Kabbalah Part II -- The Tormented Master

This post is about the second week of my Kabbalah class. I recommend you read this post first: Kaballah -- Just Like I Expected and Not Like I Expected At All

You may also enjoy this post about Rebbe Nachman, who was the subject of this weeks' class. The music in the video is completely infections.

Class #2 -- Longing

This week we moved on from the 16th century Hayyim Vital to the 18th century Rebbe Nachman of Bratzlav. Rebbe Nachman has become famous through his stories, teachings, and his longing -- a lifetime worth of longing.

A Tormented Child
He was a tormented man, reaching the highest of highs and the depths of despair. As we read in class, these emotional swings began in childhood. In one story, a 10-year old Nachman longs so desperately to "receive the higher soul which descends into men on the Sabbath" that he has an emotional breakdown when he does not feel its presence. He thought that the revelation "must come to him," but there was nothing. So he wept and wept, hour after hour. Of course, since the story is about a man who eventually became one of the greatest rebbes in history, when he was done weeping he opened his eyes to see the light from the Shabbat candles and "his soul grew peaceful in the light."

I wrote this in the margins of the story:

Why torment a child with these expectations??

From my perspective -- that of an agnostic atheist who has no belief in the supernatural -- teaching a child to expect religious/spiritual experiences is cruel. Nachman was set up for emotional trauma by the expectations of his family and his religion. No wonder he was tormented and felt separated from the world. His longing was for God and meaning and belonging.

The Rooster
The second story we read was the Rebbe Nachman story I find the most heart-wrenching and poignant. The best stories -- or TV shows, or pieces of art, or movies, or songs -- express those things it is most difficult to express. The story goes like this:

A young prince believes that he is a rooster. He takes off his clothes, sits naked under the table, and pecks at his food on the floor. The king and queen are horrified that the heir to the throne is acting this way. They call in various sages and healers to try and convince the prince to act human again, but to no avail. Then a new wise man comes to the palace and claims he can cure the prince. He takes off his clothes and sits naked under the table with him, claiming to be a rooster, too. Gradually the prince comes to accept him as a friend. The sage then tells the prince that a rooster can wear clothes, eat at the table, etc. The Rooster Prince accepts this idea and, step-by-step, begins to act normally, until he is completely cured. 

One interpretation of the story is that the young prince is really a secular Jew who has forgotten his true self. The wise man is a rebbe who helps him find his way back to God and religion. The rebbe succeeds because he meets the prince "where he's at".

What I see in the story, however, is a child who feels so alienated and so different from those around him that he can't even deal with sitting at their table, with being part of their world. While it's good that the wise man was able to get down to the prince's level, quite literally, the goal of the entire endeavor was to change the prince into being like everyone else.


He needed to be "cured" of being a rooster instead of being accepted as a rooster. Read that again without the animalistic imagery. He needed to be cured of being different instead of being accepted for being different.