'Chapter 1
Returning Home
Spirituality with Jewish Integrity
Return, O Israel, to Adonai, your God.
Hosea 14:1
Return again, return again, return to the land of your soul.
Current liturgical song
My first brush with spirituality came with an unexpected question, back in
1975. Literally and metaphorically, I was far away from home giving a guest
lecture to the Theology Department of the University of Notre Dame, on the
rituals of Passover. \"What is the spirituality of the seder?\" a woman wanted
to know. \"You have talked for a week, covering every conceivable aspect of
the Passover experience, but not once have you addressed anything
spiritual. Isn\'t there such a thing as Jewish spirituality?\" Unbelievable as it
may seem a quarter of a century later, I was at the time completely stumped:
I had no idea what to say.
The next day marked my return in more ways than one. I was
newly committed to discovering the spiritual foundations of Judaism, and my
journey home to Jewish spirituality is still in process.
More than twenty-five years have passed since then, but the
curiosity over Jewish spirituality has only grown. Now, not only Catholics at
Notre Dame want to know what it is. Everyone is asking the question. And
they are mostly getting the wrong answers.
The search for spirituality is endemic to North American society.
Its sociological roots lie in the demise of extended families, neighborhoods,
and ethnic communities. Demographically, It is an outgrowth of baby-
boomers reaching middle age; their parents living longer in retirement years;
and the generation in their twenties and thirties postponing marriage and
looking for some abiding principles of life as they change careers and try out
new identities. It comes from the information explosion which instantly
connects us with far-off traditions that we once would have considered alien.
It arises from the panoply of worldwide religious traditions migrating from
countries we never heard of to our own neighborhood and work place. It is a
consequence of feminism, which has successfully critiqued the solo voice of
corporate men in church and synagogue seminaries and boardrooms. It is
the result of a national distrust of institutional wisdom, and a concurrent
failure of denominations to speak as compellingly as they once did.
Psychologically, it grows from the "me-generation" claim that each of us has
a self; that the self is sacrosanct; and that the self needs nurturing within, not
just without.
It is especially important to see just how pervasive the spiritual
search has become. It is not just a leisure-time project of intellectuals;
spirituality has become big-business, fueled by rampant marketing in a
popular vein. Book shelves stock every conceivable tract on the life of faith. I
have yet to encounter The Underground Guide to the Babylonian Talmud or
Thomas Aquinas for Fools, but I know they are coming. They will sit
alongside an undifferentiated melange of offerings on such topics as returning
from the dead, health foods from the Bible, channeling and rolfing.
Spirituality was mainstreamed in the 1990s. A 1994 Newsweek
cover trumpeted \"The Search for the Sacred: America\'s Quest for Spiritual
Meaning," and two years later, it diagnosed America as \"hooked on the
paranormal.\" By 1998, even The Wall Street Journal ran a lead story about
executives who hunt down spiritual directors to monitor the state of their soul
for "internal movements of God"; and as late as July, 2001, Fortune
Magazine carried a cover story entitled, "God and Business: The Surprising
Quest for Spiritual Renewal in the American Workplace."
This popularized spirituality was a far cry from what anyone could
have predicted back at Notre Dame in 1975. My serious questioner at that
lecture would have been astounded at the quiet giant of a man whom I was to
meet years later and who identified spirituality as the inherent quality of
crystals to reverberate sympathetically with the body\'s hidden reservoir of
wholeness; or another air traveler who thought she was spiritual because she
could identify colored auras around the head of would be passengers, and
from them, determine whether they would arrive safely at their destination.
Maybe some people do benefit from crystals; maybe the magnetic
field that does indeed surround our brains is visible to some. I don\'t know. I
remain open on these things. But I am suspicious of pop interpretations that
claim falsely to be scientific, and miss the really serious side of the spiritual.
Jewish insights that go back two thousand years to the Rabbis, and before
that, to the Bible itself may not be scientific; but they are not unscientific
either. They avoid the intellectual pablum that passes for truth these days,
and offer genuine wisdom instead.
