Sara Davidson
|November, 30, 2024
In the massive cleaning I’m doing of my office—the first in maybe 20 years—I keep running across pieces I’ve written and forgotten. I just found the first thing I wrote about Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi, the beloved spiritual teacher I met when I moved to Boulder. Remembering the time we spent together always makes me smile. Enjoy.
Midway through my sixties, I woke up in the middle of a June night and saw a comet streaking across a black sky. It was not a dream, neither was it real but an image I saw clearly. Bolting up in bed, I watched the fiery orb shoot from left to right, tracing the last third of a rainbow-like arc. And 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 email. I had too many balls in the air, too many items on a list that never grew shorter, too much busyness and very 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 visit with Reb Zalman. Since July of 2009, I’d been meeting every Friday with Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi, who founded the Jewish Renewal movement and had asked me to have a series of conversations with him about what he calls “The December Work.” At 85, he wanted to discuss what it’s like “when you’re in the December of your years, you feel your cells getting tired, your hard drive is running slow and you know you’re coming to the end of your tour of duty.” He said he’d been in my years, “but you haven’t been in mine, and I want to help others not freak out about dying.”
This was intriguing—I certainly needed help in the almost impossible task of knowing and accepting in your bones that you’re going to die. I understood that “dancing with your mortality,” as Reb Zalman puts it, enables you to have a richer, more heightened and grateful life, but the truth is, I would have seized any invitation to spend time with him. He’s deluged with requests for his counsel and blessings—for a new baby, a marriage, or solace with fatal illness—and it’s hard to book even a short appointment. His insights generally come from an unexpected angle, and more important, he says, “the time I spend with people tastes good; it gives them endorphins. There’s a carry-away of love, and if that’s not there it won’t work.”
What’s unique about Reb Zalman is that he’s a bridge between two worlds—the ancient Orthodox and the current cutting-edge. Born in Poland and ordained a Hasidic rabbi in Brooklyn, he has long been a trailblazer for people from many faiths. He’s been a catalyst for the tectonic shift that began in the 1960’s, moving away from what Zalman calls triumphalism—the belief that one religion is the best and only way—toward universalism, the recognition that, in Gandhi’s words, “It is of no consequence by what name we call God in our homes.”
Reb Zalman has not followed convention. He’s been married four times and has 11 children, including one for whom he was a sperm donor to a lesbian rabbi. His life mission has been “to take the blinders off Judaism.” Along with his Hasidic studies, he read psychology and philosophy, communed with leaders of other faiths, took L.S.D. with Timothy Leary and became close with Thomas Merton and the Dalai Lama. He founded Jewish Renewal to help keep Judaism alive and relevant, and he’s ordained 166 rabbis and cantors who lead communities around the world. Every year when Newsweek would compile its list of the 50 most influential rabbis in America, Reb Zalman was on it.
Tall and striking in his younger years, Zalman is no less magnetic in his 80s. What I notice first are his eyes. Large and dark brown behind red tortoise-shell glasses, they meet you directly, saying, “You–you are the one I want to speak with now.” When he smiles, there are glints in his eyes that signal his amusement and eagerness to be surprised. He’s game to try new things, quick to adopt emerging technology and reluctant to dismiss even the most outlandish idea. At 79, he tried hang-gliding and started studying Arabic so his mind “wouldn’t get stale,” which spurred many to say, “He’s the model of how I want to be when I’m older.”
During the two years we’ve been meeting, much has changed for both of us. I traveled to Afghanistan and had a close brush with death; my mother died of Alzheimer’s and I worried I was heading for the same port; my daughter got married; and illness brought my body to a stop, forcing me to re-set my course and open to a different understanding of death.
Reb Zalman struggled with a decline in health that was steeper than he’d expected. He felt equanimity about dying but suffered pain and anxiety when he couldn’t walk well or catch his breath. He came to feel that he’s completed the work he set out to do, but at the same time, he took every measure he could–seeing batteries of doctors and unorthodox healers–to keep his body going.
