Part 5 (1/2)
”The angels who praise G.o.d are called seraphim,” Zalman continued. ”Then there are angels that look like animals. One with a face like a lion. Another has a face of a bull. Another one has a face like an eagle and another has a face like the human being. These angels represent the signs of the Zodiac of the year. Each person has a nature. Sometimes a person has a bull nature, sometimes a person has a lion nature, or an eagle nature, and there's a person who is a human being. So all these natures are influenced by those angels.” He pointed up to the heavens. ”That's how we talk about it.”
The Dalai Lama actually giggled.
”Right. And then below that, still more below, there are angels we call wheels. These angels have to do with s.h.i.+fting energy around. Sometimes we come into a room and the room feels flat, no energy. Sometimes a room is filled with energy. Ophan Ophan, one of those wheel angels is there and energizes the thing. But angels...” Zalman swept his hands in the air, as if dismissing the subject. But the Dalai Lama was undeterred.
”So these angels have some connection with the weather condition?”
”Yes, yes, yes.”
”There was some small earthquake at seven this morning. So there was some angel?”
Zalman nodded. ”That's right. They say not a blade of gra.s.s grows without an angel saying, 'Grow, grow, grow.' Angels are pus.h.i.+ng fruit to ripen. So they speak of all kinds of beings, but when we use the word angel, that is only human speech because the number and variety of these beings is beyond being able to count. Okay. But I want to go away from the angels, I want to go higher.” He made a sweeping away motion with his hands again, this time more forcefully, and then pointed upwards with his thumb as the Dalai Lama laughed.
”Oh,” he said, looking slightly abashed.
”Okay?” Zalman asked.
But even then the Dalai Lama did not want to let the subject go. Instead, he steered the conversation toward a point of some subtlety. The Buddhist leader wanted to know if the action by these angels is ultimate. Do they have autonomy and authority or ”did all their activities come through the creator's guidance?”
Reb Zalman answered, ”If I would use an electrical image, I would say, the infinite needs transformers for lower levels.” He built a transformer tower with his hands raised high and then represented the cascading down of energy with large spirals. ”Ultimately there are no angels, ultimately there is G.o.d. But the garment G.o.d wears appears to us as an angel. So G.o.d has a little finger, and the little finger, as it were, has a glove, and the glove has another glove, and the outermost glove is what we would call an angel, or what we would call a wind or a force in the universe. But what moves them is always the power of the creator.”
This discussion had taken some time, and Rabbi Schachter was anxious to get back to his charts. But just as Marc Lieberman had predicted, the real energy in the dialogue emerged in give-and-take with the Dalai Lama. The ophanim ophanim, the wheels, were moving around the room, exchanging energies all around.
I could see that the other Jewish delegates were getting a bit uncomfortable with that energy. Rabbis have egos too, and perhaps some were simply concerned that Zalman would use up most of the time that day. (As indeed he did.) But there was something else too. Although the group had already a.s.sumed Rabbi Schachter's material would be of interest, they could not have antic.i.p.ated this absolute explosion of curiosity from the Dalai Lama. It hit with enormous force. Suddenly they confronted their own embarra.s.sment about the subject, which was not just theirs personally, but endemic to contemporary Judaism itself.
Rabbi Greenberg, for instance, felt the need to add some spin control. ”What you're hearing is the mystical tradition-actually there are two or three. Many in the more rational or more legal systems would not affirm all these beliefs.” Then Rabbi Joy Levitt piped in, to general amus.e.m.e.nt, ”And some of us are hearing them for the first time as well.”
Even though her comic timing was impeccable, her remark defined in brief the whole mainstream Jewish att.i.tude toward mysticism. Repression of angels had been going on for centuries, but somehow the Dalai Lama had cracked it open and released them.
Then Moshe Waldoks joined in. ”There is no obligation to accept this, but if it helps you in reaching the higher levels, then you can accept it. Some people can reach higher levels maintaining a very rational position or ethical position without the use of angels. It's all an image, a colorful enjoyable image.” He added, with unintended irony, ”But some people get very frightened.”
