Shalom Friends! My teacher, Rav Ebn Leader, just put out a piece on Substack on the second Introduction to Tikunei Zohar, the Patah Elihayu, which you can read here.

I went back to listen to what Reb Zalman said as an introduction to this piece in his Baumann lecture from 1993 which you can hear here. A transcription of the audio follows and Reb Zalman’s translation of Patah Eliyahu was previously published here.

If you look in a Hasidic Siddur, any Siddur that’s been influenced by Kabbalah, you will find this statement, Patah Eliahu, in one of two places. The first is, some Siddurim will have right in front, at the beginning, a Tefilah kodem hatefilah. (Have you seen it? A prayer before praying.)

There is a beautiful Tefilah kodem hatefilah written by Reb Elimelech of Lizhensk where he says:

Riboyno shel olam / Master of the world, I’m about to do this impossible thing, to pray and talk to You! Please help me! Clean my heart and let me not feel any anger toward anybody. Let me feel joy with them and love.

Then he talks about what is worthy and what is unworthy in prayer and pours it all out to God.

Usually that’s printed on one column in tinier letters because it’s a longer thing than the Patah Eliyahu which appears alongside in slightly bigger letters on the other column with a line dividing in between, as you’ll see in those Siddurim and it will say Patah Eliyahu.

The other place where you could find Patah Eliyahu in a Hasidic Siddur is right before Mincha on Friday evenings.

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Dear Friends:

Professor Hava Tirosh-Samuelson has graciously shared her presentation from the recent Edinburgh International Center for Spirituality and Peace event honoring the life of Reb Zalman with us. You can view it below:

Shalom, u’vracha!

I was inspired to write this after recently reading a wonderful piece you can read here from my teacher, Rabbi Ebn Leader. In it, Rabbi Ebn compares and contrasts Van Gogh’s process of creating art with Rebbe Nachman’s thoughts on how prophesy creates a vision for a better world. In both cases, they use a combination of imagination together with observing what is real in the world.

After reading it, I noted that the content of Rabbi Ebn’s article was similar to an excerpt of Reb Zalman (you can read it in its original Hebrew here) from his Sefer, Yishm’ru Daat, pp. 62-63. I have decided to publish it along with Reb Zalman’s translation and commentary, taken from two recordings of Reb Zalman giving this piece over. May we together imagine and then bring about a better world, as we are in a very difficult time now,  כן יהי רצון במהרה בימינו אמן:

נשא את ראש בני וגו’, (במדבר ד’ ב’)

Raise a headcount of the children [of Israel] (Numbers 4:2).

נשיאות ראש, כדי שהשכל יהיה לבוש לנשמה השכל צריך להתפשט

Raising the head: In order that the sechel / the mind, the intellect, should be a garment for the soul, the sechel has to spread itself

ולהרחיב

and it has to make a lot of wide space.

“On the level of פשט / p’shat / the simple meaning, the נשיאות ראש in the beginning of the Book of Numbers is a counting and, the counting is always done with this phrase, naso et rosh / Raise a headcount.

“We can take the drash / interpretation a little further, and say that when a person is treated as just a number, their humanity is reduced; they become an object. And this was one of the first things that the Nazis did; they would take away the name of the person and reduce them to a number.

“But here, I am not talking about the p’shat. The word, naso, also means to lift. So how can we lift the head?”

על ידי (תהילים כ”ד ז’) שאו שערים ראשיכם — (משלי ל”א כ”ג) ונודע בשערים בעלה –

It does it by opening the gates of your head (Psalms 24:7). And in Mishlei (21:23) it says, “her husband is known in the gates.”

שערים ההשערות (ל’ ערות בשפעל)

And I translate the word שערים as השערות. It means the imaginal openings, from the word ערות, awakeness in the שפעל which puts a shin in front of that.

Here is how he explained his translation of this word, שערים / gates.

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Shalom! In this lecture by Reb Zalman on the subject of fundamentalism, he gives his insights regarding a fundamentalist mindset. He also identifies that our own views have something in common with the views of those we more typically think of as fundamentalist. And so it occurs to me that it may be useful to share this at this time so we can begin to heal from the division and divisiveness.