What made our talks zesty and unpredictable were the differences between us. I was raised Jewish but the multiple commandments and all-powerful Hebrew God do not resonate with me as much as do the philosophies of Buddhism and Hinduism. For Reb Zalman, despite his rebelliousness and breaking of ground, Judaism is his oxygen and lifeblood. He observes Shabbat every Friday night, which I do not. He welcomes the Sabbath queen by writing a note of love and appreciation to his wife, Eve Ilsen, which he slips under her dinner plate before she lights the candles and he blesses the wine. For the next 24 hours he does not travel, talk on the phone or use the Internet, creating a sacred interlude separated from the rest of the week. I admire the practice of Shabbat but have never been moved to create it for myself.
From the start of our meetings we’ve developed a ritual. I drive to his home in Boulder, CO, at the base of the Flatirons—gray triangular mountains jutting out over fields that, depending on the season, are covered with snow or ablaze with wildflowers. I ring the bell to let him know I’ve arrived, then open the front door that’s rarely locked. Removing my shoes, I walk down to the basement, which is Reb Zalman’s domain: a warren of dark rooms for praying, working and meeting people. The rooms feel jumbled and chaotic, containing everything from an electric organ and a treadmill to portraits of rabbis going back generations, Hebrew prayer flags, shelves of books, tapes, DVDS and CDs and an astonishing amount of techno clutter: computers, giant screens, numerous phones, a video camera, tripod and lights, a dozen voice recorders and wires running in every direction.
“I’ll be right with you, Saraleh,” he calls when he hears my footsteps. It’s one of our first meetings, in July of 2009, the temperature is about to hit 90 and Reb Zalman shuffles out from his computer room wearing slip-on sandals, knee-length shorts held up by suspenders, a black shirt and black knit yarmulke over his ample white hair. He opens his arms to hug me, then sits down in a reclining chair and I sit across from him, balancing my computer and voice recorder on my lap.
I ask how he’s feeling.
“Thank God, my body’s in pretty good shape,” he says, rapping his knuckles on the wooden arm of the chair. “I never dreamed I’d live this long. I’ve still got some mileage left, but the end is getting closer. I can hear the footsteps.”
“Are you reconciled with that?” I ask, reminding him that in his book, From Age-ing to Sage-ing, which he wrote in his 60’s, he talked about his fear of being reduced to “a rocking chair existence… and a dark and inevitable end to my life.”
“The rocking chair doesn’t frighten me now,” he says. “When I wrote that, I was busy running around. These days, I often sit in the evening and am happy to do nothing. Just sit.”
“What about the dark end?” I ask.
“I don’t think it’s all dark. Something continues.” He says it’s as if the body and soul are tied together with little strings. “The closer you get to leaving, the more the strings loosen and the more you connect with greater awareness, the expanded mind.”
I tell him I’ve had intimations but no certainty of that happening.
“Look,” he says. “There’s a deep human fear of not being, not existing anymore. Either I survive bodily death in some way, or the whole machine is gonna turn off and that’s the end—nothing. But if there’s nothing, there’ll be nobody around to be upset about it.”
“That’s what’s frightening. Extinction,” I say. “Much as I dislike parts of myself, the idea of being annihilated, no awareness of anything, ever….”
Reb Zalman nods. “I know how that feels in the gut. But I don’t think it ends in oblivion. I’m curious—really curious to awaken to the larger picture.” The glint comes to his eyes. “Remember what Woody Allen said, `I don’t mind dying, I just don’t want to be there when it happens?’”
Right.
“I do want to be there, I want to watch the last breath going out and whisper the shma. I want to merge back with the infinite, I want to dissolve like a drop in the greater ocean.”
“That sounds kind of boring, just floating around in the ocean.”
He starts to laugh. “In the ocean I have a lot more than I have in my drop.” He leans forward. “Do you know what your past life was?”
