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Search for Meaning with Rabbi Dr. Tal Sessler · Search for Meaning with Rabbi Yoshi

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: God's vessels are broken.
• 0:02
  SPEAKER_00: And what are God's vessels?
• 0:04
  SPEAKER_00: That's us.
• 0:04
  SPEAKER_00: That's humankind.
• 0:15
  SPEAKER_01: Welcome to Search for Meaning.
• 0:17
  SPEAKER_01: I'm Yoshi Zwyback.
• 0:18
  SPEAKER_01: Thanks so much for joining me.
• 0:20
  SPEAKER_01: I'm really excited about the conversation today, and you'll understand why in just a little bit.
• 0:25
  SPEAKER_01: My guest is Rabbi Tal Sessler.
• 0:28
  SPEAKER_01: Tal was born and raised in Tel Aviv, came to the United States to earn his doctorate in political philosophy before being ordained a rabbi at the Jewish Theological Seminary.
• 0:39
  SPEAKER_01: He currently serves as rabbi of Temple Beth Zion in Los Angeles.
• 0:44
  SPEAKER_01: And he's also a spiritual counselor at a treatment center for addiction recovery run by Chabad.
• 0:49
  SPEAKER_01: And I have a copy of his recent book, Torah for Mental Health.
• 0:53
  SPEAKER_01: And we'll talk in the context of the conversation a little bit about how I came across the book and how Tom and I met.
• 0:59
  SPEAKER_01: But this is just a beautiful, beautiful volume.
• 1:02
  SPEAKER_01: And I'm so grateful to you for sharing it with us and for making time for me and the podcast.
• 1:07
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you, Talk.
• 1:09
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you, Rabbi.
• 1:10
  SPEAKER_00: It's a pleasure to be here and discuss Torah with you.
• 1:14
  SPEAKER_01: So you've moved between different worlds: Tel Aviv, a doctorate in philosophy, rabbinic ordination, an Ashkenazi pulpit in New Jersey, and then your previous job, which I didn't mention in your bio, was working at the Sephardic Temple here in Los Angeles.
• 1:31
  SPEAKER_01: And so you've moved in all these different worlds.
• 1:34
  SPEAKER_01: Is there sort of a through line as you think about it, or is it this kind of serendipitous path that happened?
• 1:40
  SPEAKER_01: How did that path emerge?
• 1:42
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you.
• 1:43
  SPEAKER_00: I love your question.
• 1:45
  SPEAKER_00: I think that I started with my ancestors in Europe.
• 1:50
  SPEAKER_00: I wanted to understand what happened to our people, those of us who are of Ashkenazi European descent, we have resided in Europe for over a millennium.
• 2:01
  SPEAKER_00: And then two-thirds of us perished in genocide.
• 2:05
  SPEAKER_00: And my grandfather was a Holocaust refugee.
• 2:08
  SPEAKER_00: And I wanted to understand Europe and European Jewry and what life was like for Jews in Europe.
• 2:16
  SPEAKER_00: What were the ideas and the culture of European Jews?
• 2:22
  SPEAKER_00: So I actually spent half a decade in London, including college studies.
• 2:27
  SPEAKER_00: I lived in France and I wrote my doctorate on two French philosophers.
• 2:33
  SPEAKER_00: One is a Jewish Holocaust survivor called Immanuel Levinas, on whom I wrote two books, and the other one is Albert Camus, the great secular humanist.
• 2:43
  SPEAKER_00: So I dedicated about a decade of my life to studying the Western canon, if you like, through college and a PhD program in my first book.
• 2:54
  SPEAKER_00: And then I went on a journey to Jewish textuality to gain more Jewish literacy.
• 3:01
  SPEAKER_00: Having been brought up in Ramataviv, which is like the stronghold of the Israeli secular intelligentsia, I wanted to have access to the Jewish canon, and I also wanted to become a rabbi because I felt that in the rabbinate ideas come to life.
• 3:19
  SPEAKER_01: Well, I love that.
• 3:20
  SPEAKER_01: And when I was reading a little bit about you and I came across the Levinas connection, I wrote my my senior thesis in college on Emanuel Levinas.
• 3:31
  SPEAKER_01: So maybe for a future podcast, we'll dive deep and all of the Levinas fans out there.
• 3:36
  SPEAKER_01: But for people who've read any of Levinas, you know that this is not for the faint of heart.
• 3:41
  SPEAKER_01: This is for the serious philosophy student.
• 3:44
  SPEAKER_01: I accessed Levinas through his Jewish writings, so I I looked at some of his Talmudic uh lectures that he would give that were a little bit more accessible.
• 3:52
  SPEAKER_01: What how did you first get connected to Levinas?
• 3:55
  SPEAKER_01: I'm just curious as someone who's who's um you know kind of broken his teeth a little bit on Levinas.
• 4:01
  SPEAKER_00: Well Levinas was a bridge for me.
• 4:03
  SPEAKER_00: You know, when I lived in Manhattan, which is for me New York City, the last Jewish city in the world, in the sense that Vienna was a Jewish city a century ago, with uh Freud, Gustav Mahler, and Arthur Schnitzler all living in the same street, and Freud and his circle.
• 4:21
  SPEAKER_00: So when I lived in New York City, um I was active in modern Orthodox circles before I went down the conservative route.
• 4:31
  SPEAKER_00: And I was pursuing my studies in philosophy, and Levinas uh was a bridge between the two because he studied philosophy under two of the great masters of 20th century philosophy, Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger.