What I find especially troublesome is the way the suspiciously
spiritual spirals down into the occult – the realm of Tarot cards, teacup
leaves, and the entrails of animals. I am no hardened Philistine, mired so
deeply in modernism that I cannot get beyond religion reduced to radical
reason. I count myself among the many who suspect they are being had,
however, by the more extreme rhetoric of spiritual access to special powers,
but who do not on that account want to give up the belief in a kind of
spirituality that is very real, consistent with science, supremely important,
and (in my case) Jewish to its core. Ever since my Notre Dame lecture, I
have been coming home to these authentic roots of Jewish spirituality that
had somehow eluded me for so long, but that now sustain me. I am
discovering that on this, my journey home, I have lots of company.
Jewish spirituality begins with the Bible\'s claim that there is a
region of experience called the Holy. It surfaces in times of awe, or in daring
notions of harmony, hope and goodness -- in the prophet Isaiah\'s vision of
the heavens, for instance, and in his older contemporary, Micah's demand
that we live profoundly here on earth. This biblical spirituality was adopted
and then transformed by the Rabbis of late antiquity who made it part and
parcel of the historic quest for meaning that we now call Judaism.
By the nineteenth century, the claim to holiness was being
echoed more loudly than ever, but it had been divorced from its spiritual
moorings. My own branch of Judaism, the movement we now call Reform,
championed the sacred but denounced the mystical. It restricted Judaism to
the bounds of modern liberal ethics and the syllogistic sterility of logical
rationalism. That was why I was so taken aback by my questioner in the
Notre Dame lecture hall. Spirituality? In five years of rabbinic school and four
more years of graduate study, no one had ever so much as mentioned the
word to me. No wonder I didn't even comprehend the question.
The 1990s spiritual revival is epitomized in Mollie, a Jew by birth
and training, who seeks spirituality but not religion, from which she is
alienated. She has launched her own private search for a spiritual home. She
wants to recapture her Jewish soul, thinks of herself as a Jew, but is
investigating other faiths as well, to find some generic sense of God and
wisdom enough to unify her world within and the world without. Mollie\'s
spiritual testimony sounds mushy, soft and soppy, but that is just because
she never learned "proper" theological language to describe it. It is the Mollies
of the world who become Jewish Buddhists -- Jew-Bus, as they are known --
when they find a ready Buddhist rhetoric for the objects of their inchoate
quest; the Mollies too who love the idea that Judaism might also somewhere
harbor meaningful mystagogy (as Catholics call it) -- mysteries, that is, to
satisfy the soul. Too bad synagogue Sunday schools had all been clones of
the no-nonsense schools of rationality described by Charles Dickens in Hard
Times; all their principles named Mr. Gradgrind; their teachers, Mr.
McChoakumchild; all duly appointed \"commissioners of fact\" (as Dickens
puts it), Jewish fact, we should say, \"who will force the [Jewish] people to be
people of fact, and nothing but fact.\" From People of the Book to People of
the Fact, and for most Jews who grew up the way I did, spirituality failed
the "fact-test": it was unlike Jewish history, say, or Hebrew grammar. When
we went to enroll my eldest son in a Jewish day school, and asked the
principle what the school\'s philosophy was, he replied, \"Like the Talmud
says, `When they're young, stuff \'em like oxen.\'" Mr. Jewish
McChoakumchild: alive and well.
The problem was that my five years of seminary training and four
years of doctoral work had been given over entirely to \"getting stuffed like
oxen\" on data -- in my case, the history of Jewish prayer and related
literature. I could date familiar prayers to their time of origin, trace the history
of Jewish prayer books, explain liturgical revision, discuss medieval prayer-
book art, and even think through the way prayer worked once upon a time
when the absence of cheap paper made a written prayer book inaccessible to
all but the elite. But I had never considered Jewish spirituality -- the very idea
of which sounded strange to me that day.
It was as if someone had asked me to discuss \"national
migraines.\" I know what the words \"national\" and \"migraine\" mean
separately, but I do not automatically think of combining them. Only after
thinking about it for a while, does it occur to me that there might be a
category of things aptly described by them both": road construction coast to
coast, perhaps, or a garbage strike in every city across the nation. Similarly,
I recognized both \"Jewish\" and \"spirituality\" as perfectly good English words,
but it did not occur to me that the two of them went together. The
adjective \"Jewish\" (I thought) described myself and what I and others Jews
teach about my tradition; \"spirituality\" (I imagined) was a particular
something-or-other (I wasn\'t sure exactly what) that Christians talk about.
