Rabbi Rami Shapiro and Tonya Dawn Recla Share the Walk of the Lamed Vavnik

Rabbi Rami Shapiro:

And I’m Rabbi Rami and I have superpowers.

Tonya Dawn Recla:

I love it. All right, what are your superpowers? And how are you using them for good?

Rabbi Rami Shapiro:

Well, because I never thought of myself as having superpowers. But when I was in Europe one time at a European Union Conference. And the conference wasn’t going well, as it was people from all over Europe, and they were supposed to be in dialogue. But there really was no dialogue happening. And at some point, a fellow from India leaned over to the convener of a conference. And he whispered though I could hear it. He whispered to her and said, turn this over to Rabbi Rami, fix this. And so she said, Okay, we’re going to Rabbi Rami is going to do something with us. And I was stunned. I didn’t know. I had nothing in my head. I had no idea. But I started just, I mean, what do you do? You can’t if you think about it, you’re stymied, you’re stuck because you’re in your ego. What am I going to do? Well, I can’t do anything. I’m part of the problem when I do that. 

So I was blessed enough not to get into that mode. And I simply trusted reality, trusted the universe, trusted, the field, trusted, the mother trusted, whatever you want to call it. And I simply gathered everyone together. In like a huddle. There were a lot of us, it was a big huddle. And I asked everyone to find their heartbeat and to tap their heart to their own rhythm. And after just a couple of minutes, everyone was actually tapping in sync. And then I started a chant. Now I do a lot of chanting in different languages, but one of my favorite chants is his own Ammachi via Hindu chant. So I started doing that, in Sanskrit, and everyone slowly picked it up. It wasn’t it’s not very difficult to do. And there was a Hindu guy there from India, who was a well-known Indian guitarist and Swami. And he went, left the huddle grabbed his to Tara came back. And he started playing the music for the chant and bringing the chant to a more aesthetic level than I was doing acapella.

And the whole group just started tapping their hearts and singing Shiva. And we did that for a little while. And the group became one heart, one voice, one chant. And then it just seemed to me time to stop and we ended it and went back to our seats, and the room, the whole energy of the room had changed. We were now really in the community and communion even more powerfully. 

Later on that morning, I asked the guy from Intel why he did that. And I said, Why would you do that to me? And he said, Don’t you know that’s your superpower. create these rituals that will bring disparate groups of people together into greater harmony. So that’s my superpower. And the way I use it is the way I used it in that case, to create to help people taste experience, the greater unity of which we are all apart.

And so here was this concept that at every given moment, there are 36, at least 36 people who were so incredibly lit up and locked into that way of being that you just described, which was like, I can do nothing. I can do nothing. It’s done through me. I agree to be here. I agree to light up, I agree to shine, I agree to love God and love others here. The idea that that’s happening all around like it just it was just a beautiful concept to me. And I’m sure I’ve morphed it and worked it into my own way of understanding. Can you share with us this concept and why it helps such a personal kind of why bore mentioned within this beautiful space that you created?

Well, I think you did a great job with that. So I don’t know if there’s much to add, but it comes from teaching from a fourth-century Rabbi named a Biei. And it’s just a one-liner. The Talmud is an anthology of rabbinic teachings that spans five centuries, and it’s got 60 odd volumes, it’s huge. And there’s this one line, where a buyer says, there are always at least 36, and there’s a special meaning to the number. There are always at least 36 people who don’t say Jews don’t say men, it says 36 people awake to Shahina. And I’ll have to explain that in a second. But awake to Shahina. And then living the way we would say it is in Genesis, chapter 12. Verse three, says people are called to be a blessing to all the families of the earth. When you’re awake to Sheffy. Now, which is the divine energy, you live as a blessing to other families of the earth. 

So he says as always, 36 People wake to Shahina. And let’s that’s the line, it’s just a throwaway line. So let’s start with the number 36. So Hebrew has a lot of numerologies because in Hebrew there are no numbers, you know like we have Roman numeral numerals and Arabic numerals. In Hebrew, you only have the Hebrew alphabet. So every letter of the alphabet does double duty as a letter and a number, which means every word in Hebrew has a numerical value. So the word for life, for example, chi is made up of two letters, which if you add them together comes up to the number eight Team 36 is twice a team. These llamas love necks, and that’s the number 36 These 30 Sixers live two lives, they live for themselves, they take care of themselves, but they also take care of the life of the planet, the life of other human beings, the life of other beings in general. So they live not only for themselves but for the greater well-being of all beings. So that’s why it’s 36. But more importantly, in my mind, because he says it’s never fewer than 36. So it could be any number. But more importantly, is that they’re awake to Shereena. So the phenom is usually translated into English as the Divine Presence. But it’s because Hebrew is a gendered language. She is fina is a feminine gendered word. So the rabbis were incredibly patriarchal and created a masculine-dominated society with themselves at the top.

Tonya Dawn Recla:

Sounds familiar? Yeah, right.

Rabbi Rami Shapiro:

Their experience of God which they called God, Lord, and they call God King In the pronoun was always he and his, but their experience of God was almost always feminine. So when they heard God’s voice, the language that they put to it, is they use the term but call like a bat mitzvah, the daughters, the daughter of the commandments, Bat Mitzvah, but call means they heard the voice of the daughter. So when they heard God speaking to them, they heard a woman’s voice when they experienced the presence of God Shahina they experience the presence of the feminine. 