• 4:46
  SPEAKER_00: And Heidegger became a Nazi, and that's a separate conversation, and that really shook Levinas.
• 4:52
  SPEAKER_00: And then Levinas became also a Jewish ethicist.
• 4:56
  SPEAKER_00: He had these remarkable Talmudic commentaries, which were very contemporary and pertinent to what's happening in the world, and he also wanted to find a remedy to what happened to European ideas through Nazism and Stalinist communism, how Europe, that was the bedrock of great ideas for humanity, like the French Revolution and universal human rights, ultimately took us, humanity, down the path of murderous Stalinist communism and Nazi genocide.
• 5:35
  SPEAKER_00: So I chose Levinas in short because he is a bridge between Western secular philosophy and Jewish tradition and Jewish textuality.
• 5:48
  SPEAKER_01: There's an essay in nine Talmudic readings that you just referenced called Judaism and Revolution, where he confronts the issue of Heidegger becoming a Nazi.
• 6:00
  SPEAKER_01: And the question is, you know, even in the pursuit of something that seems to be a moral good, like pursuing thieves, can you collaborate with what is the opposite of moral good, you know, the Nazis?
• 6:15
  SPEAKER_01: So can you essentially be a university professor for the Nazis or could you be a police officer for the Roman government?
• 6:23
  SPEAKER_01: And so that's it's a powerful question that not all of us uh in our real lives have to confront because we don't always have those kinds of situations.
• 6:33
  SPEAKER_01: But the question of, and I'm actually thinking about this week's Tor portion, which we're recording this at Parshatchov team, and there's that that doubling, that famous doubling, sedik, sedik, tier dof, justice, justice you shall pursue, and the beautiful teaching that there have to there has to be a just process towards getting to justice.
• 6:53
  SPEAKER_01: The means have to be just as well.
• 6:55
  SPEAKER_01: Or is it the opposite where you say, look, you know, don't be naive.
• 7:00
  SPEAKER_01: The world is the world.
• 7:02
  SPEAKER_01: And if you want to have the outcome you want, sometimes you have to get in the mud and get dirty and deal with that.
• 7:09
  SPEAKER_01: How do you navigate that when you think about both moral philosophy, which you've obviously studied, and also what it means to be uh in the in the world of therapy and psychology and treatment?
• 7:20
  SPEAKER_01: And I guess what I'd connect it to is the beginning of the book where you talk about brokenness, you know, the broken vessels.
• 7:27
  SPEAKER_01: And so, you know, the reality of the world is there's these jards and fragments, and you get your hand, you reach in there, you're gonna cut your hand, but how else are you gonna put it together unless you try to reach in there?
• 7:38
  SPEAKER_01: So I guess the question is how do you navigate that in your own rabbinant, in your own life, the brokenness, the wholeness, the messiness trying to reach moral perfection in the process?
• 7:51
  SPEAKER_00: I have your question.
• 7:52
  SPEAKER_00: It's a very deep and twofold question.
• 7:55
  SPEAKER_00: Uh the first part of the question, as I understand it, is are we willing to compromise the ideal for the sake of the real?
• 8:04
  SPEAKER_00: Are we willing to sometimes walk through routes that are not ideal or perfect in the pursuit of ennobling ideas?
• 8:15
  SPEAKER_00: And I think that politics in its better versions is precisely that.
• 8:21
  SPEAKER_00: I also think that the idea of tzedek, tzedek, tierdov can be construed as individual justice and collective justice.
• 8:29
  SPEAKER_00: There have been many great thinkers and many people that are enamored with humanity as an abstract idea or but and are concerned about ideas of justice, say under communism, but when it came to actual human beings, flesh and blood, three-dimensional, next to me, in need on the street, they were oblivious to human suffering.
• 8:52
  SPEAKER_00: And they were willing to justify sending millions of people, including rabbis and priests, to the gulags, to the Soviet concentration camps, in the name of progress, in the name of redemption.
• 9:03
  SPEAKER_00: So I think that's a path that we should be mindful of.
• 9:09
  SPEAKER_00: With regards to the brokenness, that part of your question, um, I often think about the Japanese art of kintsugi, which is a magnificent art form where they take uh a vase or a vase, whichever way you want to pronounce it, that was shattered, and they stitch it back together and they cover it with gold, and it looks exquisite, even more exquisite than it looked before.
• 9:35
  SPEAKER_00: It becomes shining and glorious in the broken places.
• 9:39
  SPEAKER_00: And there is a legend that a Japanese emperor had a vessel which he cherished, and it was broken, and this ingenious artist came and stitched it back together and plattered it with gold, and then came the idea of kinsugi.
• 9:53
  SPEAKER_00: So kintsugi can be construed as the way in which we beautify and bring dignity and redemption to brokenness.
• 10:01
  SPEAKER_00: Now there is a beautiful Jewish uh analogy to that in Rabbi Alexandri and Vikarabba in uh in a Jewish midrashic work where it's where he says the kadush bohuhu, the holy blessed one, kelav shvorim, God's vessels are broken.
• 10:18
  SPEAKER_00: And what are God's vessels?
• 10:20
  SPEAKER_00: That's us, that's humankind.
• 10:22
  SPEAKER_00: So uh we are all inherently broken, and I think nobody put it better than Ernest Hemingway in his masterpiece on World War I, a farewell to arms.
