In the mid-1980s, Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi (1924-2014), z”l, better known as ‘Reb Zalman,’ made a twelve minute video of himself praying in the “modes” of various Hasidic rebbes of the past. [1]

Just over 60 years old at the time—his hair and beard a pearly white, curling white peyos framing his face—Reb Zalman, in a short-sleaved navy blue jumpsuit, stands and wraps his original ‘rainbow tallit’ [2] around himself and commences to pray . . . perform . . . embody a series of well-known Hasidic masters.

The video— known only to a few before Reb Zalman’s passing in 2014— was eventually released and made generally available. [3] It was a decision that required some consideration, as Reb Zalman was himself ambivalent about it being seen.

Born in Zholkiew, Poland, in 1924, Reb Zalman was a Holocaust survivor who would leave his Belzer Hasidic roots to join the HaBaD-Lubavitcher Hasidim in New York. An early emissary of the 6th and 7th Lubavitcher Rebbes, he eventually broke away from Lubavitch to become one of the most significant Jewish teachers of the 20th and early 21st-centuries.  

The founder of the influential Jewish Renewal movement, Reb Zalman attempted to infuse the movement with Hasidic teachings and spiritual ‘technologies’ in a more expansive interspiritual milieu. Eventually, he was invited to Boulder, Colorado, to take up the World Wisdom Chair at the Naropa Institute in 1995, where I first met him as a graduate student in 1998.

One day, as we stood outside his office a few years before his passing—going through a rack of recordings of him on CD and DVD—he lifted up a DVD labeled “The Rebbes and Their Modes of Davvenen” and asked me if I had seen this recording from the 1980s. I told him that I had seen it. (I was then in charge of archiving his materials for the University of Colorado.) [4] He said that he believed the recording of him taking on the personae of various Hasidic masters was valuable, but was concerned that if it was not viewed with the proper attitude, it might be thought either disrespectful or comic. Ultimately, he trusted his own sincerity in making it and was willing to be ridiculed if it might benefit others in their own prayer-life.

The video in question opens with Reb Zalman talking about our "root metaphors" for engaging God in prayer, saying:

Every time a person faces God, there is a mirroring going on. I ‘mirror’ the God I place myself before. If this God is ‘exalted,’ I mirror the exaltation; because, after all, what are names of God except ‘root metaphors’ to set up relationships? 

If I call God ‘Adonai’—‘Lord’—a powerful master stands before me. If I call God with the name ‘Yud-Heh-Vav-Heh’—all-pervasive, ever-present being—then I become another one vis-a-vis that name of God. If I say ‘Shaddai,’ I feel that power, that control that is divine (and that is the mezzuzah). And if I want to say ‘Yah!’ . . . there is another outcry to that which reaches me with ‘Wah!’ from God—Yud-Heh Vav-Heh. [5] 

That is to say, there is an internally felt response to ‘placing ourselves before’ different aspects of God: if the God is “exalted,” we might also feel “exaltation.” The ‘reference’ for these various states is ‘resident’ in us, and only needs to be ‘accessed,’ as a Method actor might do, identifying with and experiencing a character's inner motivation and emotions.

Having made this point, Reb Zalman then attempts to ‘feel’ into the archetypes of various Hasidic masters, demonstrating styles of davvenen—praying as if truly in the presence of God, nokhaḥ p’nai HaShem—as it might be expressed through those archetypes. As a short preface, he says:

Often, when I teach about Hasidic masters, I find that for all the teaching, and for all the things I have to say, and for all the things that I quote in their holy names, there is still something missing; because there is a way in which I have gotten to know who those masters are that expresses itself in prayer. [6]

This was a belief that Reb Zalman expressed frequently when speaking about Hasidic masters. Most often, he expressed it in the following manner:

If you really want to know what a particular rebbe was like, you have to know four things: their divrei torah (“teachings”), their sippurim and ma’asiot (“stories and tales”), their niggunim (“melodies”), and their davvenen (“prayer”). [7]

Often, Reb Zalman went further, quoting the Apter Rav, Rabbi Avraham Yehoshua Heschel of Apt (1748-1825), “If you want to learn to pray, you have to learn it from a praying person.”[8] 

But in all this talk of “prayer,” Reb Zalman is referring specifically to davvenen, as noted, and not t’fillah. 

The Hebrew word t’fillah, of course, refers to formal ‘prayer’: the thrice daily rabbinic obligation to pray the Jewish liturgy. But the Yiddish word davvenen, according to the Ḥasidim, is something else: davvenen is to pray with one’s entire being, to become personally involved in the prayer, thus fulfilling the Torah commandment to ‘cry out when we have a need.’ [9] T’fillah is something that can be accomplished without such personal involvement; davvenen can never be accomplished without it. Davvenen, according to Reb Zalman, was ‘tuning to the divine.’ [10]

Here, Reb Zalman creates a situation in which we can witness him—as “a praying person”—‘tuning to the divine’ in the imagined personae of various Hasidic masters of the past. Thus, Reb Zalman goes on to ‘embody’ seventeen different Hasidic masters, as if inspired by each, one at a time: 

Yisrael ben Eliezer, the Ba'al Shem Tov (1698-1760); Dov Baer, the Maggid of Mezritch (1704-1772); the Alter Rebbe, Shneur Zalman of Liadi (1745-1812); Levi Yitzhak of Berditchev (1740-1810); Elimelekh of Lizhensk (1717-1786); Ya'akov Yitzhak, the Ḥozeh of Lublin (1745-1815); Zvi Hirsh of Zhiditchov (1763-1831); Uri, the Seraf of Strelisk (1757-1826); the Tzemaḥ Tzedek, Menachem Mendel of Lubavitch I (1789-1866); the Yid HaKodesh, Ya'akov Yitzhak of P'shiskah (ca. 1766-1814); Simkhah Bunem of P'shiskah (ca. 1765-1827); Menachem Mendel of Kotzk (1787-1859); Mordechai Yosef of Ishbitz (1801-1854); the Apter Rav, Avraham Yehoshua Heschel of Apt (1748-1825); Nahman of Bratzlav (1772-1810); Shlomo of Bobov II (1908-2000); and the sixth Lubavitcher Rebbe, Yosef Yitzhak of Lubavitch (1880-1950). 