Ah, yes. Better to get this out on the table. “I don’t believe, literally, in past lives,” I tell him. “I can understand reincarnation as a metaphor or myth but when someone tells me they remember being a queen or an army general, my eyes glaze over. No one seems to remember being a leper or a child molester.”
Reb Zalman says there’s a great deal of anecdotal evidence—people being hypnotized and remembering details from a past existence‑that we’ve lived before.
“And there’s a great many who dispute that,” I say.
“Nu? That’s what makes for horse racing.”
I ask if he’s always felt at ease with dying.
“No. It came gradually. Liberal Judaism hasn’t dealt much with the afterlife, and since the Holocaust, hardly anyone speaks about it. The sense is that you live this life and when you’re dead, you’re dead.”
I remember, as he says this, asking the warm and very modern Reform rabbi who confirmed me at age 15 what happens when people die. He said, “There are several possibilities. Some people believe you live on in the good works you’ve done. Some believe in an ethical force that moves through all of us…” As he ticked off the other possibilities, I knew he believed none of them. My father, when I asked the same question, said, “We live on in the memories of others,” an answer I found equally unsatisfactory.
Polls have consistently showed that Jews are far less likely to believe in an afterlife than people of other faiths. But Reb Zalman says there are Kabbalist texts with long passages about reincarnation and what’s beyond this world, though they’ve never been translated into English. “The rationalists have held sway for the last hundred years and they’ve wanted Judaism to be perceived as the religion of reason,” he says. “So they buried the mystical. But the classical Jewish belief is that there are two worlds–this one and the world to come. At birth the soul enters the body and at death, the soul survives.”
He urges me to go to the library and look in section 13 of the Dewey decimal system—the section on the occult and supernatural. “I read everything I could find there,” he says. “In almost every culture people have had visions of the afterlife and they’re remarkably similar. Also, the people who’ve had near-death experiences write that they felt so much light and love they were reluctant to come back. They felt so free.”
I shake my head. “Near-death experiences don’t prove that that’s what actually happens when we die. I’m not saying it can’t be true, but I prefer to hold it as a mystery.”
Reb Zalman laughs. “That’s fine. You leave a possible door open so there could be a surprise.”
I tell him about a book I’ve read, My Stroke of Insight, by Jill Bolte Taylor, a brain scientist who had a massive, near-fatal stroke that wiped out her ability to understand any words. She remembers being in a state of bliss and oneness, however, not wanting to return to the speaking world.
Reb Zalman claps his hands in excitement.
“But that could just be the brain, producing a chemical reaction that induces a sense of oneness and bliss,” I said.
Reb Zalman throws out his arms. “Isn’t it wonderful that we should have such an illusion in those dire circumstances? We should thank mother nature for giving us that kind of illusion.”
I can’t resist laughing. He’s pulled the rug out from my mind’s perpetual questioning.
“I don’t want to convince you of anything,” Reb Zalman says. “What I want is to loosen your mind.”
What you’ve just read became the first chapter of the book I wrote about my time with the rabbi, The December Project. Find it on Amazon.
Reb Zalman died in 2014, but those who knew him remember him vividly, with joy.
I was around Zalman for a few years with Jewish Renewal but never got to know him. Thanks for the inside glimpse. I’ll get your book
Thanks Marc for getting in touch. Please let me know what you think after reading the book. Each time I read it, I get a hit of Zalman, and smile.
So delighted to read this blog! I have read The December Project –thank you for reminding me about this heartwarming and evocative book. For many decades, I have been a student of Reb Zalman and his universal teachings. As a practicing Jew and Sufi and Yogini, I am awed by the similarity of the philosophies, practices and values. Many blessings to all on the path of righteousness and inclusivity. Happy Holidays
Very powerful reading this. My husband is ill with a mystery abdominal mass that has developed rapidly in the last two months. We are discussing and considering all outcomes of this illness. I don’t think I’m ready to start reading too much about the great beyond and acceptance, but reading this post was enlightening.