• 10:32
  SPEAKER_00: And of course, Hemingway had his struggles with mental health, with a mood disorder, with alcohol addiction.
• 10:39
  SPEAKER_00: And Hemingway writes uh very poignantly and powerfully, he writes, the world breaks everyone, and afterward, many are strong in the broken places.
• 10:50
  SPEAKER_00: And I think that the cement in life, in many ways, is to realize that brokenness is inevitable.
• 11:01
  SPEAKER_00: And I think as educators, we also need to ready our children for the fact that there will be devastation, heartache, loss, failure.
• 11:11
  SPEAKER_00: It's synonymous with the human condition.
• 11:13
  SPEAKER_00: But how do we harness those uh broken fragments that are integral to the human condition and achieve another term that I'm enamored with, which is post-traumatic growth, PTG?
• 11:28
  SPEAKER_00: People talk a lot about PTSD.
• 11:31
  SPEAKER_00: Uh people tend to know it's post-traumatic stress disorder.
• 11:35
  SPEAKER_00: But today there is uh in the last two decades in psychological literature the idea of post-traumatic growth.
• 11:41
  SPEAKER_00: How do people take terminal illness, devastating loss, being uh victims of political violence, and actually take themselves to the next level and become a blessing to others through service.
• 11:53
  SPEAKER_01: So powerful and so beautiful, and something I think probably every listener can relate to on some level, some more dramatic examples of trauma, maybe some less obvious or dramatic examples of trauma, but there's no getting through this world without it.
• 12:10
  SPEAKER_01: And and then there's also the sort of trauma we experience when we see others experience trauma.
• 12:16
  SPEAKER_01: And I'm thinking about, you know, post-October 7th, there were many Jews around the world, and not only Jews, who witnessed through video, through reading stories, through hearing testimony, witnessed the trauma, and there's a vicarious kind of experience of it as well, or Holocaust studies.
• 12:36
  SPEAKER_01: You know, I was born in 1969, so certainly post that experience, but my entire life of fascination with those stories and wanting to learn more and go deeper and now having visited, you know, there's there's the trauma that you experience just vicariously, and how can it help us to grow?
• 12:55
  SPEAKER_01: How can we see it as an opportunity for growth?
• 12:58
  SPEAKER_01: I think is such a a powerful insight.
• 13:00
  SPEAKER_01: So in all of those different places, and you're already seeing clients as a therapist at this point?
• 13:05
  SPEAKER_00: Yes, correct.
• 13:06
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 13:06
  SPEAKER_01: Um, I'd love to hear about your approach, especially when I think about the book and the way you weave.
• 13:15
  SPEAKER_01: So for me as a rabbi and as a person who've stu who has studied some of these texts, just how powerful it is.
• 13:22
  SPEAKER_01: For example, there's a uh a vignette where you talk about Psalm 147 and the image of God as healer of the brokenhearted, you know, how rofa le chauvre lev, which is such a powerful image.
• 13:35
  SPEAKER_01: And you know, we can see it as a metaphor.
• 13:37
  SPEAKER_01: We can also see it as, no, literally, God is actually healing our broken hearts.
• 13:41
  SPEAKER_01: How do you partner with God, as it were, in your own work and and through this book in trying to bring healing in the in the brokenness, in the shattered places, in the in the wake of trauma?
• 13:55
  SPEAKER_00: We're really touching the depth and the core of the human condition.
• 14:01
  SPEAKER_00: And I think one of the differences uh between the two great civilizations of antiquity, Greek civilization and Jewish civilization, is the Greeks looked at life as tragedy.
• 14:13
  SPEAKER_00: They were stuck on that element.
• 14:16
  SPEAKER_00: Uh but in Judaism, as Rabbi Sachs used to say, Judaism is the voice of hope in the conversation of humankind.
• 14:26
  SPEAKER_00: So I think that uh therapy is very similar to what we talked about, Levinas, the great Jewish moral thinker that we both did some work on.
• 14:36
  SPEAKER_00: Levinas spoke in French about the faça-fass, the face-to-face human encounter like we are having now.
• 14:43
  SPEAKER_00: It's uh, or or what Buber called the I thou, the IU, the intrinsic soulful relationship.
• 14:49
  SPEAKER_00: Most of our relationships in the world are what Martin Buber called i-it, instrumental transactional relationships.
• 14:57
  SPEAKER_00: But we can also have soulful relationships.
• 15:00
  SPEAKER_00: Take, for example, you're taking an Uber ride.
• 15:04
  SPEAKER_00: So I can be stuck on my phone returning emails.
• 15:07
  SPEAKER_00: I never saw the driver, I said hello, thank you, I got out.
• 15:10
  SPEAKER_00: That's an I it transactional instrumental relationship.
• 15:13
  SPEAKER_00: The driver gets paid and I get to my destination.
• 15:16
  SPEAKER_00: Conversely, I can start looking at the driver, I see his face, I say, Where are you from?
• 15:20
  SPEAKER_00: He says Egypt.
• 15:21
  SPEAKER_00: I say Israel.
• 15:22
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, we're both from the Middle East, we're both immigrants.
• 15:25
  SPEAKER_00: Do you have a family?
• 15:26
  SPEAKER_00: I have a family.
• 15:27
  SPEAKER_00: I have two children.
• 15:28
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, I have three children.
• 15:29
  SPEAKER_00: What's it like to raise children in America?
• 15:31
  SPEAKER_00: Then we have an I thou, I you relationship.
