"How can we learn to talk to God? This is what Rabbi Nachman learned as a boy: you go out into the woods, alone, and you pray your heart out. You scream, you cry, you beg and plead. You leave behind all your sophisticated vocabulary and your immense learning that you have worked so hard for, and you find your heart.
"Rabbi Nachman was born just as the romantic movement, with its call for a return to nature, began sweeping Germany. Though he lived in a backwater, in nowhere Ukraine, as a boy he was out there in the fields and among the flowers, the streams in the dark forest, on a boat, on horseback, talking talking talking with his great open heart. Talking to God in his own everyday language. That, too, was romantic, the shift to 'a language really used by men,' and here is Rabbi Nachman talking to God in the everyday Yiddish of his speaking heart.
"He shared this practice with his followers. He taught them to do this 'self-isolation,' as he called it, hitbodedut, and like all Jewish innovators he claimed this practice was nothing new: prophet Elijah practiced hitbodedut praying alone in a cave; the tzaddikim knew this secret as well. You secluded yourself in nature and prayed.
"Again and again when I spoke with Hasidim of Breslov, this is the practice they brought up because this is the practice of the broken heart, to go below the surface, to break through our irony, our distance, our darkness, and our numbness. And sometimes it is very difficult, almost impossible to do."
