| Reb Zalman |
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A spiritual giant and a living
mystic. Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi
has been called the Jewish Dalai Lama. He is credited with re-energizing Judaism by making it more emotionally satisfying,
inclusive, experimental, experiential and compelling. He leads an interfaith movement that invites people of various
faiths to a warm, experientially based, gender-equal, environmentally aware, non-hierarchical, and grounded piety.
We are very fortunate to have had an exclusive 2-way video conference
with Reb Zalman on Monday evening, September 15 in our Parish Hall. The event was a joint project with Temple Shalom and the Sufi Center of the Ozarks.
Reb Zalman talked about the internal struggle that all religions are undergoing between fundamentalism
and those believers who are making a paradigm shift. Reb Zalman called us to be sensitive to the needs of our
planet while our spiritual traditions are undergoing internal upheavals.
Reb Zalman offered an introductory
reflection and then invited us into conversation and Q & A with him via video link.
We had his exclusive attention. This was not a networked broadcast.
Zalman, now 88, escaped from Nazis in Europe in 1938. For years he was the Professor of Jewish Mysticism at
the U. of Manitoba and later taught the Psychology of Religion at Temple University. He was initiated as a Sheikh in
the Sufi Order and has combined his Rabinnical Hasidism with Sufi traditions. His conversations with the Dalai Lama are documented in the book The Jew in the Lotus. Among his several books is the popular publication From Age-ing to Sage-ing which became the catalyst of the Spiritual
Eldering movement.
His teachings integrate influences from Catholicism to Buddhism, psychology, bodywork,
feminism, and envirnomentalism. He is versed in the wisdom from the Jewish Essene monastic tradition of the Dead Sea
Scrolls, Hasidim, Kabalistic mysticism, Buddhism, mystical Christianity, and goddess religion. Learning from Reb Zalman
is like taking six courses in six different disciplines, all at once.
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