• 15:34
  SPEAKER_00: The uniqueness of the therapeutic relationship is that it is on the one hand, it's an I-It relationship because there is a transactional element to it, but it's also a deeply soulful relationship.
• 15:48
  SPEAKER_00: And to really try and answer your question directly, my approach as a therapist is in line with the humanistic existential tradition, which means that the therapist is a fellow traveler in life's journey.
• 16:03
  SPEAKER_00: Unlike in Freud's classical psychoanalysis, where the therapist is this oracle, this all-knowing sage who keeps a poker face.
• 16:15
  SPEAKER_00: Uh in humanistic existential psychology, the therapist is with you on life's journey, equipped with some psychological know-how.
• 16:25
  SPEAKER_01: It's interesting to think about the way, you know, what is the role of a rabbi and the various roles of a rabbi in our tradition.
• 16:33
  SPEAKER_01: You know, one is to be uh a Marbitz Torah, someone who spreads Torah and teaches Torah.
• 16:39
  SPEAKER_01: But the idea of spreading and teaching Torah is standing next to the person, ideally, I think, as an educator, saying, okay, Tao, what are you interested in?
• 16:47
  SPEAKER_01: Where are you in your life?
• 16:49
  SPEAKER_01: What are you troubled by?
• 16:51
  SPEAKER_01: What are you excited by?
• 16:52
  SPEAKER_01: Let's see if we can find something in our tradition.
• 16:54
  SPEAKER_01: And so, you know, almost walking alongside you in that path.
• 16:57
  SPEAKER_01: If you really want to spread Torah, that's what that is, as opposed to, you know, just proclaiming Torah or something like that.
• 17:03
  SPEAKER_01: How is how is your rabbinate shaping this conversation the way you you you think about therapy and the way you think about trauma?
• 17:13
  SPEAKER_00: Well, um I think that there is a strong similarity between the rabbinate and therapy.
• 17:20
  SPEAKER_00: My wife is a clinical psychologist, and after I met my wife, I started seeing how many, how common it is to have uh couples that are rabbi therapists.
• 17:29
  SPEAKER_00: I think the late Rabbi Schulweise, his wife was a therapist, the late Rabbi Aden Steinsoltz, his life, his wife was a therapist.
• 17:37
  SPEAKER_00: Um, I believe Rabbi Adam Klickfeld from Bethum, his wife is a social worker.
• 17:42
  SPEAKER_00: So these these two these two professions have an affinity, and people from both professions are drawn to each other.
• 17:50
  SPEAKER_00: Well, I can tell you on a personal level, the place that I derive the most existential satiation in the rabbinite, uh, even more than leading, let's say, Rosh Hashanah services, is end of life.
• 18:05
  SPEAKER_00: Sitting with a fellow human being at the end of life, holding palm in palm, reciting the Shmah, uh embracing a family, enveloping a family during Shiva, having the incalculable honor of trying to pay homage to a departed soul by way of eulogizing a person armed with the sagacity of the Jewish tradition.
• 18:28
  SPEAKER_00: So I drew a lot of sepuknefesh, a lot of spiritual satisfaction from uh that part of the rabbinet, end of life, uh and and broken heartedness.
• 18:41
  SPEAKER_00: And I think that's what ultimately led me to also pursue the psychotherapeutic route.
• 18:50
  SPEAKER_01: There's a section in the book where you write about two of the hostages who were stolen on October 7th, Noah Argomani and Andrei Kozlov, and you talk about inner freedom and what it means to, even in captivity, to be able to maintain a sense of of uh chirut of freedom.
• 19:12
  SPEAKER_01: Can you say a little bit about your understanding of that, how it is that you can have freedom even in captivity?
• 19:20
  SPEAKER_00: Right.
• 19:20
  SPEAKER_00: So um there was a great uh therapist who concluded her doctorate in her late 40s, who was also a survivor and corresponded with Victor Fenkel, author of Man's Search for Meaning, another survivor.
• 19:36
  SPEAKER_00: Her name was Edith Eager.
• 19:38
  SPEAKER_00: She passed away a few months ago, I believe, here in California.
• 19:42
  SPEAKER_00: She was almost a century old.
• 19:45
  SPEAKER_00: And when she was 90, she wrote her memoirs, which became her memoir became a New York Times bestseller called Um The Choice.
• 19:57
  SPEAKER_00: And the choice is really about inner inner freedom.
• 20:01
  SPEAKER_00: And um she writes in her book, Dr.
• 20:04
  SPEAKER_00: Edith Eager, who continued to provide therapy well into her 90s on Zoom.
• 20:08
  SPEAKER_00: Her grandson would prepare the Zoom room for her.
• 20:11
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, she was a woman of great luminous beauty and vitality, and she spoke about how she had to dance in the camp before Dr.
• 20:22
  SPEAKER_00: Mengele, who conducted all these uh abominable uh experiments and gestured with his hand who is going to the gas chamber, who is going to forced labor, and her family was murdered and for many years she felt she was trapped in the prison of her trauma.
• 20:46
  SPEAKER_00: And her book is really consecrated and dedicated to showing us how ultimately freedom is internal.
• 20:53
  SPEAKER_00: And I think both of us know, Rabbi, that there are people who can live in extravagant wealth uh and uh from a material socioeconomic perspective, and they are held captive by all sorts of internal conditions and inner strife, and there are people who were devoid of everything.
