More than Experience
Some Meandering Jewish Thoughts on the Meaning of “Spirituality”
“Nothing is more ambiguous than the term ‘spiritual life.’”
— Emmanuel Levinas, in “Ethics and Spirit” [1952]“It has become increasingly clear over the past several decades that what is really essential in spiritual work is the daily, disciplined practice of spirituality—not the highs we might experience at a weekend retreat or a workshop or a hike at Yosemite, but the essential work of connecting ourselves to the transcendent every day of our lives.”
— Rabbi Alan Lew, from Be Still and Get Going [2007]
After I left the religion I was raised in in my early 20s, I began to describe myself as “spiritual, but not religious” and as a “spiritual seeker.” Americans have been dividing the spiritual from the religious at least since the early Transcendentalists in the 1830s, and maybe as far back as the Freethinker movement of the late 18th century—so I was certainly not doing anything new. I spent the next 15 or so years chasing after an elusive spirituality that I could never quite name or describe, but which I experienced in various forms, dancing with Sufis, sitting silently with Quakers, having a sweat with Lakota friends in northeast Kansas, meditating with Vipassana teachers, posing with yogis, hiking through giant Sequoias, washing feet with Lutherans on a Maundy Thursday, or even watching and hearing “Defying Gravity” performed for the first time at a Wicked preview before it premiered on Broadway. Yet I always found myself still lacking, still seeking something.
Spiritual seeking can be stimulating and interesting and inspiring and beautiful; but it can also be exhausting and alienating. I used to wonder why I tried at all—I hadn’t actually believed in a literal sense since I was a teenager, at least not in the way some Christians mean “believe.” Yet I craved certain kinds of experiences and a deeper meaningfulness. Why? Because I was raised religious? Maybe a biological predisposition? Just a personal psychological need or taste? Decades later, I’m still not sure I have an answer to that; and I’m not sure when, but at some point, I just accepted that it was part of who I am, part of how I’m put together. Interestingly, since I found my home in Judaism and blended spirituality back into an organized religious practice, I still find myself hoping to experience something special, something MORE.
In his famous descriptive analysis of the psychology of mysticism, William James implied that the quest for the spiritual experience was as important as the experience itself. Without denying the reality of the experience of the MORE, as he called it, and the MORE’s importance to the individual seeker, James also never really defines it. He attempts to describe it, from his research of mystical seekers, but leaves the definition frustratingly open. James’ posture echoes that of the earlier Transcendentalists who likewise never actually defined the “spiritual”, but did describe ways to experience it (Note 1). I’m not sure any other teacher I’ve ever studied with has actually been able to define what spirituality actually is. It almost is an “I know it when I see it” kind of phenomenon.
I encountered meditation early in my seeking as an undergraduate when I discovered the work of Thích Nhất Hạnh, and have moved in and out of meditation practices ranging from Buddhist to Indian to secular mindfulness. Since converting, I’ve been particularly drawn to the Jewish meditation tradition, which has ancient roots in early Jewish mysticism and has had many different forms over the past 2000 years, particular 18th century Hasidism and modern Neo-Hasidic movements. Rabbi Alan Lew was a teacher and congregational rabbi in San Francisco who had in his early life spent a decade studying and practicing Zen buddhism (Note 2). Rabbi Lew founded a Jewish meditation center, Makor Or connected to Congregation Beth Shalom in San Francisco as part of his rabbinate.
Rabbi Lew was one among many American Jewish leaders and thinkers who, after World War II, found the Judaism of their parents and grandparents to be inadequate to their needs and questions. From multiple different angles, generations, and strands of Judaism, these reformers and renewers, often outside of institutional Jewish denominations, worked simultaneously to enliven traditional practice (Halacha) and to infuse Jewish life with “spirituality” and meaning by emphasizing the experiential and meaningful side of Jewish practice. For these reformers, Judaism’s reason-for-being had to be more than “because tradition” or “because Halacha” or “because that’s the way it is” (Note 3). This “respiritualization” of Judaism during the post-war period has led to in the 21st century a vibrant, dynamic, expanding, exploratory, open, and creative moment in Judaism, including within the traditional American denominations. I offer this extremely brief (and slightly biased) historical context to help situate the place of Rabbi Lew’s teachings and meditation practice within Judaism more broadly.
