Holocaust. You see in my altered states I can go back to a time BEFORE the
Holocaust ... if I use shamanic terms, I journey to the land of the ancestors in a sort
of dreamtime where the pre-Holocaust world and its people still exist in the other
world ... I visit there and receive gifts such as stories and songs which I then share
with the people in my writing.
Q13. Reading ... somehow opens a doorway that allows me to go back to those
times in a sort of time warp of consciousness ... there are times when I just get
some obscure reference or detail in a story that I consciously would have no way of
knowing, but it later turns out to be accurate ... I am rather poor at reading Hebrew
... I don’t just study Hasidism, I access it somehow in my own consciousness.
Q14. The imagination creates the characters differently for each reader.
Q16. Yes ... Sometimes when I really get into a book, I really live in it and
sometimes find it hard to come back to the real world.
Q17. Place is certainly important historically, in the sense that Hasidim came from
Eastern Europe ... But Hasidic Jews – and religious Jews in general, do not live in
place as much as in sacred time. The Sabbath is, in Heschel’s’ words, a palace in
time ... it is a whole other world from the week days. I s the Sabbath a place?
Shamanically, yes, it is a sort of magic circle that we draw in time, not space ...
Sabbath preparations and observations transforms that location into another kind of
space that is connected to all Sabbaths that Jews have observed for over 5,000
years ... non-Jews don’t get this at all ... because they do not understand the
mystical structure of time ... you could say that in terms of physical place, there is a
part of me that lives in Brooklyn ... a part of me lives in Uman, Ukraine.
Q18. I think that people who have lived for generations on the same piece of land
have a strong affinity for it – they may even reincarnate as their own descendants.
Native people certainly believe that this is true.
Q20. Sure I had a love-hate relationship with Germany when I was there. As long
as I stayed in the present it was a beautiful country. But if I allowed myself to think
about what happened to my people there, I hated the place. I saw the big
cathedrals and saw ‘I nquisition’ ... now I ’m supposed to feel connected to I srael ... I
do accept that it is my ancestral home but I don’t feel the mystical connection that
some Jews feel.
ron
(Ron)
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