an edited excerpt from the CD set:
The True and the Real

I want to offer a few remarks concerning how to approach texts like the Tanya from the point of view of renewal. Or, to put it another way: how to learn Tanya from the point of view of a different paradigm than the one in which the Tanya was written. Whenever I teach Tanya, I always encounter the same reservations, especially in regard to what is written about the souls of non-Jews. I will certainly readily confess that I have felt that myself many times. There was a certain period when I didn’t really want to even look at the Tanya and I’m sorry to say I found it to be distasteful to the point where it wasn’t possible for me to receive the incredibly wonderful things that are in the Tanya.

The Tanya from our point of view is problematic in certain ways—as are, I believe, virtually all Jewish texts that come from earlier paradigms, from earlier periods in history. Now I want to add as a quick footnote that in one way or another, the same thing could be said about the religious and spiritual literature of other traditions as well. Judaism may have a unique form of “neurosis” resulting from the experience of Jews historically. What comes across in Jewish sacred literature is more or less consistent with the experience of the people who wrote it, given the contexts in which they wrote, and the conditions and the way the Real looked to them at that time. But this is a basic problem with all spiritual literature that a conscious person at this point in time has to recognize. When you think of the Real itself, the Real has a history. I believe that there is an evolutionary process in the course of that history. It doesn’t mean that everything is completely getting fixed or perfected, but it does mean that very gradually there is some kind of ascending consciousness.

We can distinguish a sequence of developments that is evidenced not only in terms of the nature of the spiritual text, but also in the nature of the social structure, the relationships that people have, the economic conditions that existed in certain periods, the climactic conditions—all of these factors. We should think, in other words, very integrally. We shouldn’t think that a spiritual text just exists in some vacuum. It’s a product of an entire complex of causes and influences, not all of which are even known to us. Generally, if it’s a good text, it reflects what appeared to be true to people who were living under those conditions. This is true in the case of Judaism, although as I said earlier, if you would look at virtually any other spiritual tradition you would also find things that would be repugnant to a developed person in our time and place.

I can remember the time when I wasn’t able to open the Tanya yet, but had a very idealistic view of Buddhism. I used to think: “The Buddhists have it all together. They don’t say any mean things about other people or other traditions.” One time I was studying a very beautiful Lam Rim text, and I got to a place where it says “except for the barbarians who live on the border of Tibet.” Everybody else is ok, they have Buddha-nature, but these barbarians can’t get it. Or, in the history of Zen Buddhism itself, especially in the way it’s taught and still understood by some Zen roshis today in Japan, you can find some very extremely biased and bigoted views concerning people who are not native Japanese. I was reading recently the story of a black American who went and sat for a pretty long time in a very strong Zen temple in Japan and finally was asked by the roshi to leave because, he said, “Frankly you can’t get enlightened. If you’re not Japanese you can’t get enlightened.”
Now I’m not saying that is the essence of what Zen is. What I’m saying is that if you look historically at virtually any tradition, you will find that in the old paradigms there is often the tendency to be ethnocentric or triumphalist to some degree and that certainly applies in the case of Judaism. The Jews have gone through their history and have tended to define themselves as Other in situations where they were not the dominant culture and you will find evidence of ethnocentric Judaism in all the oldest levels and layers of Jewish literature.

Now my personal approach to Judaism and everything else is from the point of view of what seems to be the most evolved perspective that is available to me today to the extent that I have access to it. If I have the merit to gain access to a higher perspective I hope that I will have the flexibility to open myself to it. But it seems to me that from the perspective in which I presently exist, we need to repudiate most Judeocentric and triumphalist elements.

Triumphalism and ethnocenticity may have been necessary factors in earlier periods. I’m not judging the past, but I do feel that in our time, if we don’t transcend these limiting concepts, the world may not survive. So I think that at this point, all the spiritual traditions basically need to cooperate with each other and to find ways of overcoming this tendency that they all have.

