talkingdream

INTERNAL POLLING: DONALD TRUMP IN YOUR DREAMS

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sun, 06 Nov 2016 19:37:00 +0000

Now up on The Daily Beast, the significance of dreaming about Donald Trump.
Now Trump Is Invading People's Dreams on The Daily Beast

THIS BIG DREAM OF PASSOVER

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sun, 17 Apr 2016 14:37:00 +0000

THIS BIG DREAM OF PASSOVER

--from the archives

I spent Passover of 2001 in Dharamsala, India, the exile capital of Tibet. I have shared Seders with Tibetan sages and the Dalai Lama, but a young Tibetan kitchen worker asked a question I’m still thinking about. Peeling potatoes with my friend Donna Mussarra, he wanted to know what the seder was about. She said, "We tell the story of the Exodus from Egypt."
"Do you do that every year?"
"Yes."
"Don’t you know it by now?"
Donna laughed and said, "Well, we do it to teach the children."
The young man looked out to the main hall. "I don’t see any children here." It was true. Most participants were young adults, Jewish and Israeli travelers. So Donna explained, "We do it to remember."
"Remember what? To hate the Egyptians?"
"No we don’t hate the Egyptians."
"Well I hate the Chinese."
As we davened maariv, the full moon rose over snowy mountains to the east. That young Tibetan, and over 125,000 others, had crossed those mountains from Chinese-controlled Tibet to freedom—and exile. Their modern story made our ancient Exodus vivid in my mind. The Seder offers a universal message of hope: Slavery does not last forever, freedom will overcome oppression.
Still, the young man’s question was a challenge. Why have a Seder every year? Don’t we know it by now?
And how could I tell the young Tibetan, who had lost his home and family, that he shouldn’t hate the Chinese? Especially when many American Jews hate and fear Egyptians, Palestinians, or more generally, Arabs. In recent years, through our emotional connection to Israel, we have suffered violence and the bruising of our hopes. And we have hardened our hearts—haven’t we?—and sometimes put our faith in violence. Yet on Passover we tell how God, not military might, delivered us from slavery. Do we believe it? Don’t we know it by now?
We have to experience the Seder at a deeper level. The Haggadah insists that the liberation from Egypt occurred not just for my ancestors but for me. Pesach is not a history lesson, but a recurring dream. It is personal. It speaks to the many times I find myself in the same dumb tight spot—emotionally constricted, enslaved by my stubbornness, insensitivity, arrogance, greed. I understand why our great teachers made the connection between Mitzrayim (Egypt) and metzarim, narrowness. I feel trapped in a narrow spirit, with a hard heart and a closed mind.
In this big dream of Passover, I’ve played every part. I’ve been a frustrated slave trying to make bricks without straw. I’ve been the taskmaster whipping the slave on. And most of all, I’ve been Pharaoh, coldly logical. As Pharaoh said to Moses, I’ve said to my heart, "I am not aware of this God you are talking about."

If only at the moment of crisis-- the Red Sea before me, Pharoah's chariots at my back --- I could hear a voice of strength and wisdom, Moses responding, "Be not afraid. Stand and witness the salvation of the Lord."
Then the sea would part before me and I would have nothing to fear.
Don’t I know the story by now?
No, not really, not deeply enough. That is why this year, I will tell it once again.

25 years after The Jew in the Lotus dialogue

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Thu, 05 Nov 2015 02:22:00 +0000

At the National Museum of Jewish American History, October 28, 2015, on the 25th anniversary of the dialogue, Jay Michaelson and I discuss the history and the future of the Jewish Buddhist dialogue.

Watch the video :

http://bit.ly/1RwJAbv

Dream Poetry & The Dream Caravan

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Tue, 03 Nov 2015 22:05:00 +0000

A delightful interview with Diane Mack accompanied by Kezia Kamenetz. In which I read a dreamy poem...and we talk about dreams & the arts.

https://soundcloud.com/marriedwoman/dream-poetry-reading-wwno-interview

I AM A HOMELESS MAN

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sun, 30 Aug 2015 00:08:00 +0000

-Note: this piece was written ten years ago. I was out of town when Katrina hit, and residing in Brooklyn when Beliefnet asked me to write a piece about the disaster. At that point I did not know what had happened, and everything I wrote was based on my imagination and news reports. I returned to New Orleans on September 15, 2005.

I am a homeless man.

Last week I had a two-story home in a city called New Orleans. My wife and I left that home with our toothbrushes and a few shirts on a Thursday, expecting to return in two days. When I left, I did not know of a major hurricane heading for my city. Now it seems I won't be able to see my house again for three or four months.

This is what happened in my city today:

An old man in a chaise lounge lay dead in a grassy median as hungry babies wailed around him. Around the corner, an elderly woman lay dead in her wheelchair, covered with a blanket, and another body lay beside her wrapped in a sheet.

"I don't treat my dog like that," 47-year-old Daniel Edwards said as he pointed at the woman in the wheelchair. "I buried my dog."

In my house on Pine Street, there are some poems I'd like to have back. There are some pictures of my wife and my children I would like to see again. Looters, you are welcome to the tuna, to the television, to the jewelry, even. You are welcome certainly to the peanut butter. There are bottles of water in the laundry room. Please drink. You may find it more comfortable to sleep on the couch downstairs than upstairs in my bed, where surely it is very, very hot. There's been no power for days, no air-conditioning. Late August and early September in New Orleans, after a big storm, is not a place to be.

In the backyard, the key limes are small, but they are ripe. Please help yourself. Their juice is perfect. The Meyer lemons I don't think are quite ready, fat as they are. It's funny what you miss. I miss my lemon tree.

Two days ago, we learned our city was flooding. That night, my wife suddenly woke and remembered that she had taken the old photos and scrapbooks that were kept on the second floor downstairs. We don't know how far above or below sea level our house is, or how many feet of water will come in. After the levees broke, we were trying to understand how high the water would go, but we kept getting confused. Would the water go to the ceiling of the first floor? What happens to a hundred-year-old home that sits in water for days or weeks? We could not do the calculations and kept subtracting when we should add.

My wife and I have been waking up in the middle of the night with thoughts that we've not thought all day. She remembered the piano that I had not thought about. My mother had given it to me before she died, and my brother had helped me move it to Louisiana. I felt a certain wave of sadness, and then it crested and subsided and we let the piano go. We let the pictures of our children go. We let the old books go, and we let the new kitchen go. We let the water cover it all.

But the thought of all that water did not let me go. There is an image I've seen on the television of the water from Lake Pontchartrain floating over the broken levee into the city. It is very beautiful, that image. Peaceful water going about its business, which is to flow and seek its own level. It is powerful and terribly violent to be so peaceful.

Water is very heavy. That is something to think about. Surprisingly dense and nothing stops it very well. For a whole day we'd felt and seen the water flowing into the city, though the gentle word "flowing" hardly does water justice because water is so basic and so powerful and so necessary and we human beings are very arrogant but very weak and frail. We can't stop a common thing like water. Not easily.

So I imagined the water rising on my street, up the steps into the first floor, and lifting that old spinet my mother bought--it was for her such an important investment in culture and a different way of living than her poverty and depression--and then in my dream I saw this: my wife with a pile of photographs, beautiful images, and under one, which seemed to show water flowing in grey lines into the sky, I saw underneath this legend in black print: An image is a pump.

Then the dream seemed to shift, and I saw my mother's piano lifted up in the living room, turning delicately--water can do this, lift whatever it gets underneath, an SUV, a tractor trailer--so why not a piano? It lifted the piano as the first floor filled with black water, and the piano turned daintily, like an elephant dancing under the big top.

But none of this happened. The piano is not wet, probably. The living room is not full of dark water. It was just a dream about the house I remember and imagine--part remember, part imagine--the house I cannot live in, and won't for months and maybe not ever again.

Houses are fragile. Wind and water can take them down. And fire. And indifference and neglect, and racism and separation, the separateness we feel from others who don’t look like us, or live like us. The others for whom we are an us.

Today I know my house is dry, and so it is now the looters I fear. I fear them, but I don't condemn them. Some are criminals going about their criminal business, but others, most of them, are just me. They are just me.

If I were there, I would be them. I would thirst as they thirst, and hunger as they hunger, and I would break any door, I would enter any store or home, I would steal, I would do whatever I needed to live and to make sure those I love would live. My wife, my children: Yes, for sure, for them, I would do what I needed to do.

