An Energetic, Vibrational Understanding of Judaism

It was a freezing winter night in Karlin, now part of Belarus, in the middle of the 19th Cent. Everyone in the city was home, shivering in their dark, cold apartments, as no one dared break the curfew. The Russian authorities were not known for their compassion to anyone who broke the law. However, one devout chassid, Reb Feitel, found the curfew impossible to observe. His heart was aflame with a desire to see his rebbe, Rav Aaron of Karlin, and do service to God. Clutching a book of Tehillim, Psalms, wearing only a thin overcoat, he hurried through the streets. Suddenly, a Russian police officer towered above him, blocking his path. The policemen leered at the hapless chassid, who quickly slipped the Psalms into his pocket. “Spy! Counter-revolutionary!” the policeman shouted. “You’re going to regret this nighttime excursion,” as he trussed the man’s hands and marched him off to jail at gunpoint. The jail cell, a dank pit in the cellar of the city hall, reeked with mold and grime. It was inhabited by half dozen vagabonds. Feitel was thrown inside and the door was locked from the outside. Dazed and stunned, all he could do was stand in a corner and try to make sense of his surroundings. His hands had not been tied well, and he tugged at the rope until it was slack. Now that his hands were free, he reached for the Psalms in his pocket. “It wasn’t bashert for me to see my rebbe tonight, but at least I have my Psalms,” he mused. Feitel opened to the first chapter and began to chant with tremendous fervor. The criminals around him watched, open-mouthed, as this strange man communed with his G-d. His dismal surroundings melted away, and all that remained was a Jew and his Psalms. Suddenly, the jail cell swung open, and a rough pair of hands grabbed the Psalms from him. Now Reb Feitel stood, alone and bereft. A small kernel of despair wormed its way inside his heart. But only for a moment. Suddenly he caught himself. A Jew never gives up hope. “They took me away from my rebbe, and they snatched away my Psalms,” he murmured. “Still, I am a Jew, and they can’t take that away from me!” He was suddenly suffused by a tremendous wave of joy and gratitude that he was from the Chosen People, God’s beloved. Reb Feitel, trapped in a Soviet prison with the dregs of humanity, lifted his feet, raised his arms in the air, and began to dance. As he danced, he hummed a merry niggun, “Ya da da da dada di da da.” He kicked up a storm as he twirled to the tune in his head. Once again, the door to the jail cell burst open, and the prison guard stood there, eyes bulging in shock. “Get out of here, imbecile!” he shouted. “This prison has no room for crazy people. You belong in a mental institution!” As the other prisoners watched, the guard shoved him out of jail, up the stairs, and into the freezing night. As soon as he was freed, Feitel ran through the darkened streets until he arrived at the home of his rebbe. “Nu, the rebbe said with a smile, so now you know that with simcha, joy, one can break his chains of captivity!”

Manifesting Through Love

Well, it’s been quite a year, but not in the way you think. The political situation aside, through several authors and teachers I have learned some amazing facts. I say, facts, because initially this learning has come from a book called, The Field, by Lynn McTaggart, a science writer. No please stay with me, because this is important and it relates to you. How many of you have ever heard of the Uncertainty Principle in quantum physics? The scientists Max Planck, Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg made discoveries in the early 20th Century which informed us that you can’t predict where an electron is in an atom. Einstein proved that matter and energy can be converted into each other. Another way to express Einstein’s discovery is that waves of light become particles in our physical world and particles can become energy, or waves of light. Consider the following experiment. A scientist named Robert Jahn, educated at Princeton, who also taught there, made something called an REG machine or Random Event Generator. He and his colleagues collected reams of data from many human studies concerning our ability to influence this machine. Then a French scientist named Rene Peoc’h took one of Jahn’s machines and imprinted baby chicks on it as if the machine were their mother. The machine was set to wander around a room randomly. He found that the desire of the chicks to be near their mother changed the path of the machine so that it approached them more often than randomly. This has been called the Observer Effect: that our minds and hearts have the power to change reality.

What was going on here and how does this relate to us? McTaggart’s book documents hundreds of double blind peer reviewed experiments, the gold standard in science, which taken together show two things: #1) the model of classical physics, Newtonian physics is wrong or perhaps in complete. And #2) The Uncertainty principle of the atomic world operates not just on the atomic level, but in our bodies and our physical world. There is now scientific proof that we live in a field of energy which apparently has intelligence and heart or feeling, and further, that we have the power to influence that field. In reading about this research, one can even go so far to see in it a scientific proof for the existence of God. To me, this is all amazing to know, but how does it affect us? In investigating healing techniques for my husband Hal, who has mental and physical challenges from cardiac arrest a number of years ago, I was gradually led to some contemporary scientists whose work I’ve read or whom I’ve listened to on the internet. The scientists include Bruce Lipton, author of The Biology of Belief, Joe Dispenza, author of You are the Placebo, and Gregg Braden, author of The Divine Matrix. These authors have rediscovered the principles of affecting the Field in a purposeful way, for healing and for peace. I’ve been teaching about some of these principles for years. I’ve said that Love is the spiritual currency of the Universe; that we are all One, that we are meant to live both in the physical Universe AND the spiritual universe; that God appears to every person according to their experience and belief, and that the coming age will produce a synthesis of science and spirituality. However, it was not until recently, through the work of these and other contemporary teachers, that I’ve grasped the missing pieces in my understanding.