Ultimately, the reason Jews are in the world, in my opinion, is for one reason alone. The basic reason that we are here is because the Ribbono Shel Olam (Source of the Universe) wants us to be here and as long as that is the case, we will be here. There is no force in the world that can stand up against the divine will. As long as that divine will is willing Jews to be part of the Real, they’ll be part of the Real. I don’t think that their survival or their existence depends on any particular cultural or social model. It may be in the past that they way the Ribbono Shel Olam’s will was expressed required a toughening or strengthening of in response to oppression that Jews did indeed suffer, but I believe that there is no limit to the capacity of the divine will and the Ribbono Shel Olam could also keep the Jews in existence under other paradigms and other models.

I prefer to put my trust in the One that everything is constantly and ultimately only depending on. At the same time, it seems to me that the One is now showing us in so many ways through the eyes of so many people and so many traditions that we’re now in a critical state. The ecosystem that supports human life on earth itself is in jeopardy. We’re also in an an information age which represents a model of existence that is unprecedented. There was never in the past the opportunity to know very much about most of the world, whereas now it’s very hard not to know at least a little about every part of the world.
And this is not to say that every single person in our age has evolved to this level. Rather, it seems that at the cutting edge of our time, Spirit or consciousness, the “True,” is making itself transparent in its newest form, so that it’s becoming possible for more of us to see the absolute interconnectedness between all people and all things. At the same time, that doesn’t in any way diminish the importance of particular peoples, particular paths, and particular traditions. I think it is very essential for us as Jews to be here. The question is, “what do we Jews need to be like in this particular age in order to bring the new revelation into the world?”

Although the language we have been using is contemporary discourse, what we have been saying reflects the deep teachings of Hasidism. One of the reasons that I love Reb Nachman is that he has a model of evolving Spirit that suggests that the amount of Torah that has been brought into the world to this point is really very limited. It’s not only that there’s more Torah to bring, but it’s really incumbent on us to bring more light into the world and the more light we bring—that is revealing more of the hidden Torah. There is new Torah coming through, and it’s coming through on a level that’s teaching us or telling us that we have to develop a new kind of confident Judaism, where you can be proud to be Jewish without needing to put somebody else down or have your sense of feeling good about being Jewish depend on having to be the best or always be right.

Like others, I’ve gone through similar periods where I was leaning much more toward the haredi model. I lived in Boro Park, and lived in frum areas and there was a time in my life where I really thought adhering strictly to Orthodoxy was right. I wasn’t doing it just to try it out. But what’s changed for me, is that at a certain point I evolved into this forward looking backward compatibility mode that Reb Zalman likes to talk about. I realized the need to be backward compatible. I have to be plugged into the previous programs. I don’t want to be disconnected. I don’t want to be rootless, but I want to be forward looking. I want to be backward compatible, but not backward looking.

I’m not trying to be like a hasid in the eighteenth century. I’m not trying to be like the Ari and his hevra in Safed in the sixteenth century but I’m trying to be an outgrowth of them. I’m trying to be part of an evolution of them, I’m trying to be something that comes from them, that’s definitely connected to them, comes from them, but has brought them up to the present and is trying to find a way to bring them into the future. And that means taking into consideration the changing nature of the Real. The True doesn’t change, but the Real is constantly changing. To be able to distinguish what’s True from what’s Real is a very, very deep thing. So, backwards compatibility is essential.

My answer to why we should learn texts like the Tanya would be something like this:
I feel a certain obligation to the Jews of the past, to the previous generations. I think that I owe them something. That came to me one time when I was first awakening and I had a powerful, but painful vision.

During that awakening process, I started to feel an existential guilt. I think many people experience something like this. We speak about survivor’s guilt. In a way, whether you had family who, God forbid, suffered in the Holocaust, suffered losses in some other place because of anti-Semitism, or not; whether you had that in your family experience or not, we’re all survivors of the Jewish past. During the period when I had this vision, I saw what was available around me. There were all these great lamas and gurus and sheiks and wonderful spiritual teachers and they seemed to be reaching a very high level, pointing to a cutting edge in consciousness and saying all kinds of things that seemed incredibly true to me. I would look at the Jewish resources I had access to then and they weren’t shining quite with the same light. I felt really sad in my heart and had the thought, “what a tragedy if Judaism isn’t represented at the highest levels.” That would be a shande for our ancestors because in their day, they did the best they could. They were cutting edge in their time. They taught at the point that was as high as you could see if you were living then. If you were where Shneur Zalman was in the eighteenth century, he would have been the brightest light that you could find. That was as bright as truth could shine under those conditions.