And I feel the same way about my city. My beloved New Orleans, which is submerged right now, and which I hope one day will rise again.

An image is a pump. An image has the power to move energy from one realm to another, from the realm of reality to the realm of imagination, from the realm of imagination to the realm of reality--from the realm of dream to the realm of fact, and sometimes back again, recycling, pumping.

So we absorb televised images of people we don't know, of people who are thirsty and sick and scared, people on rooftops who are lifted in the air by rescue helicopters and dangle there, the children too afraid to look up as their rescue basket ascends in the sky. Images of people who have lost husbands and wives, children and grandmothers. Images of men and women and children, abandoned by all of us--abandoned by "us" because they are not us: They are poor and we are not; they are black and we are not; or they are ill and we are well. They are old and we are young. Images of those abandoned because of indifference bred of separation. But images break through barriers, they flood us.

An image is a pump, from the realm of dream to the realm of fact, and then back again, turning, turning like the piano floating in a pirouette, then delicately spinning down to the ground.

That is how an image plays in the mind.

An image is a pump to turn fear into beauty, and maybe beauty into terror. My fear of losing my house to water becomes a piano spinning in the dark, and an elephant turning on its toes.

And then the water subsides and the piano settles down. But all is not well. I have an image of my house, and that is the only house I have right now, because I am a homeless man, but only one of many homeless men and homeless women. In a city that is no longer a city. And though I know that no home is permanent, it is something different when that is no longer a spiritual metaphor you read in a book, but a felt reality, when the image pump turns an abstraction into a stabbing pain in the heart.

Homelessness is something different and true, and it has been felt before by many people, felt deeply by them every day. We live in a world, and a nation, of far too many homeless people, and I have done too little about it. So I am just one of many, and not the worse off either, but still, it is my home and my image and I am entitled to it. It doesn't cost anyone anything for me to be carrying my home with me in my heart.

It is one thing to miss a house. It is another thing to miss a whole city.

There is so much room in the heart--enough room not just for my home, but for a whole city that is going under, that is overwhelmed, inundated. Right now, the city of New Orleans is an image in the hearts of those of us who love it, because the reality of the city is too terrible to bear with our eyes.

And the heart is a pump too.

I am homeless, but I am one of the lucky ones. I am not abandoned on I-10 while politicians talk and generals dither. I am not lying in the hot sun with children dying in my arms. I am not an old, sick woman. I am not poor or black; I do not live in the part of town that is underwater. I live in the high part of town. I am separated from them.

New Orleans is a town of levees and water. The levees are man-made hills of clay, artificial banks. They are separation, and privilege, and holding back, but water is the truth of our common humanity, water is our common element. We all need water and we are water, and our separateness is an illusion that thirst obliterates immediately.

The speaker of the House of Representatives (I do not even want to write his name), said New Orleans was not worth saving. I do not know what sort of person could say this at a time like this. For some people, I suppose New Orleans is a black city, a poor city, even a sinful city. For all I know, for some people New Orleans is images of Bourbon Street on Mardi Gras, though the truth is, Bourbon Street is not New Orleans; it is much more the shadow of conventioneers from Ohio and Illinois, its tawdriness reflects who they are and what they desire.

To some who do not understand what New Orleans means--what gift it has given the world, and given all of us in America--for those people who don’t know any better, New Orleans is a shadow of this country, but to me New Orleans is the heart.

And if we don’t save New Orleans, we have lost our heart completely.

Rodger Kamenetz

The SONG OF LUIS ELIGIO

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sat, 05 Apr 2014 16:31:00 +0000

Cuban poet and freedom activist Luis Eligo D'Omni recently visited us here in New Orleans. I wrote a poem based on his account of beatings he's received from the police & conversation with his mother. Luis returned the favor making this video.

Jonathan Rosen receives mysterious letter from Rebbe Nachman about Burnt Books

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 20 Dec 2013 05:32:00 +0000

Post by Nextbook Press.

And here's the letter

WELCOMING THE DALAI LAMA TO NEW ORLEANS PART TWO: THE ANGEL OF NEW ORLEANS

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 20 May 2013 13:57:00 +0000

WELCOMING THE DALAI LAMA TO NEW ORLEANS PART TWO:
THE ANGEL OF NEW ORLEANS

-- a talk given at Temple Sinai, New Orleans, May 9, 2013
Part Two

Your Holiness, when you did dialogue with Jewish teachers in Dharamsala, there were two exchanges. One was people to people, about a shared history of exile and destruction. And there was a second, very intimate exchange, that had a profound effect on all whoheard it. And this one was soul to soul, and angel to angel, the Jewish soul and the Tibetan soul, the Jewish angel and the Tibetan angel. For the spiritual dimension of reality is so often neglected despised even hated in today's world, but it is a major part of what makes Jewish survival worthwhile in the first place. And right now, it is in the midst of our wreckage I speak to you, both as a Jew and as a New Orleanian. Because survival is not just a matter of urban planning, or of financial aid, or willfulness.. it is something deeper, it is of the soul , the soul of individuals and the soul of the city, and the soul of nation. To rebuild is important, but to recognize a new historical moment and to renew is a matter of soul I do believe, and without soul nothing we do can ever really be new.

Your Holiness, the second rabbi who spoke with you soul to soul, was a man who became my teacher as you also became my teacher, and his name is Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi, though everyone calls him Reb Zalman as if to say, brother Zalman. And Reb Zalman began with a Hebrew prayer translated into Tibetan, and then he spoke to you as one who had escaped the fires of the holocaust but barely, fleeing Austria and then Belgium, and landing in a dp camp in southern France under command of the Gestapo, before somehow making his way via the West Indies to New York. And Reb Zalman carried with him all the teachings of Jewish mysticism, of a world that was being destroyed as he fled, for we must never forget that largely Hitler succeeded in destroying Jewish Europe and its institutions and its holiest teachers, as if someone had come to the US and destroyed Harvard, Yale and MIT, and then wiped out a whole generation of political leaders as well.
Reb Zalman during the sixties left Chabad and became the leader of a movement known as Jewish Renewal, which sought to combine the mysticism of Hasidism with feminism and an openness to meditation , and most of all to joy. And this movement has greatly influenced every branch of Judaism, with its music, its style of prayer, its egalitarianism, and its interest in mysticism.

And this is something that we need to remember about New Orleans too: that culture is carried by human beings, specific men and women who know how to cook an etouffee, or play a drum with a certain beat, or sew beads on to a suit, and these precious kinds of knowledge are easily lost and are carried by human arks.

So Reb Zalman spoke to you as that sort of human ark, carrier of centuries of wisdom, a fellow exile, and as a man who lived the loss of home and culture that you have personally have experienced over the past 63 years now since the Chinese army moved into Tibet and took control. And since then even unto today the Tibetan people in their own land have been subjugated and their religious leaders, their monks have been persecuted, their temples destroyed and then in some case rebuilt as tourist destinations, a land where merely wishing you long life, Your Holiness and carrying your picture cane be punished by imprisonment and torture. And when we had the Seder together in Washington, we played the tape of Tibetan nuns in prison chanting a song of freedom, and even today they are not free and in your homeland your people are burning themselves alive in anguish and protest and still they are not heard.

And Reb Zalman said, "I want to say when a soul comes down to earth they show him first what he has to do here, that's our tradition. And I believe those who volunteer for difficult jobs deserve special consideration. When I think of the job you have to do, which is not only to guide your people through the crisis, and God wiling, the restoration of your home, but also the risks you must take and the choices you must make of what is essential and what is to be left behind, I want you to know that I feel with you from heart to heart."

His task was to explain the inner meaning of Jewish practice, especially the more esoteric teachings we know as kabbalah, which means, actually 'tradition. For it is a largely esoteric tradition that was once kept entirely secret or passed on by word of mouth only to a select few. For you had asked to know another secret, what is the benefit of Jewish practices such as our holidays and prayers, -- a very Buddhist question I might add-- and you asked it this way, "What are the Jewish practices for overcoming afflictive states of mind?"

