And as a Jewish man who faced unthinkable evil during Nazi Germany and a rabbi who has studied many philosophies and religions, he’s extraordinarily well-equipped to offer vision and hope for our nation and the planet in the years to come.

Born in Zholkiew, Poland in 1924, Reb Zalman spent most of his childhood in Vienna, Austria, where he was educated in a “leftist” Zionist high school, where he learned Latin and Modern Hebrew, and a traditional Orthodox yeshiva, where he studied Torah and Talmud. When he was 13 years old, he and his family fled Nazi oppression via a long and circuitous route through Belgium, France, North African and the Caribbean, finally landing in New York City in 1941.

Over the next several decades, he received his rabbinic ordination from the Central Lubavitch Yeshiva, as well as a Master of Arts degree in the Psychology of Religion (pastoral counseling) and a Doctor of Hebrew Letters degree. Though he was essentially “divorced” from the Lubavitcher Hasidim sect of Judaism because of his untraditional and controversial engagement with modern culture and other religions, Reb Zalman continued as an “independent” hasid, teaching the experiential dimensions of Hasidism as one of the world’s great religions. He also studied Sufism, and was initiated as a Sheikh in the Sufi Order of Hazrat Inayat Khan. And in 1985, he took a forty-day retreat at Lama Foundation in New Mexico, an experience that culminated in a new teaching that resulted in the Spiritual Eldering movement.

In 1995, Reb Zalman accepted the World Wisdom Chair at Naropa University. From here, he began teaching contemplative Judaism and ecumenical spirituality in an accredited academic setting. Here, he speaks with Nexus about our current economic and environmental crises, the state of religion, an organismic view of the world, and his hopes and vision for our planet.

RD: Our nation is in a complex and fearful time. Our new president is taking office in the face of a huge economic crisis and two long-running wars. You’ve seen more, read more, lived longer than I and most of my readers, and you’ve had a broad and vast perspective on the world. In what direction should our new president—and we, as Americans—go?

RZ: We must demand at all times an accounting of the hidden costs of any event. You build a hospital to treat sick people? That’s wonderful. And there will be iatrogenic diseases as a result of that; you’ll build roads, and trees will be cut down and there will be road kill and people will die on the roads. We’re talking about creating an energy system so we can keep driving and flying the cars and airplanes which are polluting the atmosphere so greatly. The simple fact that the airlines are having trouble and the car companies are having trouble is a way in which the mind of earth is telegraphing us a message: “This can’t go on.” We want growth at whatever cost, but it’s like a Ponzi scam; it has to fall apart.

The “growth at whatever cost” ethic has even affected global population. I once wrote a letter to Pope Paul when he was coming out with his Humanae Vitae, the birth control encyclical. Instead of speaking about natural law, the Pope should go back to the Bible. It says be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth; now the earth is full. As the earth becomes more and more crowded, we’re like rogue cancer cells: we’re killing off the body of the earth.

We can’t allow the structure to fall apart completely. We now have a president-elect who understands, more than anybody else I can think of, what’s wrong with this form of government. But he won’t telegraph anything that will scare people, because he wants to make the transition like a healing; he wants to approach it in a gradual way.

RD: It seems clear that our current crisis is not a passing economic cycle, but rather the potential collapse of our system. Do you think this is true?

RZ: Yes; our system itself is outdated. It’s like working with Windows III when it first came out. Imagine what an extraordinary amount you couldn’t do today, if you didn’t have the new system. Just like you have a computer system, we have a life system and a political system. We have to de-bug them and take the viruses out; we have to update them. We have to make sure the life and political operating systems will work. We can’t expect the old mind, left-brain technology to accomplish that; we need a new way of thinking.

Here’s a funny example. What if we restructured Senate meetings so that senators weren’t sitting in rows but rather in a circle, according to their signs of the Zodiac. Could you imagine two Aquarians sitting next to each other, two Leos sitting next to each other, regardless of the party? It would be more harmonious.

And imagine if we ensured the mental and emotional capacity of member of congress, if we administered a psychological profile. What if, before we vetted anybody for Congress or public office, we put them through a whole series of examinations, like we do with Supreme Court justices or CEOs? I would make a rule, if I could, that no one gets to run for office unless he or she has been vetted to be sane and capable of having a larger view. Part of the larger view is to see that Earth is a whole organism.

