#gilgul

[janegirl-onias]

""But then we find out, that, why do I hate somebody? Because I have the wrong thought. If I would understand the context of that person's actions, I wouldn't hate him. So I have to now go to that realm of thought. And this is called hitbonenut, the contemplation of truth and also impermanence. This is where our traditions come very close. Our rabbis would be say, 'Nothing of this world remains. Everything changes, everything falls apart.'"

"Yes."

"Yes. So at the level of thought when I understand this, why should I get so upset? The story about the wheel that turns- we use the same word galgal ha-hozer. Today, he is poor, tomorrow he is rich, it's all on the wheel" -Zalman's voice almost chanting- "it's all on the wheel. And the word that we use as gilgul, being on the wheel."

The Dalai Lama pronounced gilgul to himself a few times. It made an important contact between the 2 traditions- for Zalman was touching again on rebirth. He cited a bedtime prayer from the Art Scroll Siddur. "Before going to sleep: Master of the universe, I here forgive anyone who sinned against me my body, my property, my honor... whether he did in this transmigration [gilgul] or another transmigration."

- Jew in the Lotus, pg. 84-85

[thejewitches]

Death is but a change of circumstances, like moving homes.

Rabbi Menachem Mendel of Kotzk

[themirrorofsienna]

The Broken Whole: From Sparks to Communion

The question of division has followed humanity from the beginning. Some saw it as punishment, others as fracture, others as exile. Still, within different traditions, runs a deeper recognition: the soul belongs to a greater root, a body or tree from which it cannot be separated. Encounters that seem accidental are in fact echoes of ancient unity. The memory of what was broken still circulates, and philosophy, mysticism and myth have given it different names. Plato spoke of a lost whole, Luria of shattered vessels, Paul of the body of Christ. Three languages for one truth.

More at The Mirror of Sienna.

[ouroboros8ontology]

To recapitulate what we have said, the Gilgul is part of the process of restoration, of Tikkun. Owing to the power of evil over mankind, the duration of this process is immeasurably extended, but—and here we come to a point in Luria’s doctrine which appealed very strongly to the individual consciousness—it can be shortened by certain religious acts, i. e. rites, penitential exercises and meditations. Everybody carries the secret trace of the transmigrations of his soul in the lineaments of his forehead and his hands, and in the aura which radiate from his body. And those to whom it is given to decipher this writing of the soul can aid in its wandering. It is true that this power is conceded by Cordovero and Luria only to the great mystics.

Gershom Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism; Seventh Lecture: Isaac Luria and his School

[seldow]

gilgul

[janegirl-onias]

"So Rabbi Schachter explained that the goal of the Jewish mystic "at the highest level of all is not to come back into the world, but to achieve what is called the annihilation of the personal, to be so totally drawn into the being of God." This goal might be achieved over several lifetimes or reincarnations. So we were back to the wheel. And the Dalai Lama hadn't forgotten the angels. He wanted to know if angels could also experience rebirth, as devas do.

Reb Zalman answered "Ravi Nachman of Bratslav had a beautiful teaching. He said that all of reality is like a spinning top, sometimes that which is above becomes that which is below. That which was an angel becomes an animal, that which becomes a stone..."

The Dalai Lama interrupted with delight, "Oh. The same."

"When I first met with Geshe Wangyal in America", Zalman continued, "he asked me, is reincarnation only human or also in animals? I user to be a shokhet. It's the one who kills animals that are kosher. Before I would kill the animals, I would send all the people out of the room. I would say to the animals, 'I don't mean to harm you. I mean to give you an opportunity to raise you up. When people eat you with mindfulness and they will open their hearts and their minds to God to pray, you will be able to experience human consciousness and move up on the level of incarnations.' that was part of the task."

[...]

The Buddhist leader wanted to know how rebirth worked in Jewish doctrine. "What determines whether an angel in the next rebirth will be a bird or an animal? What is the main factor? Buddhists call it karma."

[...]

For the Buddhist, the goal of purification practices, such as prostrations and reciting of mantras, is to release one from the negative effects of previous actions, to purify bad karma. Unfinished karma provides energy for another rebirth, it keeps the wheel of rebirth spinning. the ultimate goal- known as Nirvana- is getting off the wheel. Now the Dalai Lama asked about the goal of the Jewish system.

