A few years ago, I was surprised by a call from Reb Zalman Schachter-Shalomi,a colorful and brilliant rabbi of 89, asking me to talk with him about the December Project. “When you can feel in your cells that you’re coming to the end of your tour of duty,” he said, “what is the spiritual work of this time, and how do we prepare for the mystery?” I jumped at the chance to spend time with him, and we met every Friday for two years.
Reb Zalman knew I was a seeker who owned a skeptic’s mind. My heart wanted to travel any road that might lead to truth or transformation, and my head would come along and point out cracks in the paving.
Despite years of meditation and spiritual practice, I feared that death would be a complete annihilation. Reb Zalman, by contrast, felt certain that “something continues.” He said he didn’t want to convince me of anything. “What I want is to loosen your mind.”
Interspersed with our talks are sketches from Reb Zalman’s life. He barely escaped the Nazis in Vienna, became a Hasidic rabbi in Brooklyn, then began seeking wisdom from outside his own community. He took L.S.D. with Timothy Leary and became friends with Thomas Merton and the Dalai Lama. He was married four times and had 11 children, one from a sperm donation to a lesbian rabbi. His aim in founding Jewish Renewal was to “take the blinders off Judaism,” and encourage people to have a direct experience of God.
During the time we spent together, I was nearly killed by a suicide bomb and Reb Zalman suffered a steep decline in health. We created strategies for dealing with pain and memory loss, and for cultivating fearlessness and joy—at any age.
Midway through my sixties, I woke up in the middle of a June night and saw a comet streaking across a black sky. Bolting up in bed, I watched the fiery orb shoot from left to right, tracing the last third of a rainbow-like arc. It was not a dream—my eyes were open and everything else in my bedroom appeared as it normally does. Except for the comet. Was it a hallucination, a projection, a fragment of a dream leaking into my waking mind? I couldn’t tell, but as I watched it burn down and disappear, I knew: that comet is your life, babe, and it’s coming to the end of its trajectory. Are you spending your days the way you want to? A response rumbled up from deep within: NO.
In that season—the autumn of life—I was spending the majority of my hours in front of the computer. Most nights, I would have to forcibly push myself up from the desk chair to go to sleep. In the morning, the first thing I did was walk, still wearing my nightgown, to the computer and check e-mail. I had too many balls in the air, too many items on a list that never grew shorter, too much busyness and too little being accomplished. I wanted to play music, have a more robust social life, mentor young people, spend more time in nature, and connect with a man who could be a full partner. I was, instead, having a long-distance relationship with someone who measured out our time together with coffee spoons.
I fell back asleep, consoled by the thought that the next morning was my regular Friday visit with Reb Zalman.
The aim of The December Project is to address your concerns and feelings about mortality; prepare you for the ultimate letting go; and enable you to find meaning, fearlessness and joy in all your days.
If you’d like to take up The December Project, there are 12 exercises at the back of the book. You can do them alone, with another, or with a group.
Before beginning, you may want to consider and discuss these questions:
“Revelatory… the best rendering of Reb Zalman’s wisdom that I’ve come across… (Davidson’s) transformation seems to have come simply from being in the elder sage’s presence — and seeing that there’s a real person behind the ‘sage.’ Thanks to The December Project, we can taste some of that presence ourselves.”
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Warner: “Do we have the power to decide when we will die?” Reb Zalman: “Power? No. But we have the possibility… to accept it when the hour comes.”
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Davidson: “The experience was so strong that it has totally changed the way I feel about growing older and mortality. I don’t say I welcome it. I love life, but I no longer feel death is the fearsome tragedy that I did when we started our project.”
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“The intense spirituality that (Reb Zalman) found in the Hasidic world is something he has worked to make accessible to Jews who want an intense spirituality while living in the modern world”
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