RD: How does that organismic view relate to religions? Do they needed to be “updated” like other systems?

RZ: Yes. Religions haven’t had an update for a long time. Christian Fundamentalists are going around with a snapshot of divinity that was taken in the year 160. Jews go back far longer. Islam is stuck in the 6th century. If you want to run life on the planet today with those old systems, it’s not going to work. On the other hand, we don’t want to give up on the values that religion carries. It carries consciousness, it carries a tradition, and most religions have an additional factor that people are not aware of--the chthomic factor, a Greek word meaning “from earth.”

We have many active religions here in the United States, but many of them are lacking in their ethnic roots and connection to the earth. For example, the Buddhism that has been exported to the United States has been stripped of all markers of ethnic and chthomic stuff. The japanoiserie has been pulled out of Zen, and we practice yoga without much of the pantheon of Hinduism. It’s like one man told me: “I’m a Hindu without masala.”

These and other religions will have to have some updates; so we’re not looking for a god who’s sitting outside the universe, using intelligent design to fix everything up; and we need some updates to recognize our connection with the earth, to learn what the earth is teaching us. We have to get away from the old cosmology but still keep the teachings.

If you look back throughout history, you’ll see that religions have shifted and changed many times.We’ve had a goddess time. We’ve had gods who were zoomorphic—they looked like animals, like Ganesha or Anubis. Then those started to look like human beings, so that became the period of anthromorphic gods. Then there came the period of the Middle Ages, after Aristotle. The important time was the Axial Age.

This era saw many great thinkers, philosophers and religious leaders: Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Ezekiel, Jeremiah, Isaiah, Zarathustra, Mahavira, Buddha, Lao Tse and Confuscious; they all lived roughly around the same time. Karen Armstrong (see Nexus, May/June 2008, “Jesus and Jihad”) wrote about the Axial age as well. It was as if there was an awakening in Earth like a flash, and not everybody had a photographic plate to pick it up. These men had many theophanies—a theophany is an appearance of god—and they used them to create systems. The Axial Age is so called because it created a huge shift in overall consciousness.

In our new view of the organismic world, we realize that every religion is like a vital organ of the planet. It would be silly to say that I should be made only from liver and no bones or anything else. The notion that Islam should conquer the world is like saying the whole world should be liver, or the whole world should be spine. When you have an organismic understanding, you realize that all religions contribute to each other and all are essential to the life of the planet-but not as they stand right now, because they don’t communicate. Have you ever heard of the body talk system?

RD: I have. It’s an energy medicine system?

RZ: Yes. It was created by John Veltheim, an Australian chiropractor. Velthein says the body is very smart, much smarter than the head. With kinesiology, you can ask the body questions, and the body will tell you which organ isn’t talking to which organ. If you can get all the organs to talk to each other in harmony, healing takes place by itself. In the same way, we must recognize the essential need to have each religion, and to be connected with each other. “From you I receive, to you I give, and together we share and from this we live,” as the song goes. Or how I like to say it: the only way to get it together is together.

With that in mind, there’s another piece to the change that needs to happen: a recognition of the feminine aspect. More and more, women are coming into the picture. The fact that Hillary didn’t make it this time doesn’t matter. We now know we have to have women in leadership roles. We have to have women involved in religions like Catholicism, which still thinks in a masculine way. And we have to recognize that men are not only masculine; we have female hormones, too.

RD: I wonder how hormones and hormonal cycles are related to the organismic world view. It seems women tend to have more recognition of and intuitive understanding of cycles in life.

RZ: I agree. There is a deeply cyclical aspect to the organismic reality. We have seasonal changes, daily changes in light. We certainly don’t honor the daylight cycle and the night cycle, and we have disorders now called seasonal affective disorders and such. Why is this happening? Because we’re out of sync with the cycles of the earth. At night, we need to sit near the fire, not keep working past sundown, sometimes even well into the night. That intuitive feminine understanding of cycles and life has to be brought back.

