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April 30, 2004
Balancing mind and heart
Reb Zalman joins world-renowned spiritual leaders at the Chan.
LORNE MALLIN SPECIAL TO THE JEWISH BULLETIN
One of the world's foremost Jewish spiritual teachers engaged his
good friend, the Dalai Lama, and other luminaries in a spirited
interfaith forum April 20 at the University of British Columbia's
Chan Centre. Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi joined the exiled Tibetan
spiritual leader, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Iranian human rights
activist and lawyer Shirin Ebadi and UBC aboriginal educator Dr.
Jo-ann Archibald of the Sto:lo Nation in a roundtable dialogue on
Balancing Educating the Mind with Educating the Heart.
The group's consensus was that the world has succeeded in educating
the mind but suffers a severe deficit in addressing ethical, spiritual
and emotional needs. Reb Zalman (as he is known) of Boulder, Colo.,
spoke about a lack of vocabulary for the heart, intuition and the
higher realms.
During Reb Zalman's first visit with the Dalai Lama in his home
of exile in Dharamsala in northern India in 1990, they engaged animatedly
and communicated intuitively about beings on the angelic level.
On April 17 and 18, both men spoke at a multifaith meditation retreat
in Vancouver. The April 20 discussion capped the Dalai Lama's five-day
visit to Vancouver before he moved on to Ottawa and Toronto.
"For technology, we have good language; we reason, we have
good language," Reb Zalman, a founder of the Jewish Renewal
movement who has been instrumental in promoting inter-religious
dialogue, told the audience of 1,100 at the Chan Centre. "When
it comes to feeling, we have a very small vocabulary. The poets
have given us a larger vocabulary, but in the world we haven't developed
a vocabulary of the heart. Whenever there is consciousness that
doesn't have vocabulary, it seems to shrink away into avidya,
[a Hindu term for] not knowing.
"What is also necessary when we speak of faith, the higher
levels, we need language for intuition. And our intuition is mute.
At this point, we don't have any words for intuition. When I go
to medicine people, shamans and so on and so forth, and you ask
them the question, 'Tell me, how do you know?' How could they say
how they know? They were there, they experienced, they knew. So
it [is] also with people who say 'I've been born again.' I think
our problem for education is to create more language for heart and
more language for soul."
The Dalai Lama said that education alone sometimes creates more
problems. "Human knowledge without a proper balance of a good
heart, a warm heart, brings more unhappiness for fellow human beings
and also other sentient beings and the planet itself." He said
that intelligent, imaginative individuals may generate unrealistic
expectations for themselves. "So the result [for] the person
himself, herself, [is] much unrest mentally. Therefore, education
or knowledge or awareness alone is neither good for oneself nor
for others."
Tutu recalled visiting a Second World War concentration camp outside
Nuremberg, Germany, where a museum's artifacts included photographs
taken by Nazi researchers of prisoners undergoing brutal and often
fatal experiments.
"They were carrying out experiments on human beings partly
to discover what depths a human being could tolerate and what altitudes,"
said Tutu. "And they had the pictures of these people with
their distorted faces. Now they were very, very clever. I mean all
those doctors were very, very smart doctors. You have to be smart
to pass a medical exam. And yet you wondered about the heart of
a person who could subject a fellow human being to the kind of experience
that was reflected in those pictures of the experiments."
Archibald, as part of her presentation, invited the audience to
hold up their left palm and hold the hand of the person on their
left and to hold their right hand palm down in holding the hand
of the person on the right to pass on blessings. Ebadi reflected
on how that struck her in considering the commonalities at the roots
of all creeds and religions.
"When Dr. Archibald spoke of extending the hands and taking
blessings from one and giving it to the other, I recalled the whirling
dervishes," said Ebadi. "In the whirling dances, the dervish
holds the left hand to the sky to receive blessings and the right
hand to the earth to give it back to the earth."
Reb Zalman, who comes from a Chassidic lineage of mystics, charmed
the audience with his gentle humor. Dressed in a long robe and a
round fur hat called a streimel, he joked that "I look
like someone from Fiddler on the Roof." Then he sang,
"To life, to life, l'chaim!" When 17-year-old student
Alexandra Chan came to the stage to ask him a question, he went
head to head with her in a "mind meld" from Star Trek
and remarked that half the answer was in the question. But he also
held the audience's rapt attention when he spoke of how "the
problems we face at this time don't seem to yield to the solutions
of traditions and lineages."
He said religions historically have seen themselves as sharply separate
from others.
"Often when they made universalistic statements, they made
them in subtle and not so subtle ways, in ways that people now call
inclusivistic, that is to say, if you come under our umbrella as
a lesser adjunct, as a minor satellite, we will legitimate you.
Still, the attitude is basically triumphalistic. When the Mashiach
comes, when Christ appears, when the Mahdi comes back, when the
Avatar shows up, when Maitreya comes, we will be proven right and
you will end up on a lesser plane than we. Then came Auschwitz,
Hiroshima, Nagasaki, the moon walk, the Internet, and now we can
no longer afford any reality map that doesn't base itself on organismic
life, a view that sees us as part of this living gaia, this living
planet."
Reb Zalman said he sees shifts in consciousness. "More and
more we have deep-thinking eco-theologians who come to the conclusion
that each religion is a vital organ of the planet and that we, for
the planet's sake, need each one of us, in order to stay alive,
to become devout in the most healthy way we can manage. Hence, for
all my universalism, I need to be the healthiest Jew I can be and
urge my co-religionists to become the best and healthiest Jews they
can be in order to contribute to the healing of the planet."
He said that present times require more than can be attained by
individual minds. "The only way to get it together is together.
I plead for research that would discover what it takes to enable
us to operate in webs of consciousness, in mind networks. At least,
for a small group of prepared minds to seek to merge dreams and
behold visions. These people would serve as our 'psychonauts' and
contact minds of much higher regions. We are quite underdeveloped
in this area."
Reb Zalman began and ended his address with inspiring blessings,
remarking that "we need to relearn the technology of blessings."
He drew a response from Ebadi.
"When the rabbi spoke of all of us doing the work of God,"
she said, "I recalled a verse from the holy Koran, 'We come
from God and in the end we return to God.' Between Islam and Judaism
there are many commonalities. The important thing is to find those
points of commonality, rely on those and leave aside those things
that separate us. And this is the path to human salvation."
An audience member, Evelyn Neaman, was struck by Reb Zalman's presence.
"Reb Zalman's responses throughout the afternoon clearly demonstrated
his appreciation for and sincere respect for all sacred traditions,"
said Neaman, special programs manager of the Law Courts Education
Society of British Columbia and operator of the Tikkun Yoga Centre.
"I was inspired by his urge to all of us to reframe our questions
if we want to find solutions to the difficulty of balancing the
individual and social agendas of our times. I loved his invitation
to rediscover a place for blessings in our daily lives."
When Reb Zalman was part of the group of rabbis and Jewish scholars
visiting the Dalai Lama in 1990, he suggested holding family seders
as a way for the Tibetan people to keep alive the story of their
people in exile. At a press conference after the April 20 dialogue,
Reb Zalman said that the Dalai Lama has attended a number of Passover
seders, and that "Next year in Jerusalem" has been echoed
with "Next year in Lhasa."
Lorne Mallin is an editor in the entertainment section
of the Province.
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