We can find the missing pieces in Torah, if we know what we are looking for. In Deuteronomy, what I call the Love Book, because there is an emphasis on Loving God. Love is mentioned 15X in Deuteronomy and heart is mentioned 48X. It says (if) you will seek God your God and you will find God if you search with all your heart and all your soul (4:29). The same portion, Va Etchanan contains the Shema, the prayer of the Oneness of all being and also V’ahavta, begging us to love. These verses show us the key that unlocks heaven’s doors: emotion, love, feeling, and compassion. The second paragraph of the Shema in the next Torah portion clearly tells us that through love and service we can influence physical reality. Where am I going with this? The energy field is influenced through thought; we know that. What we don’t realize is that the thought has to be powered by the emotion. It is the unity of thought and emotion that produces a result. Love, gratitude, and joy supply the current which allows us to communicate with the Field; to communicate effectively with God, if you will. The current is both electrical and magnetic. Studies have shown that the brain sends out weak electrical and magnetic waves. Heart energy is 100x more powerful electrically and 5,000X more powerful magnetically than the brain’s energy. This is why love energy paired with thought is so important. King David said this too. We affirm it in the Ashrei prayer: God is near to all those who call upon God, to all who call upon God in truth. The Eternal will fulfil the desire of those who fear him; he also will hear their cry, and will save them. God preserves all those who love him…. Zechariah said: not by might nor by power but by my spirit, says the Holy One. And there’s more to understand: We’ve been taught that biology is our destiny, that genes determine our health and much more. However the science now shows that belief and expectation direct gene expression. It sounds like magic, but it has been proven to be true. This is also the Observer effect – what we expect to see is what manifests in our lives. Change our perspective, change our expectations, and supply the power of emotion and we change ourselves and change the nature of our reality.

The Kabbalistic masters of the past understood many of these principles without being able to quote the science behind them. There are kabbalistic writings from Roman times among the Essenes, a sect of Judaism which is no more, writings from the 16th Century rabbis of Safed, the circle of Rabbi Isaac Luria, and also most importantly and readily available, the 18th & 19th Century teachings of the Baal Shem Tov and the many Chasidic rebbes who taught and extended his wisdom. The Baal Shem Tov taught us to live joyously. He taught that everything is God. And he taught about the power of emotion: One Teaching: A student of The Baal Shem Tov became distraught over losing the kavanot, the secret meditations before the blowing of the shofar on RH and burst in tears. The Baal Shem said: There are many halls in the King’s palace and intricate keys open the doors, but the axe is stronger than all of these and no bolt can withstand it. Pure emotion unlocks heaven’s doors. The Chassidic masters could change the nature of reality, averting severe decrees against individuals and communities and in the case of the Baal Shem Tov, arrive at a distant location several days journey away by coach, overnight, even taking his students with him in the coach. A slightly later master, Rabbi Elimelech of Lizhenk was troubled by his ability to alter the physical universe and wrote about it a number of times in his work, Noam Elimelech. He said, God…created the Tzaddik who can nullify and annul God’s decrees. How can he annul decrees that have already been determined and decided in the higher worlds? Now you may say that the stories of the Chassidic masters cannot be proven, and yet, like God speaking to the prophets, there are too many instances of what some may call miracles to discount them all. Also, the contemporary scientists have proof that alterations in our physical reality can be accomplished by ordinary people. Think about the chicks: If chicks can change the nature of reality, one researcher said, just think what human beings can do.

Meditative states amplify our ability to remain in an elevated emotional state, in our subconscious, where change can more effectively occur. Repetition is also a way to build a new habit of being, into our lives. There are projects in place to heal people and also bring more peace and harmony into the world through group intention and elevated emotions. Negative emotions and fixed expectations limit us, and make us feel that we are victims and not creators of our reality. God has shown us the way to a true renewal – through morality, integrity, love, joy, gratitude, and an unlimited imagination. As I have taught, we have a vision of peace and harmony that we and God have dreamed of together. How will we get there? It is not the world that will change. WE will change – change our beliefs, our thoughts, and our emotions and the world will change. Rabbi Gelberman taught that LIFE means to be loving unconditionally, to be inspiring unconditionally, to be forgiving unconditionally and to be excited unconditionally; and he was a Satmar, the inheritor of the Chassidic tradition. If we are open minded and open hearted we can be God’s partners in creating a marvelous future. God as created the world this way. A new reality is already upon us and now we have the understanding to be creators in it. Isn’t life grand?