Only relatively recently have we begun to see that spirituality is not just
Christian. It is not like Christmas carols, the Eucharist, and the Gospel of
Luke -- things really Christian in their essence. Spirituality is more like ethics
and theology, the sort of thing you find in many religions, but clothed in
particularistic religious garb that make then Muslim or Christian rather than,
say, Hindu or Native American.
Once upon a time Jews would have responded equally quizzically
to the idea that there could be Jewish ethics and Jewish theology also, not
because Judaism dismisses morality and belief, but because English is so
dominated by 2,000 years of Christian thought that Christianity has cornered
the linguistic market that describes them. So too, although the classical
western literature on spirituality is monopolized by Christian authors, there is
no reason to think that spirituality cannot be Jewish. It is just that Jews have
not generally thought through what their own kind of spirituality is. No one
ever asked. But that day at Notre Dame, someone did, and as a result, I can
now see what was not clear to me back then. I know now that \"Jewish\"
and \"spirituality\" do go together to describe something real.
What the Notre Dame questioner wanted to know (although I am
not sure she knew that she wanted to know it) was how learned and spiritual
Jews would talk among themselves, if they were to have a readily accessible
vocabulary of Jewish spirituality; and how I could describe Jewish spirituality
to others in a way that remained true to Jewish experience but
understandable to outsiders. She was not the only person who wanted to
know that, however; I did too! There had to be some form of Jewish
spirituality, but I needed proper words for it: something other than the
Christian lexicon that defined Christian experience in the light of Christian
theological concepts, but was tangential to what Jews know as familiar
experiential landmarks of their lives.
What most of Western thought takes as spiritual rhetoric is
largely foreign to traditional Jewish discourse which, unlike its Christian
parallel, did not emerge from the schools of the Roman empire where Greek
philosophical thinking was modified for theological debate. The closest Jews
come to that Hellenistic ideal is Philo, a first-century Alexandrian philosopher
whose topics are marginal to rabbinic Jewish consciousness. By contrast,
his Christian counterparts, like Clement and Origin, were central to early
Christian rhetoric. Over the centuries, Christians specialized in talk about the
things the philosophers debated: essences, truths and absolutes. Jews did
not. I could
not readily answer my questioner at Notre Dame, because the language of
spirituality (like the language of theology) is a foreign implant for Jews. It is
not that Jews have no ideas that correspond to Christian theological topics
like revelation and salvation, but it takes a sort of translation process to arrive
at what our parallels are, since we do not normally think in those terms. By
now, one hundred years of Jews doing theology has modified the foreign
sound of theology; not so -- not yet, anyway -- spirituality. We have learned
to make Jewish sentences about \"salvation through works, not just faith,\" for
instance. Parallel sentences about spirituality still sound strange to Jewish
ears, like tomorrow\'s spring fashions imported from a Christian designer and
being tried on for size. We may be like women trying on men\'s jeans when
they only wore dresses and skirts. It was not as if you couldn\'t wear them,
but they weren\'t exactly contoured for women\'s bodies. It took good
designing to reshape jeans as women\'s wear.
So too with ideas clothed in words. It is not as if Jews can\'t use
those words. But it takes work to make them fit. With words and ideas, the
redesign is best thought of as translation.
Here is the problem: Jewish categories can end up being
translated in such a way that they become utterly Christianized, in which
case they cease being descriptive of what Jews actually experience. Or Jews
can answer questions about Christian categories by simply translating old
Hebrew documents into modern English and then pointing to them as if to
indicate how the Rabbis would have talked if they had lived in our time and
spoken English. These two pitfalls can be called, respectively, \"Satisfying the
Anthropologist\" and \"Going Native.\"
Satisfying the Anthropologist and Going Native
I keep a cartoon on my office door, picturing a family of natives
living in a thatched hut in some far-off jungle. They are frantically carrying off
their television set, freezer and stereo system to a hidden alcove of a back
room, with the warning, \"Quick! Get these out of sight; the anthropologists
are coming, the anthropologists are coming.\"
Inquiring about Jewish spirituality is like being an anthropologist in
a strange culture called Judaism, in that we want to know what Jews have to
say about topics they never actually talk about. Anthropologists who set up
camp in a strange village might, for instance, be interested in family
relationships, which they have learned in their doctoral studies to call kinship
systems, a term the natives have never heard of. So the field workers have to
ask about other things: whatever the local dialect is for \"getting a woman\"
perhaps, or \"why people call their mother\'s sister\'s daughter their own sister
rather
than their cousin.\" Imagine, however, some crafty native informants who have
gotten hold of an anthropology textbook, figured out what the anthropologists
want in the first place, and decided to save their questioners a lot of trouble,
by just answering right away, \"Oh, the kinship system; certainly; we are
matrilinear and matrilocal.\" Unwary anthropologists would write that down at
their peril, even if it were true. They would have translated the culture in
question into proper scientific categories, but missed the whole point of what
they were there to find out: how these people may be similar to others, but
still be special in their own way. Alternatively, imagine that all they get is the
usual native interpretations which they dutifully record but then decide not to
translate back into scientific categories at all. They would then publish a
book transcribing exactly what they were told, but in English, and again they
would miss the point, this time capturing what natives think they are doing
but never conceptualizing it in a way that is useful to people other than the
natives, who hardly need anthropologists to tell them what they already know.