And I want to say-- it would be another talk to explain-- that many many Jews today would not even know what that question means, let alone what the answer is. For in the urgency to survive especially in the period post war, many Jews concerned themselves primarily with institutions and buildings and not with the inner work, what Reb Zalman called "the esoteric, the deep attunement, the deep way." And I have to say, the very words I am using such as soul, and deep way, might sound very foreign to some of my Jewish brothers and sisters, very remote.

But on his way to explaining the "deep way" of Jewish mysticism, Reb Zalman spoke with you about angels or devas and here the dialogue really became exciting because I saw, Your Holiness, we all saw how fascinated you were with angels, you wouldn't let go of the topic, Reb Zalman waned to explain the four worlds of Jewish mysticism the four worlds of prayer, but you kept him in the second world, the world of formation, the world of imagination.. and dreams are there, and feelings are there, and angels are there, messengers who mediate in the imagination between the loftiest heights of pure thought and the ground and senses where we live as bodies. And you wanted to know if angels had different colors and yes Reb Zalman answered, there are orange angels and blue, and there's the black angel we call the opponent or Satan-- and he too .. they are all serving God. That is our tradition Reb Zalman kept saying though the other rabbis seemed either astonished or embarrassed even horrified you could see that in their faces, so estranged from this inner core of Jewish life had the mainstream Jewish world become.
So you moved worlds there Your Holiness and you wanted to now if angels have anything to do with earthquake, there was a small earthquake that morning in Dharamsala and Reb Zalman said yes, in our tradition, angels cause earthquakes and changes in the weather and there are little angels over every blade of grass that say grow grow grow. Yes he said it's in our tradition and by then some of the rabbis were giving each other looks, like this clearly wasn't in THEIR tradition, but Your Holiness you were not deterred, not at all, and then Reb Zalman said something about the angel of cities and the angel of nations, which is really not a foreign notion at all--- Maimonides writes about it-- and you were really curious about this idea, and Reb Zalman said, "Oh yes there's an angel of each nation, there's an angel of the Jews and an angel of Tibet.. and if we do the dialogue right, the angel of the Jews is speaking through me and the angel of Tibet is listening in you, and vice versa you see-- so the dialogue isn't just at one level."

Suddenly it wasn't. That was the moment that encapsulated the whole thing. These two men were no longer just men, but something was speaking and listening in them that was greater than any individual.

And I saw a certain light there which I still see and I've been trying to explain ever since. There was something very beautiful in that moment, what I could say is, it was both a metaphor-- and yet literally true, well we poets call that a metonymy--- because wasn't Reb Zalman in effect speaking for the Jewish people and weren't you, Your Holiness listening for the Tibetan people and speaking for them as well... speaking their essence-- so the dialogue wasn't just at the human level. For the angel of a nation , Maimonides teaches, is the essence of that nation, and now you ad Reb Zalman were speaking for just a moment essence to essence, in a dialogue that had never before ever happened at that level between these two unique peoples, the Tibetans and the Jews both of whom had tasted in the twentieth century exile and destruction.

That moment it really did seem as if these angels were talking to one another, the only way I think angels can, through two human beings who are open to astonishment, and who have the curiosity and the love to share soul to soul.

And that is the kind of dialogue I wish for Your Holiness as you come here to New Orleans, For if there's an angel of Tibet and an angel of Lhasa, surely there's an angel of the Jews and an angel of New Orleans. So I hope you will meet us not just as a people struggling with social problems or even ecological catastrophe though we clearly are, but also you will somehow meet the angel of New Orleans in some of us, and that we will somehow also feel the angel of Tibet speaking through you. Then the dialogue will not be just on one level-- and I hope there will be a dialogue-- it will be also on a deeper level.

I know that the precious times when I've had the privilege to speak with you, I have felt the intensity of your presence, and the power of your listening.

I believe that is what you will bring to us here in New Orleans, the power of the quiet mind, shaped by the daily meditation and visualizations which are the precious spiritual values you and the Tibetan people carry-- and we hope thanks to you and them, that this will survive and will continue benefit human beings.
I hope-- if we listen not just with our ears but our hearts-- we will learn from you your own secrets of spiritual survival in exile, and perhaps also you will learn a little from us as well, how we live our New Orleans soul, and even get a glimpse in the joy of our daily lives, in music, in dancing, in food and in our culture , of the angel of New Orleans.

Rodger Kamenetz is the author of The Jew in the Lotus

Welcoming the Dalai Lama to New Orleans Part One

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sat, 18 May 2013 04:54:00 +0000

From a talk given at Temple Sinai in New Orleans on May 9, 2013. This is part one in a series.

The Dalai Lama has come to New Orleans. If I were to speak with him, this is what I might say.

Your Holiness, you are coming to New Orleans at a time of some optimism, some hope. Eight years ago, after Katrina, there was some concern we might not survive as a city. Many of us had lost everything, our homes, our community our relatives and friends, and most of all our trust in the large institutions and government we thought should have protected us. The levees broke and so did our hearts, and out in the country there were many dark voices who said we had no right to exist, to continue as a city. We might have lost all faith in each other, but somehow we did not. In the first place, from all over, there was a tremendous outpouring of love and help, of compassion. There was a new influx of young people with energy and hope. We have not exactly triumphed, but we have rebuilt much of our city, our schools.

Yet we still face terrible problems many of which we had before the storm: We have tremendous poverty and hopelessness in our streets; we have violence and a terrible murder rate; our young people are killing each other; we still have corruption; we mistrust our institutions, our police and our jail; the rich and the poor still live very separate lives; and while we often come together to celebrate and party, black and white also live very separate lives. And we are still living on the front line of a world wide ecological disaster. So while we look ahead, with some confidence, that perhaps our city will be safer in future storms, in the not very long term, the destruction of our protective wetlands continues, our land is sinking and the sea is rising and our margin of safety grows thinner every year. So yes we have survived, but the question of long-term survival for our city as a community and as a culture still is very much in question.

Your Holiness, survival was the question you brought to the Jews in our dialogue in Dharamsala in 1990. It was an historic dialogue between two exile peoples, Jews and Tibetans who had never met before at such a high level. And it was a religious dialogue, a dialogue of philosophy, faith and soul -- you would call it Mind, your Holiness. When we met with you in 1990, a group of eight rabbis and Jewish teachers, and me as a modern day scribe, your question to us was, can you tell me the secret of Jewish spiritual survival in exile?

What a beautiful question it still is, and one we might ask ourselves also here in New Orleans. Not only for Jews but for all of us here: Do we have a secret for survival?

Some of us smiled at your question as we journeyed through the Punjab. Have we been doing so well as Jews that we can offer advice to others? One of the rabbis on the trip said, I don't know that you can tell the Dalai Lama, eat chicken soups, send your kids to Sunday school and it will be OK? Some said if there is a secret of survival maybe it's because it was God's will and how can you tell that to a non-theist like you? But mostly Your Holiness we were deeply honored by your question, For 2,000 years we survived, and up to now, no one ever thought to ask, how did you do it?

That question was really how you started dialogue with us, so sweetly. When I was sitting in your temple in your exile home in India, that first day, I saw a Buddhist thangka, a sort of wedding cake of Buddhas piled up, and before them was a reflecting pool. And I said to the man next to me, "Is that a pool of water?" And he said, "No, it's a pool of nectar." So that is how you reflected us in your eyes, right from the start, sweetly, maybe more sweetly than we knew how to see ourselves, for Jews are a very self-critical people, as you now know, Your Holiness, very contentious and very much opinionated and given to arguments.

So right from the start, the dialogue with you was never going to be just one way with the Jewish side teaching and you receiving. As my beloved teacher Reb Zalman -- Rabbi Zalman Schachter -- said, "We didn't come just to sell, but also to buy." And oh what you had to sell us Your Holiness, was so precious -- we are still feasting on the light.

You know, Your Holiness, as we told you then, we Jews have a prophecy that tells us that our suffering and our exile, our collective trauma as a people, has some redemptive meaning. Because of exile we were able to share our teachings our wisdom, our story of redemption from slavery, our Torah. And it's true also that our Torah, thanks to our sister religions Islam and Christianity, is now known through every corner of the earth, as our greatest philosopher, Maimonides, pointed out. We even found a mission in exile, to be "a light unto the nations," and yet at times how bitter those words can sound to us and how far from their meaning do we live, caught up in practical concerns.

