Baal Shem Tov and Pulses

This is a story that has come up in my life in three different unrelated contexts recently. When that happens, I realize it must be important. This version is from The Wings of the Sun by R. Avraham Greenbaum.

Another English version of the story, which is slightly longer, can be found in The Light and Fire of the Baal Shem Tov By Yitzhak Buxbaum.

"...Another story tells of a prominent doctor who had come to visit the wife of the local lord.

The countess lavishly praised the Baal Shem Tov as a great man and an expert healer. The doctor asked the countess to send for him. When he came, the doctor asked him if it was true that he was an expert healer. `True,' replied the Baal Shem Tov. `Where did you learn? Who was your professor?' asked the doctor. `God taught me,' replied the Baal Shem Tov. The doctor laughed heartily and asked him if he knew how to take someone's pulse. The Baal Shem Tov said, `I myself suffer from a certain problem. You take my pulse and see if you can find what it is, and I'll take your pulse and see what it reveals.

The doctor took the Baal Shem Tov's pulse and could tell that he had some kind of problem but he did not know what it was, because the truth was that the Baal Shem Tov was sick - he was love-sick for God (cf. Song of Songs 2:5), but this was beyond the doctor's level of understanding. After this the Baal Shem Tov took the doctor's hand and examined his pulse. The Baal Shem Tov turned to the countess and asked, `Have you had a burglary here?' The Baal Shem Tov listed a number of precious items. `Yes!' replied the countess, `It's some years since they were stolen and I have no idea where they are.' `Send to the doctor's lodgings,' said the Baal Shem Tov, `and open his chest. You'll find everything there, because I can feel this theft in the doctor's pulse.' The countess sent to search the doctor's lodgings and found the stolen goods, as the holy Baal Shem Tov had said, and the doctor left in disgrace" (Shevachey HaBaal Shem Tov #206.)

Responses to a flood

I've always been fascinated with the idea of Jewish Archetypes. I think we could gain a lot in understanding our actions by seeing our own lives reflected in the stories and patterns of our ancestors. As I discovered last year, when I began to study texts in greater depth, the characters and choices of our ancestors are complex and often difficult to understand. The stories I understood, and last studied, when I was a child have a much greater depth than my childhood understanding could comprehend. Now that I study the stories as an adult, I see there are patterns and stories in our ancestors that replay themselves today, and maybe understanding the patterns will help to do Tikkun Olam.

I am not sure that I am the right person to prepare a comprehensive analysis of Jewish archetypes, but I think it's a good idea. So I'll send it out in the Universe and maybe it will germinate in the someone else for awhile until it grows into something or is passed along. (I also don't feel that I've studied enough to add to this discussion, but that's really an example of giving away my power - check in later for another post on that topic.)

It's raining in Jerusalem today. Due to soil conditions, an overabundance of development, and a lack of good drainage, whenever it rains, the runoff on the sides of roads tends to be mini-floods. This got me thinking about Jonah and Noah.

I had a patient awhile back who was re-playing the story of Jonah. There was something within herself that she was being asked to do that she absolutely didn't want to do, so she was spending a lot of time and energy running away from it. When I would connect to her, the vision I had was either her standing on the deck of a ship during a storm (when her symptoms were bad), to hiding in a storage room (when her symptoms were decreased).

I had no idea what God was asking her to do, but it became clear to me that for her to get better she needed to jump overboard in a raging storm and get swallowed by a fish for a few days. The first required courage in that she was essentially going to have to choose to allow her old self to die (a common shamanic metaphor - the shaman needs to die to move forward). The second would be enormously painful as she went though a near death experience in a cold dark place. But when she got spit up by the fish on the shore, things were going to be a whole lot better.

Today weather got me thinking about Noah too. In that case, Noah listened to what God asked and was able to ride out the flood in an ark. I can't imagine it was comfortable living in a huge boat filled with animals for a little over a year. Nor can it have been easy to watch your entire community, and everything you know, get wiped out. Noah also went through a "death" of sorts and emerged a changed man.

Comparing the two:
Noah listened to what God wanted and rode our the storm on top of the water.
Jonah ran away, got tossed around on a boat until he jumped into the water and rode out the storm in the water and in a fish.
Noah went through the change with his family.
Jonah went through it alone.
Noah listened and went through the storm with God.
Jonah ran away and caused the storm.
Noah accepted the change at the end and became a new person, though somewhat of a drinker.
Jonah didn't accept the change and did what he was asked but resented it.

If we are to think of these as Archetypes, we need to look at what they can teach us about our own lives and the problems we face. Both of these men were challenged by God. Is our response to our challenges to run away or to figure out what to do? Is the storm part of the challenge or is it caused by our response to it? Are we willing to let the challenge change us or are we going to resist to the end, long after the change has happened? How do we involve others in our challenges? Are we going to maintain our community connections or try to go it alone? Do we keep our problems to ourselves or do we let our challenges cause problems to others (the sailors on the ship Jonah was on)? Or do we involve others to help them ride through a crisis?

The Archetypal part of this is to ask if these behaviors go together. If we identify as a Jonah or as a Noah, can we use that to understand our behavior? And most importantly, can we use that to change and grow? A Jonah might suddenly understand why they cause problems to others when faced with a challenge and try to head off the storm by spending more time with themselves. A Noah might try to involve others in help her to meet her challenges instead of trying to go it alone.

This is just a brief sketch of what two Jewish Archetypes might look like. These two stories are very short and incomplete, so I wouldn't think that a person would be primarily one of them, but a person might have a bit of Noah in him, and that might be useful to understand. I'm very pragmatic about this and if they can help us to understand and grow, then it's something worth pursuing.

Amulet making part I

I've begun work on an amulet. I had a feeling that this was the right time to do it and called a friend in the art world. She gave me the name of a jeweler who gives private lessons and the two of us hit it off immediately. I had thought of making amulets in the past, but things never seemed to work out. Now the path opened for me very simply, so I am assuming that this is the right time to do it.

I'm at the beginning of the process, but it's very interesting to learn a new skill at this point in my life. I've worked with tools all my life, and silversmithing is not that different, everything is just much, much smaller. I've come up with a very simple design for the amulet I want to make and the first step was cutting a small triangle out of a sheet of brass. (Brass is for the model, Silver will be for the amulet itself.)

Holding the sheet of brass and running the tiny hacksaw blade up and down was not an entirely new skill, but my attitude was wholly different. Amulets are about channeling spiritual energy into an object of power. In the past, when I have "charged up" objects, I have held them in my hands and done the equivalent of a healing on them: connect to Shechina, connect to the object, and let the energy flow through me into the object. In this case, I am creating the object, so I need to make sure that I am transmitting energy every moment that I work on it.

I try to always work on the amulet in a healing mode. Usually my healing is very quiet with my hands kept still while on a person's body, tuning in to the patient's energy. Jewelry making is very different, every moment is concentrated on moving the tools in the proper direction using good technique. For me, it's a healing in motion where the only person in the room is me and the presence of the Shechina comes from my focus on my work, not from my connection with the client.

As I worked, every few moments I would have to stop and make sure that my body was relaxed. The focus in learning the new skill was causing me to tense up my whole body, especially my shoulders and neck. Then I would need to breath deeply and allow the energy to flow as I began to work again. It makes me realize how tense I must have been in the past when I've done physical work.

The hacksaw required a softness of hand that I'm not used to. Carpentry taught me to let the saw do the work instead of my muscles, but with thin blades, any tension or misdirection in my hand would snap the blade. The lines I was cutting were tiny without the margin of error I'm used to. Then I needed to breath and relax again, letting the Shechina flow through me.

If I get in the habit of always working on the amulet in a spiritual way, then it will come naturally as I continue to do the work. My focus is intense now because it is such a new skill. But as I get more practiced, it will become harder to maintain the focus and the energy. I don't know if I will make one amulet or many, or even if I'll complete the one I'm working on, but it gives proof to the idea that people don't need to be healers to bring God into the world. Anything that we do can be done with connection to the shamanic realm, it's just requires practice.

My Thoughts on Ritual Impurity

One of the restrictions on Cohanim is that we are not allowed to be in the presence of a dead body, which is considered ritually unclean. Growing up this mostly meant I stayed out of graveyards and sat in a shed next to the funeral home with my father when my Aunt died.

I never understood why I did these things, though I did know that on the few occasions when I went through graveyards, I felt uncomfortable and had the feeling that it was wrong to be there. (Notably only recent graves; when I've walked through colonial era graveyards, I experienced no discomfort.) A few years ago, I attended a wake for the brother-in-law of a close friend. I looked at the body out of curiosity, but then stayed as far away from it as possible - it just felt wrong. I could feel the soul of the deceased was present in the room, which was normal, but the body itself made me feel uneasy.

Two years ago, my dog died. She had been with me for almost 12 years and fought against cancer for five months when we decided that the pain was too much and it was only going downhill from there. We brought her to the vet and as she was put to sleep, my wife and I cried. I felt her ancestors come into and fill the room immediately before the injection. They gathered her to them as she died, and surprisingly quickly, they took her to the other side and were gone from the room. We sat there crying and then I suddenly looked at my wife and said that we had to leave. Her body, which only a minute or two early had been filled with life, was now empty. And impure.

A few days later, when I picked up her body to take it to bury, it was no longer impure, energetically I felt nothing.

At the moment of death, there was a particular energetic about it that felt like this was a vessel for life that had none in it. It's very hard to describe as it's not anything I've felt since. It's hard to base my thoughts on a major tenant of Judaism on a single experience, but when I look at other examples of ritual impurity, it seems to make sense.