In the first mistake, the natives would have satisfied the
anthropologist; in the second, the anthropologists would have gone native.
Studying Judaism is like visiting a far-off society whose native
informants are the Rabbis, and whose testimony about what Jews think and
do is available in the books those Rabbis wrote. Unlike anthropological field
workers who really visit the culture in question, all we can do is visit the
books we have inherited, asking questions of their contents the way we
would if we were actually to have their rabbinic authors in front of us. Asking
the questions, however, is not as simple as it looks. Everything depends on
what language we use to express them and (even more important) what we
decide will count as a good answer.
Questions about Jewish spirituality are difficult because if we limit
ourselves to sentences that describe it in terms of modern spiritual jargon,
we may satisfy the spiritual anthropologist within us, but not learn anything
valuable about the way the Rabbis really thought. If, however, we just
endlessly reiterate the stock phrases that come naturally to the native lips of
the Jewish authors, even though we will be replicating authentically medieval
or ancient sentences, we will not be coming to terms with what those
sentences mean for our own lives today.
The Jewish case of satisfying the anthropologist, then, consists of
imposing on our sources the foreign categories of Western thought. In
theology, for instance, it would be inappropriate to limit the Jewish question
to \"the doctrine of grace.\" Jews may have one, but even if we knew what it
was, we would miss the subtlety of the Jewish way of arriving at theological
reality. It would amount to asking Jews to talk like Christians, but with
content taken from Judaism. Even if it ended up that Jews could be taught to
talk that way, the fact is they don't, and we would miss knowing what Jews
have to say when they speak their own authentic language of Jewish
tradition. Similarly with spirituality: whatever the categories of Christian
spirituality turn out to be, they may not be the ones that best describe the
Jewish side of things.
Alternatively, we could go native. We might just replicate in
English the content of old Jewish books, figuring that if it was good enough
for their learned authors, it ought to be good enough for us. We would be
compiling a collection of everything spiritual that native Jews have had to say
over the centuries, but in a language that we can all read. This is the strategy
of most people who write about spirituality; they know that there are
authentic spiritual masterworks that ought to be consulted, and figure that
the easy way to write their book is just to translate from old Hebrew or
Aramaic to new English, and then to string together a summary of what they
have, whether it actually means anything or not. Imagine, by analogy, that
someone discovered the work of Lewis Carrol and decided to reprint it with a
synopsis of what it says. A summary of Jabberwocky might include the
presumably meaningful explanation: \"Jabberwocks and Jub-jub birds can be
frightened off, but only like frumious bandersnatches, and only by the
beamish among us who are not shy to use their vorpal blades\" -- perfectly
good English that sounds positively proverbial in its wisdom, even though
most of the words mean nothing at all.
Translations of Medieval Kabbalah are often an example of going
native. Kabbalah comes loaded with technical vocabulary. Summing it up by
saying, \"Creation proceeded through stages of s'firotic unfolding in which
emanations of light smashed the vessels that held them, thereby giving us
evil\" is not necessarily any more enlightening that my Lewis Carrol summary.
Just repeating medieval language in modern English gets us nowhere, unless
we can somehow say what that language means in terms that moderns can
comprehend.
