The Kabbalah Kronicles V– Busy-ness
By
Uncle Zally, Zalman Velvel
It’s Thursday morning and I finished my third session of Kabbalistic prayer and meditation … and I’m scared. It started out the same, Tefillin and tallus, coffee in Starbucks cup, Peanut barking at imaginary possums, then the 3 beginning Prayers – “God, I love You,” “Thank You for all my blessings and problems,” and “Thank You for the greatest gift of all – life itself.”
I closed my eyes, faced East, emptied my mind of to-do’s, feelings, priorities, and questions. I pictured a white room with no doors or windows, and as the sun shined on my face, it made the white room feel like it was filled with light of Creation, on the First Day.
Then nothing happened. Zero. Effes. Bupkis.
In my reading about great Kabbalists, it was suggested they had secret mantras that they repeated when they prayed, and these words opened up a special communication with God. Sometimes, this communication was so powerful it could drive them insane, and a prayer partner was needed to bring the Kabbalist back to this world.
I had Peanut as my prayer partner – his barking could rouse the dead, so it would bring me back to sanity if the need arose. I started repeating God’s name, using “Hashem,” which means “The Name” in Hebrew.
I switched to His real name, Yud Hay Vav Hay, which only the High Priest was supposed to say in the Holy of Holies. I felt justified since the white room filled with light inside my mind felt like the Holy of Holies.
I did not ask any questions during this prayer time. That was adding a to-do list, a set of priorities, to this session. Instead, I asked God to speak to me about whatever He wished.
It was then that I got scared.
No, I did not hear the voice of God, nor see a burning bush.
I had this sense of what God felt like before he made Man, the loneliness, the need to be recognized by another living being, the desire to share.
King Solomon came to mind, the wisest man who ever lived, and how he arrived at the conclusion in his later years, when he wrote Ecclesiastes, that everything associated with Man’s endeavors was Vanity, and Vanity led only to emptiness. Good old King Solly knew about Vanity. He had thousands of wives, gold by the ton, palaces, and hundreds of chariots and horses. He was richer and more powerful that any man living today, so wise he could talk to animals and speak in parables. And what about his relationship to God? God chose him to build His house on earth.
Then, at the end of a life of great abundance, King Solomon’sbest advice was to follow God’s commandments in his Holy Torah … and by doing so, one would draw closer to our Creator, and lead a holy life, a good life.
In one sentence, “Go your way, eat your bread with joy, and drink your wine with a merry heart; for God now accepts your works.”
In light of this wisdom, how does prayer fit in? Is it supposed to be like going to the supermarket, where God is waiting at the checkout counter to take your shopping list, then ring up on His Holy Cash Register the blessings that are on sale today?
Or is prayer more than that? Is prayer the act of opening our heart to God, recognizing that He created us to share our lives with Him? Each time we pray, do we thank God for our blessings, the blessings He feels we need … and after we receive these blessings (Kabbalah is the Hebrew word to receive)do we give love back to God, with specific actions listed in our Holy Torah, called mitzvot? To me, this felt like the true purpose of prayer.
I sensed in my prayer that God lets us run free with our choices, and He likes surprises. Love comes with surprises – it is part of what is so wonderful about love.But when our choices run too far amuck, He then reigns us in. He must watch over his Creations, be a constant caretaker … a shepherd. That is why God loves the caretaker.
Furthermore, when it is time of celebrate, we should “eat our bread with joy, and drink our wine with a merry heart, for God accepts our works.”
That is when my fear set in.
I realized that most of the priorities that I had lived my life by, up to this point, were misguided. There were so many hours spent being busy … so much time spent in the pursuit of Vanity … so many years of ignoring God. After all, I’m a BBBT – a baby boomer bal tshvuah.
My fear intensified when I thought about making drastic changes with the days I have left. Do I continue to fill them up with busy-ness and Vanity? Or do I take another path, this late in life?Drastic changes are not pleasant thoughts to a man in his sixties.Wisdom set in. No drastic changes were needed. Much of what I do in busy-ness involves caretaking of others, and I enjoy it. There is a greater understanding now, why I chose my busy-ness, aside from the Vanity.
I pushed this line of thought to its conclusion, asking, “What do we have in the end, when the time allotted to us is gone? The only answer I could come up with is: we have each other. If that is true, then it stands to reason we should take care of each other, like God takes care of us, during the short time we have together.
Along the lines of taking care of each other, the picture below was sent by Gil Locks at the end of his last email to me. Doesn’t it make you smile?
It is so nice to have a good friend like you.
Uh oh!
Rabbi Itchy said there was another level to Kabbalistic prayer, even higher and more powerful than the one we discussed last week, and we will learn it this Shabbos. Should I be scared again?
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