In modern times, menstrual blood, or Niddah, is a good example of ritual impurity. When women have their periods, they are ritually impure until a period of time passes (seven days after the last drop of blood) at which point the woman needs to immerse herself in a Mikvah (ritual bath) to become pure again. There are many Jewish men and women who do not touch members of the opposite sex because they are worried that the woman is in a state of Niddah and may pass along the ritual impurity.

Menstrual blood is that same state as I describe earlier: it is a vessel for life that has none in it. The egg has the potential for life, but there is no life there. When it is discharged from the body, the blood would have the same potential. The seven days might be the time period that it takes for the impurity to wear off, so to speak, just as it did with my dog.

Different people have different gifts, and I think feeling ritual purity has not been one of mine, or at least it's nothing I've focused on. I don't know if I felt it so acutely with my dog due to the intensity of my emotions, or if it was because it was the first time I had ever been with someone as they died.

I suspect that there are people who feel impurity very acutely and I think the Jewish laws on ritual purity originated in a person or persons with that gift. They then got canonized and expanded by people with a more intellectual gift. I need to study all of the other instances of ritual impurity (such as Tzora'at) in the Torah to find out if my ideas fits in the other cases.

A first look at Tzora'at

I took a few minutes today to look over the mention of Tzora'at in the Torah. Tzora'at refers to some sort of skin disease. The usual translation is leprosy, but from what I understand, it is not known what disease it is exactly. The discussion is found in Leviticus 13-14, in parshas Tazria and Metsora.

A quick read is that the first section is about deciding when a person has Tzora'at, which is mostly about a Cohen (priest) coming to look at the person. The Cohen then makes a determination if the person is clean or unclean depending on the color of the skin, the depth of the skin disease, and the color of the hair growing in the affected area. If a person is unclean, they are isolated from the community for seven days at which point they are checked again. If they are determined clean, they can re-enter the community, but they need to go through a very elaborate cleansing ritual which involved shaving all the hair off of their head (eyebrows included) and sacrificing sin and guilt offerings. The blood of the offerings is put on several places on the person's body and then they are considered clean.

The first thing that stuck me was that the diagnosis is done by looking - it's entirely visual. The Cohen must be there is person, and they must look at the afflicted person. I have to study it more to see the role of the Cohen in the healing, but it seems that they declare a person as impure, wait, then declare them pure and perform the purification ritual to allow them to re-enter the community. (I will write another post soon on my thoughts about purity and impurity.) So the simple read is that the Cohen's role is to know when a person can or cannot be ritually pure, and help them become pure when it's possible. This bears more thought.

One passage that particularly struck me was Leviticus 13:13:

יג וְרָאָה הַכֹּהֵן, וְהִנֵּה כִסְּתָה הַצָּרַעַת אֶת-כָּל-בְּשָׂרוֹ--וְטִהַר, אֶת-הַנָּגַע: כֻּלּוֹ הָפַךְ לָבָן, טָהוֹר הוּא.

13 then the priest shall look; and, behold, if the leprosy have covered all his flesh, he shall pronounce him clean that hath the plague; it is all turned white: he is clean.

If someone has Tzora'at, they are impure, but if it has covered his entire body, so that he has no healthy skin at all, then he is pure. The following passage states that if "living skin" re-appears, then he is immediately impure.

In Chinese medicine, one of the basic principles is that Yin can transform into Yang, and Yang into Yin, and extreme Yin can transform into extreme Yang. A simple example is hypothermia. One of the warning signs that someone is entering hypothermia is that they start feeling warm when it is freezing outside. They become so cold that the Yin transforms into Yang and they begin to feel warm.

So it is in this case, when someone has become completely transformed by the impurity such that there is nothing pure remaining about them, they are transformed into a state of purity. It's as if the disease itself, by completely taking over the body, has purified them. This strikes me as a third possibility, they are pure, impure, or extreme impure that becomes pure.

This would also suggest that there is a state of extreme pure that becomes impure, though I don't know what that would look like but the myth of Icarus comes to mind. Perhaps there are those that try to get too close to God only to have it destroy their body.

The role of the Cohen is also generally considered the one who blesses. My hope is that this study will help me understand what exactly is the blessing that we give, and how to do it.

Bringing God into the world through the 13 attributes

We studied a passage from the Sefer Ba'al Shem Tov last week and as we were studying the sources behind the text, I went in a different direction than the text. So I'll present the sources and how they formed my thoughts.

This post has a lot of text quotes. I like to provide as much original texts as possible to inform as well as empower. These are my conclusions, but far from the only possible interpretation. If you have the whole text, you can come up with your own interpretation.

The first is from the 3rd Chapter of Joel:

ה וְהָיָה, כֹּל אֲשֶׁר-יִקְרָא בְּשֵׁם יְהוָה--יִמָּלֵט: כִּי בְּהַר-צִיּוֹן וּבִירוּשָׁלִַם תִּהְיֶה פְלֵיטָה, כַּאֲשֶׁר אָמַר יְהוָה, וּבַשְּׂרִידִים, אֲשֶׁר יְהוָה קֹרֵא.

5 And it shall come to pass, that whosoever shall call on the name of the LORD shall be delivered; for in mount Zion and in Jerusalem there shall be those that escape, as the LORD hath said, and among the remnant those whom the LORD shall call.

The question that arose from this is what does it mean to call on the name of the lord? How does one do it?

One answer can be found in Sifrei Devarim 49:

ללכת בכל דרכיו, אלו הן דרכי מקום?
"ה' אל רחום וחנון" (שמות לד ו)
ואומר: "והיה כל אשר יקרא בשם ה' ימלט" (יואל ג ה)
וכי היאך איפשר לו לאדם לקרא בשמו של מקום?
אלא נקרא המקום רחום - אף אתה היה רחום,
הקדוש ברוך הוא נקרא חנון - אף אתה היה חנון, שנאמר: "חנון ורחום ה'" וגו' (תהלים קמה ח) ועשה מתנות חנם,
נקרא המקום צדיק, שנאמר: "כי צדיק ה' צדקות אהב" (תהלים יא ז) - אף אתה היה צדיק,
נקרא המקום חסיד, שנאמר: "כי חסיד אני נאם ה'"(ירמיה ג יב) - אף אתה היה חסיד.
לכך נאמר: "והיה כל אשר יקרא בשם ה' ימלט"(יואל ג ה) ואומר: "כל הנקרא בשמי ולכבודי בראתיו יצרתיו אף עשיתיו" (ישעיה מג ז) ואומר: "כל פעל ה' למענהו"(משלי טז ד) .

"To Walk in all his ways." (Deut 10:12) What are the ways of God?
"God, God, a merciful and gracious God." (Ex. 34:6)
And it is said: "Whoever will call on the name of God shall be saved." (Joel 3:5)
How is it possible for a person to call on the name of God?
God is called Compassionate - you also be compassionate;
The holy one, blessed be he, is merciful - you too be merciful, as it is said: "God is gracious and compassionate" (Psalms 145:8) and you should give unconditionally;
God is called righteous, as is said: "For God is righteous, Justice he loves" (Psalms 11:7) - so you be righteous;
God is called Merciful - as it is said: "For I am merciful, says God." (Jeremiah 3:12) - You too be merciful.

I think the simple reading of the text is that when one does something merciful, one is calling the name of the God. Another way of reading it would be to say that when one does something merciful, one is bringing God into the world. That to embody the attributes of God is to bring God's presence into the world. I connected this to my idea of the messianic age - when it comes no one will notice. It's not that God sends someone down to save us, but we raise the world up to God. In that sense, going back to Joel, those who embody God will be saved, and such, will save us all.

My pragmatic side made me think about how one does this. I think I need to think and explore a lot more about the 13 attributes of God, but one thing that strikes me is that they are very vague attributes. They are not specific actions, but philosophical principals. So how does one encourage this in oneself and in others?

One of the child-rearing principals I hold to is process based praise. Trait based praise is praising someone for being smart or pretty. Process based praise is praising them for the effort they put into things. An example would be a child who completes a puzzle - one can say that she succeeded because she is smart or because she thought carefully about where each piece goes. The child will then try to emulate the praise: the process based praised child will try to think more carefully about where each piece goes and ends up working harder. The trait based praised child will try to be smarter. But how does one do that? By succeeding, so that child will look for easier challenges to succeed at and get frustrated when she has to work harder at things because it indicates that she isn't smart.

Applying this to the 13 attributes, one needs to praise oneself for working towards Justice or putting effort into righteousness, not for the trait, but the process that leads to each. The next step is to determine one's personal gifts and how we can use those to bring God into the world using the 13 attributes as a guide.

A family story about being a Cohen

I was just reading something my father wrote last year and came across this passage:

By the way, my father’s synagogue was basically a store front kind of place, and the people in it were all from Ostrova. My father and I were the only Kohanim in the congregation, so at the important holidays the few Leviim would wash our hands and we would bless the congregation.

Every one, of course, knew each other. It wasn’t a big congregation, all poor people who couldn’t afford a Rabbi, so everything was done by the people themselves.

On Saturday, after services, there would be a small piece of cake and some schnapps, so I got used to strong liquor from when I was a child. I wore tzitzit till I was sixteen, and in my second year in college, when I guess it got too embarrassing for me.