Yet the power of the angels could not be dismissed all that easily. Zalman's discourse partook of both belief and imagination. Though Moshe Waldoks was right to say that angels are an image, they are not just just an an image but how mystically minded Jews experience the living reality of G.o.d in everyday life. The question for the Hasidim is how to develop kavvanah kavvanah, a strong spiritual intention, in order to lift everyday acts to higher realms. Visualizing a world in which every blade of gra.s.s growing has a cheering section of angels is a powerful help. At the rational level where contemporary Judaism tends to operate, it is important to discriminate. Logically, angels are either real or not real. But in the world of intuition, that logic no longer applies. Beautifully and profoundly, the image of two angels in dialogue captured the essence of the exchange between Rabbi Schachter and the Dalai Lama. Together they had raised the dialogue between Jews and Tibetans from the world of knowing to the world of intuition. And that was a very high place to be.
As Moshe Waldoks admitted later, the Jewish delegates had no reason to be embarra.s.sed because the ”esoteric is like gefilte fish to the Dalai Lama.” It became obvious that the Buddhist leader had noticed the divisions in the Jewish group because a little later he joked about it. This, after a rather long consultation with the lamas behind him on a point of Buddhist doctrine. When he finished, he turned back to us and said, ”I consult and they agreed. And they're the more Orthodox type.” Over the ensuing laughter, I heard Yitz saying to Moshe Waldoks, ”You see, it's the same the world over. Covering your right flank.”
Perhaps because of Yitz's spin control, the Dalai Lama looked for confirmation from Zalman. ”What you are explaining about angels, do you find it mentioned in the Torah?”
”Yes,” the rabbi affirmed. ”In the five books of Moses it says when G.o.d closed off the Garden of Eden, he planted there an angel with a flaming sword. He sent angels to Avraham our grandfather, to announce the coming of a child. Our grandfather Jacob sent angels to his brother. The word angel also means messenger, so you can read it as messenger or as angel. If you have an inclination to mysticism, you say angel, and if you want to see everything as plain reality, then you say messenger.”
But Zalman still had two more worlds to take the Dalai Lama through and not much time.
He had traveled from a.s.siyah a.s.siyah (doing) to (doing) to yetzirah yetzirah (feeling)-where the angels dwell. The realm above the angels is (feeling)-where the angels dwell. The realm above the angels is beriah beriah, first creation. ”If I were to borrow a word from your tradition I would say samsara is here.” He explained that beriah beriah is the beginning and source of the object world, the source of name and form and individuality, though it is ”not yet object,” but instead, ”the divine mind conceiving of objects.” is the beginning and source of the object world, the source of name and form and individuality, though it is ”not yet object,” but instead, ”the divine mind conceiving of objects.”
Above beriah beriah is the realm of is the realm of atziluth atziluth, emanation. Atziluth Atziluth ”is so infinite that it's both full and its empty. It's full of G.o.d and it's empty of everything, no object in it.” This linking of G.o.d to a concept of emptiness was a crucial point of contact with Buddhism, as we would see. ”is so infinite that it's both full and its empty. It's full of G.o.d and it's empty of everything, no object in it.” This linking of G.o.d to a concept of emptiness was a crucial point of contact with Buddhism, as we would see.
Rabbi Schachter was giving the kabbalistic road map of G.o.d's creative processes. But because man was made in G.o.d's image, it is also a map of human creativity. The four worlds cosmology gave me a new vocabulary: one could speak of an intuition arising in the realm of emanation, becoming a thought in the realm of creation, being formed into a particular shape in the realm of formation, and eventuating in an action in the realm of function. There is a fifth level, as Zalman had hinted, above emanation-known to the Lurianic kabbalists as ”Adam Kadmon”-but that was not discussed. Instead he turned from view to path.
Here Rabbi Schachter was going to address the second matter of interest to the Dalai Lama, what Michael Sautman at our breakfast meeting had called ”thought transformation.” This key element of Buddhist practice includes visualization, meditation, and as a preliminary to those practices, techniques of purgation such as prostrations. One Western Buddhist monk had told me about the one hundred thousand prostrations he was performing to purify himself to receive advanced teachings.
In Jewish terms, these activities correspond to prayer-in Hebrew, tefillot tefillot; in Yiddish, davennen davennen. Not just prayer in synagogue, but the blessings or brakhot brakhot spoken throughout the day. spoken throughout the day.
”Here is a very important part,” Zalman explained. ”Nothing we are to do should we do with instinct alone. Every instinct that we have can be gratified. But it always calls for stopping and becoming mindful. So we say a blessing before we eat. The blessing I said on greeting you is also part of this discipline.”
With that, I understood better what Jonathan Omer-Man had meant by the inner ch.o.r.eography of that blessing. He was speaking of kavvanah kavvanah. Only with the proper intention would the blessing succeed in elevating our sense of the moment as we entered into dialogue.