• 21:16
  SPEAKER_00: Um and they manage to find inner sustenance and hope and even vitality.
• 21:25
  SPEAKER_01: It's so important to remind ourselves of that and to be reminded of that.
• 21:29
  SPEAKER_01: And I love one of the things uh I love about Judaism is the way in a counter-cultural way fashion, it will redefine certain terms.
• 21:39
  SPEAKER_01: So, what does it mean to be free from uh you know a classic Jewish perspective?
• 21:44
  SPEAKER_01: It's to be obligated, to be commanded.
• 21:46
  SPEAKER_01: That's freedom.
• 21:47
  SPEAKER_01: You know, we're not freed from Egyptian bondage so that we can just do whatever we want.
• 21:52
  SPEAKER_01: We're freed from Egyptian bondage for a purpose that we that is revealed to us at Sinai.
• 21:57
  SPEAKER_01: And so that's what it means to be free.
• 21:59
  SPEAKER_01: You know, what does It means to be rich?
• 22:01
  SPEAKER_01: Well, it's to be content with what you have.
• 22:03
  SPEAKER_01: You know, what does it mean to be mighty?
• 22:05
  SPEAKER_01: It means to be able to exercise self-control.
• 22:08
  SPEAKER_01: So, you know, uh it's so it's so powerful.
• 22:12
  SPEAKER_01: And I think in some ways you have to be an outsider.
• 22:16
  SPEAKER_01: Maybe there has to be a certain degree of trauma or oppression for you to be able to re-understand, rethink um these uh categories and these definitions, you know, to to understand wealth in a different way, I think only comes through experiencing some of the things that we've experienced as Jews.
• 22:33
  SPEAKER_01: So I was thinking a lot about that as you were describing freedom.
• 22:36
  SPEAKER_01: I want to pivot a little bit to your work in the treatment world.
• 22:41
  SPEAKER_01: How has that changed the way you understand things like freedom, uh, choice?
• 22:47
  SPEAKER_01: What tell us a little bit about your work in in that world and what it's revealed to you, and some of it certainly comes through in the book, but I'd be interested in hearing how it's shaped you as a rabbi and as a therapist.
• 22:59
  SPEAKER_00: Well, um, as we both know, there is a Kabbalah professor, Jewish mysticism professor at the Jewish Theological Seminary, Dr.
• 23:07
  SPEAKER_00: Aitan Fishbane, who was one of my teachers.
• 23:11
  SPEAKER_00: And his father, Michael Fishbane, is a great Jewish philosopher of our time from the University of Chicago, now retired.
• 23:19
  SPEAKER_00: And Michael Fishbane wrote a book called Sacred Attunement.
• 23:23
  SPEAKER_00: I think it's an exquisite title and an exquisite term, sacred attunement.
• 23:29
  SPEAKER_00: So I think in some ways, being a therapist, to a certain extent, not completely, is the antithesis of being a rabbi.
• 23:39
  SPEAKER_00: Because as a rabbi, you have the microphone and you're the orator, you're the sage.
• 23:45
  SPEAKER_00: Uh you you personify the tradition and its wisdom.
• 23:50
  SPEAKER_00: And as a therapist, we need to move to the side and immerse ourselves in what Michael Fishbane calls sacred attun attunement, the ability to continually c completely hone in to the inner world of a fellow human being for almost an hour, to be attuned to every nuance, to every gesture.
• 24:16
  SPEAKER_00: And um and in some ways uh there they are very different.
• 24:22
  SPEAKER_00: On the other hand, a good therapist also offers or at least suggests insight uh and possible direction.
• 24:30
  SPEAKER_00: So in that sense, uh there are some commonalities between the rabbi, the rabbinate, and the therapeutic realm.
• 24:39
  SPEAKER_01: And and bring in, if you can, the treatment world around, I'm assuming that the the work that you're doing at Chabad includes treatment for addiction, whether it's to alcohol or drugs or other things, how does that play into this conversation about being attuned to where a person is, but also perhaps, you know, directing and and being a bit of an order?
• 25:05
  SPEAKER_01: Is it any different in that setting or is it the same process that you'd find in any therapeutic setting?
• 25:12
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you.
• 25:13
  SPEAKER_00: Um the kotskarebe, who was a very glum chasidic sage, unlike most Chasidic sages who were infused with elation, the Kotskerebe, I think, coined the term um there is nothing more complete than a sh broken heart, a shattered heart.
• 25:32
  SPEAKER_00: In Hebrew, enda valyotel shalem, illev shavu.
• 25:35
  SPEAKER_00: And the idea is that when the heart is broken and shattered, we're actually finally receptive to change.
• 25:43
  SPEAKER_00: Because we tend to grow in a meaningful way and in a very pronounced way when there is great adversity.
• 25:53
  SPEAKER_00: So I think that working with people in addiction, I don't use the word addict because it supposedly describes the core of the person.
• 26:04
  SPEAKER_00: I like to say, I prefer to say people who are in addiction, people who have an addiction, are really a parable uh to all of us in a more accentuated place.
• 26:17
  SPEAKER_00: What I'm ultimately trying to say is when you are at an addiction center, you do work with brokenness.
• 26:23
  SPEAKER_00: People have reached a point of brokenness such that they are actually receptive to change.
• 26:32
  SPEAKER_00: And there is something very sacred about that.
• 26:36
  SPEAKER_00: People don't talk about the superficial things of life.
• 26:40
  SPEAKER_00: People are really there.