At some point one of the writers, who must have been widowed, for one of the Jewish newspapers, not an Ostrovan, joined the synagogue, and many of the congregants (the word doesn’t feel right, but it fits) would vie to have him come for Sabbath lunch – he was, after all, an educated man.

Given my reconnection this past Shabbat, I found this very interesting and timely.

Receiving the blessing of the Cohanim

I went to the Amika-Debira minyan this morning. It's a wonderful place to pray, they pray with a lot of Ruah (spirit) and they sing almost all of the prayers. Which makes for a very enjoyable, though long service.

One difference between praying here in Jerusalem and in the states is Birkat Cohanim, the priestly blessing. It's done during the leader's repetition of the Amidah. The Cohanim (those descended from the priests of the temple) go to the front of the room, say a short blessing, and then bless those assembled. Outside of Isreal, it is done only on High Holidays, if it's done at all, but here in Israel, it's done all the time.

When I first got here, I remember seeing it done and staring amazed at the people up front with the Talitim over their heads blessing the congregation. I am a Cohen, but I'd never done the Birkat Cohanim. I felt an urge to, but always felt held back because I had no idea what it meant or how it was done. So when the Cohanim would go up front, I would stay in my seat. On a Shabbat morning, the Birkat Cohanim is done twice, once during Shacharit (morning prayer), and once during musaf (additional prayer).

At some point during Shacharit today, I got to thinking about how I heal. This past week, I was explaining to someone about my approach to healing (in Hebrew) and mentioned that I study shamanism. "Shaman?" She asked, "That's a kind of Cohen (priest), isn't it?" It got me thinking that she was correct and that perhaps what I do could best be termed "Cohenic Healing" or something like that. I realized that I don't really know what that means and it might be a good idea to go through the Torah and look at all the examples of when the Cohens acted as healers.

About then, it came time for the first Birkat Cohanim. I saw only one person go up front and give the blessing (there are usually three or four people as all the Cohanim present give the blessing). We then took a break for kiddush and I put my thoughts on hold. When we gathered again for the Torah reading, I realized that the only other Cohen had left. So when they asked if there were Cohanim present, I raised my hand for the first aliyah (call to the Torah).

My teacher Avraham, who was reading the Torah for that Aliyah, looked at me very funny and said "You're a Cohen?"
"Yes." I replied, "Is that ok?" He was looking at me very funny.
"With the name Askanase, I didn't think..." He replied.
"I got the name with the marriage." I said. I took my wife's name when we got married. She wanted to keep her name, and I wanted to have the same name - we both won.

I did the blessings over the Torah reading and returned to my seat thinking that this really was a Cohen day. Now that I had come forward as a Cohen, and there were no other Cohanim there, I was going to have to go forward to do the Birkat Cohanim! I kept my eye on Avraham and later on, I saw him step outside for a breath of fresh air. I followed after and asked him if he could tell me how to do the Birkat Cohanim. He told me that he hadn't realized I was a Cohen because I never did the Birkat Cohanim, to which I replied that I had never done it because I had never done it and didn't know how. He was amazed and gave me brief instructions on what to do.

He asked me why I had never done it. I stumbled for an answer and told him I just didn't know what to do. If we'd had a second more, I would have continued that I'd never done it because it would have made me feel arrogant - that I get to do this special thing because I am better than everyone else. But the truth is not about humility or ignorance, but about fear. This was a new thing to me and I was scared to try it out.

Whenever the other Cohanim had done the blessing, I had tried to feel the energy or power that came out of it, but hadn't felt anything. So I put the ritual down and came up with all sorts of rationalizations why I shouldn't do it. But the truth is that I was scared. I probably hadn't felt anything from it because the fear blocked my perceptions. When I got his basic instruction, I became less scared, but as the time came closer, I began to shake quietly with fear.

When it came time, I went forward to do the blessings, only to be led to the side by two Levites (the tribe who traditionally did the administrative and logistical duties in the Temple). They took me into a side room and ritually washed and dried my hands. I returned to the front of the room and took off my shoes and stepped onto a rug placed there for this purpose. I pulled my Talit over my head and felt the fear throughout my entire being. It was an interesting sensation to, at the same time, be both experiencing and being aware that I was experiencing the fear.

I said the blessing before the blessing, then put down my prayer book, placed my hands in front of me in the priestly sign, and repeated as the blessing was read aloud word for word. I know the blessing very well as it's the same blessing I say to my children every week, but I couldn't remember a word of it. I had trouble understanding the words that were being said to me even though I knew them by heart. That's how scared I was.

When I finished, and lowered my Talit, I head Avraham say a Shehechianu (the blessing thanking God for bringing us to this moment that is said when something significant or new happens). Others looked around, not understanding why he had said it, but as I found my way back to the seat and Avraham gave me a big hug, he told others that it was my first time. Then all of the handshakes came and another friend came over to give me a big hug.

When the service came to a close, many others came over to thank me for letting them share in my first time doing the Birkat Cohanim. It was quite moving.

I continued to talk to Avraham, a few others, and the person who had been leading Musaf. It turned out that he was a cohen also so he gave me a few instructions on how to do the prayer. Avraham looked at me and said that it all made sense now as the Cohanim were the spiritual healers, the shamen of the Jews, and it was all in the discussion of Tzoraat (sometimes translated as leprosy). I looked at him and said that now I knew what I needed to study next.

The whole time we were talking I kept turning around to find out who was behind me, but there was no one there. Then I realized that I was feeling a huge spiritual connection behind me. It felt like there were generations of cohanim standing behind me, and they had all shown up to be with me for this service.

I am a Cohen, and this is my lineage, and today I finally realized what that means and how powerful it is. I hope that I can make them proud.

Blessing the Children

This is something I wrote last year that I wanted to share.

December 17, 2007

Blessing the Children

In this week's Torah Portion, VaYehi (Genesis 47:28-50:26), we come across the blessing the Jacob give to Manasseh and Ephraim. They are his grandchildren, the children of Joseph. The blessing they are given is:

"The God in whose ways my fathers Abraham and Isaac walked,
The God who has been my shepherd from birth to this day -
The Angel who has redeemed me from all harm-
Bless the lads.

In them may my name be called,
And the names of my fathers Abraham and Isaac,
And may they be teeming multitudes upon the earth." (Genesis 48:15-16, JPS Translation)

Later on it continues:
"By you shall Israel invoke blessing, saying: God make (put/appoint) you like Ephraim and Manasseh." (Genesis 48:20)

And so it is that on every Friday night, we bless our children with the blessing that for boys begins: May God put/appoint you like Ephraim and Manasseh, and for Girls begins: May God put/appoint you like Sarah, Rebbecca, Rachel, and Leah. It continues: May God bless you and keep/guard you, May God illuminate his face (presence) for you and teach you, May God turn his face to you and put/appoint peace for you.

We were talking about this in class today and what does this actually mean. What was the blessing the two grandchildren received, and what exactly does it mean to bless someone like Ephraim and Manasseh?

People were throwing out some very good ideas of what it means to be blessed like these two, such as that these are the first example of brothers without sibling rivalry in the bible, so we should all be so lucky. Or that they were really fathers to our people, and we should all be blessed with such fertility. Or that they grew up comfortable and didn't really seem to experience many struggles or hardships, so we should all be blessed to have such uneventful lives. (We know very little about their lives as their only role in the bible is to receive these blessings, but given what others had to go through, that's maybe a good thing.)

I sat quiet for the first part of class because I was lost trying to figure out how I would bless my children. I mean, I say this blessing every week, and my wife always does a wonderful job of giving each of the girls their own personal blessing after I do the traditional one. Things like: "a week of health", "A week of good sleep", or "A week of new words." But I've never really thought about how I would want to bless my children. And I was at a loss.

I think often of the blessing I gave a good friend's daughter at her naming. There is a chassidic story that goes something like this: Reb Zusya was dying and was very anxious and worried. He was known far and wide as a tzaddik, a righteous man, and those around him said: don't worry, you have lived as righteous a life as Moses or King David, surely God will accept you into the world to come. When Reb Zusya heard that, he cried even more and answered: When I get to the world to come, I won't be asked if I've been a good Moses, I'll be asked if I've been a good Zusya. I'm worried if I was the best Zusya that I could be. My blessing for my friend's child was to be the best her that she could be.

I always thought that my blessing for my daughters was something similar to that one, it's how I try to parent, so it would make sense. But how then to make sense of this blessing that I say every week. It feels very powerful and I enjoy saying it, but how to make sense of it?

It then came to me to understand it slightly differently: not to be blessed like Ephraim and Manasseh, but to be blessed like they were blessed. Jacob blessed them by connecting them to his lineage, to his God and the God of his fathers. The Torah portion continues with Jacob's blessings to his own sons, which are pretty stark. Some of them even sound like curses, but these two boys were blessed with the connection to God, and with Jacob's spiritual lineage. And maybe that's why we are commanded to bless our children as they were blessed - we give our children our spiritual lineage, our connection to God and the Jewish people. It's a call to me to work on my own spirituality so that I have more to pass on. We are not commanded to bless our children to be any particular way, but we are blessing them to be connected to God like our forefathers and mothers were.

The blessing for daughters is then read that they should be blessed as our foremothers were blessed. Each of whom was blessed with a strong and powerful direct relationship with God. I will continue to try to help my daughters to be the best persons that they can be, and in terms of blessings, I'm not sure what else I could hope for other than a strong connection to God who can help them be the best them that they can be.

