Open Secrets: The Letters of Reb Yerachmiel ben Yisrael
Open Secrets: The Letters of Reb Yerachmiel ben Yisrael
by Rami M. Shapiro
Monkfish Publishing Co., Rhinebeck, NJ ©2004 (GT-Judaism) 128 pp.
As he has done previously, Rami Shapiro makes
use of a fictitious 19th century Eastern European rabbi to write a
dialogue between the rabbi and a student, Herschel, who is now in America. The letters address such subjects as
God, death, the soul, good deeds, duality and whether all religions are true. Of interest to me, Father Thomas Keating, to whom the book is dedicated, is both
teacher and friend of Shapiro and strongly supported the publication of what
began as a class handout.
I was particularly
impressed with the chapter on God. God is all, “the Substance and Source of
everything and its opposite.” He expands by saying that there is Yesh or form, and there is Ayn or emptiness. God is both and
either. Just as a bowl must have the form of walls but also the emptiness in
order to be a bowl, so God also must have both in order to be God. This is the Shlemut or completeness of God. I find
this a simple, global image for meditation, where everything, without
exception, is God.
-- reviewed by Wesley Lachman