Reb Zalmon

“I asked how he was feeling. “Thank God, my body’s in pretty good shape right now,” (Reb Zalmon) said in his rich baritone, rapping his knuckles on the wooden arm of the chair. “I never dreamed I’d live this long. I’ve still got some mileage left, but the end is getting closer. I can hear the footsteps.” “Are you reconciled with that?” I asked, reminding him that in his book From Age-ing to Sage-ing, which he wrote in his sixties, he talked about his fear of being reduced to “a rocking-chair existence . . . and the eventual dark and inevitable end to my life.” “The rocking chair doesn’t frighten me now,” he said. “When I wrote that, I was busy running around. These days, I often sit in the evening and am happy to do nothing. Just sit.”

“What about the dark end?” I asked. “I don’t think it’s all dark. Something continues. It’s as if the body and soul are tied together with little strings. The closer you get to leaving, the more the strings loosen and the more you connect with greater awareness, the expanded mind.” I said I’ve had intimations but no certainty of that happening. “Look,” he said. “There’s a deep human fear of not being, not existing anymore. Either I survive bodily death in some way, or the whole machine is gonna turn off and that’s the end—nothing. But if there’s nothing, there’ll be nobody around to be upset about it.”

“That’s what’s frightening,” I said. “Extinction. Much as I dislike parts of myself, the idea of being annihilated, no awareness of anything, ever . . .” Reb Zalman raised his eyebrows and nodded. “I know how that feels in the gut. But I don’t think it ends in oblivion. I’m curious—really curious to awaken to the larger picture.” The glint came to his eyes. “Remember what Woody Allen said? ‘I don’t mind dying, I just don’t want to be there when it happens.’ ” Right.

“I do want to be there. I want to watch the last breath going out and whisper the Shema. I want to merge back with the infinite; I want to dissolve like a drop in the greater ocean.” I stopped typing for a moment. “That sounds kind of boring, just floating around in the ocean.” He started to laugh. “In the ocean I have a lot more than I have in my drop.” He leaned forward. “Do you know what your past life was?” Ah, yes. Better to get this out on the table. “I don’t believe, literally, in past lives,” I told him. “I can understand reincarnation as a metaphor or myth, but when someone tells me they remember being a queen or an army general, I start tuning out. No one seems to remember being a leper or a child molester.”

Reb Zalman said there’s a great deal of anecdotal evidence—people being hypnotized and remembering details from a past existence—that we’ve lived before. “And there are a great many who dispute that evidence,” I said. “Nu? That’s what makes for horse racing.” I asked if he’s always felt at ease with dying. “No. It came gradually. Liberal Judaism hasn’t dealt much with the afterlife, and since the Holocaust, hardly anyone speaks about it. The sense is that you live this life, and when you’re dead, you’re dead.”

I remembered, as he said this, asking the warm and very modern Reform rabbi who confirmed me at age fifteen what happens when people die. He said, “There are several possibilities. Some people believe you live on in the good works you’ve done. Some believe in an ethical force that moves through all of us . . .” As he ticked off the other possibilities, I knew he believed none of them. My father, when I asked the same question, said, “We live on in the memories of others,” an answer I found equally unsatisfactory.

Polls have consistently shown that Jews are far less likely to believe in an afterlife than people of other faiths. But Reb Zalman said there are Kabbalist texts with long passages about reincarnation and what’s beyond this world, though they’ve never been translated into English. “The rationalists have held sway for the last hundred years, and they’ve wanted Judaism to be perceived as the religion of reason,” he said. “So they buried the mystical. But the classical Jewish belief is that there are two worlds—this one and the world to come. At birth the soul enters the body, and at death the soul survives.”

He urged me to go to the library and look in section 133 of the Dewey decimal system—the section on the occult and supernatural. “I read everything I could find there,” he said. “In almost every culture, people have had visions of the afterlife, and they’re remarkably similar. Also, the people who’ve had near-death experiences write that they felt so much light and love they were reluctant to come back. They felt so free.”

I shook my head. “Near-death experiences don’t prove that that’s what actually happens when we die. I’m not saying it can’t be true, but I prefer to hold it as a mystery.” Reb Zalman laughed. “That’s fine. You leave a possible door open so there could be a surprise.” I told him about a book I’d read, My Stroke of Insight, by Jill Bolte Taylor, a brain scientist who suffered a massive near-fatal stroke that wiped out her ability to understand    words. She remembers being in a state of bliss and oneness, however, not wanting to return to the speaking world.

Reb Zalman clapped his hands in excitement. “But that could just be the brain,” I said, “producing a chemical reaction that induces a sense of oneness and bliss.” Reb Zalman threw out his arms. “Isn’t it wonderful that we should have such an illusion in those dire circumstances? We should thank Mother Nature for giving us that kind of illusion.” I couldn’t resist laughing. He’d pulled the rug out from my mind’s perpetual questioning. “I don’t want to convince you of anything,” Reb Zalman said. “What I want is to loosen your mind.” ~ excerpt from "The December Project: An Extraordinary Rabbi and a Skeptical Seeker Confront Life’s Greatest Mystery."  Copyright © 2014 by Sara Davidson.

~ Reb Zalmon Schachter-Shalomi (1924-2014) barely escaped the Nazis in Vienna, became a Hasidic rabbi in Brooklyn, then began seeking wisdom from outside his own community.  He took L.S.D. with Timothy Leary and became friends with Thomas Merton and the Dalai Lama.  He was married four times and had 11 children, one from a sperm donation to a lesbian rabbi. His aim in founding Jewish Renewal was to “take the blinders off Judaism,” and encourage people to have a direct experience of God.

He was committed to the Gaia hypothesis, to feminism, and to full inclusion of LGBT people within Judaism. His innovations in Jewish worship include chanting prayers in English while retaining the traditional Hebrew structures and melodies, engaging davenners (worshipers) in theological dialogue, leading meditation during services and the introduction of spontaneous movement and dance. Many of these techniques have also found their way into the more mainstream Jewish community. Schachter-Shalomi encouraged diversity among his students and urged them to bring their own talents, vision, views and social justice values to the study and practice of Judaism. Based on the Hasidic writings of Rabbi Mordechai Yosef Leiner of Izbitz, he taught that anything, even what others consider sin and heresy could be God's will.