Joel 2:13 - Tearing one's heart

In Joel 2:13 it reads:

יב וְגַם-עַתָּה, נְאֻם-יְהוָה, שֻׁבוּ עָדַי, בְּכָל-לְבַבְכֶם; וּבְצוֹם וּבִבְכִי, וּבְמִסְפֵּד.	12 Yet even now, saith the LORD, turn ye unto Me with all your heart, and with fasting, and with weeping, and with lamentation;
יג וְקִרְעוּ לְבַבְכֶם וְאַל-בִּגְדֵיכֶם, וְשׁוּבוּ אֶל-יְהוָה אֱלֹהֵיכֶם: כִּי-חַנּוּן וְרַחוּם, הוּא--אֶרֶךְ אַפַּיִם וְרַב-חֶסֶד, וְנִחָם עַל-הָרָעָה.	13 And rend your heart, and not your garments, and turn unto the LORD your God; for He is gracious and compassionate, slow to anger and abundant in mercy, and repenteth Him of the evil.

In the midst of reading Joel, I was struck by the above passage. Joel begins with an apocalyptic vision of the destruction of Israel followed by a call to repentance, after which there will be an abundance in Israel.

Two things struck me from this passage, the first is that he asks us to rend our hearts and not our clothes. When we are doing true repentance and change, it must come from the inside, not the outside. It's no good changing our external appearance - we can fast, we can weep, we can say the right things, but only when our hearts are torn in two can we really change.

Later, we learn our rewards for change in Joel 3:1:

א וְהָיָה אַחֲרֵי-כֵן, אֶשְׁפּוֹךְ אֶת-רוּחִי עַל-כָּל-בָּשָׂר, וְנִבְּאוּ, בְּנֵיכֶם וּבְנוֹתֵיכֶם; זִקְנֵיכֶם, חֲלֹמוֹת יַחֲלֹמוּן--בַּחוּרֵיכֶם, חֶזְיֹנוֹת יִרְאוּ.	1 And it shall come to pass afterward, that I will pour out My spirit upon all flesh; and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, your old men shall dream dreams, your young men shall see visions;

The result of all of this soul-searching and heart rending is prophesy and being filled with רוח הקודש (the wind/spirit of God). One could read this in reverse and learn that if one is searching for direct spiritual connection, one must start with repentance and do תשובה (Tsuvah - returning) from the heart.

In my mind, this is a very simple thought, but I think it's a very important one. It's a nice summary of the Jewish approach to building spirituality. The first step is to make oneself as pure as possible, then one is able to connect to the spirit world.

[The translations are from http://www.mechon-mamre.org/p/pt/pt1403.htm]

Thoughts on a seminar with Tommy Thompson

Two days ago, I had the pleasure of attending a seminar on the Alexander Technique given by Tommy Thompson. From July 2003 until we left Boston in 2007, I had been working with a student of Tommy's in Boston named Debi Adams (a very gifted healer), but had never managed to meet Tommy himself. I'm glad I made the effort to attend his seminar in Tel Aviv as it was really great and contained many gems on Healing that are applicable to all healers, no matter what your modality.

This seminar was mainly for teacher of the Alexander technique, so it was interesting to be a witness to the internal Alexander debates. Tommy mainly focused his lecture on differentiating between really connecting with the person and working with them as a piece of machinery on whom the technique is performed. He gave many demonstrations of working the "regular" way and then working when connected.

Watching Tommy switch back and forth between a connected treatment and a "regular" one was impressive. His words for connecting were "finding the person". In doing the treatment, you related to the client as a person, not as a machine or a piece of meat. Instead, you try to find their deeper movements beneath their normal "patterns of behavior". He told a story of being on a sea kayak in the ocean. He could see the waves moving, but it took him a long time to realize that there were deeper currents underneath. When he ignored the visible waves and focused on the currents, he was able to maneuver with ease, but when he tried to steer according to the waves, he always struggled.

He said that our patterns of behavior are the waves, but those may not be the person, they may just be what the person is used to doing. Underneath that is the real person and we need to connect to that person when we are doing healing.

In many ways, it is such a simple concept, yet so profound and difficult to do. Some practitioners reach this point on their own through either long experience or moments of realization. Some meet a teacher, and are helped to this realization. Some have a natural tendency to connect to the true person, and some never manage to do it at all. It strikes me that many of the best practitioners I've met all get to this same point. Much of what Tommy spoke about is very similar to how my mentor John Myerson talks.

There were several people in the crowd, several of whom were very vocal, who clearly did not get it. They kept trying to understand it within their own patterns of thought and it was clearly not their experience so they missed the point entirely. Some tried to minimize what he was saying by rationalizing it into other, more popular concepts in their work. I guess there is a fine line to know when someone is saying something that can enlighten my own understanding of my experience, and when they are experiencing something completely different that requires me to broaden my understanding.

Some other gems from the seminar:
People don't come to you for their health problem, they come to you because the energy of the universe has led them to your door. Their deeper self brought them to see you, so don't get lost in their surface problems.

He took two matches and lit one. Then pressed it to the other match which flared up as it was lit. He said that this represented our passing the knowledge onto to our clients - we are not given them something they don't already have. We are igniting something that is already there. In the moment of contact, the two matches burned brighter than either apart.

"Put your hands where they are needed." Not where you think they should go. He was clear not to get caught up in the technique, but to let the healing happen. "You can find the face in the back." No matter where you are working, you are treating the entire person.

"If you get hit a lot, you develop a pattern of behavior to prevent yourself from getting hit." Which may not really be you, but a reaction to your surroundings. Try not to focus on the pattern, focus on the person inside.

As a practitioner, always let the work to make you a better person.

When someone goes through a traumatic experience: if they experience it, they will be fine. If they react to it, it will get stuck in the tissue. Most people react to it without experiencing it and have troubles later on. Help the client to experience it without reacting to it and the can move beyond the event. (I was struck by how similar this is to the way in which I approach fear.)

Experience what you are experiencing. If we don't go looking for something in particular, then we can really experience what is going on, but if we go looking for something, then we miss what's happening.

Experience things from who you are now, not who you were. Change the story you tell to reflect who you are now, not who you were when the story originally took place. Let go of any attachment to the event as you used to understand it and then you can heal and move on.

I really enjoyed learning from Tommy, and look forward to attending another seminar tomorrow. If anyone has a chance to study with him, I strongly recommend it.

You can read about the second class here.

Rethinking the Shechina

The Shechina is understood as the feminine presence of God. When we feels God's presence, we are feeling the Shechina. I've never given much thought to what this meant, but recent study has made me realize that I had been thinking of the Shechina as the warm and fuzzy side of God. The presence that arrives which makes us feel whole and connected. But I think I've been wrong. Or at least not complete in my thinking.

With many Kabbalistic concepts, my methodology has been to compare the writing to what I have experienced in the past and see if they are explaining something I've experienced. If it doesn't, I try to connect to the author of the text, and then use that connection to feel what they were experiencing. Another variation on that is to use the text itself as a guide to try to find the experience. If I'm still drawing an experiential blank, I try my best to understand the concept intellectually and how it fits in to my larger understanding of shamanism, spirituality, and Kabbalah.

Shechina is traditionally associated with the lowest sephira of Malchut. I've been studying Shaarei Ora by Rabbi Yosef Gikatilla (1248-1310) with my Hevruta and we've just completed the first section on Malchut. He finds many different words in the Torah that connect to the Shechina and uses them to describe her different aspects. Two of the major descriptors of the Shechina are as an empty pool or mikvah that is filled up by the other sephirot, and as the gateway between the spiritual world and the physical one. The Shechina sits on the bottom of the sephirot and in order for us to access the treasure rooms above, we must first pass through Malchut. Likewise, when the higher sephirot act upon the world, they also pass through Malchut.

He seemed to imply that there are time when the other sephirot act upon us directly, through malchut, and times when the empty nature of malchut fills up with the higher Sephira and then malchut acts upon us. Practically, I'm not sure if we would be able to feel much difference between the two, though I would imagine that when the higher Sephira acts upon us directly, it is a more powerful experience as there is no mediator involved.

This makes a lot of practical sense to me. There is a veil or a gate between the spirit world and the physical one which can be called Malchut. Whenever we want to enter into the spiritual world, we need to pass through this gate. There are many different ways of doing this, through drumming, singing, praying, and others. But the idea of a gate or doorway makes a lot of sense with my past experience. It also didn't bother my notion of a warm fuzzy Shechina.

But at the end of Gikatilla's section on Malchut, he writes about Malchut wearing three types of fire, each associated with a name of God: black (Shakai), red (Elokim), and green (A-D-N-I). (I'll write another post with the whole passage and a longer discussion.) The Black devouring fire disperses bad spirits and impure things. The Red fire destroys everything around it, good and bad, like a plague. And the green fire causes fear, awe, and trembling upon all the created. Not so warm and fuzzy.

This version of the Shechina means that when the presence of God comes to us, it can be terrible and dark. It can use that dark energy to heal us and drive away dark spirits, but it can also destroy everything around itself. In this sense, when the Shechina comes to us, it's not always a good thing. I am tempted to link this to what John Myerson writes about dark energy and the dangers it presents when we use it, but I think that would be too much of a reach at this point. I want to see what else Gikatilla writes about dark energy, if I can use that term "black fire that devours".

In class yesterday, my teacher taught us of an idea in the Zohar that the Shechina is the energy that is created between people. The Shechina can be thought of as Knesset Yisrael (the gathering of Israel) . And from that we can understand that anytime people get together the shechina manifests. I experience this everyday. There is a particular power that manifests in my healing when there is a connection between myself and the patient. I just have been calling it a connection, but might I also be able to understand it as the Shechina?