"If an angel takes rebirth in animal form, is it due to the creator, or is it fate? How much is due to one's own behavior? how much is in God's hand?"

Rabbi Omer-Man spoke up. "Perhaps I can give an image we use. Each soul has to create a garment. And each incarnation, each remanfestation, we make a little more or we undo a little more. Ultimately, the goal is to complete the garment, which is a garment of light when it is finished. And in some incarnations, we do more damage, so we pull threads out, in other incarnations, we put more threads in. So how we were manifest depends on what we have done in the past."

The Dalai Lama took this in and asked Jonathan, "The next reincarnation, what kind of reincarnation will take place, is that mainly due to the previous life's behavior?"

"Yes."

Now he appeared satisfied. This sounded very much like karma. The 2 mystical systems of rebirth appeared to have remarkable degrees of similarity."

-pg 87-89, the Jew in the Lotus

[janegirl-onias]

"It should be noted that although Hasidism did not greatly develop the complex Lurianic theory of reincarnation, nonetheless there is a substantial hagiographical discourse on the various incarnations of the Hasidic masters. On the more sociopolitical level, this served to buttress their claims to authority, as in the case of Eichenstein, who displaced more senior claimants to spiritual succession in the name of his mystical expertise. However, from the point of view of the practitioner’s own spiritual self-awareness, knowledge of the origin of his soul was part of the construction of a sense of destiny and mission. Eichenstein also reportedly ascended to the heikhal of the Messiah in a sleep-like state, thus establishing a clear connection with the Besht’s epistle."

-pg 100, Shamanic Trance in Modern Kabbalah (by Jonathan Garb)

[janegirl-onias]

"The challenge of serving the spiritual needs of this odd community were great, however, and though the overall project was surely a remarkable success, it was not without complications. Clearly, for some converses the experience of living as inauthentic Catholics, of engaging in ongoing religious dissimulation, particularly in an era of violent wars of religion and inquisitorial persecutions, was conducive to the development of a skeptical view of religion and religious authority. Upon arrival in the new Jewish community of Amsterdam, yet another difficulty faced the converso: assimilating traditional (i.e., rabbinic) Judaism after having long nursed idyllic (mis-) conceptions of its character. Naturally, conversos, whose knowledge of Judaism was limited to what they could glean from available Catholic sources, were apt to conceive of Judaism as a Christless Christianity, the religion of the "Old Testament." Those who imagined Judaism to be a more "natural" or "reasonable" religion than Christianity on the basis of their sense of the this-worldly character of the Hebrew Bible were dismayed by the rabbinic religion they encountered upon gaining religious freedom. We need only situate Menasseh ben Israel as a young rabbi during the Uriel da Costa affair, and as Spinoza's tutor, to get a sense of how acute this challenge was for him and his communal peers.

Indeed, nearly thirty years before Menasseh wrote Nishmat Hayyim, controversies in the community over the nature of the soul and its afterlife— over the eternality of punishment, that is, whether eternal damnation was a Jewish doctrine, and over the heretical assertions of da Costa (including his thesis that the soul perished with the body)—had led to the penning of a se-ries of polemical tracts by the sages of Amsterdam. The treatise by R. Isaac Aboab da Fonseca, also entitled Nishmat Hayyim, was analyzed and published for the first time in a classic study by Alexander Altmann that explored the complex theological and pragmatic issues raised by the controversy over eternal damnation in the community of former converses. Altmann revealed the extent to which the invocation of the kabbalistic notion of gilgul allowed former converses to escape the tormenting doctrine of eternal damnation— a doctrine that had contributed to da Costa's discarding of Christianity, according to his autobiography. Moreover, Altmann suggested that this kabbalistic escape hatch from this doctrinal "dead end" had something in common with the Socinian writings that were then being published in Holland, writings that presented religious doctrines "as consolatory rather than terrifying truths." Although Jewish historians since the nineteenth century had viewed the kabbalah as a retrograde body of knowledge that promoted a primitive, ethnocentric isolationism among its adherents, Altmann was among the first scholars to recognize its equivocal nature. In this case, Aboab's kabbalism "happened to resound ... with echoes of kindred spirits in the contemporary world at large." This finding anticipated recent work by Robert Bonfil and Allison Coudert, who have argued that the kabbalah functioned as a modernizing force in early modern Jewish culture."

- pgs 121-122, Between Worlds by J. H. Chayes