• 26:41
  SPEAKER_00: I think about group therapy is akin to a minion, to a communal prayer.
• 26:47
  SPEAKER_00: People really sit together and open up in a very powerful way.
• 26:52
  SPEAKER_00: You know, there was this great uh Jewish American sociologist, Irvin Goffman, who spoke about the presentation of self in everyday life, or Carl Jung said we inhabit personas in public life.
• 27:05
  SPEAKER_00: Persona is Latin for mask.
• 27:08
  SPEAKER_00: So when you are in therapy, uh in this case in an addiction center uh context, but not only there, in in uh in in real deep, rigorous, authentic therapy, the persona, the masks fall.
• 27:26
  SPEAKER_01: That's so powerful and uh suggestive, you know, in in in every setting, because there's so many places we find ourselves where there's a persona, there's a mask that we wear, certainly professionally, you know, Rabbi Sessler, you know, Rabbi Yoshi, that is partly who I am, and it's true, and it's partly a mask.
• 27:47
  SPEAKER_01: And I've got to remember, oh yeah, this is how this person is seeing me right now, or how perhaps I want to be seen or need to be seen.
• 27:54
  SPEAKER_01: And there might be another, obviously not there not might be.
• 27:57
  SPEAKER_01: There are many other personas that we might carry as a ABBA, as a father, as a colleague, as a spouse, um, as a supplicant, you know, whatever it is.
• 28:07
  SPEAKER_01: I want to pivot to um Rachel Goldberg-Poland's recent book, uh, When We See You Again, which I had the pleasure of having the opportunity to interview her here at the temple, and you were there that night, and we spoke that evening, and I had noticed in reading the book that at the very beginning you're quoted, um, Words are redemptive, Tal Sessler.
• 28:33
  SPEAKER_01: And um and it's interesting because I'm thinking about, you know, the books that you've written.
• 28:40
  SPEAKER_01: I've I've only had the pleasure of reading this this one, uh, but I'll dive into others.
• 28:45
  SPEAKER_01: But I think about the way words can be redemptive, the way Rachel's words in that book are.
• 28:50
  SPEAKER_01: Well, first of all, what was it like to see that?
• 28:53
  SPEAKER_01: Did you know before the book was published that you were quoted right before the table of contents, right at the top of the book?
• 29:00
  SPEAKER_00: No, uh Rachel didn't tell me.
• 29:02
  SPEAKER_00: Um it happens, it just so happens that um Rachel listened to another podcast I gave, and then we corresponded by email, and she told me that it deeply resonated with her during uh a time of inner struggle, and that when I spoke about the commonality between uh psychology writ large and psychoanalysis in particular in Judaism, is the notion that words are redemptive.
• 29:31
  SPEAKER_00: In in Judaism, the world is created through a series of divine utterances, divine speech.
• 29:38
  SPEAKER_00: And as we know as rabbis, we excavate the words of the Torah, we look at every word, we look at every letter to find underlying truth, concealed truth.
• 29:50
  SPEAKER_00: And that is similar to the business of psychology, where the therapist sits with uh, today we say a client rather than a patient, not to pathologize.
• 29:59
  SPEAKER_00: So a therapist sits with the client, and and the therapist tries to be attuned to every verbal nuance because we believe that words can be a gateway to the subconscious, to a deeper layer of human existence.
• 30:12
  SPEAKER_00: So when I said that words are redemptive, which resonated with Rachel, is the idea, which is a deeply Jewish idea, and Freud, uh his full name was Sigmund Schlomo Freud, and his teacher was Joseph Breuer, also Jewish.
• 30:29
  SPEAKER_00: And all of Freud's circle in Vienna, uh, they were all Jews, except Carl Jung.
• 30:36
  SPEAKER_00: But then Rabbi Sachs says, but then again, if you're not Jewish, who needs psychoanalysis?
• 30:41
  SPEAKER_00: But uh he had a great sense of humor, Rabbi Sachs of Blessed Memory.
• 30:45
  SPEAKER_00: But to go back to your question, that's the idea that words are redemptive, that through articulated speech we can find catharsis, we can find an emotional release.
• 30:57
  SPEAKER_00: And when we bury our feelings, um then we risk um lack of well-being, severe lack of well-being.
• 31:05
  SPEAKER_00: As Freud himself said, uh unexpressed emotions never die.
• 31:10
  SPEAKER_00: They just manifest themselves in other ways, which uh in today's colloquial language we call them acting out.
• 31:20
  SPEAKER_01: Well, I was thinking, you know, if if something happens and I don't get to talk to you about it, did it really even happen?
• 31:27
  SPEAKER_01: You know, if I don't get to reflect on it, did it really even happen in that way that we make sense of the world is through processing and reflecting.
• 31:36
  SPEAKER_01: And I think as Jews in particular, although not exclusively, but certainly it is a core characteristic of who we are, is dialogue, is chavruta, is the back and forth.
• 31:49
  SPEAKER_01: And you know, when we think about the rabbinic tradition, it's it's so much about the spoken word, and this rabbi said in the name of this rabbi, in the name of this rabbi, and then there is a an attack made on that, and then you know, a defense, and so it's it's back and forth, it's dialogic, and all of it ideally is Lishem Shemai.
• 32:12
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, all of it ideally lifts us up and and brings us meaning.
• 32:16
  SPEAKER_01: The specific uh, you know, moment when you uh think about the way something that you've said or written can have that sort of resonance and can touch a person's life, in this case, layers.
