Breslav Hassidim and Franciscan Catholics are told to talk to God in the woods. Gestalt Therapy provides us with many tools to help us get past our own ego trips and really speak to God. Part 1 of this project shows us “dumb hitbod’dut”, all the wrong things to do, while parts 2-7 of this project attempt to demonstrate some of the right things to do to be more successful if and when you do talk to God.
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“HITBOD’DUT”
CONVERSATIONS WITH MR. H
A LOWBROW, SLIGHTLY IRREVERENT
INTRODUCTION TO BRESLAV THEOLOGY
by franklyn wepner
december 2008
franklynwepner@gmail.com
PREFACE
(a) ON THE HYPOTHESIS OF THIS EXPERIMENT
The teachings of Rabbi Nachman of Breslav, as embodied in today’s Breslav Hassidic sect of Judaism embody a form of what traditionally goes by the name of “Pietism”. Pietism emphasizes faith and simplicity over against complex intellectual explanations of religious matters. But from the day that the Baal Shem Tov, it is said, sought God by talking to Him in the woods and jumping back and forth from one side of a stream to the other, until the day Nachman published his collected essays, “Likutei Moharan”, much water in the stream of Jewish Pietism has passed under the bridge. That is to say, Likutei Moharan is not simple stuff. In order to write what he writes in those pages, Rabbi Nachman had to be well versed in the complex tradition of Pietist religion. Whether he got it from the original sources or from other compilations, he had to know something about the Neoplatonism of Philo, Ibn Gabirol, Judah Halevy , Abu-l-Barakat and Leone Ebreo. He had to know something about the responses of Hasdai Crescas to the Aristotelian Jewish tradition which crystallized in Maimonides “Guide For The Perplexed”. To these two traditions, Nachman of Breslav added a strong emphasis upon the philosophy of language, in the sense that the Word of God is coming to us from a Jewish God who in a profound mystical sense is a speaking God, speaking to us and speaking through us. Though it is hard to find precedents to this in Judaism, we can find it in the work of the Christian theologian Johann Georg Hamann, which appeared, shortly before the time Nachman was born, in Konigsberg, East Prussia, not far from where Nachman lived in Eastern Europe. In the work of Hamann we find much of the philosophy of language which Nachman incorporated into his teachings. In other words, since the teachings of Rabbi Nachman of Breslav are so saturated with the complex tradition of Pietism, they are anything but a return to the naivete of the Bal Shem Tov. In this respect Nachman is deliberately deceptive when he tells his disciples again and again to keep it simple, and rely mainly on prayer.
But he also tells them to study! So he is not preaching mindlessness. Nor is he teaching blind following. His elevation of “the tsaddik of the generation” to the level of highest authority in the community of Hassidim is to be read both in the literal, “pshat”, sense, and also in the profoundest philosophical sense as the Moses-Mashiach element potentially available in every person who submits himself to the theological process outlined in Likutei Moharan. Traditionally in Judaism it is said that each Jew shares in the living reality of Moses receiving the Torah on Mt. Sinai, but for Nachman this notion is merely the tip of an iceberg which is available to those who take the trouble to fathom the ideas of Likutei Moharan.
In view of these elements contained in Nachman’s teachings, it should not be surprising that in what follows here I discover profundity rather than naivete in Nachman’s advice to his disciples that they ought to sequester themselves every day and talk directly to God. Of course, we can talk naively to God in the manner of Tevye in Fiddler On the Roof. That procedure here I label “dumb hitbod’dut”. Dumb hitbod’dut in that sense is in most cases better than no hitbod’dut at all. It can’t hurt, and it might even be more useful than talking to oneself. But I am after bigger fish than that. My goal here is to begin to apply the principles of Likutei Moharan itself to the process of hitbod’dut. This introduction is not the place to spell out the complex principles of Likutei Moharan. You will find some of that in the sequel. Here I will just outline my basic assmptions for this project, which are that
(i) Since Neoplatonism and Hamann’s philosophy of language are examples of dialectical thinking, therefore Likutei Moharan likewise is dialectical thinking.
(ii) Gestalt