the timboucher experience

Finally read that Sacred Tale article. I’ll condence the best parts of it here. The reason I was interested was cause the summary said something about how the telling of stories is considered a holy & redemptive act within Hasidism. Sure, its pretty restrictive in terms of how it interprets that, but that doesn’t concern me much, cause its a great idea, and I’ve been toying with something similar for about a year now: how stories have a kind of ecology. That you can tell a story to shift energy in the mind (and perhaps the universe). Like, you could tell a propaganda tale, which will send all the nearby energy to a particular center in the mind, inflating it in importance, and thereby draining nearby areas. Or you could tell redemptive stories, which function to rebalance and redistribute energy evenly through the centers (archetypes? complexes? something like that - maybe I’ll call them nexuses). And also, I’ve been thinking about channels within the mind, basically a trail of nexuses which becomes illuminated in sequence by the telling/hearing of a story.

Anyway, back to the items I liked out of this article:

1. The “lofty and hidden concepts” found in tales other people, be they Jews or Gentiles, tell are parallel to the “holy sparks” that fell into the created world at the time of the cataclytic act of creation.
2. The tales themselves underwent a process similar to the Lurianic “breaking of vessels” at the time of creation; they are therefore confused, ruined, disorderly, and their original meaning has been lost.
3. The inspired zadikim, in this case the Besht, is endowed with the power to reveal the holiness hidden in the stories by restructuring them according to their original, proper order. In this sense the zadik “repairs” the story.
4. Once the story has been repaired, it assumes enormous religious, even theurgic power and a zadik like the Besht can use the story to “unite the unities,” that is, to reunite the sefirot (tiferet and malkhut), which had split asunder in the act of creation.

And then this section - it’s about the zadik descending into the “empty space” to save the souls there:

Since the empty space implies total absence of all divine presence, it is the locus of all evil. As such, it is the domain of silence, particularly since its opposite, the created world, was brought into existence by divine speech. The letters of the Holy Tongue by which the world was created and in which divine law is revealed comprise the border between the created world and the empty space. The Great Zadik, in that he belongs to the category of Moses, partakes of the paradoxical nature of Moses: He is both a great leader and “heavy of tongue,” that is - interpreted by Nahman - a man of silence, hence the only man capable of descending to the realm of silence, the empty space, to redeem the souls that have fallen there. The zadik does this by means of the nigun (melody) or the zemer (the song) which is peculiar to him, a manifestation of his essence as a man of faith.

….The gap between him and his audience, however, can be bridged through the telling of tales which are a garb of his divine concepts. The tales have a specific therapeutic, cosmic function: They redeem souls from the empty space. In this sense, the tales are marvelous and the telling of tales, a redemptive act.

Of course, I edited out the section about how stories are a necessarily impure means of communication, cause I think thats bullspit.

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