Thanks for your message, Kat. Please accept my warm wishes of healing for your husband and you.
Thanks for sharing about this perplexing man. He speaks of love, but with 4 wives he probably caused wreckage. And 11 kids is unacceptable in an overpopulated and polluted world (not showing love for our planet), plus, who wants to be one of 11? It’s disrespectful to the first set to create more sets and painful to all. But I can appreciate him as a real intellectual, a seeker, and someone who has learned how to joyfully embrace the mysteries and certainties of life.
Thanks for your words, Zan. I got to know Reb Zalman’s youngest child who lived in Boulder for a while, and he had a deep, warm relationship with his father. But I understand what you mean, and am grateful you sent your thoughts.
I am grateful that my wife shared this piece with me. I met Zalman once and did not connect with him. However the brief interaction prompted me to understand an event of my immediate past life. Since you seem to be interested in that phenomenon I can share it with you if you like.
Sure, I’d love to hear it. I don’t have any certainty about past lives, but I’m interested to hear about your experience.
I really enjoyed your interview with Reb Zalman. I grew up in an orthodox Jewish household and recently at age 78 started visiting Synagogues in the Boston area to find one that feels like home. A big step or me. Your blog inspired me to pursue Reb Zalman’s writings as part of my Jewish revisiting. Thanks so much and good luck to you Sara.
Love, Lay
And thank you, Lay, for your response. I hope you find a congregation where you feel at home. Warm regards, Sara
Dear Sara – I no longer recall how I got on your mailing list, but stories like these make me glad I am. What a blessing to have had such a friend in your life. Thank you for sharing him! Layni
Hi Layni, I’m glad you’re on my list. Your comment means a lot. And yes, sharing time with Reb Zalman was a great blessing. I’m not sure how I earned that. Warme regards, Sara
Excellent and thought-provoking.
Thanks, Joseph, for your respoonse. I send warm wishes for now and the coming years. it’s amazing that we’re in touch, after just one year at Columbia.
I look forward to reading your words. I get excited when I see a new posting in my email. It’s wonderful to feel like I know you and I’m having a conversation with you. Thank you for all your words.
And thank you, Barbara, for your kind words. They make writing this blog a joy.
I love Reb Zalman and I don’t agree with you. But I love your writing and your articles.
The December of my life is never far from my conscious thoughts. Thanks for your writings!
Hi Rich, did we know each other at Berkeley? I recognize your name. Thanks for your comment on my blog. YOu can also reach me at
website-feedback@saradavidson.com
Love this blog. It’s even more applicable today. As I am a baby boomer and feel the footsteps getting closer. Love the descriptive nature and feel like Im there with you and the Rabbi.
Thanks for the kind words. They mean a great deal. Love, Sara
I bear witness that We Go On. This is as a result of personal experience; it is not the recitation of a creed.
The experiences were simple, and not dramatic. I would see, in a dream, some weeks or months before they occurred, a moment (an utterly unpredictable moment, usually with another person in it, with whom I would be talking) that would come along in waking life. I often told my dreams to my parents, in the morning (not that I ever knew that a dream was prescient until the actual event came along) so, when the real-life event occurred, I recalled not only the dream but, as well, naturally, the instance of my recounting it to my parents.
I had no handle on these dreams. I could not summon or cause them: I could not put them to any planned use. Instances occurred something like … twice a year. These dreams’ occurrence – which started, perhaps, around when I was 9 – faded off as I moved into my middle teen years.
About 20 percent of the people I have happened to ask, over the years, say “yes” to having had equivalent experiences.
( I ask anyone reading this: has it happened for you? )
What these occurrences proved, to me, is that time and matter do not exclusively grip our consciousness. My complete, casual awareness – my knowledge of my self, my recognition of others whom I knew, my recognition of my place in the routine world, and of the ordinary places familiar to me – came to my sleeping, material brain: jumped to it, from the future, from where my material brain could not possibly go except via the ordinary passage of time. I visited myself: visited from where the matter of my body could not be, from where time had yet carried neither me _nor_ the person with whom I was (in the dream) talking.
