The following is a transcription of Reb Zalman speaking at the recent Shavuot retreat.  Please scroll to the bottom for a copy of Reb Zalman’s singing translation of Yedid Nefesh.  Gabbai Seth Fishman, BLOG Editor. 

“The last few years, I’ve felt that it is important to draw back from leadership so that I can really put my energy in highlighting what’s most critical: 

“In terms of the innovations we’ve made in the Jewish services, we are doing good Friday nights.  ‘We give good Friday night.’  People come and they dance and it’s freilach and they love each other and ‘v’ahavta l’rayacha kamocha’ / love thy neighbor as thyself and Shema Yisroel / Hear Oh Israel.  And we did pretty good with Shabbos morning, because everywhere, little by little, the notion of not calling up the ‘Mr. Goldberg-s,’ i.e., the ones who would give a big donation to the shul, (he gets this aliyah and this one gets that aliyah), has been replaced by saying to people, ‘We’re going to read in the torah about such and such a thing.  Do you feel this deep?  Then you come up to the torah here.’   So we’ve done something remarkable with shabbos morning too. 

“What we haven’t yet done well is shalosh seudos.  This means the Shabbos afternoon time.  Also, I’m still worried about us not doing enough weekday davvenen.

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From the The Jewish Daily Forward, here’s a review of two books recently published by Reb Zalman.  Gabbai Seth Fishman, BLOG Editor

Reb Zalman’s Ah-ha Hasidism

A Heart Sutra for Pashute Yidden

By Alan Brill

Published June 17, 2009, issue of June 26, 2009

Ahron’s Heart: The Prayers, Teachings and Letters of Ahrele Roth, a Hasidic Reformer
By Zalman Schachter-Shalomi and Yair Hillel Goelman
Ben Yehudah Press, 150 pages, $14.95.

A Heart Afire: Stories and Teachings of the Early Hasidic Masters
By Zalman Schachter-Shalomi and Netanel Miles-Yepez
The Jewish Publication Society, 384 pages, $45.00.

Contemporary American religion is filled with quests for inner happiness, a direct sense of presence and charismatic gifts. The quest ranges from spontaneous drum circles to the Dalai Lama’s Westernized talks on happiness, and from Eckhart Tolle’s New Age wisdom to Sarah Palin’s Pentecostal exorcisms. In this landscape of emotive spirituality, Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi serves as one of the major guides for contemporary Jews who seek the path of the heart.

Schachter-Shalomi, called Reb Zalman by most, is the cherished teacher of the Jewish Renewal movement, which seeks to create a trans-denominational neo-Hasidic spirituality.

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Rabbi Ayla Grafstein (http://www.youtube.com/jewishrenewal) and others have been putting snippets of Reb Zalman on YouTube.  Here is a current index of what you will find.  Gabbai Seth Fishman, BLOG Editor

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Last week, I was one of the hundred plus participants at the wonderful Shavuot retreat at Isabella Freedman (Elat Chayyim).  At the closing circle, a question was posed by another attendee: 

• “For those of us who came here from a place of more traditional observance, do you have any advice for how we can integrate what we’ve experienced and learned here with those traditional places of worship?“ 

I’ve transcribed Reb Zalman’s response below.  Gabbai Seth Fishman, BLOG Editor

In the booklet called “Gate to the Heart,” I make the following point (cf., Stages of the Path, pp 6-8): 

When a person first gets caught in “Oy! How wonderful it is to be a Jew,” they are in the land of “Milk and Honey.”  This is like the Oral Phase in Freud’s Psychosexual Stages of Development, (NOTE:  Referred to as the Rung of Love in “Gate to the Heart”).  “Oy is it good, geshmak / delicious, it’s beautiful.”  

And after a while, following the Freudian model, the progression has their Judaism moving to the Anal Phase, which is to say, “Now I need to learn some discipline,” (NOTE:  Referred to as the Rung of Power in “Gate to the Heart”).

But if someone doesn’t want to move on, saying, “I don’t want to go for a practice with discipline, I want to go back to the original belief that I had,” then they are like one fixated on the Oral Phase.  And if they get fixated on the Oral Phase, they will go from guru to guru and from system to system and say, “Because I love to be ‘love-bombed’ by the people to whom I come and bring my soul and they love me and I feel good, I will stay here.” And so, they will be going in this kind of incestuous way from one place to another trying to recapture the good feelings of the Oral Phase. 

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