”Here is where all the laws come in,” Zalman continued, ”to which all Jews are obligated. We speak of 613 of these laws.”
”Six hundred and thirteen?” The Dalai Lama seemed impressed by the count.
”Six hundred and thirteen. So when a person in your tradition becomes a monk, he takes on 250. In the same way, when a boy becomes bar mitzvah, a girl becomes bat mitzvah-they take on the commandments. And from that time on there's an expectation of doing what leads to purification.”
The next stage up the ladder from doing is formation or feeling. ”Purification of the action isn't enough because what leads a person to do the wrong action is often the wrong att.i.tude. So then on this level of formation or feeling comes the development of calm and of loving respect toward G.o.d and the universe-cleaning up the heart.”
Borrowing a basic term from the Buddhist Eightfold Path, right aspiration, or right feeling, Zalman explained that ”the laboratory for right feeling is prayer in the heart. Here is where we work, asking, Why did I do it? Before you go to sleep, you say, What was my day like? What did I do? Why did I do this? Once a week you do this deeper before the Shabbat. And once a year, at Rosh Hashana, you go though the year and you ask yourself, Why did I do what I did? and try to clean up all the karma, and this is where the discrimination of feeling comes in.”
The Dalai Lama studied the chart intensely, looking it over like the detailed plans of a house. Zalman gave him time and for a moment the room fell quiet. Then he looked up and Zalman continued, ”I can ask myself, Why do I hate that person? What's in my heart? Asking these questions, and working in the heart is what we do on this level of the path.
”But then we find out, that, why do I hate somebody? Because I have a wrong thought. If I would understand the context of that person's actions, I wouldn't hate him. So I have to now go to that realm of thought. And this is called hitbonenut hitbonenut, the contemplation of truth and also impermanence. This is where our traditions come very close. Our rabbis would be saying, 'Nothing of this world remains. Everything changes, everything falls apart.'”
”Yes.”
”Yes. So at the level of thought when I understand this, why should I get so upset? The story about the wheel that turns-we use the same word, galgal ha-hozer galgal ha-hozer. Today he is poor, tomorrow he is rich, it's all on the wheel”-Zalman's voice lilting, almost chanting-”it's all on the wheel. And the word that we use is gilgul gilgul, being on the wheel.”
The Dalai Lama p.r.o.nounced gilgul gilgul to himself a few times. It made an important contact between the two traditions-for Zalman was touching again on rebirth. He cited a bedtime prayer from the Art Scroll Siddur. ”Before going to sleep: Master of the universe, I here forgive anyone who sinned against me, my body, my property, my honor,...whether he did it in this transmigration [ to himself a few times. It made an important contact between the two traditions-for Zalman was touching again on rebirth. He cited a bedtime prayer from the Art Scroll Siddur. ”Before going to sleep: Master of the universe, I here forgive anyone who sinned against me, my body, my property, my honor,...whether he did it in this transmigration [gilgul] or another transmigration.”
They would return to the subject, but the Dalai Lama had more questions about what he'd heard already. At the dialogue in New Jersey, the Buddhist leader had deferred any discussion about G.o.d or atheism, explaining that it was best to save such discussions over apparent disagreements until the two religions knew each other better. Now, evidently, that time had come. ”Of course,” he said, ”you know Buddhism does not accept a creator. G.o.d as an almighty or as a creator, such we do not accept. But at the same time, if G.o.d means truth or ultimate reality, then there is a point of similarity to shunyata shunyata, or emptiness.” Shunyata Shunyata is also called by the Tibetans ”dependent arising,” the interrelatedness and interdependence of all things and beings. All phenomena that arise do so through previous conditions and relations.h.i.+ps-nothing stands independently, permanently, or absolutely. All is interrelated. Such interrelatedness implies enormous individual freedom and responsibility. Perhaps that is why the discussion on angels had interested the Dalai Lama. It showed that in Jewish thought there is also a respect for different levels of creation, or ”different levels of sentient beings.” It corrected a simplistic notion-which seemed common among even Western Buddhists-of G.o.d as an autocrat, an all-powerful commandant. is also called by the Tibetans ”dependent arising,” the interrelatedness and interdependence of all things and beings. All phenomena that arise do so through previous conditions and relations.h.i.+ps-nothing stands independently, permanently, or absolutely. All is interrelated. Such interrelatedness implies enormous individual freedom and responsibility. Perhaps that is why the discussion on angels had interested the Dalai Lama. It showed that in Jewish thought there is also a respect for different levels of creation, or ”different levels of sentient beings.” It corrected a simplistic notion-which seemed common among even Western Buddhists-of G.o.d as an autocrat, an all-powerful commandant.
