(c) Shaman 2. Rebbe Yonassan Gershom
Rebbe Gershom has published several works on shamanic rabbinism and is
acknowledged in his community as a shamanic rebbe. He prefaced his responses
by explaining that many religious Jews would regard the term ‘shaman’ as pagan
but that he used it since there were similarities between how a Hasidic Rebbe and a
shaman might interact with God and His people. He also explained that his
response would be from a comparative perspective: OK, so we have this
phenomenon among shamans – now what in Judaism is similar to this – since the
two cultures are really the same and we might experience similar things?
The Rebbe explained that he was a traditional Breslover Hasidic Rebbe (not
a rabbi, although one might also be a rabbi as well). Rebbe said that he did enter
an altered state of consciousness when writing and becomes oblivious to everything
around me for hours at a time. The tales he writes are based on real people and in
this altered state of consciousness: I seem to actually go back in time, and could
sense the souls of the people around me. I was not conjuring them up as “spirits”
they just seem to come when I was working on a tale about them or their village.
And I would seem to step back in time and actually be there as I wrote.
Q1. The Rebbe responded by saying that a Hasid does not read secular poetry and
novels and that books to religious Jews means religious books. He considered the
Psalms a form of poetry, and the Bible and the Hasidic stories to be literature and
that the characters in them influenced him. Such reading, he explained, was
devotion and soul seeking also, particularly since such literature contained all the
emotion and human feelings a person could experience, including anger, since the
literature was spiritual.
The Rebbe wrote that in the Passover Haggadah it is said, “Every person should
regard himself as if he were a slave in Egypt, and as if he were personally freed”.
He explained, ... so we Jews personalise history, until it becomes internalised as part
of our consciousness as individuals ... this is why ... we do not forget the Holocaust
even though it ended over 50 years ago. Because these were ... part of our
consciousness ... it is all here and now.
The Rebbe wrote that he had memorized vast amounts of the Psalms, in Hebrew,
which has a different rhythm than that of the King James version and that these
‘niggun’ come to him in times of joy and sorrow, that these are sung over and over
like mantras and in shamanic terms, were like power songs.