Brokenness AND Repair

    “The physical world in which we live … is only part of an inconceivably vast system of worlds. Most of these worlds are spiritual in their essence … they exist in different dimensions of being.” Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz, “The Thirteen Petalled Rose”

    “The old temple of Western religion is burning … We are seeking a new temple, one that links our inherited traditions with our forgotten ancestors.” Jill Hammer, “The Hebrew Priestess.”

    “The October 7th slaughter of her fellow Jews, and the Israeli invasion of Gaza, deeply shook Jill Hammer and her wife Shoshana, whose father survived Auschwitz and fought in Israel’s war of independence. Hammer looked drawn and exhausted when we spoke a few days after the massacre. I asked if there was anything in her belief system that would allow her to digest what had happened. 
    ‘In the Kabbalah, the world is a broken place,’ she said almost forlornly. ‘And the whole idea of tikkun, repair, which is at the heart of Kabbalah, assumes that our world is broken. And it makes the mystical assumption that the small acts of repair that we do are a way of slowly piecing back together that broken world. I don’t think that’s a bad way to look at the human condition.’ 
    As we spoke, thousands of human beings were being killed each day by other human beings. Divine intervention was not the answer, Hammer explained sadly. The onus, she said, was on us. ‘The Kabbalah assumes that there isn’t some deity looking at this from some perfect realm, but that the transcendent is itself implicated in all of this brokenness and also cannot escape it. And for me, that’s a much more appealing theology than there’s some God in some perfect space who could fix all this if only God would bother.’ 
    I could see a change in her face as she tried to compartmentalize her human pain and reconnect with her spiritual self. ‘As long as we live in bodies, there is the potential that we will fight over things, that we will hurt each other.’ The Kabbalah taught this was the inevitable result of imbalance between gevuruth, strength, and chesed, loving-kindness, in the world. Strength without compassion, she explained, was the root of evil. ‘It’s like a cancerous growth that comes out of gevuruth. Then you get acts of ego and cruelty and separation.’ 
    But it was on the idea of Jews as the ‘chosen people’ that she parted with her beloved Kabbalah. ‘I certainly feel the Jewish people have a unique history and perhaps destiny, but the Kabbalah’s argument that Jews are engaged in this work of tikkun and other people are at best neutral and at worst agents of brokenness, that’s not a thing I would want to adopt.’ That view just fueled narcissism and the quest for strength without compassion. Peace might be out of reach, but restoration of balance – which would be the first step – was at the center of her prayers. ‘I understand that there are things that may not move in response to my prayer, but maybe there are some things that can.’” 
    Lawrence Pintak “Lessons from the Mountaintop. Ten Modern Mystics and Their Extraordinary Lives.” Sentient Publications, 2025.

    Perspective, as in most things, is all-important when the concept of "chosen people" comes up. Non-Jews, might immediately feel excluded, inferior, second class etc. However, ALL the other theistic religions ALSO dogmatically state that their specific religion is the ONLY way to heaven - they may not call themselves "chosen people" but religious exclusivism, no matter how thickly sugar-coated, excludes anyone outside the club just the same.
    Narcissism still rages like a wildfire in politics, but mercifully, it's causing rigid, ossified, religious dogmas - like religious exclusivism - to crumble.

“We live in a moment of disruption, death, and rebirth.  
What’s dying is an old civilization and mindset of ‘me.’  
What is being born is less clear but in no way less significant… It’s a future that requires us to tap into a deeper level  
of our humanity, of who we really are,  
and who we want to be as a society.  
It’s a shift that requires us to expand our thinking  
from the head to the heart.  
It is a shift from an ego-system awareness  
that cares about the well-being of me  
to an eco-system awareness  
that cares about the well-being of all,  
including myself.” 
Otto Scharmer


“God dwells within you, 
as you.”
Muktananda

"The answer my friend, is blowing in the wind ..."

 

Fear to Love

    Krishnamurti said, "It is no measure of health to be well-adjusted to a profoundly sick society." It is indeed sad, stressful, disgusting and terrifying that a 'crime boss' is ruling, at his whim, over the most powerful military & financial gang in the world. Many around the world must surely be amazed at the psycho-social-spiritual level of a nation that would not once, but twice elect such a leader.

    “Worryin' is just prayin' backwards."    David Chethlehe Paladin

    Fortunately, a proportion of us also intuitively understand that there is ultimately only one real force or form of energy, and that is love. Like darkness is the lack of light, fear is the lack of love.
    There is an old Jewish legend that every generation has 36 saints (lamedvavnikim) on whose piety the fate of the world depends. By now, our world must surely have millions of awakening evolved human beings!

    So when we witness consistently irrational, heartless, uncivilized behavior, it is best for us & everyone else to consider, 'What if this perpetrator were my only child? How would I want them to be treated?' Not beaten or murdered. We'd certainly want them to be arrested & securely restrained, and ideally, if at all possible, rehabilitated to become as functional as possible, & if possible, safely re-introduced into a decent, law-abiding society.

“If this world is to be healed through human efforts,

I am convinced it will be by ordinary people

whose love for life is even greater than their fear.”

Joanna Macy

 

    Poetry, along with other arts, has the wonderful potential to connect us with our heart, right-hemisphere, body, the now, others, Nature and the Divine.

 

When she was a garden spider
Terry Ofner

and she hovered improbably above the patio
on that autumn morning, she caught me
with a filament across the brow.

Now, here comes the longest night.
People gather around solstice fires
as sparks drift into whatever comes next.

Angels, too, must have a ritual for this,
the moment of perfect imbalance
when the dark is collected in one place.

They must lean into it, their weightlessness
floating us through gravity’s fingers.
For me, I need a face. One I can recognize.

Take this photograph of my aunt Claudia
who died in childbirth years before I was born.
How do you know what’s no longer there?

Or take the field mouse that nibbled on a seed
under the feeder that late November evening.
A blink of owl-white and it was gone.

What we don’t know comes out of nowhere,
takes us up to the other side of doubt.
She’s gone, but traces of her remain.

A dun-shaded egg sac tucked in a corner
out of sight, full of now and hereafter.
Or light. Or wings.

Or that which floats or falls
when let go into our cousin night.


Winner of the Thomas Merton Grand Prize in the annual Poetry of the Sacred Contest www.centerforinterfaithrelations.org published by Parabola, Winter 2024-2025 www.parabola.org

Each individual's Loving Zest for Life is the Real Power

Freedom to Choose One's State of Being

     “A human being is not one thing among others; things determine each other, but man is ultimately self-determining. What he becomes – within the limits of endowment and environment – he has made out of himself. In the concentration camps, for example, in this living laboratory and on this testing ground, we watched and witnessed some of our comrades behave like swine while others behaved like saints. Man has both potentialities within himself; which one is actualized depends on decisions but not on conditions.”
     Viktor E. Frankl. “Man’s Search for Meaning. An Introduction to Logotherapy.” ed 3, Simon & Schuster, 1984.

     "Moral transgression," above and beyond all other dangers & hardships, is considered by another psychiatrist to be the most important cause of combat PTSD.
       Jonathan Shay. “Achilles in Vietnam. Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character.” Scribner, 1994.