Of course, many devout Jews do carry such an image of G.o.d. After all, in the prayer liturgy, G.o.d is described as a father, a king of kings, an almighty. But within the four worlds cosmology, the highest contemplations avoid such imagery. As Zalman had mentioned, the realm of nearness (atziluth) is both full of G.o.d and completely empty-because at that level there is no ”thing” for G.o.d to be. The name the kabbalists used for G.o.d in atziluth atziluth is is ain sof ain sof. This literally means no limit or infinite. Yet in some interpretations, ain sof ain sof is translated as is translated as ayin ayin-nothing. For instance, the thirteenth-century kabbalist Joseph Gikatilla writes, ”The depth of primordial being is called Boundless. It is also called ayin ayin [nothing] because of its concealment from all creatures. If one asks, 'What is it?' the answer is, ' [nothing] because of its concealment from all creatures. If one asks, 'What is it?' the answer is, 'Ayin,' that is, no one can understand anything about it.” As the Dalai Lama had carefully phrased it, there is ”a point of similarity” between the kabbalistic ain sof ain sof and the Buddhist and the Buddhist shunyata shunyata. It would be exaggerating to say they are identical. The kabbalistic approach emphasizes that G.o.d is No Thing. But it still affirms an absolute existence-even if ineffable. In the Buddhist approach, all existence is empty because none of it has inherent reality, or absolute reality in itself.
Clearly though, by presenting the kabbalistic view, Zalman had changed the Dalai Lama's perceptions of monotheism. Now he saw that G.o.d is ”the basis of all existence, not necessarily to create with a certain motivation or willingness.”
”So personally,” the Dalai Lama told Zalman, ”when you explain it this way, it gives us a much wider perspective. When it becomes wider, or more sophisticated, then naturally there are more similarities.”
I felt a tremendous excitement at this moment, a sense of a real meeting between the two religious traditions that Marc Lieberman must have had in mind for the dialogue all along. Zalman, who loves computer talk, would probably have called it a successful interface. The most obvious and fundamental difference between the two religions is zero and one, Buddhist nontheism and Jewish monotheism. But now that the angels were talking, shunyata shunyata had met had met ain sof ain sof. It was not necessary to equate the two concepts. But Rabbi Schachter and the Dalai Lama had narrowed the gap, and I felt the sparks leaping across the empty s.p.a.ce.
The very word G.o.d G.o.d had always been a stumbling block for me, but Zalman had made the concept much broader and more sophisticated, not only for the Dalai Lama, but also for me. had always been a stumbling block for me, but Zalman had made the concept much broader and more sophisticated, not only for the Dalai Lama, but also for me.
The Dalai Lama had mentioned creation and Zalman wanted to amplify. ”I would like to suggest that the notion of a creator who comes from outside, who makes something happen, is not the way kabbalah spoke about it. Kabbalah speaks about emanation. It comes out of G.o.d. There is nothing but G.o.d, so it all flows from G.o.d.” He explained that there is a new feminine insight emerging that sees cosmology in female terms. Instead of seeing creation as ”papa does and goes away, it is seen as more like mama, and child growing, and worlds begotten. Reality begotten-and arising out of. And so we speak of the womb of being, which could be seen as out of shunyata shunyata. Our theology is now very much in transformation because of the impact of feminist thought. People are saying the way you have expressed it up until now is how men think, do, and act.”
This prompted a flurry of discussion about the role of women in Buddhism, a topic that would be covered more thoroughly at the second session. For now, the Buddhist leader wanted Zalman to complete his discussion of view, path, and goal.
So Rabbi Schachter explained that the goal of the Jewish mystic ”at the highest level of all is not to come back in the world, but to achieve what is called the annihilation of the personal, to be totally drawn in to the being of G.o.d.” This goal might be achieved over several lifetimes or reincarnations. So we were back to the wheel. And the Dalai Lama hadn't forgotten the angels. He wanted to know if angels could also experience rebirth, as devas devas do. do.
Reb Zalman answered, ”Ravi Nachman of Bratzlav had a beautiful teaching. He said all of reality is like a spinning top. Sometimes that which is above becomes that which is below. That which was an angel becomes an animal, that which becomes a stone...”
The Dalai Lama interrupted with delight, ”Oh. The same.”