That connection has a power, but it can be many different types of power and do many different things. I have to pay more attention to this to determine if what I am terming the power of connection is truly the presence of the Shechina. If so, it can lead to a whole new way of explaining the connections between people, and a new way of understanding how to call the Shechina. It is not just the presence we hope will descend upon us, but something that we intentionally draw towards us by improving the connections between us.

We'll see how that develops, but for now I am certain that the Shechina is not always so warm and fuzzy!

Words stretching across creation

I had a wonderful vision during a treatment I recently received. I was brought into a room and shown a book with black pages. I looked into it and knew I had to write something. In white letters, I began writing בראשית (Berashit - the first word of the Torah). I wrote the letters in the same script as the Torah. At some point, I realized that I was writing black letters on a white page. As I finished the word, I looked at it and realized it stretched across creation. The start of the word, written in white against nothingness crossed into black letters on creation. It was profoundly beautiful.

The Role of Healers in the Healing

In dealing with my Yetzer haRah (see last post), I spent a lot of time thinking about the role of the healer in the healing, and particularly my role in the healing.

I often think of my treatments as creating the space for the healing to happen. My role is connecting to the patient, connecting to God, and then the healing happens. The power for the healing came from God, but I was involved as well. So how do I understand my role? And from that, how do I become a better healer?

I can interpret every treatment as completely God's work in which I am an empty vessel who simply does God's work. In this story, my role is to learn to be empty. There is no particular training needed, no need to work on healing techniques or better needle insertion. There is only one skill - being empty. Whatever path I followed to suppress my ego and become empty is all I need to keep doing to be a better healer. The danger of this path is that one can beat oneself up for having any ego at all, and so get into a rut of self-denial and self-suppression. I think there are people for whom this path works, it's just not who I am.

Another way of describing the treatment is that I can take complete credit for the treatment. I can believe that the whole treatment comes from my power, and there are no greater forces involved. My ego has complete control here. The dangers here are many. The story is all about me, and there is no room for God. This is the story of arrogance, and there is no need for growth - I did such an amazing thing, aren't I wonderful. There is no fears or tears or tensions created that would drive me forward. In this story, I am already perfect.

The challenge is finding a way to tell the story that allows me to have a sense of self, to keep growing, and to acknowledge the role of God. I think it is natural to take joy in our successes. When the harvest comes in, the farmer is joyful, but the farmer knows it is only temporary as it will be soon be time to start planting again.

I know that God played an integral part in the treatment and all the power is his, but I was there too. Is that arrogant to say? Is there a way to tell the story such that I acknowledge the work I did to enable the treatment to be successful?

The farmer knows that just scattering seeds on the soil and waiting won't bring crops to harvest. One needs to do a lot of planning, and hard work to make those plants grow. Ultimately, it's God who makes the plants grow, the rains fall, and who decides if the harvest will be successful. But that doesn't free the farmer from working very hard to create the right conditions in which the crops can succeed.

I think it works this way with healing. I have to work very hard to create the right space, to relax the patient, to place the needles in the right points, to place my hands on the right places - all that so that the healing can happen. My tension for growth is to always get better at my part of the healing. And then when I succeed and the patient gets better, then I feel joy. But like a farmer, I know the joy lasts only until my next treatment when I must begin all over again.

My teacher John once said to me that the Zen concept of not attaching to things is very important. I see it in this case: if I attach to the joy, then it prevents me from growing. If I deny the joy, I am not being honest with myself. If I feel the joy and then let it go and move on, then I can continue to plant and grow.

The story should perhaps be told in this way: A patient came in, I worked hard to create the space for the healing, and then felt joy when God connected to us and helped the client to heal. And then I moved on to the next patient.

A final note:
I wrote this post yesterday. Last night, I was reading The Wings of The Sun by Avraham Greenbaum. In the section on the rabbinic tradition (chapter 4, p. 33), he solves my dilemna by stating that God heals, but he grants the doctors power to heal as God's agents. He continues the point thus:

This latter viewpoint is vividly expressed in a midrash telling of a sick man who approached Rabbi Yishmael and Rabbi Akiva as they were walking in Jerusalem one day. The sick man asked the two rabbis what he should do to be cured. They gave him a number of recommendations, upon hearing which a farmer who had been listening said to them, "You're interfering in something that's none of your business! God afflicted him with illness and you want to heal him?" "But don't you as a farmer do the same?" they replied. "God created the earth, but you have to plow, till, fertilize and weed if you want the land to yield produce. `As for man, his days are as grass' (Psalms 103:15). The human body is the tree, the medicine is the fertilizer and the physician is the tiller of the earth" (Midrash Shmuel 52a #4).

What amazed me was that my analogy of a farmer was actually a classical one. It's amaizing when things come together like that!

If you follow the link to Wings of the Sun, the entire book is available on-line. It's worth the read: http://www.azamra.org/.

Feeling Joy without arrogance

I finished a treatment last week and smiled. It was a good treatment: there was a lot of power in the room, I had felt a very clear disharmony in the patient's cranial rhythms and was able to return it to proper functioning, and the client was one who I had a personal stake in the treatment's success. It was a patient who is well connected in the local community and I knew that if I was able to give him a successful treatment, it could directly benefit my business.

When the patient left the room, I pumped my fist and smiled a broad smile and said "I did it!" Then I paused and checked in on myself. I hadn't done it. God had done it. The power, the clear vision, the healing the patient felt happened as a result of God working through me, and working directly on the patient. But here I was taking credit for it.

I'm a person who has long struggled with arrogance. In my youth, I think it was a defense mechanism: if I was better than everyone else, then I didn't need to work hard or measure myself by their measures. So if I failed at something, it wouldn't matter to me. Like most things, I think it was generated out of fear. In particular, a fear of not being the best - of not succeeding. So rather than trying and failing, I found a way to convince myself that I didn't need to try. And then, if I failed, I could always say that I failed because I didn't try, but if I had tried, I could have succeeded. I know now that it did matter a great deal to me, but back then I didn't have the tools to succeed, so I fashioned an attitude which allowed me to fail and not feel bad about it. It was neat little knot I had tied myself in.

These days, I'm always worried that the arrogance will come back. So when I find myself taking too much credit for a good treatment, I feel the need to do some introspection. The first place I look is at my fears. I knew there was a small fear that my business wouldn't succeed, but that's always there. I think that I need that fear of business failure needed to keep me motivated to keep working on my business.

There was also the fear that I am not a good practitioner. Again, the fear of not being proficient is necessary to keep me growing. But what I saw was that alongside this fear was my Yetzer haRah (urge to self-destruction). The fear opened a small place inside me when the Yetzer HaRah started telling me to beat myself up over taking joy in a good treatment.

It was an interesting energetic thing - I was not criticizing myself for the quality of my treatment, I was going after myself for my reaction to the treatment. The patient received a good treatment. His symptoms were lessened, and he was in a much better place when he left then when he came.

My feeling on how to overcome the Yetzer HaRah is to be aware of it. I haven't found a lot of traditional sources for ways to deal with it energetically. Most places simply talk about suppressing it or overcoming it, but not much on how to actually do that. I treat it much the same as fear: know when it's present and be aware of it. Then you can decided to listen or not to listen to it, but it no longer has any power over you.

In this case, it was trying to lead me down an old path so that I get caught up in myself and stop moving forward. There is no fault in taking joy in a job well done as long as I realize my role in the treatment and don't take credit for the parts in which I had no part. The tricky part is that this moment can lead me down two opposite bad directions: either getting arrogant and taking all the credit for the treatment, or taking no credit at all and beating myself up for feeling joy. The delicate middle path is where I ended up, but I had to sort out where the energies and inclinations were coming from.

My next post will be about the role of the healer in the healing which was also a result of the same moment as this post.

The tensions that move us forward

I've been thinking more about the Ba'al Shem Tov's tips for perpetual growth - sowing tears and harvesting joy (though he really just focuses on the tears). I have been taught that one of the differences between Judaism and many eastern religions is that in Judaism there is no concept of becoming enlightened. In Judaism, there is a dynamic tension created between the world as it is and the world as it could be. We are always trying to find ways to do tikkun in the world, and, more importantly, on ourselves. The Ba'al Shem Tov is outlining one of the methods for using that tension to continue to grow.

(As a side note, the goal of all of this tikkun is to repair the world so that the messiah can come. My personal feeling is that when the messiah gets here, no one will notice. We will bring about the messianic age bit by bit and tear by tear. We repair the world slowly, as we repair ourselves gradually. There will be no huge event when the messiah comes, no great jump forward, he will just show up and, God willing, be like everyone else. The messiah is not a person who will come to save us, we will save ourselves and thus bring the messiah to us.)

I have been spending some time looking at my life and seeing the tensions that drive me forward. I am old enough to start seeing patterns in my behavior and to see that many issues in my life return after I thought I had dealt with them. I have changed my focus now in how I follow the patterns of my life. What I am looking for now is the tensions that create those issues. A clear example is my marriage. I can see the differences between my wife and I that create friction, but they also drive us to deepen and strengthen our relationship. Though the will probably never be resolved, they push us both forward to become better people.

I would suggest to everyone to take a moment and consider the recurrent issues in your lives, and then examine the tensions that create those issues. Are there tensions that create growth? Are there tensions that create self-destructive behavior? Are there tensions in which you get to choose a nourishing or a destructive path? The next step is to strengthen the tensions that force us to grow, and get out of the destructive ones. The goal is not to become enlightened, but to meet the tensions with wisdom and grow from them. To give power to those things which help us to do Tikkun, and take the power away from those things that lead us to Yetzer ha-Rah (evil inclination).