For Reb Zalman, each rebbe was a unique personality, with a distinctive style of davvenen, often expressing vastly different religious sensibilities. There was no flattening of them into conventional or homogenized ‘saintly’ modes.

Indeed, the last two rebbes ‘embodied’ were actually figures he knew personally, and to whom he had attached himself as a Hasid in his youth. Particularly significant is his ‘embodying’ of this last rebbe—the sixth Lubavitcher Rebbe, Yosef Yitzhak Schneersohn—who was his own most intimate and beloved rebbe. In this act, we have the opportunity to witness something beautiful: a Hasid ‘re-member-ing’ his own rebbe, more than thirty years after his death. 

Reb Zalman, as Hasid, takes on the ‘affect’ of his rebbe, as he exists in his “cellular memory”—a practice that Sufis call tasawwur-i murshid—and embodies him in prayer. This is especially significant, as Reb Zalman often spoke of how, as a young ḤaBaD-Lubavitcher Hasid, he would watch the rebbe in his davvenen and experience a ‘mirroring’ of the rebbe’s ‘mode of davvenen’ in his own body. 

The sixth Lubavitcher Rebbe, as is well-known, was partially paralyzed after his imprisonment by the Communist government. This affected his speech and mobility, slowing and modifying how he could davven. But so focused were the Ḥasidim on their rebbe, that they too slowed and modified their davvenen to match his, experiencing a kind of “sub-muscular movement,” a pattern or gestalt of the rebbe’s davvenen in their own bodies, which they used to “tune-in to him,” thus enhancing and upleveling their own davvenen. [11] This type of practice is perhaps the entire point of Reb Zalman’s demonstration.

Reb Zalman ends with this statement:

I hope that, somehow, you can see something inside of your neshamah [‘soul’],  in this whole palette of possibilities of stances before the ‘Living God’ that speaks to you. Often, for me, it is just like this . . . to be able to say . . . ‘Rebboina shel Olam [‘Master of the Universe’], I thank you so much, for this opportunity, and for this medium, and for these possibilities that you have opened up to us, so that we can communicate with one another through electronics and make a connection, that allows me and the person who sees this to say, Omayn [‘Amen].’ [12]

In the end, I believe Reb Zalman’s original impulse was justified. The video has been much appreciated and stands as a testimony to how a davvener—which is how Reb Zalman understood himself—can invest in prayer, with truth and authenticity, comparable to the truth and authenticity that Lee Stasberg helped young actors to find in the Actors Studio. The good actor, like the committed davvener, is not ‘faking’ it, they are ‘finding’ that it already exists in them. Everything human and divine is there within us, a spiritually-encoded ‘DNA’ that allows us to access every dimension of being and to reflect it back to God in prayer. 

But for me, the true beauty of this video will always be Reb Zalman’s humility in the moment of discussing  it with me, in his willingness to be ‘seen,’ or even ridiculed over it . . . if it served others in the search for God.

Notes

[1] Likely recorded in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, ca. 1985. At the time of this writing, this author was unable to identify the videographer or anything more about the context of this recording.

[2] One of six original prototypes of the ‘B’nai Or’ or ‘Rainbow Tallit.’ Some of the others were given to Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, Rabbi Arthur Green, and Rabbi Everett Gendler.

[3] This video was ‘ripped’ from a DVD in Schachter-Shalomi’s library by Steven Newman and released on the Yesod Foundation Youtube channel, May 9, 2020, by Netanel Miles-Yépez. Permission for this release was granted to the Yesod Foundation in 2018 by Schachter-Shalomi’s widow, Eve Ilsen. 

[4] “The Zalman M. Schachter-Shalomi Collection” is currently housed at the University of Colorado at Boulder in the Norlin Library Archives. The original archiving and accession was carried-out by Netanel Miles-Yépez for the Yesod Foundation, while he served as content development specialist for, and later executive director of the Reb Zalman Legacy Project (which was operative from ca. 2002-2012). The collection was first housed in the archives of Naropa University.

[5] Zalman Schachter-Shalomi. "The Rebbes and their Modes of Davvening" with Reb Zalman (ca. 1985). The Yesod Foundation, May 9, 2020: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XGdOvA9xT48 

[6] Zalman Schachter-Shalomi. "The Rebbes and their Modes of Davvening" with Reb Zalman (ca. 1985). The Yesod Foundation, May 9, 2020: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XGdOvA9xT48 

[7] Heard on many occasions directly from Schachter-Shalomi. 

[8] Heard on many occasions directly from Schachter-Shalomi. 

[9] Based on a teaching of the Rebbe RaShaB, Shalom Dov Baer Schneersohn of Lubavitch (1860-1920).

[10] Schachter-Shalomi believed that the word davvenen was ultimately derived from the Latin divinum, ‘doing something in a divine manner,’ or ‘doing the divine thing,’ as he might say.

[11] Heard on many occasions directly from Schachter-Shalomi. 

[12] Zalman Schachter-Shalomi. "The Rebbes and their Modes of Davvening" with Reb Zalman (ca. 1985). The Yesod Foundation, May 9, 2020: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XGdOvA9xT48