Where I am coming from

Nobody human brought me back to the Torah. In retrospect, it was as if I was dragged there despite myself, by a hidden power that somehow succeeded in overcoming my own stubbornness.

Estrangement from Torah

Not long after my Bar Mitzvah, I rejected the mish-mash Judaism with which I was brought up, just like huge numbers of other born Jews following some 200 years of growing assimilation. The lighting of Friday night Shabbat candles at home was followed by turning on the TV, and Saturday morning synagogue services by going shopping or watching football.

The aggressive atheism espoused by one of my schoolteachers made far more of an impression on me than the uninspired sermons of our synagogue rabbi, which became earnest only when he was soliciting donations for the Joint Israel Appeal. Amidst the rising crescendo of conversations by congregants during the prayers and Torah reading, it seemed clear that if there was a God, He was quite absent from the synagogue. Only for brief, magical moments when the entire congregation sang together on Kol Nidrey, night of the Day of Atonement, would tears come to my eyes.

I did and did not want God. If there was no God, the universe and life itself were random, purposeless and ultimately futile. Yet the apparently irascible God of the Bible had a set of rules that seemed archaic and quite out of tune with the modern age. A kosher-only diet would cut me off from innumerable culinary delights not to speak of social life with my friends, while the Torah moral code was directly contrary to the sexual permissiveness of the 1960’s and 70’s.

I searched all over to check if God existed – in ancient and modern philosophy and literature, in anthropology, sociology, psychology… in chapels and cathedrals… in the solitude of the mountains…

Back in the big evil city, permissiveness won out in the latter years of my teens and as a student in my early twenties. Until as a postgraduate student in New York on Yom Kippur night 1974 (though I had no idea then that it was Yom Kippur), I found myself obsessively walking around and around the same mid-town Manhattan city block asking if I should turn myself in to a psychiatrist. I felt my back was against the wall – because my years of efforts searching for a lover, which seemed like the only thing that could bring any real meaning into my futile life, had brought nothing but frustration, disappointment, bitterness and depression.

Meditation

I did go for a few sessions with the campus psychiatrist, a swinging, sexy blonde woman from Berkeley, California, who warmed to certain a gut idea I had. This was that if I could search deep enough into my locked up past, I would rediscover the wellspring of spontaneous joy and delight I had in earliest childhood – before it was lost and destroyed in the pains of growing up. Instead of searching in books and mountains, she encouraged me to search inside myself.

In the same period, something made me try a course in Transcendental Meditation. Here was simplicity itself, sitting for twenty minutes twice daily in a relaxed posture, silently mentally repeating a one-word mantra, thereby allowing the hidden wellsprings of mental and spiritual wellbeing to bubble up by themselves and radiate serenity into the rest of the day.

This was my first experience of prayer. Except that the Sanskrit mantra supplied by my instructor stuck like a bone in my throat: to me it had the sound of a downer. I went back and asked her if I could change it. “Oh no,” she replied, “It was chosen for you by the guru himself.”

I never went back to the TM center. Instead, I started experimenting with Shalom as my mantra. And in the same period, that something inside me that was pushing and drawing me caused me open the Bible at Genesis. Obsessively I pondered the story of Adam and Eve and their bitter expulsion from Eden, until it dawned upon me, or rather, it hit me like a bombshell, that written here in big was the story of my own soul and the loss of my childhood bliss.

If so, I realized with an exuberance coupled with near horror, the only way to return to that lost Eden was by embracing the Torah code that comes to repair the primal sin.

Whose Torah?

But how could the way back have anything to do with the tired old route of all those I had grown up with, who seemingly never doubted their own Jewishness yet found nothing inconsistent in chattering incessantly through the synagogue services? I felt unwilling to turn to any of the Jewish synagogues or organizations I knew for guidance, because of the feeling that they were all compromised by a this-worldliness that had driven away the spirit of God I had begun to taste. I wanted a new, fresh Torah pathway for the future.

I had to go to TM to discover that the mindless recitation of Hebrew prayers and blessings I knew from childhood was in fact a complete system of meditation crafted with the intent of keeping one’s mind constantly focused upon God in different ways in all of the different junctures of life.

Since I was starting a job, I decided to set aside one day in the week for meditation and self-growth, and that something inside me made me feel that if it was a choice between Saturday and Sunday, for sentimental reasons it should be Saturday…

Shabbat. That was where it all really started. I would meditatively repeat a few prayers remembered from childhood, and read more and more of the Bible.

I read: “And you shall write them on the doorposts of your house” (Deut. 6:9) – so I literally pinned a card with the Ten Commandments on the doorpost of my room.

“And they shall make for themselves fringes on the corners of their garments” (Numbers 15:38) – I was determined to tie the Tzitzith fringes myself. But from books alone I just couldn’t figure out how to do it….

Who have the goods?

So I got on my motor scooter one Sunday morning and drove from my trendy central London apartment to the North London Stamford Hill area, where the unfamiliar sight of heavily-bearded black-hat, black coat Jews on the streets gave me the dreaded feeling of going back to the ghetto. At least the young man I met in the entrance lobby of the Lubavitch House smiled instead of scowling. Within minutes he was showing me exactly how to tie the knots of the Tzitzith.