Mishnah Berachot 5:5 - R. Hanina's Healing

There is a very interesting mishnah about healing found in Berachot mishnah 5:5 (translation is mine):

Some who prays and makes a mistake: it's a bad sign for him. If the prayer leader [shaliah tzibur – emissary of the public] makes a mistake, it's a bad sign for all who are led because those who send an emissary are just like him. It's it said of rabbi Hanina ben Dosa that when he would pray for the sick, he would then say: this one will live, and this one will die. The said to him: From where do you know? He said to them: if the prayer is fluent in my mouth, and I know that it will be received, but if not, I know he will be consumed by the illness [literally torn apart or devoured].

My first response to this was of course that's how it is. If R. Hanina was connected to God, he will know when his prayers are having an effect and when they aren't. By connecting to the sick person and then praying, he knows if the person can heal or not.

I had a teacher in school who described a certain type of pulse that indicated that the patient would die in the next few days, and that he had felt this pulse in the past and the patient did pass away soon after. When I asked another teacher about it, he described a different pulse, but said it doesn't work that way in reality, only in theory. I asked a third teacher, and she said that was bunk, she'd worked on terminal patients who died shortly after she saw them and she felt nothing in the pulse. My conclusion was that the first teacher had a gift for knowing when a person would die, and the tool he used for it was the pulse.

Similarly, R. Hanina had a gift for knowing when a person would recover or die, and the tool he used was how well his prayer for the patient came out of mouth.

People have different “tells” for when the spirit world is communicating with them. When I started this work, my tell was pressure on the left side of my head. Whenever there was spiritual energy in the room, my head would feel like someone was pressing on the side. Others feel it in different places in their bodies, or they just know. After a while, I learned to distinguish between my imagined or internal feelings, and those that were connected to the spirit world. At first I relied solely on my “tell”, but after a while, I started to recognize the qualitative difference in my feelings.

R. Hanina's “tell” was how well his mouth worked when he said the prayer. The text asks "From where do you know this?" R. Hanina answer is a response to this question, and he is telling us about his indicator or "tell" for his receiving a message from the spirit world and God. It is unclear if is when he said the prayer itself or just the person's name, though he knew that if he stumbled during one of them, the prognosis was poor.

Praising the growing, not the growth

From the Sefer Ba'al Shem Tov , Mishpatim 16.
Below is my translation and then my interpretation.

It is based on Psalm 126:

(1) A Song of ascents.
When the lord restores the fortunes of Zion
--We see it as a dream --
(2) our mouths shall be filled with laughter,
our tongues, with songs of joy.
Then shall they say among the nations,
"The Lord has done great things for them!"
(3) The Lord will do great things for us,
and we shall rejoice

(4) Restore our fortunes, O Lord,
Like waterways in the Negev.
(5) They who sow in tears
Shall reap with songs of joy.
(6) though he goes along weeping,
carrying the seed bag (or spreading the seeds he carries),
he shall come back with songs of joy,
carrying his sheaves.

The Ba'al Shem Tov teaches:

If he walks from [spiritual] step to [spiritual] step and desires to achieve more, he is really like the Ayn Sof (without end - a name of God) in that there is no end to his potential. Thus is the man who has the attribute to obtain the stream that comes from Ayn Sof.

But the man who says I have enough in what I can learn. This is not success only straw and hay which are klipot (shells - spiritual blocks).

And the explanation of the verse: "(6) though he goes along weeping" is that it says that if he wants to walk from [spiritual] step to [spiritual] step then all that he has obtained is already not enough for him. This is the "carrying/spreading the seed bag," that Ayn Sof has given him.

Thus someone who says "He shall come back", as if he has already been to top of the steps, and he is in "joy" all the time. And who says my soul is at peace because he has learned a lot of Torah, and doesn't need any more. This is "carrying his sheaves", and they are nothing but straw and hay.


My interpretation is more cyclic. You need to keep walking, keep searching for knowledge. Keep spreading and sowing seeds to rise up from step to step. Otherwise, in the passage of time, you will be left with only the fruits of the harvest - straw and hay. Because if you stop planting, the straw and hay will soon be used up or be blown away. And you will be left with nothing.

The cycle is sown with tears and harvested with joy. To grow, we need to look to our tears. To find the frustrations and short-comings in our learning and practice so we can grow. If not, we will soon find ourselves surrounded with only dead straw, with no young plants to nourish us in the future.

When a person is always happy, he is not moving forward. Each challenge in life follows this cycle: we get frustrated with ourselves about something so we work hard to grow in the area. At some point, something happens to make us realize how much we have grown and find we are no longer frustrated in the same way. A wise person meets their problems with wisdom and grows. A fool doesn't engage in their problems and doesn't grow. A wise person welcomes the cycle of tears and joy, but looks for the tears always knowing that there is further to go.

I am reminded of an article on how to praise children by Carol Dweck. She would say that one should praise oneself and others for the process of growing, for the tears, rather than for the accomplishment, the joy. I think the Ba'al Shem Tov would subscribe to her philosophy - he praises us in the teaching above for always striving to be better, not for the success in having grown.

After a Spiritual Journey: Bread and Wine

I heard a wonderful teaching today from my teacher Avraham: according to Jewish tradition, when a person returns from a mercavah journey, having visited the heavenly palaces, and stood in the presence of God, the best thing to do is to eat and drink.

To me, this is pure technique: when someone has been meditating deeply or journeying, one of the best ways to ground oneself and bring oneself fully back to the physical world is to eat.

In Genesis 15:18, during the meeting of Avraham Avinu and King Melchizedek of Salem, we are told that "Malchizedek of Salem brought out bread and wine". He then gives Avraham avinu a blessing.

Another story Avraham my teacher relayed was of a Hasidic rabbi who was known to rise up to the heavenly realm during prayer. He had a hasid (disciple) who's job it was to hand the Rabbi bread and butter when he finished praying so that he could return fully to this world.

I believe there is another textual source, but haven't been able to find it yet. I'll post when I do.

Gevurot Geshamim

Sometimes it seems that I am led to certain topics. The latest is Gevurot Geshamim, גבורות גשמים, the strength/powers of the rain. At the end of Sukkkot, we change the rain prayer we say twice during the Amidah from blessings to rain.

The prayer occurs twice. The first time is during the prayer for reviving the dead, מחיה המתים, and the second is during the prayer for a good year. The Talmudic explanation for this is because when the rains come it is like reviving the dead. I remember being in the Negev desert many years ago and watching what I thought was a dead branch start to sprout immediately after the rains. There are certain plants in the desert that remain dormant for years and then come to life after the rains. Thus the rains can easily be understood as bringing life to the dead.

Interestingly, during this prayer, we mention the rains, but don't request any. Later, during the prayer for a good year, we specifically ask for a blessing during the summer, and dew and rain during the winter. In any land, rain is essential to agriculture, and too much or too little rain can determine who lives and who dies in the coming year.

Traditionally there are three things for which God alone is responsible: creating life (babies), reviving the dead, and the rains. This leads to very interesting discussions about the effect of modern technology on human power to effect those three things, but in my mind we are still technicians. For all the medical advances in IVF, we still have no idea how life is created. We can help it along, but if it works or not is far beyond us. We can predict the rain, but we have no control over it. We've just gotten better at observing what God does, not influencing it. Though human actions do seem to have an effect on the climate, we are just a small part of a very big system.

My question here is really about the term Gevurot Geshamim. In one sense it could mean just the strength of the rains meaning that we want strong rains and not just a drizzle. In another term, it might mean the power to cause the rain to fall. In that light, I called the soul of Honi the circler who was a Talmudic figure who actually did cause it to rain.

The last time I talked to him about this, he showed me that he could connect to the weather and influence in much the same way that I heal clients. If God meant for it to rain, then he was able to help that process happen, and if God did not, there was nothing he could do.

This time, he showed me how to connect to the energy of clouds. They felt very scattered, like touching something that has a form but very little substance. The process of helping the rain was one of filling the clouds so that they became fuller, more dense. When the cloud became too "pregnant" with energy, the rain would come forth. I practiced it awhile, connecting to God and then connecting to the clouds, though I don't think I'm much good at it. And it is very humbling to realize how little power one have over this process. The analogy that comes to mind is of pushing a truck. If you are going downhill, it will roll with your help, but if you are trying to push it uphill, there's not much you can do. Maybe the strength of the rains is the strength to push that truck?

I need to do some more study on this topic, so hopefully will write more in the future. I suspect also that this is one of those topics in Judaism which energetically comes up every year around this time, so if I don't get back to it soon, I'll probably be back next year about this time.

Knowing when to Heal

I heard a wonderful story last night told in the name of R. Shlomo Carlibach.

A barren couple went to a famous rabbi in a neighboring village who was known as a great tzaddik. They asked the rabbi for a blessing to enable them to have children. After they had received the blessing, the rabbi's gabbai (assistant), with great confidence, told the couple that in a year they would be back to visit with a new baby.

Sure enough, a year later, word came to the rabbi that the couple had just given birth to a baby boy and requesting that the rabbi please come for the great honor of being the Sandak during the bris (the person who holds the baby while it is being circumcized).

