When Oceans Merge

Auteur

Gregory Blann, also known as Muhammad Jamal al-Jerrahi, is a sheikh in the Halveti-Jerrahi order of Dervishes and the author of Lifting the Boundaries: Muzaffer Efendi and the Transmission of Sufism to the West and The Garden of Mystic Love: The Origin and Formation of the Great Sufi Orders.

Texte du rabat

In-depth exploration of the cross-currents between Jewish and Islamic mysticism, exemplified in the teachings of and relationship between two renowned teachers.

Résumé

This is a book about the intersection of Sufi and Hasidic wisdom as gleaned from the lives and teachings of Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi, the founder of the Jewish Renewal Movement and Pir Vilayat Khan, the head and spiritual director of the Sufi Order of the West. The foreword is by Netanel Miles-Yépez who is one of the founders of the Adam Kadmon Book imprint as well as a Pir and founder of a Jewish-Sufi lineage which was blessed and inspired by Reb Zalman and Pir Vilayat. Reb Zalman and Pir Vilayat knew and held each other in the highest regard while still living. Indeed they were initiated into each other's spiritual community. More than anything, this book shows how a deep spirituality can be developed that is rooted in religious tradition but transcends it.

Échantillon de lecture

Foreword: The Merging of Two Oceans—The Making of a Sufi-Hasidic Lineage and a Universal Priesthood
Netanel Miles-Yépez

Toward the One
The Perfection of Love, Harmony, and Beauty
The Only Being
United with all the Illuminated Souls
Who form the Embodiment of the Master
The Spirit of Guidance --- Likhrat ha-ehad
Ha-yahid ha-ehadv'ha-m'yuhad
Shleimut ha-ahavah, ha-tzedekv'ha-tif'eret
Ha-nimtza ha-yahid
Ha-kolelkol ha-n'shamot ha-ne'orot
Yotzreihag'shammat ha-rabbi
Ha-ruah ha-kodesh

Sometime in the mid-to-late 70s, my teacher, Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomibetter known as 'Reb Zalman'took it upon himself to translate the universalist Sufi prayer Toward the One into the traditional Hebrew of Hasidic Jews in Eastern Europe. The prayer itself was composed in English by the first Sufi master to bring Sufism to the West, Hazrat Inayat Khan, and is arguably one of the most popular non-sectarian prayers in the world today.

Many years after he first encountered it, Reb Zalman wrote that he initially had trouble getting through a single recitation of the prayer . . .

For even as I was speaking, I would be lifted Toward the One to regions of Love, Harmony, and Beauty where my feet no longer touched the ground of materiality, but instead were grounded in The Only Being. I was overwhelmed by the energetic qurb'proximity' to the Onein the words themselves. There was such holy precision in them and manifest spiritual energy that my heart could not fail to respond to them. And, as with other things that touched me powerfully from outside of the Jewish tradition, I immediately wanted to translate it into Hebrew, the language of my spiritual upbringing.

As many people have often asked me how such an important Hasidic rabbi, trained in the traditional world of Judaism, could become a Sufiindeed, a Sufi sheikh interested in translating the Toward the One into HebrewI want to tell the story of how this happened, and indeed, of how this same Hasidic rabbi also contributed significantly to universalist Sufism through his relationship with Sufi master, Pir Vilayat Inayat Khan.

From Hasidism to Universalist Sufism

Meshullam Zalman Schachter was born in Zholkiew, Poland, in 1924, and raised in Vienna, Austria, where his parents ran a small store selling textiles. In 1938, after the Nazi annexation of Austria, the family fled with their teenage son to Belgium where, in Antwerp, he first encountered Hasidim of the famous Habad lineage of Hasidism.

Hasidism is the name given to a series of communal mystical movements in Judaism, the latest initiated by Yisra'el ben Eliezer (1698-1760), called the Ba'al Shem Tov, from whom all latter-day Hasidic lineages stem. The Ba'al Shem Tov taught that God could be served joyfully through the body in ecstatic prayer, song and dance, instead of the harsh ascetic disciplines commonly practiced among mystics of the time. He taught that worlds, souls, and divinity were all overlapping, interpenetrating realities, ultimately reducible to one divine reality, as it says in Isaiah 6:3, the whole earth is filled with God's glory. Thus, the step between us and divinity is only a matter of perspective, overcome through a powerful intentionality (kavvanah) and cleaving to the Divine (devekut).

Among the Hasidic lineages that sprang from the inspiration of the Ba'al Shem Tov was the Habad lineage, founded by ShneurZalman of Liadi (1745-1812), a genius known for the tremendous sophistication of his mystical thought and his emphasis on deep contemplative practice.

In Antwerp, although from a family of Belzer Hasidim himself, the 14-year old Zalman joined a radical group of young Habad Hasidism with whom he began to experiment in authentic spiritual living. But when Antwerp was bombed by the Nazis a few months later, he and his family were quickly forced flee in a coal train heading into France. After a period of internment in a refugee camp, the family made their way to Marseille, where Zalman met the son-in-law and future rebbe (master) of the Habad-Lubavitch lineage, Menachem Mendel Schneerson (1902-1994), who provided him with an introduction to Yosef Yitzhak Schneersohn (1880-1950), the sixth Lubavitcher Rebbe, to whom he attached himself shortly after his arrival in the United States in 1941.

The sixth Lubavitcher Rebbe, himself a refugee from the Holocaust, had recently established his headquarters at 770 Eastern Parkway in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, where young Zalman entered his yeshiva (seminary), training to become a Hasidic rabbi. In 1947, he was ordained and soon sent out by his rebbe to college campuses to bring Jews back to the traditional fold. A naturally talented and charismatic teacher with broad interests, he studied pastoral psychology at Boston University, and eventually (after a short period as a pulpit rabbi) became a college professor at the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg, Canada, teaching psychology of religion and Jewish mysticism.

By the late 50s and early 60s, Reb Zalman had noticed a generational shift among his Jewish students. Passionate in his desire to serve them, he sought to understand where they were coming from, exploring their questions as his own. It was clear that there was a deep spiritual impulse in them that was not being fed in the synagogues of the time. Though thoroughly grounded in the mystically-oriented tradition of Hasidism, he could see how the Jewish tradition in general was failing to meet Jewish needs in the wake of the Holocaust. Judaism in North America was a wasteland. Thus, many young Jews were finding their paths outside of Judaism in so-called 'Eastern religions.'

Already curious about other religious traditions, in the mid 1950sin a move that separated him from other traditional Hasidimhe had begun to read deeply in mystical traditions at Boston University under the famous African-American Christian mystic, Rev. Dr. Howard Thurman (1899- 1981), and soon began to seek out encounters with their practitioners. Before long, his knowledge of other traditions was considerable and an integral part of the courses he taught in the psychology of religion.

By the late 1960s, Reb Zalman was familiar with traditional Sufism through the writings of Idries Shah and had also read the universalist Sufi writings of Hazrat Inayat Khan. But it was not until the early 1970s that he made his first real connections with Sufis. These were the disciples Murshid Samuel or S.A.M. (Sufi Ahmed Murad) Lewis (1896-1971), a direct disciple of Hazrat Inayat Khan, who had become the le…