, who took seriously my leaning into new insight, who greeted me with smiling eyes and called me Rochel Leibn.
Stories are told of rebbes of such sympathetic genius that every hasid in the room thinks each word is directed specifically to him; believe me, what I have just attributed to my relationship with Reb Zalman, every single one of his students, colleagues, neighbors, family members, and friends will also claim. He mindfully shepherded all of us, individually and in relationship to one another. At our last encounter, I was sitting next to him awaiting a presentation by Rabbi Chava Bahle, whom we have had the joy of learning with here at Yavneh. As the room began to fill up, Reb Zalman told me and the others in the row with him to go sit up front, to show Chavaleh the honor her teachings merit. Reluctant to move, I leaned into my Rebbe and said, “oh, I’d rather sit here and bask in your aura.” To which he replied, “Rochel Leibn, my aura reaches to Raleigh.” Even higher, even wider, I would say.
At the memorial weekend about six weeks after Reb Zalman’s passing, participants had an opportunity to sit in small groups to reminisce. We are taught that hearing stories about tzaddikim, righteous souls, is a sacred activity, a form of Torah study. One of the men in my group is a distinguished Jewish scholar who had once lived around the corner from Reb Zalman. Reb Zalman’s across-the-street neighbor was also an academic. One Sunday morning, Reb Zalman borrowed some tools from his neighbor to work on his car. When he returned the tools a few hours later, the neighbor was entertaining guests. Dressed in dirty coveralls and sweating from his exertions, Reb Zalman stood at the door for a few minutes regaling his neighbor with what he had learned about carburaters – with his boundless curiosity, every bit of new information was cherished and integrated with all the rest. When he departed, the guests wanted to know just how their host had managed to find such an erudite mechanic.
Reb Zalman manifested in our world as an insatiable energy field, constantly seeking out, acquiring, integrating, and reconfiguring what he had learned and experienced. Not like the Borg, for purposes of control, but as one of the best expressions any of us will ever be privileged to encounter of the human yearning for spiritual understanding.
Author and photographer Alan Briskin posted the following remembrance on his blog:
“I met Reb Zalman when I first interviewed him for the Collective Wisdom Initiative in August, 2000. We met at his home in Boulder, and I still recall the instant connection that was made when he first began speaking. Well, maybe not instant. He was telling me a story that began 300 years ago about the Age of Reason, and I wasn’t sure we would have enough time for him to get to the point.
“I was about to interrupt him when he sensed my impatience and held up his hand. ‘Wait,’ he said. I paused, gathered myself, and had something like an epiphany. He was telling me a story that was critical if I was to have any direction for the work that was still to unfold for me. I still have my notes from that session and his words read like poetry:
“We have not learned much in our
current conventional morality
and politics about togethering.
“The last century with the
[emphasis on] scientism sought to see everything
in the reductive form. We wanted
to get to the atom and beyond the
atom, to the smallest part.
“But even in the atom, the nucleus
and the electrons that dance
around it are in relationship with
each other.
“We believed we couldn’t know anything
until we got to the smallest
component, and so we forgot to seek
“WHAT BINDS THINGS TOGETHER” – as we will see, a main theme in the evolution of Jewish Renewal’s theological orientation.
At my first face-to-face meeting with my rebbe, when I was beginning my rabbinic studies, he greeted me on the way to dinner after a kabbalat Shabbat service with a hug, took a step back and touched my birthmark, saying “You know how to dance with divine providence!” I probably squeeked out “thank you,” all the while wondering “in what universe could that true?” It took me a while to unpack that message, so, in Reb Zalman style, we’ll come back to it when it fits into a larger context, but, suffice it to say, the import of this quick encounter contributes to the many ways I am bound to my teacher, in whose lineage I gratefully serve this community
Permit me to point to just one of the ways Reb Zalman’s curiosity, erudition, loving-kindness, and holy yearning have influenced not only the Jewish Renewal movement that arose around his teachings and those of his students, but the entire Jewish world.