The conclusions I have drawn from this are, as you see, basic: they point to no particular theology; they _have_ opened doors that, otherwise, might have been held closed by the storm and cacophony of ideas, pronouncements, and threats that we are besieged with during our lives, our educations, and our searches for truths and possibilities.
Via some of these opened doors, I have come to the certainty that – besides that We Go On – our beloveds await us. I refrain from stating that I bear witness to it. I am certain of it, but not by the same types of experience as the dreams.
So many gems in this, Sara, beautifully set in your forthright questions.
Allways lovely to hear from you, Gail. So thanks for your comment. Warmest, Sara
That was very moving. It is also poignant to me that I began reading your work with your book Loose Change when I was in my 20’s, and it had a big impact on me, and now as I near 70 and you are even older, I am reading your reflections about this period of life. I always love your writings and what you share, with your generous heart. Thank you!!!
Hi Lisa, thanks for your kind response. It means a great deal. Warmest wishes, Sara
HI Lisa, thanks for your kind words. They mean so much to me, as the blog is now my main venue for writing. And hearing responses from people like you makes it so worthwhile. Sending many warm wishes, Sara
Thanks for the reminder of Reb Zalman’s beautiful energy. We missed you at last August’s event marking his 10th yahrzeit (I did some comedy, in case you’re interested: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jGFRkYsjHqQ). Hope you are well these days!
Great to hear from you, Donna. I don’t remember anyhone telling me about the event last August. In future, if there’s any event you think I’d like to know about, please let me know. Don’t assume I found out or was informed. Sorry I missed seeing you. Hope there’s another opportunity before long. Love, Sara
Sarah – Enjoyed your blog as always, though the writing much more than the reflections. Perhaps that is because I have a clear conviction about an afterlife, not just from my years as a Catholic but also from my own personal close-to-death experience. I haven’t ever written it out fully, but if you’d be open enough to be a reader, perhaps I will. It may make a good column, though I’d probably need more than the 550 words the paper here allots me.
Hi, I appreciate your “clear conviction” and wish I had clarity about it. I encourage you to write about it. You can connect with me at website-feedback@saradavidson.com
Thank you, Sara, for sharing this experience. As I approach 89 years old, I, too, think about the end game- how will I play it? How will I be remembered?
The last time I saw Reb Zalman in his home a few days before his death, he shimmered. The air around him was glistening. As he said, the ties were loosening that held his soul. I’ve worked in his home with Eve for almost 2 decades and every time I would come into the home, he would bless me. What an experience to be blessed coming to work by someone like him. A beautiful soul.
yes, that is so like him. He was a blessing to everyone he encountered, as far as I could see. I miss him so much. as I’m sure you do. Sara
Hi Sara,
What a lovely piece. This is David from honolulu. We met last year and we had a brief discussion in
the lobby of your building. At that time I shared my experiences connecting with people I love who had died. They have been teaching me about the afterlife. For twenty years. I took two paddies well and it finished the first draft of a book about my experiences. It is a memoir. Write the rabbi, I have no interest in convincing anybody of anything we will all learn in time. But I do want to push the door open a bit wider for others to consider this life and the one after it. Working title of the book is lifting to veils. First one was veil hiding sexism in schools. The second veil is the one that separates life and death.
Hope you return to Hawaii and we can discuss this further.
Be well
David, thanks for your message. I’ll be in HNL Feb through early March.
That was a lovely recounting of your relationship with him. I remember you told me about him once. Curiosity about what comes next feels natural and I don’t trust anyone to know for sure.
I agree with you about curiosity, and not trusting anyone who claims to have the sure answwer. We live in the mystery! Regards, Sara