• 32:28
  SPEAKER_01: You know, you're on a podcast and you say this thing and that touches someone who's a stranger to you, but she sees this and and that means something to her, and then she includes that in a in a book that you know many people read and and now connect with.
• 32:43
  SPEAKER_01: Um does it feel to you, and I guess maybe this is might be going into the mystical world a little bit more.
• 32:49
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, is that all just serendipity and accidental, or does it feel are there moments in your life when you feel like, oh no, that chain of events was not accidental at all, and not serendipitous or chaos, but actually design.
• 33:06
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, it's it's a it's a very uh meaningful and deep question.
• 33:10
  SPEAKER_00: Um as I was listening to you, a verse from Kohelet from Ecclesiastes came to mind, which in Hebrew goes, Schlachlach Michal Pnehamaim, send your bread across the water.
• 33:23
  SPEAKER_00: And I think that's what we want to do on the deepest of levels, Rabbi.
• 33:27
  SPEAKER_00: We want to offer some sustenance to other people.
• 33:31
  SPEAKER_00: And not just rabbis, all human beings.
• 33:34
  SPEAKER_00: Ultimate fulfillment comes from also nourishing others.
• 33:38
  SPEAKER_00: As the great Danish philosopher Kierkegaard said, happiness is a door that opens outward.
• 33:47
  SPEAKER_00: So you send your bread your bread across the water, and somebody fetches a slice or a few crumbs, and you never know who it's going to resonate with.
• 33:57
  SPEAKER_00: You just you send your bread and it goes where it grows.
• 34:01
  SPEAKER_00: It goes where it goes and it grows where it grows.
• 34:04
  SPEAKER_00: So that's one thing.
• 34:05
  SPEAKER_00: Um, your question with regard to coincidence or not, the Talmud says everything is in the hands of heaven except fear of heaven.
• 34:14
  SPEAKER_00: So except an individual's choice whether to adhere to God or not, everything is preordained.
• 34:20
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, Carl Jung had the notion of synchronicity.
• 34:25
  SPEAKER_00: Things happen at the same time in a very mystical sort of way that we don't expect.
• 34:34
  SPEAKER_00: Uh the Czech novelist Milan Kundera and the Jewish American novelist Paul Oster talked about coincidence quite a bit, but I believe that um what Jung calls synchronicity, things that happen that are meant to happen is in the eye of the beholder.
• 34:57
  SPEAKER_00: Like beauty is in the eye of the beholder.
• 34:59
  SPEAKER_00: You can reduce it to statistical uh probabilities, or you can choose to see it as a divine message or a deeply symbolic thing that carries very deep meaning.
• 35:13
  SPEAKER_00: I'll share with you briefly that after I was in Auschwitz as a high school student on a high school delegation, I had someone from there send me from the archives their certificates of my relatives who perished in Auschwitz, and one of them was my great uncle who was a teenager, and it has his date of birth on their certificate.
• 35:33
  SPEAKER_00: And I noticed that it's the same day that I received their certificate, was his birthday.
• 35:39
  SPEAKER_00: So I thought it's a very powerful synchronicity, as Jung would say, and I still had a shred of a doubt.
• 35:46
  SPEAKER_00: But a decade later, we found other documents that the Gestapo, the Nazi secret police, had an inventory of everything in my great uncle's apartment in Berlin before he was sent to Auschwitz.
• 35:59
  SPEAKER_00: And my younger brother in Israel talks to me over the phone.
• 36:02
  SPEAKER_00: I was a rabbi in New Jersey, and he says, you know, Tal, what a coincidence.
• 36:06
  SPEAKER_00: The day that I we received the Gestapo documents was our great uncle's birthday.
• 36:12
  SPEAKER_00: So it happened twice.
• 36:16
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, and it so much of trying to make meaning of our lives for me, like well, who cares if it's some sort of divine plan or whether it's just the accidental nature of the universe, and there's all sorts of things that could happen at any moment, and the fact that these things coincided doesn't mean anything inherently.
• 36:41
  SPEAKER_01: What to me, that's how we make meaning in our lives, is to try to find the the uh the essence, I guess, or or the meaning underneath these moments that otherwise could just be coincidental.
• 36:55
  SPEAKER_01: So, yes, uh of course it was a coincidence, and it means something uh powerful.
• 37:00
  SPEAKER_01: I just had this uh as you were saying, I was thinking about an experience I had just a few weeks ago on Tishaba'Av, my aunt called me.
• 37:09
  SPEAKER_01: This is my mother's younger sister, and there was just the two of them.
• 37:13
  SPEAKER_01: My mom's passed away now a long time ago, and my aunt called, and she said, Well, you know, today was uh Grandpa Jake's yurt site, his English yortside, that was her father, my grandfather.
• 37:25
  SPEAKER_01: And uh and I said, Yes, you know, I I knew that.
• 37:29
  SPEAKER_01: Um and then she said, and you know, Tishabav was the day that his father in the entire village was liquidated, and which I didn't know.
• 37:38
  SPEAKER_01: And she's talked to me a lot about that side of uh my family, and she's written an entire book about the family.
• 37:44
  SPEAKER_01: So somewhere along the way, maybe she'd mentioned it to me and I'd forgotten.
• 37:47
  SPEAKER_01: But here it was, you know, it was the heir of Tishabav, and now for the first time in my life, I'm coming to the realization that that was the day that that they were uh that they were killed.