After the Shoah, the central question “why be Jewish?” ceased being primarily about living as a minority in a majority culture, instead, it confronted skeptic and believer alike with apparent evidence of divine abandonment. The deep wounding suppressed the necessary emotional processing into near impenetrable silence. Reb Zalman spoke aloud what many others avoided: the fact that after the Shoah, many Jews were suffering from “post-traumatic God syndrome.” And so, he turned his attention to renewal instead of restoration: if a Jewish world had been destroyed in the mid-20th century, then what could we learn from the last time that had happened, when the Romans destroyed the institutions of biblical Judaism in 70 C.E.? What could we bring forward from our rich spiritual past to nurture a Judaism looking toward a transformed future, seeking its growing edge?
Jewish Renewal responds to these questions by providing a trans-denominational Jewish home for the previously disenfranchised, the doubters, the secular and the learned who needed to get far enough out of the head to rediscover the heart, the ones who didn’t know Judaism has an ancient and inspiring mystical center, the ones who had been kept at a distance (including women and non-Jews, from whom many Jews imagined we had nothing to learn). Reb Zalman cultivated in himself and others a deep and holy curiosity about how Judaism and other faiths can nurture our capacity to live fully, transparently in the Divine Presence.
And, he encouraged us to discern in our spiritual practice, in our study, in our community-building, reasons to continue along a Jewish path and to create a future together. To feel, accept, and learn from everyone; to find comfort, laughter, and joy in the tradition as it transformed. He modeled for us how to do the soul’s work over a long life-time, including how to turn age-ing to sage-ing; he even modeled for us how to meet death, how to roll our individual wave gracefully and gratefully back into the great ocean of being. He showed us how to find our individual sense of deployment in service to the Holy One and to one another; how to claim our empowerment, to stoke our spiritual fire, to feel our ritual gestures in our bodies. He taught gratitude as foundational practice, famously reporting that he begins each day saying, “Good morning, God. Thanks for godding through Zalman for another day – I’ll do my best to give you a good ride!”
During his lifetime, Reb Zalman’s students took great pleasure in the energy of what we call a neo-hasidism. After all, we were invited to immerse ourselves in the spiritual riches of the Hasidic masters and of the mystical tradition that inspired them, and we had a beloved Rebbe sitting before us, just like all the other Hasidim. Our Rebbe, however, while enjoying the energetic exchange and the reciprocal love inherent in that model, knew that what he was bringing into being was not a hierarchical lineage, but an organic, distributed, and wide-ranging lineage. On many instances, he would rise from “the Rebbe chair,” move over one seat, and absorb the “rebbetude” of whoever took his place. And then that one would move over, and someone else would teach.
This willingness to move away from centralized spiritual control in order to make space for many other teachers – and for their students and the students of their students – this wisdom has bequeathed to Jewish Renewal robust institutions and a healthy future, free of dynastic wrangling and accustomed to innovation, creativity, and responsiveness. Part of this wisdom might be attributed to something Reb Zalman said he learned from Christian monks: to sit still and let God love him.
So what about this dancing with divine providence I’m supposed to know how to do? Six months after receiving this message via Reb Zalman, I asked him why he had said that to me. He replied that he didn’t know, that sometimes he was impelled to transmit something, and he had learned to do so without massaging the transmission into something that made sense to him. So, he said, perhaps I should seek the counsel of Chana Rochel of Ludomir, a woman called by her community to serve as their rebbe, even though such a thing was “unacceptable” 200 years ago in a Ukrainian village. From Chana Rochel – who adapted her holy service to fit the constraints of her times – from my Rebbe, from my family, friends, and community, in the years I’ve been blessed to serve as a spiritual teacher, I eventually recognized that I too had learned to accept the responsibility to receive and to share, to trust my kishkes, to do the work without thinking it’s mine alone.
The foundational theological teaching of Jewish Renewal arises from an understanding shared by all mystics and certainly by our Hasidic masters: all being emanates from a single divine Source, and all forms of being manifest inextricably in relation to all others. When Rabbi Burt Jacobson interviewed Reb Zalman for an essay about the Baal Shem Tov, Reb Burt asked: “What does the BeShT have to teach us now?” The response: “That God so loved the world that She gave Herself to be the Earth.” And, this evening, as we celebrate another year in the life of our beautiful blue ark of a planet, I remind you of what our Rebbe loved to say, “The only way to get it together – spiritually, practically, environmentally – is together!”
Keyn y’hi ratzon, so may this be our will and God’s, and may the soul of our teacher, Reb Mesullam Zalman Chiyyah ben Shlomo haCohen v’Chaya Gittel be bound up in the bonds of eternal life. Amen.
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