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!” There are so many stories about the Chassidic masters performing miracles. How did they do it? What did they know that we don't know? To answer that question, and have a deepened insight about our own time and our own lives, it is useful to develop an understanding of the energetic or vibrational basis of Judaism. The teachings of Judaism: how we see them and how we practice them, have both stayed the same and changed over time. The laws of just societies: not killing or stealing, are just the minimum our Torah asks of us. But the original Judaism goes so much farther: Love your neighbor as yourself, don't lie, take care of others in your society by giving charity, develop a just court system, don't hate, or take revenge, or bear a grudge; Don't cheat, gossip, or be mean to others. The original Torah teachings urge us to be good to one another because it is the right thing to do, and because in Bechukotai, in Leviticus. we're told we will experience what we send out to others. This was the beginning of an energetic understanding of life. What you do will be done to you. Or What you send out you will receive. But the people of the time when the Torah was given were at the level only being able to understand the principle of crime and punishment. They responded to: do this and you will be blessed; do the opposite and you will suffer. One energetic change came when the Book of Deuteronomy was discovered, during the reign of King Josiah in Jerusalem during the 7th Century, BCE. I call Deuteronomy the "Love Book" because love plays such a central role in this last book of Torah. From Deuteronomy we get our Shema, V'Ahavta, which commands us to love God with all our heart, soul, and might, and so many statements about how much God loves us. These teachings were repeated and emphasized by Jesus and then by Paul, a Jew, who began as Saul, and who developed Christianity as a separate religion. However the theme of crime and punishment in Judaism lasted through the end of the Prophetic period, almost up to the turn of the Millenium, when prophets urged us to obey or else! There were teachings in Torah that showed that, really, all the power was in our hands, but the people of those times weren't quite ready to accept what my teacher, Rabbi Joseph Gelberman called, the God within. To the original Jews, God was outside of them, acting upon them. Our physical world encourages that kind of thinking. But in 70 CE, after the destruction of the 2nd Temple, the Jews of Roman times were confronted with a serious spiritual dilemma. They had been connecting to God mostly through sacrifice and only secondarily through prayer, but in 70 CE, sacrifice ended with the great destruction of the Temple, Jerusalem, the end of the Priestly class, and with the eventual exile of most Jews when the Roman rule of Judea obliterated the Jewish nation. The rabbis of that time tried to connect to God another way, through early Kabbalah: seeking to be lifted to the realm of ecstatic union with the Divine through meditative visualization. Thus Kabbalah, which means, receiving, began to take hold, at a time when the belief in crime and punishment was still the dominant understanding. It was called Merkavah Kabbalah, according to the scholar Gershon Sholom, in his landmark work, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism. Merkavah or Chariot Kabbalah was an attempt to receive the grand, uplifting visions that the Prophet Ezekiel received half a century before. Kabbalah developed from late Roman times through the Middle Ages, but it was not until the 18th Century that a major energetic change: a breakthrough came. The Baal Shem Tov, who founded the Chassidic movement, changed the energy of Judaism. What he taught was so revolutionary and so very simple that he was completely rejected by the Jewish establishment. He taught that joy: singing, dancing, enjoyment, and happiness, create a miraculous life. He had, not only many disciples, students, and colleagues, but whole towns participating in this joyous way of living. It was a huge change in energy from the past, and yes, it created what we call miracles. His students and their students, and their students created a network of miracle workers, mostly in Eastern Europe, who led whole towns to create better lives for themselves. The rebbes were healers who could see into the future and prevent catastrophic things from happening to the Jewish community. I've spoken many times before about Rabbi Elimelech of Lizhensk, who taught about a pipeline of blessings. The Chassidic masters used the image that God's blessings are always flowing, but that the so-called pipeline can be blocked by us, so that we don't receive all the blessings that are constantly being sent to us. On an energetic basis, there are two ways to look at the energy: to describe the quality of the energy and the speed of the energy. Which energy feels better, Joy or Anger? Which energy is moving faster, happiness or hopelessness? When we are singing and dancing, we can reach a quality and speed of energy which opens the proverbial pipeline of blessings, allowing us to receive the blessings we wish to have. We can't always be full of that kind of elation, but we can practice better feelings and faster energy. We can strive to feel uplifted and light-hearted. We know that events are moving very quickly in our world. Energy is moving faster and faster. The energy of pure Divine love, pure divine joy, and pure divine goodness is moving even faster than physical events in our reality: very, very fast. And we have to be at the level of the gifts to receive them. We operate at a much lower energetic level than we could. On Yom Kippur I'll speak more about the "how to" aspects of energy and why creating joy changes one's physical reality. Until then, I encourage you think about your emotional set point. Are you mostly a happy person? If so, that's great. Keep it up and do it purposefully. If not or if you are more balanced between happiness and unhappiness, can you talk to yourself when you are unhappy and find ways to think about yourself and others that are more loving and accepting? Can you create a happier life just by your thoughts, no matter what the physical circumstances are? That's what the chassid in the jail did, and it worked! Maybe it can work for you too.