• 37:59
  SPEAKER_01: And then it coincided that year with uh which it wouldn't always, but it coincided that year with, you know, my grandfather's yardside and just the coming together of all of those.
• 38:08
  SPEAKER_01: It was very meaningful, even if even if it's completely coincidental, it meant something.
• 38:13
  SPEAKER_01: And I was thinking about the layers of here was this person whom I knew and loved and was close to.
• 38:20
  SPEAKER_01: Uh he died when I was about 11 or 12 years old, so it's been ages since I've been with my grandpa Jake, but I can still see him and he smoked a pipe, and I can kind of smell that pipe.
• 38:32
  SPEAKER_01: And I remember things like him taking me to McDonald's when I was a kid, you know, these little things, these fragments, right?
• 38:38
  SPEAKER_01: And so he's very real and alive to me, even though he's gone.
• 38:42
  SPEAKER_01: And then his father, his grandfather, because his father got out, but his grandfather and and his grandmother and that whole family I never met, a few pictures I might have seen, but the the thought of you know all of this kind of coming together in this moment was very powerful and meaningful.
• 38:59
  SPEAKER_01: And so to just dismiss it as a mere coincidence, which in some ways undoubtedly it is, would be to lose an opportunity to mine meaning.
• 39:10
  SPEAKER_01: So I'm taken by that uh understanding of it, and and I think there's there's power in it and beauty in it.
• 39:17
  SPEAKER_01: And obviously there's there can be a danger in it too, right?
• 39:20
  SPEAKER_01: You can you can turn those coincidences into signs that direct you to do certain things that maybe that's not what it means at all, but certainly to find the meaning in it.
• 39:30
  SPEAKER_01: What I wanted to um close with is you know, thinking about this this book, uh Torah for Mental Health.
• 39:37
  SPEAKER_01: One of the things I really appreciated about it is I think it's about 50 chapters.
• 39:41
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and each each one is you know, three or four pages, but there's you know a powerful, I found a very powerful lesson and it's kind of a takeaway in each one, but very kind of bite-sized.
• 39:51
  SPEAKER_01: Um, what would be something you'd really want a reader to take away from from this book and and perhaps more particularly from our conversation in terms of Jewish wisdom for psychological growth?
• 40:05
  SPEAKER_00: Well, um, I would go to Viktor Frankel, who was one of the mentors of humanity in the 20th century and a survivor.
• 40:14
  SPEAKER_00: And Frankel defined human uh humanity as the meaning-seeking animal.
• 40:22
  SPEAKER_00: And today in psychology we call it meaning-making.
• 40:26
  SPEAKER_00: You sit with a client, with a fellow human being as a therapist who is in a crisis and they don't know where to go, what to do, let's say following a divorce or a premature death, um, or a professional catastrophe.
• 40:43
  SPEAKER_00: And uh the idea of meaning making looms large, both in the work of Viktor Frankel and in the words um of contemporary psychology.
• 40:55
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm just rereading Paul Johnson's history of the Jews, which I read in in college, and he writes there's something exquisite, one of the best sentences I ever read about our people.
• 41:07
  SPEAKER_00: He said that the Jewish people taught humanity that history has meaning and that humanity has a destiny.
• 41:15
  SPEAKER_00: And I think that the two great spiritual deficits that we have in secular modernity are deficits of meaning and deficits of belonging with the demise of traditional communities.
• 41:28
  SPEAKER_00: People feel they're just a cog in the world economy, they go on nice vacations and they watch reality TV.
• 41:34
  SPEAKER_00: But what else?
• 41:35
  SPEAKER_00: There is an inherent, intrinsic thirst for meaning.
• 41:40
  SPEAKER_00: We're meaning-oriented creatures, we're also the storytelling animal, we need those stories, these narratives as individuals to construct our own life story and as nations and collectives as well.
• 41:53
  SPEAKER_00: So I would end by saying that our mission today as moderns, one of our missions is to, and as rabbis, I would say, is to remedy the chronic deficit of meaning and belonging, the loneliness that we have in the world.
• 42:13
  SPEAKER_01: Rabbi Tal Ceslo, thank you so much for your time today.
• 42:16
  SPEAKER_01: Thanks for this beautiful book, Torah for mental health, Jewish wisdom for psychological growth.
• 42:21
  SPEAKER_01: I really appreciated getting to know you better and to spend time with you and hear a little bit of your Torah.
• 42:27
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you.
• 42:28
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you, Rabbi, for inviting me.
• 42:29
  SPEAKER_00: It's been a pleasure and it's an honor.
• 42:32
  SPEAKER_01: Well, that's our episode.
• 42:33
  SPEAKER_01: Thanks for listening to Search for Meaning.
• 42:35
  SPEAKER_01: If you enjoyed today's conversation, please like, subscribe, and leave a review.
• 42:40
  SPEAKER_01: It really helps others discover the podcast.
• 42:42
  SPEAKER_01: And consider sharing Search for Meaning with a friend.
• 42:46
  SPEAKER_01: They might appreciate the insights and inspiration found here.
• 42:49
  SPEAKER_01: Special thanks to our editor Josh Sterling and our production coordinator Raz Husseini.
• 42:55
  SPEAKER_01: Our theme song was composed by Maestro David Cates and myself, produced by Kenley Mantis, and features a vocal by cantor Josh Goldberg.
• 43:04
  SPEAKER_01: Stay healthy, stay hopeful, and stay tuned.