Both in his pulpit drashes and in his book Be Still and Get Going, Rabbi Lew taught that a guide to real, meaningful spiritual practice is hidden in plain sight within the traditional texts, particularly in Torah itself. As a rabbi, he taught that daily spiritual practice is the essential core of spiritual work—making Jewish practice parallel to what a Buddhist might mean by practice. For Lew, spiritual practice necessarily means a process of ever-becoming, of never-finished transformation. We begin with moments of honest insight into the self, where, “reconciled with our own darkness, we stop projecting it onto [others]…” (19). This overcoming of inner conflict leads us forward into the MORE. “Instances of cosmic consciousness often begin with a sudden eruption of inner light so vivid that the person experiencing it is convinced that the light is coming from outside himself, that it is an objective phenomenon that exists in the outside world” (20).
Lew uses the narratives and characters of Torah, the teachings and stories of ancient Talmudic sages, 18th century hasidim, and modern Jewish philosophers to construct an inward spiritual process, for a particularly modern Jewish meditation practice, with intentions for the kinds of emotional and psychological transformations that meditative spirituality can lead us through. Lew was a skilled interpreter of Torah who, in the Jewish mode, saw the humanity of the Biblical ancestors’ lives and stories as the entryway into a resonant meaning for modern practitioners. At the end of each chapter, he gives specific ways to use these insights as touchpoints of spiritual practice, both intentional (like meditation or prayer) and in the way we live our lives in the mundane world (as in service to others).
Be Still and Get Going leads us through an inward examination of the conflicts in our lives, how they may have shaped us, and how to confront and overcome them.
“Unfettered by conflict, the heart is free to plunge into the infinite pool of suffering that we inhabit with all beings and, beyond that, into the bottomless wellspring of love that informs every moment of our experience and saturates everything in creation—the love that brings the next breath into our body of its own accord whenever we breathe out, the love that faithfully leads us down the freeway off-ramp to a street and not into some dark void, the love that holds us down to this earth, and circulates our blood, and spins the stars in their spirals” (61).
This exploration of inner conflict, for Lew, allows us to feel and stay with fear and its near-kin awe in our experience of life, opening the possibility of expanding our boundaries and limits, leading us to understand that we really fear our own need to be seen, understood, and loved. For Lew, when we are able to actually see the בצלם אלוהים (in the image of God) in ourselves, we are impelled to become who we really are, which provokes a new kind of fear, the fear that the world might actually need us. “It’s a frightening thing to think that the world depends on our becoming who we are, and it is even more frightening to feel the power of that” (77). The only antidote to that fear is to open up and expand beyond who we think we are into who we may become.
Toward the end of Be Still and Get Going, Lew redefines revelation to a kind of personal enlightenment that comes from the daily spiritual practices, not done rotely, not merely performed, but done intentionally and spiritually and wakefully, entering “the great stream of spiritual consciousness from which the Jewish people had been addressing God for the past several thousand years” (122). For Lew, this personal revelation, or enlightenment, links you into the flow of the Jewish tradition, to “do what those who were already there did, and those who were there from the beginning take on the practices of those who came after them” in a kind of timeless all-at-once-ness. Importantly for Lew, this points to the underlying spirituality of day-to-day life. “Every moment of our lives has such a double meaning. Every step we take has the meaning we imagine it has and a deeper, more mysterious meaning as well” (127).
Lew’s Jewish spirituality, then, layers meaningful interpretation of traditional Jewish text and story into Jewish practice and ritual, and thereby creates Jewish mindfulness practices that extend beyond the rote, bare halachic ritual into everyday life. Lew’s spirituality focuses on the interior, individual experience of Jewish practice, while acknowledging and trying to make sense of the social, interactive exterior. “It is the prison of our individuality that the presence of another frees us from,” Lew observes (40). In his lifetime and in the context of his particular moment in American Jewish history, the interiority and individual psychological orientation of Lew’s teachings were necessary and needed. Religions have a tendency to become moribund and rote over time, to lose their meaning and life across generations, unless they are renewed and made relevant again by successive generations. The post-war “renewal generation,” as historian Jonathan Sarna calls them, were a necessary corrective. The work of this generation of Jewish leaders, thinkers, scholars, and innovators has expanded out and influenced American Judaism broadly, across traditions and denominations.
