Penimah · Turning Inward | After Session Six
Bnei Machshava Tova and Derekch HaMelekch — from the teaching of the Piaseczner Rebbe
Listen: The Niggun Between Two Books
A five-minute recording of this talk, to listen to in stillness.
Open the recording in a new page if the player does not appear. It is also available in Spanish.
Two books, one movement
Two books by Rabbi Kalonymus Kalman Shapira, the Piaseczner Rebbe, belong together: Bnei Machshava Tova, written in 1928, and Derekch HaMelekch, written in 1930. The first opens the inner life. The second deepens it. And the niggun sits between them.
The Rebbe wrote both for a fellowship he was founding, young men who wanted to take their inner life seriously and who needed a method, not only an intention.
Both books were written years before the ghetto. He remained with his community in Warsaw, kept teaching there, and was murdered in November 1943.
Bnei Machshava Tova: the opening
Bnei Machshava Tova is the foundational handbook, and it asks one question: how do we open the soul?
The name is often translated as “Children of Good Thought.” But machshava is more than thought, and tova is more than good. Machshava is the inner life of the mind, its intention. Tova turns it toward what is wholesome. The Rebbe understood it less as moral uprightness than as inward attentiveness: thought that is gathered, directed, awake. That was the membership criterion. Not lineage, not rank, but the quality of inner life each member committed to cultivating.
The book is a how to start. How to work with the mind. How to use music. How to cultivate genuine feeling rather than performed feeling. And in section eighteen, the niggun enters.
His teaching is precise. Take any melody that carries feeling. You do not need to compose it. Close your eyes. Remind yourself, actually remind yourself, that you stand in the presence of God. Then, with the heart open, not performing but allowing, sing.
At first it is you, singing to your soul, trying to wake her. But gradually, and the Rebbe says inevitably, you feel the soul begin to sing on her own. The direction reverses. You are no longer the agent. The melody is no longer yours.
What the niggun does is make the soul available.
He adds a warning, and he means it. Music opens what was closed. To open the soul and then do nothing with what emerges, to let it dissipate into frivolity or collapse into despair, wounds the very part of oneself that was exposed.
Derekch HaMelekch: the deepening
Derekch HaMelekch, The King’s Road, comes two years later and asks the next question: once the inner life has been opened, how do we still the surface so that what is deeper can be heard?
By 1930 the Rebbe had been working with his students for some time, and he could assume the foundations of the first book. So he turns to the noise of ordinary mental activity, the chatter that continues even in a person who is sincere.
The aim is da’at. It is often translated as knowledge, but here it means knowing and presence together. Not knowing about the soul. Being present to it.
The practices of this book are practices of stillness and directed attention. Where the niggun works through sound and feeling, these work through quiet.
The link: the niggun and the silence
The two books are not two projects. They are one movement, and the niggun belongs to both.
In the first book, the niggun opens. In the second, the silence deepens. Both are trying to dissolve the barrier between the surface self and the neshama: the soul beneath performance, beneath habit, beneath the chatter of ordinary thought. The niggun does it through sound and feeling. The stillness does it through quiet and attention.
The silence does not replace the niggun. The niggun prepares for it, or travels beside it to the same place.
There is also something the two share in how they work. In section eighteen the direction reverses: you stop singing to the soul, and the soul sings on her own. You are no longer the agent. In the quiet practices, too, the work is to stop being the one who is busy, so that something deeper can be heard. In both, the self steps back. That is a reading, not the Rebbe’s own wording.
Closing
Let us try what the Rebbe describes. Take a melody that carries some feeling for you. Close your eyes. Remember that you stand in the presence of God.
Now sing it quietly, without performing.
When the singing ends, do not rush to fill the space. Stay with the quiet, and listen to what remains.
Opening, and then deepening. One movement.
Penimah · cantor@cantorheller.com
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