From Love and Not from Fear

This week’s Torah portion is Mishpatim, which means, ordinances, or laws. It directly follows the Ten Commandments, and consists of over 50 rules that lay out the workings of a just society. There are laws concerning murder, injury, theft, care of and destruction of property, negligence, and social justice. There are laws about the punishment fitting the crime, integrity of words and actions, and also about helping and not oppressing a strangers, widows, and orphans, those weakest in society. Finally, there are laws about the 3 agricultural pilgrimage holidays and a vision of God, seen by the Moses and over 70 elders.

Tonight I’d like to examine three incomprehensible laws. They are: “One who strikes his father or his mother shall surely be put to death. One who kidnaps a man and sells him and he was found in his possession, shall surely be put to death. One who curses his father or his mother shall surely be put to death” (Ex. 21:15-17). Of course we don’t agree with these laws, and the ancient rabbis didn’t either. They limited them severely to adult children who have the intention of causing death to their parents. But what the laws say and what they mean, I think, are two very different things. In the 10 Commandments, we are told, “Do not take the name of God, your God, in vain,” and also, “Honor your father and your mother.” Both of these commandments concern respect: respect for God and respect for parents. The Torah is informing us that respect is an important value in Judaism: that it’s good for us, good for society, and that developing respect will help us and make us happier.

In Mishpatim, the failure of an adult child to manifest any respect for parents is deemed so dangerous to society that the courts need to be involved. It is the task of the community, the Torah tells us, to make sure that people who are a danger to their parents are dealt with not by the parents alone, but by the entire community. It is interesting that the commandment concerning kidnapping is between the two directives about parents. Rabbi S. R. Hirsch says this is because the kidnapper treated the person he kidnapped and sold as a thing, not as a person (P. 290, Hirsch Chumash). Respect is a value which has changed greatly in our society. People used to respect the king, the Pope, even rabbis. Our grandparents had respect for their teachers, for the doctor, for authority figures in general. This was a patriarchal hierarchy in which there was more of a certain type of respect throughout the society.

We know that things have greatly changed. There is much less respect for individuals, but perhaps more respect for groups. Our great grandparents may have respected the teacher, but what about a person of color? What about women, or those with disabilities, or those whose sexual preferences differed with their own? Respect has shifted, I think, not diminished. Perhaps now, in our psychologically attuned time, there is more self-respect and also more willingness to treat others as people and not objects. Perhaps, as Rabbi Elimelech taught, that is one meaning of the commandment, “Do not show favoritism,” (Deut. 16:19) which distances us from God’s Panim, face. There is a growing recognition that respect must be accorded to everyone equally, not just to parents, teachers, and authority figures: that respect should be not a component of fear, but of love. The French novelist Albert Camus wrote, “Nothing is more despicable than respect based on fear.”

Perhaps the Torah stresses respect to parents because it is through our parents that we learn how to respect, and also how to love. If we formed healthy, nourishing attachments to our parents, then we can not only love, accept, and respect others, but we have also developed the capacity to love and respect the Source of life. Respect for God, and as the V’ahavta prayer urges, love for God, helps us to rise spiritually. One can be a moral person out of a conviction that doing the right thing is valuable in itself. It may however, be easier, to tackle the self and make the changes necessary for spiritual advancement, if we have developed the respect for the rightness and goodness of God’s teachings, if we can love our Divine parent.

Respect flows from the purifying force of love in our lives. When we do the inner work to purify ourselves, we can accept, love, and respect others. The Torah and the Midrash ask us to rise in the presence of the aged and also of a sage (Levit. 19: 32; Ex Rabba 31:16). This is respect based on love, and perhaps we are moving from respect based on fear to respect based on love. There is great strength in having respect for each other. Rabbi Elimelech quotes a story told by the Baal Shem Tov that you may have heard: “All the birds fly to warmer countries in the winter. A beautiful multicolored bird appeared atop a very high tree in a certain country. The king commanded his servants to bring him the bird. They climbed on top of each other’s shoulders, forming a tall ladder. After a while the ones below decided they were no longer necessary and left. This caused the man at the top to tumble and fall to the ground. He was injured and failed to capture the bird.” The Baal Shem Tov continued: “We must always be attached and connected with each other with love.” May we have the wisdom to accord our respect not only to those who exhibit the highest human values, but also to respect our Divinity within, that we may recognize and respect that divinity of each person and be guided toward greater respect for God and each other.