So we shouldn’t really hold it against him, when we see certain things in the text that we may not be completely comfortable with. We may not resonate with everything that’s in an earlier paradigm text, like Tanya. We have to understand that we’re in a different place and time and can’t hold the past up to the standard of the present. But if we understood with sympathy and respect the conditions under which the authors of these texts lived, we would probably see that they were highly enlightened for their time. And that’s also part of the paradox: because the True is always true, but the Real is always changing.

We should keep in mind that even the greatest tzaddikim on the highest level cannot be perfect because they are still going to be limited by the nature of the reality of the particular time in which they live. They might be a bit ahead of their time. That may be one thing that makes them stand out. They might have a little bit stronger prophetic insight but they still will be subject to some extent to the limitations of their time.

I remember studying the works of some great Christian saints who wrote very, very wonderful things about purely spiritual matters. But, during the Crusades, the same people who had such a sublime recognition of the True were still capable of saying terrible things about Muslims. I used to look at that and say, “That doesn’t compute. How could that be? How could one be a realized being and say these wonderful things, and know all these things about the True but be incapable of recognizing that some other people from some other tradition are also human beings?” But that’s part of the evolution of consciousness.

What is almost obvious now was not obvious to them. It was not obvious five hundred or a thousand years ago. It wasn’t even thinkable except by very, very, rare people. The Real was not constructed that way at that time. People didn’t know much about other people. There was indeed intense persecution in those days and from that point of view it made sense for a lot of the Jewish authors to write in a disparaging way about other traditions. They didn’t have sufficient evidence or experience to contradict such conventional attitudes.

Once I began to understand those things, I also recognized that there is just such incredible wealth in these texts that we need the backward compatibility part. We cannot afford to disconnect ourselves from these things and I think it works both ways. We need them and they need us. In our tradition, we consider it necessary to elevate the souls of the past— if you have a death in the family, you have eleven months to give a little extra boost to that neshamah. We want our learning to be an illui neshamah for the mechaber (author) of the text who is waiting for us to raise his consciousness. Look what he did in his time. And if we’re not going to help him out, how is he going to get any higher? He’s not here in the Real anymore. Only the people in this world can elevate a neshamah that is no longer in a living body. So I think we owe it to Shneur Zalman, and to all the great tzaddikim and rebbes of the past, who in their time did what was possible to do and did amazing, wonderful things within their paradigm. But they now need us.

And we need them. We need to receive from them what is True and separate it from what was only Real for them but isn’t Real for us. We can’t afford to separate ourselves from what they have to give us of the True, they’re handing us insight into the True. But they need us as well because we have to elevate their neshamas. In the Midrash, there is a story in which God takes Moses to witness the rabbis learning Torah. At first, Moses was agitated, because he didn’t recognize the Torah in the rabbis’ discourse. But when he [Moses] heard Rabbi Akiva say that what he was expounding is a halachah le-Moshe mi-Sinai, something that was taught to Moses on Sinai, Moshe Rabbenu was satisfied, because he saw that there was backward compatibility. He wasn’t being forgotten, he was being raised up to the level of the Torah that was coming through Rabbi Akiva. So we need them and they need us.

If we can look at it from that point of view, it means that when you learn Tanya you know you are going to find some things that are from an old paradigm. Of course, if you go to Chabad they’re not going to tell you that. They’re still in that paradigm, but if you learn with us, this is not the way we learn. We learn from the point of view of a new paradigm with backward compatibility that enables us to respect this earlier paradigm for what it has to offer us. We want to look at it very carefully and deeply to see if we can receive the truth that is in it. But we’re going to probably have to make some adjustments concerning some points. We’ll have to modify. We’re not obligated to accept every single word as true. Some of it was only a reflection of what was Real, or what the author believed was Real given the parameters of his time and place.

From the bottom of my heart, this is what I honestly believe. This is what I’ve come to in my life. Everybody has to decide for herself, but this is certainly where I am and I think it’s a very sacred approach to learning Torah. In that spirit, in the holiest sense of the holiness of the Torah, I offer these words.