Oy veyyy!!! So the “ultra-orthodox” really have the goods??? Here that unknown guiding force had pushed me face to face with one of the things I was dreading most: Rabbinic Judaism – the Judaism of the Talmud and strict adherence to all the details of the Shulchan Aruch law code. All I had wanted was to march forward bravely to the serenity of Eden recovered. Instead, I felt I was being forced back into the rigid, narrow, ossified past.

How many tears I shed as I struggled to learn Biblical and Rabbinic Hebrew so that I could find out the truth for myself! How I envied those who had the Hebrew sounds and words in their heads from childhood. For “When one learns only when he is old, it is like ink written on blotted paper” (Avot 4:20).

Not long after embarking on my Hebrew studies, I moved to that same fairly dreary North London orthodox neighborhood, not so much because of any positive attraction but rather through a sense of compulsion, as if only here would I find “the goods”.

The burning fire outside

One night I dreamed that I was locked inside the Chabad House, but outside a splendid bonfire was ablaze. This was two weeks before I paid my first visit to Israel as a Shabbat-observant Jew, in 1977. On my first night in Jerusalem I wandered into an English-speaking “Baal Teshuvah” (penitents) yeshiva class on teachings of Rabbi Nachman of Breslov (1772-1810). Then a couple of days later, I met the Tzaddik who became one of my main Breslover teachers, Rabbi Gedaliah Koenig (d. 1980, of blessed memory), who I knew to have “the goods”, because of the serenity, centeredness, kindness and pure sweetness he emanated.

Rabbi Nachman was virtually the only outstanding rabbi I have encountered who emphasized the paramount importance of meditation as one of the main foundations of the spiritual path of the Torah. He taught us to quest, pray, sing, dance, cry, weep, scream out to God, explore the inner child, and so much more. And in Rabbi Gedaliah, sweetness of sweetness, I saw a living exemplar of that way and the serene spiritual connection to which it leads.

It was the supremely wise Rabbi Nachman whose teachings reconciled me with the Oral Torah, the Talmud and Shulchan Aruch law code. Rabbi Nachman opened my eyes to the spiritual truths contained within the riddles of the Talmud and the mysterious twists and turns of the Halachah.

Torah outreach

While studying a Rabbi Nachman text with a friend, he suggested that I should write down what I was explaining to him. This resulted in my first translation, “Restore My Soul” (published in 1980 as the first publication of the Breslov Research Institute). With my training as a student of languages and a professional BBC writer, I felt I could start to pay back for the Torah gifts I had discovered by making these teachings available to others through translations and commentaries. This has been my work since then until today.

In the earlier years of this work, while I was working with the Breslov Research Institute, I assumed that the main purpose of our publications was to “bring Jews back” to the Torah, although one Mekubal whom I visited in that period saw some of my books and asked me if they were relevant to non-Jews. After a moment of thought, I answered that they could probably be quite relevant since Rabbi Nachman deals with the foundations of faith and prayer, which apply to the gentiles as well, even though they are not obligated to practice all the 613 Commandments of the Torah that apply only to Israel.

Widening the net

From the mid 1980’s I was traveling widely in North America teaching Rabbi Nachman and Chassidut, and had an entrée into the “New Age” world of spiritual quest and retreat centers. Reading their catalogs it was immediately apparent how so many of the areas that were captivating enormous numbers of people from all backgrounds and beliefs had important parallels in the Torah tradition. I also felt that it would be necessary to go further than Breslov Research Center could officially travel in order to show the wider world the relevance of the Torah to present-day spiritual interests and concerns.

This was why I established the Azamra Institute in 1986 with the brief of communicating Torah spirituality in the languages and media of our times. Azamra publishes a variety of quality Torah outreach works including important writings of Rabbi Moshe Chaim Luzzatto (“Ramchal”) and Rabbi Nachman. I jumped onto the Internet in 1993, seeing its potential to help reach people who were physically remote from the handful of Jewish population centers where a few Torah bookstores were selling the Breslov books. Since then Internet has taken a central position in Azamra’s outreach.

Particularly since 2000, it has become increasingly apparent that a high proportion of the regular visitors to this Torah site are very serious seekers who deeply resonate and identify with the Torah yet cannot be described as Jewish according to the normal criteria of orthodox or even reform rabbis. Some are would-be converts to Judaism. Others call themselves Noahides. Many are from Christian backgrounds, and many describe themselves as ex-Christians. Some call themselves Messianic Jews, and some call themselves Ephraim.

Contacts with a number of representatives of these various currents, some of whom have become dear friends, have taught me about the enormous ferment of interest in Torah over wide areas of the world. Indeed, this very likely exists in the wider population to an even further extent than any of us can really imagine.

War and peace

Particularly since the beginning of the 21^st century and 9/11 a year later, it has become apparent that the world is increasingly locked in a war of religions and cultures. Ironically, precisely at this time the Torah is attracting interest and devotion among gentiles to a degree unknown since the destruction of the Second Temple (68 C.E.).

The Torah is not at war with anyone, because “her ways are ways of pleasantness, and all her paths are peace” (Proverbs 3:17). Hillel said, “Be of the students of Aaron, loving peace and pursuing peace; love the creations and draw them closer to the Torah” (Avot 1:12). Hillel’s word “the creations” (Hebrew, ha-BERIYOT) refers to all of God’s creations, Jew and non-Jew, Israelite and gentile.

It is in this spirit that we offer TORAH FOR THE NATIONS.