That you saw something of that light in us as Jews was not just wishful thinking; it was a kind of visualization of us, a meditation in itself. And the Tibetan people have their own theory of their brokenness and exile -- that they had stored up so much wisdom behind the barrier of the high Himalayas, and that this wisdom was intended for the whole world. So exile and destruction came to your people too in the 20th century so that at long last this light might also be shared with other nations. And you have been one of the chief carriers of that light, and have gone all over the world with it, and now you are coming to us here in New Orleans. And we are grateful.

In that historic dialogue in 1990 there were two important teachings that still seem relevant to us, both to Jews and really also to New Orleans in general.

Two important secrets of Jewish spiritual survival in exile that you received, and then with a bit of a twist, turned back to us. For your contribution, your response proved to be incredibly powerful.

The first was an historical answer, and the second I might say was a spiritual answer. Or I might say the first was how we speak as Jews to Tibetans, exile people to exile people, and the second, the deeper dialogue of soul to soul.

We sent rabbis to speak with you, mainly. And one of them was Rabbi Irving Greenberg, the founder of CLAL, who later became chair of the Holocaust Museum -- an unusual figure at the time, an orthodox rabbi given to dialogue between Jews and other religions. And we joked he was preparing for the more difficult dialogue between Orthodox and Reform Jews. Rabbi Greenberg, Yitz we called him, looked through the long history of Jewish trauma -- and we can think of so many: the destruction of the first Temple, the Babylonian exile, the exile from Spain, and looming over all of them and still today, the Holocaust. But of all these historical traumas and destructions, he chose to speak of one: of the year 70, in which the Jewish people were dispersed, Jerusalem itself was renamed for a Roman god, and the destruction of the Second Temple, which still lies in ruins today. And in speaking to you, your holiness, Yitz told of a secret of Jewish survival, which is a kind of spiritual democracy, in which instead of entrusting all the authority in a single figure, it was spread so that everyone had some responsibility. It began with a small group of teachers who we know as the rabbis or rabbinic sages, who founded a small school in northern Israel in Yavneh, and of how they essentially invented a new form of Judaism to replace the old Temple worship that had been conducted by priests.

They faced a choice then, that we have also faced here in New Orleans, as we've tried to make our choices. The choice comes down to renewal vs. restoration. When everything is destroyed, there are two impulses, and the Tibetans know this as well. One group wants to rebuild the old monasteries and the old system and keep everything the same, and this is a very human response. Get things back the way they were. The other group recognizes: No, we are in an entirely new situation now, and we cannot go back to the way things were before. We have to renew our institutions and make up new ones. And that's essentially what the rabbis did. There was no longer a priesthood, no longer a Temple, no longer a central place of pilgrimage called Jerusalem, and the whole meaning of the Torah, the redemptive history of a people who'd lived in exiled and returned home in triumph, was shattered, seemingly forever. So Yitz explained -- to you-- that the rabbis moved many of the Temple ceremonies into the home, and instead of the priest and the altar, there was the father and mother at the family table, and the blessings for the bread and the wine were now said there. And new observances were created like Tisha B'Av to remember the destruction, to never forget it, and new prayers recited to speak always of the longing for the hoped for return -- such as when we say at each Passover, "Next Year in Jerusalem..."

And your Holiness, you heard all that and you grasped it in your hand, and you said, "Now I understand the Jewish secret, in everything you do always to remind, always to remind."

But that is when the selling turned to buying. For you twisted your hand and you said quietly in your special way: So now that you have returned to the land of Israel, do you still need all these prayers and customs?

And of course you'd nailed it because after all, when my grandfather was a boy in Zhegare and said "Next Year in Jerusalem" at the end of the Seder, it was a hope or a dream, but today it is a call to my travel agent.

Rabbi Greenberg acknowledged how you had turned things around. That we thought we'd come to advise you about exile and trauma but we ourselves are living through a very new kind of situation that has not existed for 2,000 years, a situation that is in fact causing the Jewish people every where tremendous stress and anguish -- a mixture of hope and fear -- and that is the continuing drama of the state of Israel and its existential conflicts within its borders and without. So Yitz joked, "Your Holiness, we should make you a chief rabbi because that's exactly what we are wrestling with today," and Your holiness, you joked, "Then would you get me a little hat?"

So right there you'd turned the exposition into a dialogue, and showed us what we already sense, that though we have survived so much over 2,000 years, we are still struggling with questions of spiritual survival -- that is, in what form will Judaism take when exile is a choice rather than a condition?

Even though as Jews we have survived, our struggle is not at all over. It reminds me of what one of our great contemporary Jewish poets, and part time New Orleanian, Bob Dylan said,

The rabbis built a good strong boat after the fall of the Temple. It carried us along for about 1,800 years. Then it started to fall apart. We've been drifting on planks of wood and life savers for the last 250 years. But that's an amazing boat. It lasted for 1,800 years and even the wreckage is pretty amazing.

But as beautiful as that exchange about suffering and history and destruction was, there was a second exchange that had an even more profound effect on many Jews. And this one was soul to soul, and angel to angel -- the Jewish soul and the Tibetan soul, the Jewish angel and the Tibetan angel. For the spiritual dimension of reality is so often neglected, despised, even hated in today's world, but it is a major part of what makes Jewish survival worthwhile in the first place. And right now it is in the midst of our wreckage I speak to you, both as a Jew and as a New Orleanian, because survival is not just a matter of urban planning, or of financial aid, or willfulness. It is something deeper. It is of the soul, the soul of individuals and the soul of the city, and the soul of nation. To rebuild is important, but to recognize a new historical moment and to renew is a matter of soul I do believe, and without soul nothing we do can ever really be new.

Rodger Kamenetz is the author of 'The Jew in the Lotus.'

Passover and Trauma

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Tue, 26 Mar 2013 22:52:00 +0000

Every year for the past 2000 Jews all over the world celebrate Passover by gathering for a ceremonial meal. We tell our children the story of how we were slaves in Egypt. Why would a group of people remember their trauma in this way? Most people would prefer not to remember a past like that. We can see in our own American experience how the memory of slavery can itself be traumatizing, to have been a slave or have ancestors who were slaves brings for many reactions of shame. It raises uncomfortable questions such as, Why did our ancestors allow themselves to be enslaved? Why did we not resist or have the courage to die rather than submit to slavery?

The truth is, slavery is what we in the dreamwork call pathology. And we are all enslaved to pathology, we often lose the battle, every day in fact, and we often live doing what pathology tells us to do, in the iron grip of our reactions, of guilt, shame, reactive rage, of our lies and delusions.

While the Passover is mandated in the Torah-- the actual instructions are sparse: to eat a meal, to tell the tale to the children so they will know what the Lord did for us in Egypt. The actual Passover ceremony as we know it is of rabbinic origin and specifically is a response to the greatest trauma in Jewish history which was the destruction of the second Temple by the Romans in 70CE, and the subsequent exile of the Jewish people from their homeland. An exile that lasted for two thousand years.

So here is what seems another puzzle: in response to the greatest trauma in Jewish history, the complete destruction of the Temple, the loss of the sacrificial worship on that holy site, really the sense of a complete withdrawal or absence of the divine-- why would the rabbis create an elaborate ceremony to recall another trauma, that of slavery in Egypt?

The simple answer is that to tell the tale of redemption, how God with "a mighty arm and outstretched hand" freed the Hebrew slaves from Egypt--- it's necessary first to tell of the bitterness and tears of slavery. And in the ceremonial meal there is a shamanic ritual, in which bitter herbs and salt water are eaten-- to reinforce the teaching-- Jews literally ingest their bitter sad story, taste it with their tongues.

But there is a deeper pattern here that has to do with the pattern of cycling through trauma that we do in the dreamwork. The cyclical nature of the healing process in which trauma is re-experienced--- tasted again-- in order to once again be released or redeemed,

History repeats itself. Trauma repeats itself again and again. The deepest understanding of this problem came from Rabbi Isaac Luria (often known as the Ari or Lion), a 16th century kabbalist who lived in S'fad in northern Israel. The Ari explains that beneath the linear flow of time as we experience it in the horizontal, is a deeper pattern of three phases of reality which he called the tzimtzum, the shevirat ha kelim, and the tikkun. Tztimtzum is the experience of absence of God-- the 'withdrawal" or contraction of the divine. The shevirat ha kelim is the shattering of the vessels-- the sense of utter destruction which appears again and again in history. The Jewish examples of "shattering" include the destruction of the Temple, the Inquisition, the exile from Spain, and the Holocaust. But the truth is, history in general is full of examples of shattering.