The pop spirituality market is filled with such translations of
Jewish spiritual masters, as if simple translations of other people\'s recorded
experience were sufficient to allow us to share that experience. Were that the
case, we would all know the wonders of falling in love just by reading
romance novels, and we could experience financial success by devouring
biographies of people who made millions. Alas, the world doesn\'t work that
way. That is the problem of going native. It is not uninteresting to hear the
natives talk; it is just unsatisfying.
In the realm of Jewish spirituality, Jewish wisdom called Kabbalah
stands out in this regard. The Kabbalists were genuine religious pietists who
lived largely in Provence and Spain in the 12th and 13th centuries, but then
migrated throughout the Mediterranean in the 15th and 16th centuries. They
spoke regularly about angels and a creation tale of mythic proportions
wherein the cosmos was more or less spoken into existence by a God who
is both masculine and feminine. Their account features a primeval burst of
divine light that emanated through space, filled up glass-like vessels, and
then cracked under the intensity of their contents, leaving those contents to
harden like gas that cools into matter. And they spoke of absolute evil
embodied in a sort of counter-universe called \"the other side.\" Today\'s thirst
for spirituality has made endless varieties of Kabbalistic works available,
either word for word translations of medieval tracts, or popular descriptions of
the way their medieval authors thought and wrote. If they are done well -- if,
that is, their modern-day populizers remain faithful to an authentic
recapitulation of the original texts that they are translating -- they are useful
glimpses into a particular Jewish universe of discourse. But translated
Kabbalistic works alone are of limited value in providing modern readers with
answers to today\'s spiritual questions.
To begin with, even the original writers did not intend their remarks
to be taken as a snapshot description of the reality they had experienced.
They knew all along that they were giving only metaphoric descriptions of
something that went deeper than the power of literal imagery to capture.
Imagine young Einstein ruminating over the ultimate nature of physical
reality. He is overwhelmed by the grandeur of it all, the fact that light travels
at a steady speed while everything else, even what we weigh, how tall we
are, and how old we claim to be, is merely relative. Then suddenly it hits him:
e = mc² Let us now imagine that centuries later, higher mathematics and
physics have altogether vanished from a world that has been practically
destroyed by a nuclear war. People remember, however, that once upon a
time, a realm of experience existed in which mathematical formulas evoked a
deep appreciation of the coherence of all reality. One day, someone comes
across the remains of an old issue of a scientific journal, where the formula of
relativity is used to discuss some further theory regarding the way light bends
through the space-time continuum. What good would it be for average
readers in that post-nuclear wasteland, people with no prior imaginative leap
of insight into the nature of time or space or light itself, merely to repeat
literally Einstein\'s mathematical equation?
Kabbalistic description is the mathematics of medieval spirituality,
but written out in sentences rather than abstract symbols. Merely replicating
the sentences in modern English that speak of the angel Metatron or the
smashing of the spheres sounds good but goes nowhere for people who have
no immediate experience of whatever it was that prompted the original
Kabbalists to talk that way. Going native works only for natives; not for
moderns who cannot go home to the Middle Ages any more.
We can, of course, memorize the translations of old native talk,
until we learn to speak the way they did, and then make sentences back and
forth as if we both knew what we were saying. That is what pop-kabbalah
tends to be: a dialogue that has ceased being about anything rational and is
wrapped in language that makes it sound deep. Using the Kabbalah as a
vehicle for spirituality may work for some, but for most, it is far likelier to
frustrate, since it is so hard to find real experience these days to which the
kabbalistic system can be made to fit.
In any event, the Kabbalah arose only late in the Jewish story. It
is not the only way Jews have talked about spirituality. And there is another
entryway to Jewish spirituality that avoids generic new-age rhetoric and gets
us beyond \"going native\" as well. It is a deep reading of Jewish texts, to elicit
the underlying construction of reality that its authors took for granted; and
then a consideration of their grid of reality as an alternative to the way we
usually think about things. Imagine a world made entirely of colored squares
and circles on an invisible background. We might be raised there to think of
that universe as a war-like conflict in which you choose your side as a circle
or a square, and then face off for a life- long fight to the death. Then we
discover a literature in which authors talk little about shapes, but describe
instead golden sunsets, red-hewed landscapes and lush green pastures.
Awakened to the categories of color, we return to our world and discover that
the shapes come colored, with the colors blended pretty equally among the
various shapes. Exchanging our rhetoric of shape for the language of color,
we begin talking about rainbows, pastels and harmony. The world hasn\'t
changed, but we have. We see it differently.