On the day of the Bris, the rabbi and his gabbai set out for the bris. As they were traveling through a field, a storm came upon them suddenly. The rain came down in buckets and the wind was blowing fiercely, so much so that they needed to stop and take shelter. The Gabbai grew worried that they would not be able to reach the bris in time and the rabbi would not be able to fulfill this honor. So he began to pray that the rain would stop and the wind would cease.

Sure enough, soon after the gabbai started to pray, the storm stopped just as suddenly as it had come, and they were able to continue to the Bris. The Gabbai was amazed and impressed that his prayers had been answered so quickly, but the rabbi did not even acknowledge them. For the whole celebration, and on the way home, the rabbi remained stern and did not acknowledge or thank the Gabbai for what he had done.

As they arrived back in their own village, the Gabbai could bear it no longer and spoke to the rabbi, "Didn't you see what I did? Why don't you thank me for stopping the rain and wind so that we could make it to the bris?"

The rabbi looked at the Gabbai sadly and said, "Do you know why it was raining? So that the village would have enough water to grow their crops and quench their thirst. It's been a very dry year. Do you know why the wind blew so hard? There is a swarm of locusts heading this way, but the wind would have prevented them from coming and eating all the crops. Now that you stopped the rain and the wind, you have caused immeasurable harm to the village."

The story was told to me with the moral that if one doesn't understand why things are happening, then it's best not to interfere with them. This is a common theme among Jewish folktales, that something that appears bad is actually for the good, and it's just our lack of perspective that makes it appear bad. The story was told to me in the context of a discussion on healing, and knowing when to heal and when not to.

I see the gabbai's mistake as threefold: he wanted the rain to stop for the benefit of the rabbi, not the benefit of God, he did it partly to stoke his own ego (and demonstrated by his disappointment that his deed went unnoticed), and he failed to see the benefit of the rain. So what does this teach us about healing?

Always check one's motivation. What is the involvement of the healer's ego in the healing? Sometimes I find that I have a patient, who, for whatever reason, I want to impress. It could be that I hold the person in respect. It could be that I view that patient as a potential source of referrals and I know that a good treatment will benefit my business. It could be that I'm having a bad day and want to show myself what a great healer I am by making this person feel immensely better.

In those times, I try to force the situation and the flow of energy, and invariably, it's a terrible treatment. Not only am I assured of making the person feel worse, but I am assured of not getting the referrals, respect or self-flattery I was looking for. If I had been aware that I was making the treatment about my own ego and not about the patient, I would have been able to look inside myself and see that my fears had caused me to attach so strongly to the results of the treatment.

I have fears: that I'm a bad healer, that my business won't succeed, or that I will lose the respect of the patient. When I am able to change my relationship to those fears, then I am able to let go of the results and provide a good treatment.

I can't emphasize how much fear damages the connection to God. When people talk about annulment of ego, my feeling is that if one works on one's fears, then the ego loses power and slowly disappears on it's own. Trying to suppress the ego on it's own has always been a fruitless exercise for me, but after I changed my relationship to fear, the ego issues quieted on their own.

Another lesson is is to remember God's place in the healing. I am not a seer, so by the rabbi in the story's words, I should stop healing. I often have no idea why a person is sick or how that sickness fits into the world. But I know that if a client has ended up in my office, then it's my responsibility to do everything I can for them. My assumption is that if God caused our two paths to intersect, then I am supposed to work on them, but I know that I can't force things. I connect to the client and I connect to God and I see what happens. Sometimes that means interacting with, and forcing energy to change, sometimes it means creating a healing space for the client to do their work in which I have no role other than to sit there and watch. Sometimes it means that nothing happens (though that is rare at this point). But if I am connected to God then I can feel what is the best way for healing. If I'm not connected, then I risk harm.

My ultimate barometer of the treatment is how the client feels at the end. I know that there are times when he/she won't feel better or even feel a difference, but I can feel changes in them: their pulse is stronger, there energy is more present, or they are more connected to themselves. And when they come back the next week, I'll hear about the results of the treatment because the client's often take a few days to fully process the treatment.

In acupuncture school we were taught to look at barriers to healing, meaning reasons why the patient themselves does not want to heal. One of the big ones was that the patient was receiving some kind of benefit from the sickness: sympathy, lack of certain responsibilities, someone to care for them, or something similar. This has its own feel when I encounter it in the office. The patient actively resists my energy and the connection that I create between the two of us. Or they try to take control of the treatment and don't let themselves be nourished by the treatment. At this point, my response is to back off my energy as far as possible. And then just wait. When they see that I am not trying to interfere, but just to connect, their energy will reach out to me and we can connect. Or we don't.

I once had a patient with whom I tried to force a connection and force the healing while she was actively resisting it. She felt wonderful immediately after the treatment and I felt like I had really accomplished something. She left the treatment room, tripped on the stairs on her way out of the building, and called me three days later to cancel her next appointment because her ankle was really badly sprained. I didn't hear from her again.

I think that the Gabbai should have just prayed to God. His fear wanted the rain to stop, so that's what he prayed for. But a better way would have been to connect to God and then pray that they get to the bris. He gave his fear of missing the bris power, and as such, missed out on the connection to God. When his fear's prayer was answered, his ego took hold and gave him pride in what he had done. If he had felt the fear, not given it power, and then prayed for what he really wanted, he would have clearly realized that he didn't stop the rain, God did. Or he would have known that it wasn't God's will to stop the rain, and hopefully have found another way to the Bris. Or maybe he wasn't supposed to get to the Bris at all.

If one knows him or herself, and doesn't give one's fears power, then one can maintain a connection to God. Then one can know when one is truly healing.

Dealing with Prejudice

I received an disturbing email today from a list-serve of which I am a part. The list-serve is for alternative practitioners here in Israel. The email began with a blatant fallacy: The word shaman comes from the word שמן (Shemen) which means "oil" in Hebrew and refers to the practice of anointing animals with oil. My eyes just about bugged out of my head as I read through the list of basic misconceptions about shamanism and it's interaction with Judaism. The writer's conclusion was that it's too dangerous for Jews as it can lead us astray and keep us from the "real" truth.

Aside from the mystical chauvinism, which states that Jewish mysticism is better and more powerful than any other kind, and all her other misconceptions, I was most concerned with how to approach people with her attitude. My initial reaction was to correct her facts and leave it at that, but the focus of my studies is the interaction between shamanism and Judaism so I felt compelled to answer her a bit more directly. I feel that for some religious Jews, the notion of shamanism is a bit too far out, and their fundamental beliefs won't allow room for it. But for others, they are open to it, though may have issues with the word "shamanism".

Below is my response. If there is anyone out there who has more experience dealing with people like this and has pointers on how to respond to them, what presses their buttons (and how to avoid doing that), and how to get them to acknowledge that what I am searching for is a part of Jewish tradition, I would love to hear your feedback.

The etymology of the word Shaman is somewhat in dispute. It originally referred to the traditional healers of Turkic-Mongol areas such as Northern Asia (Siberia) and Mongolia; šamán being the Turkic-Tungus word for such a practitioner and meaning "he or she who knows." (see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shamanism - you can see the academic citations in the footnotes). In the course of the 60's & 70's, and particularly by Mircea Eliade's book Shamanism, it became popularized in the west.

More recently Shamanism has come to refer to many different methods of healing that make use of, and are in contact with, the spirit world (usually connected to Briyah, the second world where the angel's reside). There are some forms of shamanism which pay varying importance to animal totems or spirit guides, but they are only several among a vast array, and are usually a less important part of the practice. Practical Kabbalah would be included in this definition of shamanism.

At the root of all shamanic traditions is that the shaman connect themselves to God, by whatever name they use, and heal by means of that connection and according to God's will. This connection is the heart of all shamanic healing. Every culture has created it's own set of rituals to create and strengthen that connection. Some of which may be connected to avodah zarah. But many of which just open the veil, and then try to describe what is seen/experienced there.

Within our own tradition there are many, many example of people entering a shamanic trance and communicating with tzaddikim and angels. Lurianic kabbalism is full of techniques for entering the spiritual world and making changes there. On a recent trip to tzafat, I saw people lying down on the graves of tzaddikim to absorb their energy. I believe it was Yoseph Karo who read mishniot until he entered into a trance state at which point his maggid would descend upon him and speak through his mouth. More recent kabbalists speak of ascending into the heavenly court to annul heavenly decrees. It is in these paths, and many more, that one may explore the shamanic in Judaism.

One thing I didn't add was that I feel that cultural background influences how one experiences the spiritual world. A Catholic is going to interpret souls as saints and a Jew as Tzaddikim, but my sense is that they are dealing with the same thing. The prohibition against avodah zarah, idol worship, is very important in Judaism, so my thinking is that a Jew should probably search out the shamanic through Jewish means. That's one of the big reasons I'm searching for Jewish ways to open up and connect to the spirit world. But I also think that experiences that people have had elsewhere can help to enlighten their Jewish experiences. It's also always bothered me that people go searching elsewhere for things that exist in Judaism because they are viewed as inaccessible or non-existent. The Shamanic has always been present in Judaism, though not always completely visible.

Throwing away the shells

I met with a teacher of mine tonight to talk about dealing with rabbis who have personal problems. There have been several very highly publicized cases in recent years of rabbis who have sexually molested students. It had come up several times recently in conversation, and I asked to meet with this particular teacher because he had known two of the rabbis.