So is our personal life: divorce, death, loss of a beloved ,loss of a child, loss of a job or a career-- can all be experienced as utterly shattering moments. Luria's insight is that they are reflections of one eternal moment of shattering that was present from the beginning-- built into creation. and wil be present until the final repair.

This repair, the tikkun olam, the healing of the world is the third phase of reality, this is the repair of the shattering. So in the Passover story, the shattering experience is slavery itself, the tzimtzum is the utter hopelessness of having been abandoned by God in the darkness of slavery-- and the tikkun is the redemption of the slaves, and the liberation from Egypt.

One point Marc Bregman has made about trauma is essential here-- it is what Luria calls the tzimtzum. What makes trauma trauma.. rather than simply pain or suffering-- is this element of utter despair and the feeling of the absence of God in that moment. For the soul wishes always to be with its beloved, and yet in the very depth of the shattering, the beloved does not seem to be present. Indeed, as Marc has pointed out, in cases like the inquisition, where torture was used on victims, the purpose of the torture was to get a person to completely separate from any sense of connection to God, and this leaves a permanent mark on the soul. In the same way in the Exodus tale, the Pharoah deliberately embittered the slavery experience by forcing the Hebrews to make bricks without straw.

The tzimtzum according to the Hasidim was experienced at the personal level as psychological despair. But we can also understand the absence of the divine as producing a trauma reaction-- it is experienced as dissociation in all its many forms: amnesia, numbness, confusion, shock, leaving the body.

This layer of reaction makes it exceedingly difficult to heal the trauma. IT is necessary to pierce this layer in some way in order to re-experience the underlying pain and terror that it covers over. And here we begin to understand the beauty of what the rabbis were doing-- or trying to do-- with the Seder. Celebrants were literally ingesting the story-- taking it in by mouth, chewing it, swallowing it--- in order to get below the layer of trauma reaction to the trauma itself. For without touching down to the pain and terror of the trauma, they could not experience the third phase of healing or redemption (tikkun). In my view the culmination of redemption is the arrival of Elijah who represents the male archetype or animus in our terminology. He is the one who heals the pain between parent and child, adn who brings the promise of ultimate redemption. Invoking his presence at the seder means imagining an archetypal moment of encounter with a reality that is outside of history. As Elijah enters the room, it is the emergence of the timeless within time, the encounter with the archetypal that is usually experienced only in dreams

So all three phases of reality that Luria describes are in the Seder: the layer of amnesia or forgetting which is the ordinary state of mind of traumatized people,-- and this represents simultaneously the absence of the divine-- for people who are numb and disconnected really can't feel the presence of God or the connection to God and their souls. So this is the tzimtzum.

Then there's the shattering, which is the experience of the original pain that has been hidden. We are told, that each year we are to experience the Seder as if we too had been slaves in Egypt. The theater of the Seder is such that the experience is to be that the liberation is happening that very evening. IT is not history any more, it is happening now, once again, both the oppression and the liberation. And only then can the experience of the tikkun, the liberation occur. And the sign of that is the entry of the archetypal figure, Elijah, who brings the promise of redemption and ultimate healing.

The three fold experience of absence, shattering and healing, is explicitly cyclical. At the end of the Seder we say Next Year in Jerusalem. That is next year perhaps we will finally be redeemed. But the truth is we also suspect and know that the cycle will repeat itself: the amnesia, the memory of pain and the redemption, over and over again, year after year, until....

The Real Self

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 22 Aug 2012 21:29:00 +0000

A new blog on dreams opens up the basic question. Who is the real you?

"The idea that there is a real you is not something that I can convince you of through argument. It is something you have to feel, over and over, until you can learn to feel the pain when it is gone, the rush when it is there, the ways that it escapes from you, the utterly personal ways it meanders through your veins. This is one of the primary gifts of the dream, every night, giving you all the experiences you need to remind you of who you are meant to be, who you have always been."
Read on:
Zapala Speaks
--

Carl and Me-- Marc Bregman's reflections on the Red Book

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sun, 22 Jul 2012 19:50:00 +0000

Marc Bregman explains how dreams can balance our experience of the depths-- "We are ready when the dreams say we are ready"

ANXIETY IS A SYMPTOM OF THE SOUL

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sat, 07 Jul 2012 13:55:00 +0000

An recent article in The Atlantic points out that "Nearly one in five of us -- 40 million American adults -- suffer from anxiety disorders, the most common class of psychiatric ailment we have." Why is there so much anxiety in our country, more than in other nations with more obvious problems of poverty and disease? The typical approach-- as followed in The Atlantic article, is to look at problems in our society. This turning outward seems logical to people who think in the worldly way. It's a perverse move, because the truth is, there is nothing in the world that supports the soul. Anxiety is a symptom of how separately we live from our souls. We think all our happiness will come from having a good paying job, or achieving a higher status. We worry because we worry about what other people think instead of knowing what the soul is. And then to deal with anxiety, we take a pill. Dreamwork offers a different path. Dreams display reactions and feelings. THey show us how projection operates. Through looking at our dreams we come to understand the difference between anxiety and archetypal fear. The archetypal fear is a deep existential feeling that leads us to the soul. Anxiety is a reaction that disperses or scatters unconscious fear everywhere. Once we project anxiety on to the world, we come under the delusion that we can only solve it in the world. Then we can read the Atlantic and think about the problems with "meritocracy" or structural unemployment. The truth is, even if these problems were solved, we'd still have anxiety. We don't understand that anxiety is simply a surface signal of a deeper reality Instead of projecting anxiety we need to experience our deeper fear. Dreams show us the way.

FALSE POSITIVES

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 23 Dec 2011 18:29:00 +0000

In today's NY Times David Brooks points to the following essay as one of the best of 2011. Marcia Angell's two part series in the NYRB is titled THE EPIDEMIC OF MENTAL ILLNESS. Angell's review-essay is a serious critique of contemporary psychiatric practice that relies excessively on drugs to treat "mental illness." She cites evidence to indicate how a) the drugs themselves, including such well known items as Prozac, are scarcely more effective than placebos b) how psychiatrists are influenced-- in many cases basically bribed-- by major drug companies to prescribes their dubious products and c) how the psychiatric profession through the publication of the ever-expanding DSM (diagnostic manual) is continually manufacturing diagnoses of dubious value, with no scientific citation, but with a powerful influence on prescription and treatment practices. With a new DSM coming in 2013 with even more "illnesses", there's a sense that no after who you are, no matter how normal you might think you are, there's a diagnosis heading your way, complete with a handy drug to pay for.

This is a context for understanding the power of dream work as a natural alternative. Dreams are a natural human experience-- most people dream three or four times a night whether they now it or not. Dreams have long been used to explore the unconscious and for self-understanding. Dreamwork offers a natural approach, and relies on the self-healing properties of the psyche, to produce images that point to new ways of feeling that help people reframe their attitudes and change their lives. Rather than a magical pill offered as a cure-all, dreams offer a longer term process of self-understanding, a curriculum of the soul.

Angell's article points out that the situation in current psychiatric practice is the opposite of natural. Diagnoses are arrived at based on which drugs are used to treat patients, instead of the other way around. The expansion of diagnoses in the successive DSM volumes, is creating numerous "false positives". Perhaps a slower, more natural, more human and more humane process of working with dreams offers an alternative model that is free of the influence of major pharmaceutical corporations and the psychiatrists who according to Angell, appear to have very corrupting relationships with them.

about dreams with Josephine Sacabo at Words and Music 2011

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sat, 05 Nov 2011 21:52:00 +0000

10:45 a. m. — Hotel Monteleone, New Orleans, Queen Anne Ballroom
LIFE & LITERATURE IN THE GLOBALVILLAGE
The Importance of Our Dreams to Our Lives and Our Creativity
This session will feature bestselling non-fiction writer and poet Rodger Kamenetz, who is author of The History of Last Night's Dream: Discovering the Hidden Path to the Soul; and internationally noted photographic artist and author Joséphine Sacabo, whose most recent book, Duino Elegie, contains luscious photographs strongly influenced by her own dream life and the dreams of others. They will discuss the importance of dreams to the creative process and the importance of our dreams in harsh reality of today's shrinking village. And they will address the issue of art as a universal language to promote mutual understanding.