Reasonable spirituality: a way of being in the world
When natives satisfy the anthropologist, they frame their authentic spiritual
experience in the foreign scientific rhetoric that dominates anthropological
literature. But the anthropologists who write it up lose the sense of the
spiritual that it was supposed to describe. If we express Jewish spirituality in
words borrowed altogether from non-Jewish culture, we will get something
reasonable, but divorced from Jewish spirituality.
When anthropologists go native, they sound spiritual, but check
their rational capacity at the door. As long as the sentences make
grammatical sense they will use them, even if they come out sounding like
Jabberwockian prose. If we try to explain Jewish spirituality in words taken
only from authentic Jewish sources, albeit translated into English, we will
have spirituality that is not unreasonable, but not reasonable either. It will
simply be grammatical treatises in fantasy, intriguing accounts of light-filled
vessels, smashing glass, sexual energy, and left-handed \"otherness\"
engaged in cosmic conflict with the primeval good -- all great stuff for night-
time winter reading, but requiring translation yet again into something else if
it is really to make sense. If we do not insist that native speech must mean
something in modern experience, we will get spiritual talk that corresponds to
nothing the average person knows as real.
Finally, we have the fuzzy pop-talk about angels, demons,
crystals and auras. This is media fluff, a comic-book reduction of the way the
natives used to talk for people who cannot even bother reading the natives.
For most people, it is apt to be neither spiritual nor reasonable. There has
to be another way.
One of the most surprising aspects of the \"Jew-Bus,\" is the
particular tradition these alienated Jews choose in order to find the spirituality
that they miss in their Jewish synagogue experience. It is Buddhism, the one
world religion that has least to do with God! It would not be entirely correct to
say that Buddhism is Godless, but theology plays such a minor role in
Buddhism that scholars of religion regularly return to it as a favorite test case
of how a religion can be religious even without a western-style notion of the
Divine. Classical Confucian culture is another instance of a religion which no
one would ever accuse of lacking spirituality, even though God is hardly at
the center of Confucian experience. Some twenty years ago, my Notre Dame
informant explained to me that spirituality is the way we relate everything we
do to God, and recently, a colleague of mine told the student body at the
Hebrew Union College that he thinks of spirituality as acting as if God is
looking over his shoulder. Are they right? Must God be central to our
experience of spirituality? The counter cases of Buddhism and Confucianism
suggest that Muslims, Jews, and Christians may want to talk that way, but a
more fruitful beginning is to leave God aside for a moment, and start with
ourselves, the human situation that we all know quite well.
Religions are ways of conceptualizing the entire universe of
existence. Spiritual discourse is thus a particular way to live in the world-one
that leads us to appreciate things that we would not be conscious of were we
to limit ourselves to the way our secular culture describes reality. What
makes religions unique is the way they order the world. There are Jewish
ways of doing this, as there are Christian or Muslim or Buddhist ones. This
book is about the uniquely Jewish way of mapping reality. Getting in touch
with the Jewish map is the beginning of Jewish spirituality.
Spirituality is Drawing the Big Picture
Finally we are ready to define reasonable spirituality -- at least in a Jewish
mold. First, it is worth reviewing what spirituality is not, or more precisely,
what it need not be, even though for some people, it clearly is. There are
people, for example, who find spirituality in angels and unseen forces, just as
popular culture these days imagines it. The \"why\" of life is answered by
reference to the will of beings beyond our own: not God, but angels,
poltergeists and ghosts. To be spiritual is to be in touch with those wills
which are unseen but very real and pervasive forces beyond the material level
of experience and the explanatory realm of science.
Prayer too can be a means to the extra-sensory beyond, putting
us in touch with powers beyond the human. In some traditions, prayers may
even be directed through, if not to, angelic intermediaries. Not just God, but
an entire realm of the God-like is thus pictured as occupying real territory
called the heavens, where our prayers as real things get sent, the way
telephone conversations get transported through sound waves to real hearers
at the other end of the line. If we feel the presence of ethereal forces or at
least believe that we have been in touch with them, we say that our prayers
were effective.