I wrote a book called “From Age-ing to Sage-ing” (Grand Central Publishing, 1997). We no longer have sages, or any models for aging. In traditional societies, elders were honored; they were the wisdom keepers, and they worked together to create a vision. Now, we have no models in which elders work in ensemble; after retirement, people either spend their days in solitude, or start running around like teenagers, taking cruises and such. People with the accumulated wisdom of age should be like the traffic controllers for society, creating a vision. We no longer have any kind of sages and shaman who gather in a visioneering capacity. We have the cultural creatives, but they’re doing it in a left-brain, analytical way. We need more people to act as wise visionaries, to get out of analyzing and go into the subtle spaces and ask “What does the earth want?”

A few years ago, I was on a panel with the Dhali Llama and Bishop Desmond Tutu in Vancouver, and I raised four questions. I asked “Which cosmology does earth want us to have, so that she can heal? What are the ethics that are derived from that cosmology? What are the skillful means to help us live the ethics that are derived from that cosmology? And what transpersonal psychology and sociology do we need in order to understand how to do these things?

RD: What do you believe the earth wants and needs from us?

RZ: On a practical level, to limit growth immediately. Population growth is the greatest cause of sickness of the planet; there simply aren’t enough resources to support the number of people we now have. When religions insist that birth control is taboo, they will have to bear the guilt of the shadow costs they’re creating for the planet. It has to be trumpeted out loud and said, “This is no good; this is wrong.”

On a broader scale, we need to be in a space where we understand and really feel what the earth feels. The earth does not speak human language; if my body were to feel what Earth feels right now, I’d scream in pain. Show me one part of the planet that isn’t hurting. The air, the lungs, are clogged with emphysema. The rivers, the bloodstreams, are poisoned. I could go on and on. The earth’s pain is reflected by the human pain that is happening throughout the world, in Africa, in the Middle East, in our own country.

And the stupidity. What is it inside people that allows them to act in such foolish, crazy ways? What is it in a religion that says “There is no god but Allah,” but if you’re a Shiite or a Sunni, you get killed? To be able to understand what the earth wants from us, we need visionaries to help change the way religions operate in this organismic worldview.

RD: You’ve done that work in Judaism. Your work helped create the Jewish renewal movement.

RZ: Life deployed me in this way, that’s all, and there were other people who were deployed to go the same way. That’s how we congregated together and did what we did. Here, you have the Rabbis Tirzah Firestone and Victor Gross and Nadya Gross. They and others are to making their services more colorful, more energetic and alive. Who wants to spin their wheels when they come to church or synagogue? You want to get the holy endorphins to give you a payoff and say “Yes, I did it today. It really worked for me.”

RD: How does the Jewish renewal religion update Judaism?

RZ: We had to give up a number of things: first, that revelation only happened a long time ago at Sinai. Revelation is constant. I don’t know from the galactic god or the cosmic god or all that woo-woo stuff way up there. The only relationship I have is to the god of the planet, the spirit of the planet. That’s the god that I can get my revelations from; that god, I can serve. Meaning comes to us from an organismic understanding of how we are with earth.

Then we had to look at the commandments. And so we used to have very good commandments about what’s kosher and what’s not kosher. But then I thought, “We also have to ask what’s ecologically kosher? So, for instance, a bowl that had pork in it wouldn’t be kosher; but a styrofoam bowl that has never been used would be kosher but not eco-kosher. The ordination of women was a very important part of the Jewish Renewal, and the use of the vernacular in prayer. The use of music was important, too.
There was also the issue of hierarchy: the people on top don’t listen to the people on the bottom. But when my toe hurts, my head gets it; that’s the way an organism works. Congregations that don’t work organismically fall apart today. Many congregations, Jewish or Christians, have become life cycle facilities.

RD: What do you mean?

RZ: You want to get married, you want to have a funeral, you want to have a Bar Mitzvah, I call it a “mazel tov” facility. When there’s no event, no life cycle being marked, no one’s there. On the other hand, in Jewish Renewal, even if nothing else eventful is happening, lots of people are there. They feel seen, they feel they make a contribution, they feel they walk home with an experience, and they’re nourished by it. I think that that’s necessary all the way around. Look at what Rick Warren has created.