In eras of extreme stress, such as the one in which we are living today, dreams become even more important to healthy lives and creative processes. Since becoming obsessed with dreams and researching the subject for more than five years before writing the book, Rodger has become a dream analyst. Oprah Winfrey read Rodger's book and interviewed him and had this to say about his work: "What’s so exciting about this book is that it talks about how there’s a whole other life that we are living when we sleep and that our dreams are there as offerings and gifts to us if we only recognize what the dreams are there to teach us, what they’re there to tell us about our waking lives."

Joséphine's dreamily beautiful new collection is entitled Óyeme con los Ojos (Hear Me With Your Eyes and was inspired by Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz, a 17th century Mexican nun who was one of the greatest poets and intellectuals of the American continent. Sor Juana lived in Mexico City in the late 1600’s and was very active in defending women’s rights in Mexico through her writing and poetry which centered on freedom, specifically the intellectual and social freedom of women.

LOSING MY PANTS

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 30 Sep 2011 17:16:00 +0000

DREAM
I’m at some Jewish youth event. (Maybe I’m a youth?) I took off my jeans and wallet and put it somewhere, we are in the city. Then when I come back for them, I can’t find them. I ask a couple of the organizers. I get mad and say they should have watched things more carefully. Someone tells me it’s the city and what did you expect? I hear myself whining and complaining and I don’t like the way that feels. Then a guy is hugging me and saying that I won’t be able to get
my pants back, they are lost and there’s nothing to do about it. He’s also hugging a teenage girl with his other arm. She is also distressed. I feel he is right and that I need to stop whining.

Decades ago when I was teaching there was some left-right controversy and a right wing student caught up in it did a cartoon where he characterized me as whining. And I couldn’t believe it, me, whining? Me? And I whined about it!

But now I understand that whining, kvetching, complaining is a reaction, and it is how we spritz our bad feeling around. Here in this dream, I do hear it. That’s new. I am caught in the act – by me. And I believe this opening of awareness in me, -- hearing the whining in my voice-- allows the man can come and comfort me .. if you want to call it comfort. Because what he says is, THAT’S THE WAY IT IS. You
lost your “wallet”—your i.d., you lost your pants—you must now walk in the world naked… and you aren’t getting them back. You are with me now.

Everyone says they want to be with him, or He Himself as one of my clients calls him, and I don’t know what to call him. Or would we rather just complain? I think the Jewish wisdom was that God doesn’t have a name we can pronounce, and so the word “God” itself is also very unsatisfactory. As soon as it’s a word, it’s a concept, it’s a thing, and then next thing you know we are carrying it around in our pocket, or wearing it around our neck as jewelry, and God knows what
else. The actual Hebrew word is a combination of letters of y’ and h’ and w’ and h’ y’h’w’h’ that can’t really be pronounced together, except maybe like a breath, not a name you can put your finger on. It not only shouldn’t’ be pronounced, it actually can’t be anyway. But we
keep trying.

But then again, the whole reality of dream work is we have these experiences of relationship , and they are so powerful and refreshing.
The arm around the shoulder. The voice of comfort. It is so vivid, so complete and actual. It is not about words or lofty spiritual concepts. It is the lowly and absurd, a man with no pants who gets an arm around his shoulder, that simple connection—that absurdity-=- is also part of the holy connection. I can’t put a name on it, it’s felt.

I grew up in a Jewish family that wasn’t very observant, but on my father’s side we had a very strong grandfather and grandmother who believed in family and bringing us all together and that was the piece of Jewish life that has guided me.. the warmth and the love of people that grew out of immigrant experience. The sense of a big family to belong to. But the downside of it was that it was a very
centripetal world. It was our family I trusted.. and venturing out from that to a larger world is not always easy. So Jewish for me number one is not about religion— and maybe non-tribal people don't get that. It's like being a Sioux except you have this big book to lug around that goes with it. It’s about being in a group, a family, a
tribe.

Then for me “Judaism” – which is simply the religion of the Jewish people—was mainly the experience as an adolescent, like the “Jewish youth” in the dream. Being in a group with other young people, learning very good things like learning about writing poetry, about helping others as a tutor, joing the civil rights movement—I actually marched with SNCC when I was fifteen from Baltimore to Washington--
all of that was part of the awakening I had at that time of Jewish youth, age 15. And now I see I was awakening to my soul but poor thing I didn’t know it in that way. Dreams also even then began to beimportant to me.
And there was a little talk about God in the synagogue but never at home. There were no rituals at home either. And God was nothing to take too seriously. Yet somehow the questions about God still hooked into me, but in a very transcendental way that God is presented as
“goodness, mercy”.. as “light” & in a way, nothing personal. And wondering what my relationship to that is. So the dreamwork has brought the personal dimension in.

Then waking up and realizing I have no pants. I have no actual guaranteed understanding of my life, of the world. I have no status. I have to walk out now without pants. In many dreams I’ve been without pants and always the issue was shame or embarrassment. But here it is not that. It is just the stinging pain of loss, and the desire to regain. And here I feel my protest, my whining.. is not adequate. It
is just not to the point. And hearing that is the opening. He comes to me, and comforts me like a friend who puts his arm around me and tellsme the truth. I can hear it finally. I’ve lost them & I’m not getting them back. To hear that from him is to learn an acceptance of what it
means to be on this path.

I know what precipitated this dream is what I would call staring into emptiness. I am at that phase of my life. I’ve been dropped off. I am retired. I don’t need a wallet. I have all I need. Now what? The emptiness is, first of all, all I’ve done in the past is behind me.
There are more years behind me than ahead of me.

And the question that burns is: what is it I can do that is truly of my soul, that is mine and not someone else’s? Because it feels like everything I’ve ever done was just borrowed from someone else and I came along for the ride. So when I am in this feeling it is very dark and when I react to it, I try to make a claim that if I add something
of my own to somebody else’s stuff I can make something new.

Like there ‘s an impulse I have sometimes to write a poem, but then I start thinking, I’ll read this source and that source, and learn this and that, and the next thing you know I’m not writing a poem, I’m doing research in a book.

A lot of this has to do with my pain in knowing I am just a student of this work. And trying to compensate for that. What me a student? Yes I am literally Marc’s student as he tutors me to be a therapist, and I’m a student of my client’s work, and a student of my dreams which sometimes tell me about the work I am doing with my clients. So I have no pants.

When I feel the sting of , “there’s nothing of me in it”, that’s my wallet is lost. And when I hear myself “whining” about it... it’s great because I know , no more whining. No whining allowed. I just have to go to him without my pants and wallet, to get his arm around my shoulder and hear him say, Yes, it’s lost, and there’s nothing you can do about it, that’s the way it is.

That’s the way it is.

Sue Scavo's new blog

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sun, 04 Sep 2011 17:41:00 +0000

Sue Scavo is one of the leading teachers at North of Eden and she's starting a new blog which details her life with in and around dreams.

http://www.gnosticdreamwork.com

Currently she's on tour in Italy...

DREAMING STORIES INTO LIFE ISABELLA FREEDMAN CENTER

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Thu, 21 Jul 2011 15:47:00 +0000

Rodger Kamenetz
with Eden "Eprhyme" Pearlstein and Alicia Jo Rabins

September 7 – 11, 2011
This retreat is an introduction to dreamwork and the spiritual power of storytelling. Starting with Genesis and those primordial dreamers Jacob and Joseph, tradition intertwines dream and story. That is because imagination has the power to awaken us to the deeper story of the soul. We will begin with an evening of fantastic storytelling performances of the tales of two modern day Jewish dreamers, Rabbi Nachman and Franz Kafka, followed by a discussion of the interaction of dream and story in their work. We will follow in class with an introduction to the language of dreams and how to open them up so they can be used to understand the story of the hidden life of the soul. Our classes will include opportunities to share dreams and act them out. At the end of the retreat, participants will share their own stories, parables or dreams with the group, and we will learn how to go further and deeper with dreams.