We talked over the issues for awhile as I was trying to grasp how such a thing could have been tolerated in the Jewish community. He, who is older than I, reminded me that women's rights were not respected very well in the past, and it is only recently that things have begun to change for the better. These rabbis had grown up in worlds where such behavior was not openly discussed and though it was viewed as wrong, there wasn't much pressure not to do it. I want to point out to that my teacher never said any of this to justify the actions, just to understand them a bit better.

When I asked the question of how to deal with teachings of these rabbis, some of which are really very special, when we know that the person who taught them is deeply flawed? He responded by quoting from Talmud. There was a Talmudic persona called "Acher" (other) who was very well respected and then excommunicated (for unclear reasons - click here for an earlier post about it). People asked one of Acher's main disciples how he related to his teacher after he was declared a heretic, and his response was that he ate the sweetness inside, but threw away the shell. My teacher said that's how it is with these rabbis today, keep the sweetness of their teachings, but don't learn the lessons they taught by living badly. He also pointed out that doesn't mean deny what happened or minimize it in any way, but learn the lessons of what not to do from them as well.

I thought all of this very wise and wanted to pass it along.

Prayer stones

I don't usually remember my dreams, though I tend to have more vivid dreams here in Jerusalem then I had in Boston. I had a dream a few weeks ago which has stuck with me:

I was carrying some stones that had great importance. They looked like regular round stones that might be found anywhere in New England, but they had some significance which I couldn't quite grasp. I kept looking at them but they were just ordinary stones.

In my dream, I carried the stones with me and I met some people who did not pray. As I held the stones, I could see them through the eyes of the people I had just met and they looked just like regular stones.

I continued on my way and met some people who were praying, and I knew, prayed regularly. I again was able to look through their eyes and saw that the stones were glowing!

When I awoke, the lesson was obvious. I knew that if I prayed on a regular basis, the stones would glow again. That somehow the prayers would allow me to see the radiance of the world.

Preparation for Prayer

I've been to several Jewish Meditation groups where the meditation was a 15-20 minute silent meditation followed by regular prayers. My understanding is that the source for this (I'll try to find the actual source) is in the Talmud where it describes the first rabbi's taking an hour to prepare for praying.

This has never sat well with me, though I don't know why. It makes sense that someone wants to get in the right frame of mind to pray, but doing mindfulness meditation or just focusing on the breath didn't feel right for me.

Tonight, before devening evening prayers, I felt overwhelmed with fear. It's a fear I've been interacting with over the past few days, and it felt like I needed to sit with it for awhile before I prayed. I sat for awhile and then had particularly powerful davening, lots of energy, lots of souls.

And then it hit me, the line is "the first step in wisdom is fear of God", but I could never find any particular place in the liturgy that would give us a moment to feel our fear. So maybe this is what it's referring to: sit and feel your fear first, and then interact with God. Use that time at the beginning to be with your fear and that will open the way to use the prayers to talk to God.

I'm going to have to sit with this awhile longer and play around with it, but something feels right about it.

More thoughts on Wheat and bakers - Zohar 176/a-b

I've been thinking about what I wrote and realizing that "one who comes in and goes out" probably refers to one who can enter and exit the spirit world. One of the traditional roles of a shaman is to enter the spiritual world for information. While they are there, they gain an understanding of the essence of a person or thing, and then bring that understanding back to the physical world for the purpose of healing. But often, when they are back, the shaman then needs to do some counseling or other type of healing to help the person make proper use of the information.

One reason I don't like week-end shaman seminars is that a person gains understanding and then has no structure for using that to implement change in their lives. Change seems to take place slowly over long periods of time, and as such, a weekend can be beneficial as part of longer term work, but there needs to be a recognition of the needed follow-up.

So it is with the person who enters and exits, they need to be able to live in this world and be able to travel in the spiritual world. Without either, they are limited. So this frames the work a person needs to do if they are on the shaman's path: they need to be work on easily traveling back and forth into and out of the spiritual world. They need to understand wheat, but also how to bake bread because if you understand wheat, you can make some really good bread. but if all you understand is wheat, you don't even try to cook.

I think one of the traps I fall into is dismissing people who are good bakers because they don't get the wheat. I tend to say that people are not worth learning from because they don't understand the spiritual aspects of what they do, but they may be very good at what they do nevertheless. It's then up to me to learn as much as I can from them and then add the spiritual component to make it more meaningful to me. And also to know when people are good at wheat, but not so good in this world.

Zohar 176/a-b - Those who come in and out

I started my new Beit-Midrash today and it gave me several things to think about.

We studied a section from the Zohar, page 176/a-b, parshat Terumah. It's the introduction to Sifra D'Tzniutah, which roughly translates to the Book of Modesty. It reads in my very poor translation:

Who is the one who modest of the book [What is modesty of the book]? R' Shimon said, they are five parts that include the palaces of all, and and fill all of the land. R' Yehudah asked, if they include everything, they are more preferable then all. R' Shimon said thus it is for those who goes in and comes out, but for those who don't come in and go out, it is not thus.

It is told of a man who lived in the mountains and didn't know of the city, he grew wheat and ate the wheat by itself. One day, he came into a city and they gave him good bread. The man said to them, why? They said, bread is for eating. So he ate it and it was very tasty. He asked, from what do you make this? From wheat, they answered. Later, they gave him challahs that were dipped in oil. He tasted them and said from what are these made. From wheat, they said. Later they gave him sweet mixtures kneaded with honey and oil. He said, from what are these made. From wheat, they said. He said, it's certain that I am master of all of these as I eat the essence of all of these, which is wheat.

According to this way of thinking, the refinements [manifestations] of the world are not known, and they are lost. Thus it is for whoever grasps the basic rule but doesn't know all of the useful refinements that come out from the same basic rule.

The five parts are the Torah, which then fills up the world. R' Yehudah suggests then that we just study Torah and nothing else as in it is contained everything. R' Shimon replies that if you are "one who goes in and comes out" then you can do this, otherwise best to study everything. Who is "one who comes in and goes out"?

We then hear a story about a hermit who lives on wheat alone. When he comes into the city and tries all the yummy baked goods that can be made of wheat, he declares himself the master of all these things because he grows and eats wheat. He understands wheat, the basic ingredient in all these things, so he believes that he is master of all things made of wheat. The text then points out to us, if we haven't already gotten there ourselves, that this person is a fool, and anyone who thinks they can be master of a thing just by understanding the basic rules of a thing has really missed the point.

My interpretation of "one who comes in and goes out" is a person who lives in this world. We can study Torah to understand the world, but it's only useful if we are actually participating in the world and seeing how it is made manifest in the world. If we live in seclusion, then all the study is wasted, as we're really missing the point. If a person has trouble being in this world, and is spending all their time in the spiritual world, then studying the deep matters (basic principles of the world) is a problem as they lose sight of the beauty of the physical world.

There are some people have an easier time being in the physical world and need to work to be in the spiritual one, and there are others who are exactly the opposite. Those people have difficulty getting their feet on the ground and staying present in this world. I believe this story is teaching us that if you can be in this world, then it's ok to learn to travel in the spiritual world, but if you have trouble being here, then spend your time learning to enjoy this world. For one who can go into the spiritual world and come back into the physical world, they can extract from the basic principles to all the possibilities. But for someone who is stuck in the spiritual world, they need to concentrate on learning the manifestations in the physical world.

The last question I want to address is actually the first of the text: Who is one who has modesty of the book? If the book is everything in the world, and the book is the essence of all in the world, then modesty of the book would mean that any who understand the deeper workings of the world should be modest about it. If our story man was our bad example, then we learn that even if we understand a deep principle, we don't proclaim ourselves master over it or any of it's refinements, we remain modest and humble, and know that to truly master a thing, we have to understand the basics and all of the possibilities that can come from it.

Past lives

Last night at the Rebbe's, I asked Rebbe Nachman about past lives. I was curious about how to discover my past lives as I've never been aware of them. He took me on a very peculiar journey.

The visualization was traveling into a vagina, and then feeling the warm amniotic waters surround me. At this point, I could repeat the process to go further back, or feel the energy around me and know what it felt like to be in that lifetime. I don't know what my immediate prior life was, but the first life I felt was around 1919 or so. I was a Hasid on my way to see my rebbe. The next one I saw was 1853, and I was a peasant on a hunt. I was being careful as I was poaching from a lord's land.

At this point, I asked him if there was life that had something to teach me that I could use in this life. One of the reasons I've never really pursued past lives was that I didn't see much point. We are living in the present life, so all of our issues and problems can be dealt with here. But recently, I've been bumping into Karmic issues in my life, that is, issues that I was born with and have no clear cause in this lifetime. When I would go looking for patterns of actions to understand what and why I was doing certain things, there wasn't one. So that's why I decided to look in the past lives to see if they could help shed light on the current issues.

One thing I've seen John do is jump back through a client's lifetimes to find the genesis of an issue. When the genesis is dealt with, then the person is able to deal with the issue in the current lifetime. That was what I was trying to do with myself.

At that point, I jumped to a much earlier life where I was being killed. The only thing I could see in that lifetime was the moment of death. After going through the moment of death several times, I was able to see the person who was killing me. I realized that I had known and loved that person, and now they were killing me. As I sat with it longer, I was able to forgive that person. We were both warriors, and he had been my teacher, but when the political situation shifted, he had followed the rules of his side and fought against me. We had valued the political allegiances over the connections of the heart and he had killed me for it.

As I embraced him, I felt myself heal. I'm not sure exactly how yet, but we'll see how it goes. But in this lifetime, I know that I try to value the connections of the heart over political allegiances and rules that exist outside of myself.