RD: Who is Rick Warren?

RZ: He started the Saddleback Church in Anaheim, California, which has a weekly attendance of about 22,000 people. He also wrote a book called God’s Answers to Life’s Difficult Questions: Living With Purpose (Zondervan, 2006). How does he keep his people together? Well, they have small groups of 7 or 8 people who meet every week and talk about how to make their lives more purposeful. And he’s created a sense of community, which we don’t have any longer.

RD: How so?

RZ: Well, for one thing, we don’t have porches anymore. And we have garages attached to our houses, so we’re never outdoors around our houses. We don’t know our neighbors. It will be very important during this difficult transition time to have block parties again. They used to have rent parties during the depression, so that people could be with each other. We need to visit more, to invite people into our homes and go to theirs. We need to get to know each other better.

We also need more conversations that take us to a higher place, rather than drag us lower, and better messages from the media. Look at Bill Moyer’s Journal on PBS, for instance; this is good food for the mind and soul. There’s a lot of programming that is so bad, and it’s only done because networks think it will sell whatever it is they’re trying to sell. We want to reduce teenage pregnancies and drug use, but we have movies that show kids in their teens in the bedroom getting it on, or smoking pot. We want to reduce violent crime, but we make guns glamorous.

Another way of creating community, that will also get us through these hard economic times, is to create soft money, and to exchange goods and services with each other. And maybe to look at taxes in a different way—to offer patriotic tips to the country to pay down the debt.

RD: What do you mean?

RZ: Imagine I belong to a country club. I’m glad to pay their dues for all the privileges I get. For a man like me, who came from Europe and had to flee Hitler, the Fourth of July is a very special holiday. When I start thinking of taxes, I want to say “No, these are dues to the country club.”

After you eat in a restaurant, you get the check showing how much the food cost, how much you’re being charged in taxes, and then you have to pay the tip. I’d like to have another line that read “Patriotic contribution to pay down the national debt.” Could you imagine? Mastercard and Visa would collect that and send it into the Treasury, and it would only go for paying down the national debt. You have a good meal, you enjoy your food, it would be good to have such a line. But it shouldn’t be demanded; it should be optional, so that a person should feel his or her patriotic devotion is expressed in this way.

The other thing people don’t recognize is if Japan, China and India were to pull the rug out from under our financial system and demand that we pay up right away or default, we would be in great trouble. The notion that we have that we have to be the superpower is outdated. We are all interdependent at this point. We need to support that interdependence, not for the sake of power politics, but for the sake of helping people and the world.

Yet we have so few ways in which we actually connect or create community. Look at Second Life, or Face Book or YouTube. Second Life is a whole world that’s been created on the internet. You have an avatar, you make up a person to look the way you want to look, and he speaks for you. They have love affairs, they get married, they’re doing business, they’re teaching and so on and so forth. It’s an indication of how great is our hunger to connect.

The connectivity that’s being created around the planet is good. What it is used for isn’t necessarily good. In many ways, the cell phone is a wonderful thing. It’s convenient, it keeps us connected, it can be a lifesaver in a crisis. On the other hand, when two feeble-minded women are being sent in Baghdad into a place with belts strapped onto them, which are detonated by a cell phone, that’s not good. I’m not against technology.

There is a man named Ray Kurzweil who talks about singularity. He suggests that by 2010, computers will have consciousness. Some people are afraid of that. But I’m already half a bionic man. I have implant lenses, I need hearing aids, I’ve got dentures, I’ve got a piece of plastic in here (points to his diaphragm). Other people go around with pacemakers. We have technology now which will allow us to either create or destroy. That’s what Oppenheimer (the scientific director of the Manhattan Project) said when he saw the atom bomb: it can either destroy us, or we can really have a good world.

When I think of the current possibility optimized, I see a veritable Garden of Eden on this planet. When I see how greed would like to latch onto it, I’m scared. I don’t know what to say about the future; it depends on which way we choose to go. But my prayer is that more and more waking up will happen. When my daughter was young, and I put her to bed one night, she asked me, “Aba, when you’re asleep, you can wake up, right?” “Ya,” I said. Then she asked, “When you’re awake, can you wake up even more?” I think you can.