DREAMING STORIES INTO LIFE RETREAT

Reb Zalman recommends "Dreaming Stories Into Life"

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Thu, 21 Jul 2011 15:39:00 +0000

CURATIVE SONGS /Tikkun review by Brian Bouldrey

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sat, 26 Mar 2011 17:05:00 +0000

Curative Songs
by Brian Bouldrey
March 4, 2011
BURNT BOOKS: RABBI NACHMAN OF BRATSLAV AND FRANZ KAFKA
by Rodger Kamenetz
Schocken/Nextbook, 2010

Are stories rituals? Can they become sacred? How does that happen? One of Kafka’s most memorable parables begins, “Leopards break into the temple and drink to the dregs what is in the sacrificial pitchers.” And it famously ends just as quickly as it began: “This is repeated over and over again; finally it can be calculated in advance, and it becomes a part of the ceremony.”

Like Kafka’s parables and the enigmatic, humane tales of Rabbi Nachman, Rodger Kamenetz’s Burnt Books has an economical generosity that is thoroughly secular, deeply religious, and seriously joking. It is an account of two men with so many shared traits that fate surely meant for them to know each other, guide each other, and influence each other; yet fate separated them by a century. Kamenetz is more than reliable in providing a primer on these two modern masters, and it is clear that he has placed in this new book a lifetime of love and teaching of their work. In fact, the book is structured on a faithful pilgrimage — or, rather, aliyah — that Kamenetz makes to Nachman’s Ukraine and Kafka’s Prague.

Burnt Books positions Nachman and Kafka as speakers of and to the modern world. What modern world? The one that is full of empty disbelief. Rabbi Nachman was careful to distinguish between two kinds of atheism, with the first type being “influenced by science or philosophy.” This type of atheism, he argued, is a modern creation that can be remedied by showing the atheist glimpses of divine truth that both the believer and the rationalist could agree upon. But the other type is more entrenched. Kamenetz explains that for Nachman:

The second type of atheism cannot be answered by an argument…. It is rooted in a profound feeling of emptiness. Kafka defined this feeling for the whole world … ‘I am divided from all things by a hollow space.’ … Rabbi Nachman said that this second kind of atheism cannot be answered with an argument. It can only be answered with a song.

The tales and parables of both Kafka and Rabbi Nachman are, arguably, those curative songs. Wrote Rabbi Nachman: “I did it the way God does it in the Torah: First he tells stories, then he gives laws.” If we use stories to teach children lessons, then it may also be true that through adult stories we come to learn laws. “A myth is a tale that bespeaks an inner truth portrayed as an ancient truth,” writes Arthur Green, whose keen insights add light to Kamenetz’s brilliant investigations.

One of the many things that Burnt Books makes vivid is the way in which we contemporary readers are part Rabbi Nachman, part Kafka. Kafka was a secular Jew who saw his Judaism as one of many “broken radii” in his life (along with piano, languages, gardening, marriage attempts, carpentry, and more). Because of this never-quite-fully-embraced Judaism, Kafka may not come off as assured as Rabbi Nachman. “I’ve rarely worried about my Jewish body, but do wonder about my Jewish soul,” Kafka wrote.

All three writers are deeply engaged in questions of the soul. “What does ‘soul’ mean in our time?” asks Kamenetz, “To me it is connected to the riddle of burning books. Many people feel a special reverence for books and a corresponding sense of desecration when they are burned. Maybe we understand, in some way, that books represent a part of us that can ‘shed’ the body and live on for a time in the new form of words.” Could this be what a soul is? In Kamenetz’s probing query, the possibility gains a force that extends past mere metaphor.

And there at the fulcrum of Kamenetz’s splendid comparison is that eponymous burning bush of books — the nearly mythic stories of both tale-tellers insisting upon the immolation of their unpublished writing. Never before has a scholar offered a more plausible, multi-faceted, and unified rationale behind the motivations of these two writers: and it all has to do with a better understanding of the modern soul — we burn to preserve. Cosmic irony. “Yet the end result of irony is a separation from soul,” Kamenetz argues. “Both Kafka and Nachman were divided between their sophistication and their yearning for simplicity.” The world of the parable is the place where they captured this desired braiding of sophistication and simplicity.

The first-person presence of the author is more than welcome in Burnt Books. “I love the Jews who lug books,” says Kamenetz, and who wouldn’t like to say that sentence out loud, and drink coffee with a man of such enthusiasms? Kamenetz gives color to the two life stories without over-explaining, and offers a properly jaundiced eye to would-be highjackers of both sacred and profane texts — to be honest, he’s perhaps too generous to the Madonnas of the world and their co-optation of the Kabbalah — and turns the other cheek by offering a concise, useful introduction to the Zohar’s four levels of depth.

A Letter From Rabbi Nachman

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Tue, 08 Feb 2011 16:51:00 +0000

NOTE: Jonathan Rosen, the novelist and editor of Nextbook, passes along the following letter, which he received the other day. “I had it typed and am sending it more as a curiosity,” he says. His private opinion is that the letter was written by Kafka pretending to be Nachman, and he could kick himself now for not saving the original handwritten copy. “I could have made a fortune at Sotheby’s,” he says.

Order Burnt Books

Dear Professor Myers,

I have sent this letter to Jonathan Rosen in the hope that he will forward it to you.

I am writing about your review of Rodger Kamenetz’s Burnt Books, a review which depressed me very much, and believe me I was depressed to begin with, even before I died 200 years ago—though since dying I am no longer so manic as I used to be. Also I’ve learned English.

Before you stop reading let me say quickly that this is not the letter of a crazy person. You will be happy to know that death has rendered me completely sane. I am no longer Chasidic—which is a form of madness all its own; I now go to a Conservadox shul, which is very easy in olam habah since nobody drives anyway. Also you cannot die of boredom because, thank God, you are already dead.

Briefly, I want to congratulate you on your review in Commentary. For Burnt Books is a dangerous book that deserves destruction! And you did an admirable job.

Quoting from Kamenetz’s seventeen-year-old book The Jew in the Lotus a passage voicing disappointment in American traditional Judaism was a masterstroke. I admire the way you make it seem as though Kamenetz’s disaffection is a sign of bad faith and evil intention. Nobody considering major Jewish institutions twenty years ago could ever have believed they did not address the spiritual concerns of young American Jews. One might as well say that about religious institutions today! They are on a solid spiritual footing, even if they are no longer getting twelve percent annually because they fell, out of a desire to nourish the wellsprings of Torah, for the seductions of that monster Madoff and who could ever have seen through that?

Ridiculous to allow Kamenetz his fanciful approach just because his orthodox grandparents came to America and stripped faster than Gypsy Rose Lee (who funny enough is here too) and is now groping his way back, having the Chutzpah even to create a Jewish studies department in Louisiana. A man who does not know his right hand from his left, not to mention the town of Kamenetz-Litevsk from Kamenetz-Podolsk? True his reference to his name and the town of Kamenetz is intentionally fanciful, like the talking Kafka mug in the first chapter, but I am glad that Professor Nadler (Shlita) set the record straight—he must be a wonderful teacher, one of those men who lead lives of piety, faith and learning, using what they know as a lever to lift up the world and never, as the evil urge prompts, as a crowbar to beat down the ignorant.

Anyway, it is important to make Kamenetz’s seventeen-year-old criticism of Jewish institutions, which doesn’t appear in Burnt Books, seem like a modern American phenomenon born of ill will and ignorance and not part of the self-examination that is as old as the Prophets and really even older. But even if people saw it as prophetic, what kind of idiot would want all the people to be prophets? Only the very very learned can be critical of the very very unlearned. Dr. Johnson—who I’ve become quite friendly with here in the afterlife (what a head for Talmud!)—was wrong when he said you don’t have to be a carpenter to criticize a table. You do have to be a carpenter to criticize a table.

Also, I’m of the opinion that the prophets could really be quite anti-Semitic.

It is important to fault Kamenetz—may his name be blotted out!—for situating Kafka inside of a Jewish context. Who would want to put a writer so assimilated, dark and Germanic inside a Jewish framework? His pathetic gropings after Chasidic tales, his stabs at learning Hebrew, his messianic doubts and yearnings? His confusion of the personal and psychological with the currents of Jewish history? That would make Judaism a game any Jew could play. And Judaism is not a game!