Others find spirituality in reading spiritual books -- the
translations of medieval classics that I describe as \"going native.\" I do not
mean to denigrate their experience, as I would never challenge other claims
as well -- people, for instance, who define the spiritual as doing good, plain
and simple. To look for more, they say, is to be on a search for the pot of
gold at the end of the rainbow. Mature adults should be content with
goodness. That is the only justification of life that we can expect to know, the
only experience we can have that will convince us that we matter.
But this book is written for people who want more. Their search is
part of a larger phenomenon, increasing numbers of people who seek a
spiritual home. Until the 1960s, North Americans were generally quite secure
in the religious traditions where they had grown up. Typically, a Lutheran, a
Catholic or Jew, for instance, lived in self-imposed religious ghettoes, in that
they identified with the religion of their parents, moved in social circles with
others like themselves, and married people from those same social circles,
after which they affiliated with the same denominations in which they had
been raised. The denominations were entire worlds unto themselves, and
hermetically sealed at that; one was born, bred, married and buried as a
Lutheran, Catholic or Jew. Denominations were identity addresses. They
were homes.
All of that began to change in the 1960s, for a variety of reasons,
most interestingly, perhaps, the polarization of Americans politically into
liberal and conservative camps. Most religious traditions turned sharply to
the left on the social issues that the 1960s brought to the fore. But by the
1970s, and especially the 1980s and beyond, a conservative reaction
produced a split between left and right wings in the once-solid denominational
bodies. Now liberal Jews, Protestants and Catholics had more in common
with each other than they did with the more conservative right-wing branches
of their own movements. With growing dialogue across religious lines,
switching religions was no longer out of the question. Religious intermarriage
became normative. Once inconceivable, families with blended religious
traditions became a topic for TV sitcoms. Being born into a particular faith no
longer guaranteed an adult comfort level with it. Spiritually speaking,
Americans were on the move.
America has always thrived on restlessness. Historians
emphasize its geographic nature: the movement west in the nineteenth
century or the opening of the sunbelt a hundred years later. But new physical
homes also brought new spiritual ones: nineteenth-century Methodism or
Baptism in the population expansion that moved west and south, and
flirtations with eastern religions in twentieth-century California. Geographical
mobility eroded religious certainty because it broke down childhood loyalties
to family, church and neighborhood. But geographic change is no longer
necessary. The failure of denominations to speak in a single compelling voice
to their constituencies is cause enough to send people searching for new
spiritual homes without actually physically moving anywhere.
Once the doors of spiritual restlessness had been opened, other
forces made the spiritual search possible: the internet, for instance, that
brings alternative spiritual traditions immediately into view, and the
breakdown of extended families, neighborhoods, and ethnic communities -- a
phenomenon we will look at more seriously in Chapter Eight. The twenty-first
century dawned with a spiritual rootlessness that is sending millions deeper
within their own religious tradition or farther out to the traditions of others -- all
in search of a comfortable spiritual home. The soul knows its own
landscapes, after all. We have all become spiritual explorers, seeking new
insights wherever we can find them.
For Jews, as we have seen, this spiritual restlessness has meant
experimenting with alternative religious traditions like Buddhism. But it has
also entailed a spiritual foray back into Jewish tradition. And just as Jews are
increasingly willing to look anywhere for the deep-down wisdom they seek,
so too are others. Judaism's age-old spiritual insights therefore attract not
just Jews but non-Jews too who are in search of a spiritual home. This book
is about that home.
If I were back at Notre Dame, replaying the tape of my questioner
on spirituality, I would say that spirituality is our way of being in the world,
the system of connectedness by which we make sense of our own lives, how
we overlay our own biography in the making with a template of time and
space and relationship that is vastly greater than we know ourselves
individually to be. It is the way we dimly find our way to how we matter, the
maps we use for things like history and destiny, the way we take a jumble of
sensory data and shape it coherently into a picture, the way discordant noise
becomes a symphony of being, the way we know that we belong to the
drama of the universe. It is the wonderfully enchanting but equally rational
way we go about our business of growing up and growing older in the
mysterious business we call life.
Every great religion has its own patented recipe for doing these
great things, drawn from an eternal retelling and rereading of its own
traditional wisdom. Religious spirituality cannot come through shortcuts. It is
reached only with genuine involvement with the spiritual translation of ancient
texts into answers for modern dilemmas. This book is a map of such
authentic Jewish wisdom. It is what I have found since 1975, in almost three
decades of returning home.'