Dear Friends:

In case you haven’t yet viewed Reb Zalman’s recollections of his Holocaust years, here’s the video interview they recorded:

I have met many Jews in many kinds of shuls who wear a Tallit which was designed by Reb Zalman in the 1950’s. When I pointed this out, most of them didn’t know its background and history and so, I’ve decided to share it here. Much of what I wrote below is taken directly from an interview of Reb Zalman by Rabbi Yonassan Gershom from around forty years ago. Gabbai Seth Fishman

The B’nai Or Tallit Design

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Dear Friends:

Music heals the heart.

Last night, I went to a Jewish Gathering called “Here O Israel, Songs in Solidarity.” At the end of the night, a video was shown with members of the IDF (Israel Defense Forces) singing Hatikvah. The video reminded me of a talk I gave for a gathering of Music Therapists about  Hatikvah and the healing power of music which I share below.

The talk occurred (over Zoom) on May 17, 2021, during the Pandemic and it also coincided with a period in which there was an outbreak of violence in the Israeli-Hamas conflict.  The gathering of Music Therapists was hosted by The Louis Armstrong Center for Music and Medicine at NYC’s Mount Sinai hospital. The main presenter was the great artist Jon Batiste. The topic of the event was: Social Music: Gathering Humanity Through Song & Sound. I had been invited by the Director of center, my dear friend Dr. Joanne Loewy, to talk about how the song Hatikvah has contributed to the healing from trauma of the Jewish people. (If you are interested, you can hear my talk in full at the bottom of this post.)

The flier stated: From the roots of slavery to current-day rallies, injustices have plagued ‘civilized’ communities since the beginning of time. Laments of rage have led to music that have fostered expressions of injustice, highlighting paths toward lasting legacies. Melodious jubilees and sorrow songs, formulate many of today’s familiar spirituals. From the underground to the picket line, from farce to parody, from rogue to rap, music harbors resilience.

Here’s what I said:

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Shalom! In the first of his 1992 Germantown, PA lectures on Kabbalah, I asked the following question. Reb Zalman’s answer follows:

Seth: Dear Reb Zalman, in this lecture, I hear you mapping the tradition onto  modern cosmology and coming up with very rich imagery. But where is Eyn Sof in space time as we imagine it? Before the Copernican revolution, or at some such time when we felt ourselves locked here on the earth and looking in the sky, we saw a kind of ceiling. Reading Bereishit, we could think that creation was light and water up there. Was the concept of Eyn Sof tied to the Copernican revolution? Did Eyn Od come in with the Kabbalists? Given our current model for the universe, Space/Time and Quantum physics, etc., as one sends one’s imagination to the ends of the universe, where is Eyn Sof?

Reb Zalman: Let me say this. I’m excited about the challenge of the update. I see in Kabbalah a software for god-ing, (if I were to use those terms).

I want to have some connection with God. If I treat if as the picture of the old guy sitting in the sky saying all those no-nos and punishing all the bad guys, etc., that’s shattered for us; Auschwitz shattered this once and for all.

So then the question is: “All right, then how do we continue to be Jews?” So, it is like needing an update on the software.

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The University of Colorado Boulder hosts some wonderful oral histories which I’ve been going through and I’m sharing here a transcription excerpt from the interview with Avi Dolgin. You can listen to the whole interview by clicking here, then searching for the “Avi Dolgin Interview” and clicking the Access URL. Here’s what he says:

~~~

I remember Zalman saying that he was a Jewish practitioner of the Universal Religion. The thing I came to really value and appreciate in my connection with Zalman was all the other spiritual paths that were around us.

He would bring into a course on Jewish thought, Buddhist teachings. He would talk about how we saw things one way, how Islam saw it in a parallel way, (although maybe Islam had a better take on it than we did). He certainly knew his Christianity well and one of the reasons I think Christians came and studied from him was that he was willing to learn from them. Elsewhere there are statements documenting his relationship with his Black Rebbe with whom he had studied much earlier, [Rev Howard Thurman obm].

So that was such a wonderful thing for me.

I was the guy who went to Hebrew School. I went to Jewish camps. I went to Camp Massad north of Winnipeg for a number of summers. I went to Camp Ramah down in Wisconsin for a number of summers. I was a Chazzan at the Junior Congregation. I had a good Conservative Jewish background, but through it all, … nobody else really looked at Judaism in a broader context of the world’s spiritual paths and religions.

Basically, insofar as Judaism was discussed with any others, it was from a chauvinist perspective of, “We are better!”

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