Kamenetz—but let me just call him Rodger K. so I don’t have to write his full name—Rodger K., by suggesting that a modern Jewish writer like Kafka felt incomplete without a figure of traditional Judaism emblematized by me, is giving Kafka far too much Jewish credit. Readers who love Kafka must not now suddenly find that they have a reason for studying Judaism too for that is the wrong way to come to Judaism. And there are wrong ways as well as right ways to come to Judaism! Martin Buber, that numbskull, mistranslated all my tales and my tales were themselves mistranslations of Torah Judaism. I’m lucky they let me into paradise.

In any event, the religious stumblings of modern Jewish writers are the wrong way!

How embarrassing that Rodger K. should laud me for my stories and not for my Torah commentary, which is the true essence of my being and will light real fires of return in Jewish souls instead of the bad techno music of a few drug addicts I mostly inspire. I have in fact stopped telling stories altogether.

I agree that it is dangerous and misleading to suggest that I, a Chassidic rebbe, was fascinated with the wayward children of the enlightenment, and that Kafka, assimilated ignoramous that he was, was meanwhile looking back past the Enlightenment for inspiration from a Chasidic writer. As if these two figures needed each other to feel whole and might suggest a larger pairing of tradition and new creation. Empty metaphors! You did well to ignore this.

I’m also glad you didn’t mention in your excellent review the part of the book where Rodger K. feels shame at his own inability to read aloud from the psalms in Hebrew. Shrewd not to reveal his own dissatisfaction with his Jewish education, his own desire to know more, just as Kafka desired to know more and to learn more in a literal straightforward way alongside all his deeper spiritual struggles. It would only have stirred up misplaced sympathy for the author, who is describing his book as if it were the beginning of the journey and not the end of the journey—and what kind of guide admits he doesn’t really know the way? Sure Dante got lost in a dark wood, but he was Catholic.

I’m also glad that you did not bother with the larger framework of the book, based on my belief that a burnt book still has meaning and value. Rodger K’s mushy implication that lost lives are still present, and by extension that the traditional Jewish world—that can seem to ignorant American Jews so fully removed by physical distance, by time, and by tragedy—is nevertheless worth recovering and maybe even in some form has left invisible traces—is really quite pernicious because it makes of the lost world a metaphor and fosters cheap identification. It is rigor that will speak to the young, not vague promises of recovery and spiritual connectedness!

In short what I most admire is your recognition of the utterly destructive nature of metaphors themselves when it comes to Judaism. Christianity made Judaism a metaphor and where did that get us? If metaphors raised out of Jewish context were allowed to dominate, then Theodore Hezl, that secular ignoramus, would be considered a hero, even though he became a dramaturge of Jewish history because he was such a lousy playwright and really didn’t know squat about the Torah.

It doesn’t surprise me that the book was edited by Jonathan Rosen, whom I don’t actually know – —I only sent my letter to him because his address was in God’s rolodex, I hope this won’t make him hesitate to forward my letter—but he is, let’s face it, a heretic whose book The Talmud and the Internet argued, I believe, that Mark Zuckerberg is just as good as Rabbi Akiva. Or so I imagine—I have not actually read it; I was going to read it but it was trashed by Commentary and since they were right about the Cold War and the Middle East I figured they must be right about literature too.

I have to stop now. Even the dead have high blood pressure (go figure) and besides, I have other work to do, and coffee with Eliezer Berkowitz [sic].

So let me just end by expressing once again my gratitude and admiration.

Sincerely,

Nachman of Bratslav (peace be upon me).

BURNT BOOKS CARTOON VIDEO

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Thu, 20 Jan 2011 20:18:00 +0000

Burnt Books in under 2 minutes...

Burnt Books: Rabbi Nachman Of Bratslav and Franz Kafka from Tablet Magazine on Vimeo.

BURNT BOOKS is available at your friendly local INDEPENDENT book storeor Amazon or Barnes and Noble.

TOP TEN RELIGION BOOK for 2010 on HUFFINGTON POST

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 24 Dec 2010 13:53:00 +0000

Burnt Books was named a top ten religion book for 2010 on
Huffington Post

BOOK LIST review of BURNT BOOKS

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Tue, 30 Nov 2010 17:38:00 +0000

Burnt Books: Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav and Franz Kafka.
By Rodger Kamenetz

Whether he's writing about Judaism, Buddhism or prayer and dreams, Kamenetz's mission is to discern connections. In his most delving book, he traces the hidden links between a literary nineteenth-century Hasidic rabbi and a quintessential modern secular Jewish writer.
Rabbi Nachman, a "Jewish shaman" , and a contemporary of the Brothers Grimm, smuggled the kabbalah into fiction to extend the reach of his teachings. Kafka, concerned about the spiritual cost of modernity, “nourished himself with the tales of Hasidic rebbes." Both men were ascetics; both died young of tuberculosis; both questioned "the seeming absence of divine justice"; and both asked trusted intimates to burn their work after their deaths.
Kamenetz's dramatic and revelatory double portrait is built on a solid foundation of elegantly explicated Jewish thought deepened by the story of his journey to Ukraine to visit Rabbi Nachman's grave. Here is a whole new slant on Kafka, a unique and affecting portrait of a creative holy man, and a radiant inquiry in celebration of how both sacred texts and great literature are open to "infinite interpretation."
--Donna Seaman, Book List

The Realm of the Imagination is not Imaginary

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Tue, 26 Oct 2010 19:20:00 +0000

Kamenetz pens a new chapter in his long journey of discovery
Monday, October 25, 2010
By Chris Waddington
Staff writer
Rodger Kamenetz really gets around.

The poet and just-retired LSU professor showed up on Oprah in 2007, plugging a nonfiction book about dreams.

He first achieved bestseller status in 1994 with a book about the growing interfaith dialogue between Jews and Buddhists -- a volume that has never gone out of print.

When not at his desk, the writer bikes on the levee near his Uptown New Orleans home.

He's a dance floor regular at Frenchman street clubs, and, in 2009, Kamenetz and his wife, novelist Moira Crone, served as King and Queen of the Krewe de Jeux Carnival organization. The pair presided over a klezmer-driven bacchanal that included some the city's most celebrated burlesque dancers.

For his latest volume, "Burnt Books: Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav and Franz Kafka," the 60-year-old Baltimore native went to similar extremes. He walked the cobbled streets of Prague, seeking traces of the modernist literary icon who wrote "The Metamorphosis" and "The Trial." Kamenetz also joined thousands of Jews who make an annual pilgrimage to the grave of Rabbi Nachman in the Ukraine. The 19th century religious leader was a writer, too. His mystical narratives cloak Torah teachings in a fairy tale atmosphere akin to that of the Brothers Grimm.

"Burnt Books" deftly blends a travel narrative with literary criticism, a double biography, and speculations about the parallel spiritual lessons of Nachman and Kafka. At one point, Kamenetz quotes an observation, by philosopher Gershom Sholem, that Kafka leads readers to "those mystical theses that lie on the narrow boundary between religion and nihilism." That's a pretty good description of "Burnt Books," too -- although Kamenetz insists, with a hearty laugh, that "this book is very much an autobiography."

Kamenetz will discuss "Burnt Books" at the New Orleans Jewish Community Center on Monday and at Maple Street Book Shop on Saturday. In November he begins a multi-city promotional tour that takes him across the U.S. and Canada -- and on to Britain where he will be featured at the London Jewish Book Fair.

Wherever Kamenetz goes, he'll have some explaining to do -- and he knows it.

"I'm not a conventional religious person, so my interests are baffling to a lot of people," he said. "What interest me is how very different people understand the search for God and for meaning. I'm looking for the energy behind the outward forms of religion, the force that makes people seek."

Kamenetz sees that same force working in both Kafka and Nachman.

"Both men lived with an incredible seriousness and intensity," he said. "They are forbidding and admirable -- and otherworldly in a good sense."

"Burnt Books" argues that the secular 20th-century writer and the Hasidic holy man were both wrestling with modernity, with the sense that the materialistic world view of science is as unsatisfying as the old forms of religion. For Kamenetz, its no surprise that both men used stories to get at metaphysical truths.

"The realm of the imagination is not imaginary," Kamenetz said. "Dreams and stories are a way to provide felt metaphors for our experiences. It's the place we go to restore our capacity to create and feel deeply. That's the place I want to find in my work, too."

. . . . . . . .

Staff writer Chris Waddington can be reached at cwaddington@timespicayune.com or 504.826.3448. Comment and read more at nola.com/living.