EVENT HORIZONS
For many years, Reb Zalman sat with all of you on Sunday morning before the semicha ceremony. We, the AOP va’ad and faculty, sat quietly in the back of the room to hear what he shared about being klei kodesh in our paradigm shifting world. In particular, he emphasized that Jewish Renewal needs to be a part of the Jewish people, by which he meant that we needed to do our best to stay recognizable to the more traditionally frum Jewish world, what he and we call backwards compatibility. In addition to being Reb Zalman’s editor and collator (a job I started in Philadelphia in 1976-77 and am still doing now), it fell to me to apply Reb Zalman’s transcending principles to the specific details of our spiritual lives. Back when Reb Hanna and I (with our two young sons) lived with Reb Zalman, he would give me some time during a local gig to share something about the mysticism of everyday life. Now, much later, I still am focused on this area, which we call Integral Halacha.
Like many of you reading this, I’ve puzzled over why, even though people know there is a climate emergency, they don’t change their behaviours. There is an increasing literature of speculation and studies which attempts to understand this phenomenon.* Even as I write these words in late January 2021, the cancelling of the XL pipeline by the Biden administration is being reported in Canada mostly in terms of the pushback from Alberta and its fossil fuel industry, misleadingly called the “energy sector,” thereby excluding renewable sources from that sector.
The halachic process, which I have come to deeply appreciate, is the way in which we Jews have worked on this very question for centuries. A question about whether to do or not do a particular action, or to do it this way or another, is really a question of how will my decision in this particular detail of my life be connected to our acceptance of a mission to be a kingdom of priests and a holy people, working to reframe all of life as conscious of divine sovereignty, and bring into being a perfected world, which we call the messianic age. We have been working all this time on helping each of us place the decisions of daily life in the context of our ongoing mission to manifest the presence of the Divine in this world in a way visible to all.
In a talk Reb Zalman gave in November of 2008, he said:
There is something that’s called an event horizon. That’s a word that they use in cosmology, but I believe it’s also about human beings. My event horizon was a large one. Years ago I felt I was about 30 years ahead of the pack. That is to say, when people were thinking one thing, I was thinking what would be the growing edge with things that would be ahead of the rest of the time.
Today when people ask me what do you expect about the future, my event horizon is smaller. I still have a little mileage left, but it’s not to be able to see around the corner of time as I at one time was able to see with much greater clarity.
I tell you a story about event horizons. There was a man who came to his rabbi asked him for advice about a business venture. The rabbi said, “Go ahead, you will succeed.” On the way home he stopped at the house of the rabbi's disciple and he asked him about his business, and the rabbi’s disciple said, “You’ll lose your shirt.” So now he said, “To whom should I listen? Should I listen to a great rabbi or should I listen to his disciple?” He listened to the rabbi and in the end he lost his shirt. So he comes back to the disciple and says, “Could you explain this to me?” The disciple said, “Yes. My master only could see till the end of his life and by the end of his life you had done very well, but he couldn't see beyond. I could see beyond and I knew you would lose your shirt.” I think that's the issue of the event horizon. I can't say that people in the December years have a large event horizon, to be able to see farther.
(Talk to Interface, Boulder, CO; November 19, 2008)
If this was true for Reb Zalman, how much the more is it also true for me. One thing that I know about this moment and this pandemic is that it is something that doesn’t surprise me, that it is something I think was predictable even if not in this particular form, and that we have been on a road to this crisis for decades. Epidemiologists have been predicting a pandemic for many years and it is the “normal” to which so many want to return which is itself unsustainable and the root cause of the climate emergency. Too few of us consume and/or amass too much. Too many of us live on the edge of a totally preventable poverty. Hoarding and fear pit us against each other when we most need to work together. The list goes on and you all can add more to it.
The other thing I know about this moment is that I don’t know how it will resolve itself. Will we refuse to wake up and work together so that we can both slow climate change and live through it? Will we fail to limit and tax excessive wealth? Or will we wake up, put our shared needs first, reduce our carbon footprints, learn a new way to measure life’s meaningfulness?
In terms of our movement for the spiritual renewal of Judaism, this is also a transition moment whose outcome we cannot yet predict. Once, not too long ago, we were a small group of like-minded people who loved and fought with each other as part of a family. Some of us were more prayerful, others more political, but we all were working to re-create a wholisitic spirituality in which prayer and socio-political action, in which loyalty to the Jewish people and universalism, complemented each other. Reb Zalman’s passing symbolizes this moment of transition and succession, but doesn’t encompass it. We have also begun to lose the pioneers of this movement as those of us still living continue to age. And because you, the students of the AOP, are not all the same age, you too have lost friends, colleagues, and people with whom you would have partnered in this next phase. We are entrusting this movement to all of you, to all those who have received semicha over the past 20 years as well as the many others who are supporters and participants.
One thing I ask of you is to continue to learn what the core values of our movement are. I ask you not to copy practices the way we did them nor to comb through Reb Zalman’s huge output seeking the answer to every question you have. Rather, I ask you to internalize the principles which guided R. Zalman and the rest of us, to aspire to a state of true spiritual enlightenment, and from that aspiration rise to the challenges you are facing now, in this pandemic reality and the world which will emerge from it. On the simplest level, become acquainted with the expanding ALEPH ReSources Catalogue, with written and sound files of Reb Zalman as well as translations of Hassidic texts and the work of the Integral Halachah Institute.
In 1998, Reb Zalman gave a series of classes on Deep Ecumenism at Elat Chayyim. These are available both on the AOP Moodle and from ALEPH Canada. During one of the classes, he spole about becoming a Gaian Tzaddik. He was clear that he didn’t consider himself as having become a Gaian Tzaddik, rather becoming a Gaian Tzaddik was his aspiration. I share that aspiration with him and hope that you will listen to these classes and take on that aspiration yourselves. For me, it now means contributing to my local (and not Jewish) community from the standpoint of a practitioner of the Jewish spiritual path in addition to continuing some teaching and writing.
----
*Two examples are: Don’t Even Think About It by George Marshall and Defiant Earth by Clive Hamilton.