While true that for R. Nahman, the spiritual seeker is incessantly bombarded by the difficulties and paradoxes that interrupt any static system of meaning, thus implicitly relating the spiritual experience to what has been described as the existentialist worldview; the existentialist outlook is mitigated by the spiritual and religious faith that imbues the suffering and doubt with meaning.

With our gaze held on the moving images that move us towards the tears that have since dried up, the perceivable world induces a certain blindness. An inability to not-look. A blindness that sees too much. Worn out by the incessant barrage of images, the eyes grow tired.

Before beginning his thirteenth and final tale “The Seven Beggars”, R. Nachman asked his students to bring him the news of the world. Listening, silent, he sighed and opened, “let me share with you how once there was joy from within despair”.

Aside from the concealed meaning and the drushim contained within his holy statements in their richness which is drawn from elsewhere, or, from one teaching to another (and at times it appears that even the essence of the teaching is like an enigma, or a wondrous garment to what he grasped akin to the garbing of his understanding in the telling of his tales)….

At the inception, the word- the capacity of coherent speech- was gifted over to the world. The necessity of names was matched by the possibility of naming. Devoid of the signifying nature of direct speech, existence cracks, shatters into an impossible whirlwind of shadows and specters.

As language becomes the vehicle of interaction, subjectivity grows. In the shadow of the subject, meaning, the signified, is swallowed by meaning/less. When speech loses it’s capacity to convey the contours of an elusive essence, it becomes a game, language games.

Exiled, the word lost its vehicular capacity of getting the direct point across. Words, devarim, initially capable of expressing the davar– or thing-in-itself- were relegated to the secondary role of description. Postlapsarian language, once the solitary mode of coherent interaction, fell beneath the flux of misunderstanding.

In the veil of darkness, there emerged a new form of seeking. Searching through the ruins of the word, a luminous glow, a faint murmuring was heard. Within the breakage of the whole, the parts, the letters were seen for the first time.

Letters are formed. They gather in herds to create words. Words become sentences. Sentences carry the meaning. The meaning is imparted onto/into the blank space. The emptiness of the world is filled, subsumed with the fullness of the letters.

The soul, the inner undefinable essence of a human being is ineffable. Immanently-transcendent, the soul’s presence is sensed but remains evasive in the ever present attempt to signify it’s un-significance.

There is a certain pungency to the avodah that works from the bottom up. A bittersweet smell, that comes from the flames of desire that is situated upon the lack of wholeness. Of satiety. The movement and play within the space of shadows where the light and dark move together creates the novel act.

The stranger comes upon R. Shimon and R. Abba on the road towards Teveria. The stranger tells the companions that he is searching for R. Shimon. The dialogue begins. The discussion surrounds the three times of institutional prayer, the archetypal forefathers whose lives…

R. Yitzchak was walking alone at night. He came upon a father and his two sons speaking about the sun. Uninvited, he followed behind them listening from a distance. They spoke about gods invitation towards man and mans invitation towards god.

Typically seen as a highly arcane model of Lurianic interpretation, the Rashash has often been described as an excessively complex, nearly mathematical interpreter of Lurianic Kabbalah. Associated with the meditative school of sefardi kabbalah the Rashash has typically been known for his re-codification of Lurianic intentions (kavaanot) and as such the lot of only the most erudite mystic.

When speaking of “addiction”, we are not referring to the diagnostic category of substance abuse related diseases or addiction as a mental illness. To attempt to speak of the spiritual world of the lived experience of addiction as a disease would be grossly inappropriate.

For the past few years I have been giving a spirituality talk to individuals in acute inpatient recovery for addiction. This parable has been shared countless times, put down in writing in response to numerous requests. Addiction is but a metaphor…

Although the true origin of the 1839 split between the teacher R. Menachem Mendel Morgenstern of Kotzk and the disciple R. Mordechai Yosef Leiner of Izhbitz remains hidden within the concealment of history, it is possible to discern certain threads of thought that separate the two.

In truth, the nullification of melacha is from the perspective of God who has no need for effort (his’tadlut), and it is only applicable to the perspective of God and the sanctity of the Sabbath which is permanent and enduring.