Now, what that means because you don’t want to put you know, Western gender stereotypes. What does it mean to experience the feminine I mean, you don’t I don’t want to read into there, what they meant. For me personally, because my experience of the Divine is the divine feminine, the Divine Mother. For me, it’s this all-encompassing sense of unity, this fierce love this fierce grace, Ram Das used to speak of the Divine Mother as fierce grace for the fierce grace of his guru he talked about, but a fierce love that would burn away everything false, leaving you only with the truth, but it was a love that was tough, you know, it wasn’t like, oh, everything’s okay, I’ll take care of you. It was more clear, and I’m gonna show you what’s true, and it’s gonna hurt if you don’t, if you’re not surrendered to me, it might sting for a minute. Yeah, if Yeah, it’s gonna sting. Clinging to the false. If you’re clinging to the ego, if you’re clinging to your tribe, it’s going to burn. But if you let me burn that all the way, it’s going to be bliss. 

So the experience of God or being awake to Shahina is being awake to reality as it is, when we’re free from all of the conditioning of race and ethnicity and religion and sex and gender and you know, all the stuff that divides us until we can actually experience the fact that you and I and everything else is God is the divine happening. So that’s, that’s what these long involve next these 30 Sixers are experiencing, but I want to take one going on a little longer than I intended telling you. But I wanted to just quibble with one thing, where you made it sound like they made a really choiceless choice. Right? That it’s not like you can set out I’m going to experience I’m going to awaken because she Fina. And because of that ego. It’s not that you can do this by yourself or for yourself, you can simply strip away and even then you need the help of the Divine. But you can strip away with the Hindus called Neti-neti, or in Christianity, the apophatic, the path of the negative where you just say, you know, not this and not that. Not that. Not that, until you’ve taken away all the false. And what’s left is what’s true. 

And if you keep it the ego can’t do it. It’s done for you by the greater reality of whatever you want to call that greater reality. It’s a gift of grace. And once you’ve received the gift, and I think she gives it to everybody equally, it’s just a matter of whether are you open or you’re not open. But if you stumble into it, and you’re open to it, it’s not a matter of, oh, I chose this, or I’m doing this and not too bad for you. You didn’t. It’s, I’ve been. It’s luck. It’s It’s Grace. I’m just lucky enough to do this. Or I’ve been lucky enough to bump into someone awake. And they’ve guided me into how to do this. But ultimately, it’s not me. It’s not my choice. It’s not like, yeah, it’s not ego-driven. It’s something else. I don’t know if that makes sense. But totally that the way that I encapsulate it for myself is I made a choice. I chose to develop myself so I could stay awake and consciously aware. 

So that those moments present themselves to me and when they present themselves to me, I’m prepared, right energetically speaking. I’ve gone through those processes that you talk about, right, the life review process, like, like, like not waiting till death to start that process, right? Because early on, it became really apparent that we can teach people sort of how to clean this stuff up. But ultimately, if we’re continuing to replicate programs that started the mess in the beginning, we also have to be willing to change how we’re being in Every moment. So perhaps it does not apply to the tradition of that story, what it reminded me of was the moment every single moment reminding yourself of the choice you made kind of thing like that, to me is what inspires me to move through the moments when I’d rather let my conditioning take hold. But I know what that creates. Now. That’s being in some semblance of conscious choice. And I can see where the essence of it the introduction of it, the presentation of it, at least in the, you know, how our clients and how my experience was was, it was optional, and it wasn’t optional, right? And it’s not, I can’t speak to that experience, but the lighting up right, like we see the threads everywhere. Um, you know, being the one I like to remind people like just because they’re, you know, somebody accepts responsibilities being one doesn’t exempt you from also being the one right there. We’re all the ones as you said, it’s available to everybody. There. We’re gonna dive into this after the break because this is really juicy. So Rami, we have lots to talk about. We’re going to take a pause here because it just dawned on me that we’re gonna move this into the second portion of the interview. So right now, where can people go to find out more about you?

Rabbi Rami Shapiro:

Probably the best place to go is my website, rabbirami.com.

Tonya Dawn Recla:

Beautiful, and go over to superpowerexperts. But folks if you want to learn how how to kind of walk with this, right, well, the master your personal power stuff, this starting out of like, how do I even explore this for myself? Right, this wealth of information that Rami’s bringing forward here, like it’s held up it is available in terms of what you do in every moment. And seeing that, I think, is incredibly powerful. So you can check that out at superpowerexperts.com I cannot impress upon you enough the work that Ramiz got going on in terms of the depth of the religious material, the depth of the history, you feel it, right, it’s like, I just want to keep listening to you. 

Like, Tell me more, tell me more. Because of the way you’ve synthesized the traditions and can bring them together and mirror them. That creates that unifying kind of feeling of finding that lit-up thread in all of it. And so make sure you’re going over into his space, particularly if you’re drawn into some of the religious traditions and you’re trying to make sense of how they all kind of fit together how you can fit all of the different traditions that you’ve got going on inside of you into some semblance of a way to make sense of it. His space does a great job of that. We will be right back after the break, folks. Because today, Rabbi Rami Shapiro’s, you’re sharing the walk of the Lamed Vavnik, we will be right back after the break.

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