As I read Lew’s book earlier this year, I was torn between the pull and depth of this spiritual practice, which appealed to my own desires for particularly kinds of experiences, and a certain dissatisfaction with it that I couldn’t shake. Something about turning inward and exploring my own inner spiritual life feels inadequate, maybe even delinquent, in our present moment. We live in a time of extreme society-wide solipsism, built on 250 years of American individualism, overtaken and appropriated by consumer capitalism, and brought to the central organizing principle of American society in the 1960s and 70s. A spirituality focused on an individual’s inward “journey” feels connected to the larger cultural solipsism, as if the point of religion or spiritual seeking is individual feelings, psychological adjustment, or worse, the personal customization of an individual identity. Now our 21st century tech-fueled, social-media-boosted solipsism has been weaponized by the right-wing, anti-egalitarian backlash that began before I was born and has morphed into a full-blown fascism over the course of my life. Not to mention the ongoing catastrophe in Gaza right now. What can “spiritual experience” even be in our self-obsessed time, particularly in a Jewish context?
Emanuel Levinas was a concentration camp survivor and ethical philosopher who spent most of his career trying to make sense of the Shoah by thinking deeply about what humans owe each other. Although I’d first read Levinas as an undergraduate, it wasn’t until Covid lockdowns in 2020 that I returned to his work, trying to in some way humanize what I was experiencing in the world in that moment. Levinas’s secular ethical philosophy is anchored in a parallel and interconnected Jewish philosophy. As you might expect, Levinas’s conception, explanation, and rationale for Judaism after the Holocaust is focused on the ethical obligation of humans to each other, the face-to-face dyad where two people not only interact, but where you, the self, can truly see the Other and in that moment of true-sight, recognize the utter alienness and uniqueness of the Other, and thereby the Other’s holiness. Levinas extends this out to the “third person”, to the social, and thereby the necessity for justice in the world. For Levinas, the very raison d’être of Judaism is to continually point the Jewish people toward their obligations to other human beings.
From Levinas’s perspective, the movement within mid-century French Judaism to seek spiritual experiences over traditional Jewish practice (somewhat parallel to what was happening in the US at the same time) belied something almost unholy. Or to say this differently, Levinas harshly condemned the search for an individual spiritual experience as a distraction away from or, worse, a refusal to recognize the holiness right in front of you, the holiness of another human being.
In his reading of a series of messianic texts in the Babylonian Talmud (Sanhedrin 99a), Levinas confronts the irreconcilable views of R. Yochanan, who believed that the human spirit is a holy life free from the encumbrances and pain of the world, in the עולם הבה, the world to come; whereas R. Shmuel taught that the life of the spirit is only possible in the fullness of human existence, that is, within the conditions of conflict and suffering and want and work and relationship itself of this life, the world as it is. Levinas concludes, “It is important to emphasize that these two conceptions come within the area of Jewish thought, for these two conceptions express man [sic]. It is also important to be on one’s guard against the simplistic use of antitheses indulged in by thinkers anxious to sum up the apparent options with Jewish thought” (“Messianic Texts,” 64). In other words, for Levinas, spirituality is necessarily both here-and-now and transcendent.
Just as in his shaping of a modern Jewish meditation practice, Lew nods to the Other, the exterior, the social as he thinks about what makes spiritual practice matter, so does Levinas turn to the interior in his thinking about Jewish ritual and the individual’s experience of the Other. Indeed none of Levinas is possible without the interior world (awareness, wakefulness to the holiness of the Other); nor is any of the spiritual as outlined by Rabbi Lew meaningful at all without the social, the other, the relationships within which our interior lives exist and become. Whereas Lew and his generation were trying, for good reason, to re-spiritualize Judaism in the U.S., Levinas was trying to make Judaism meaningful after the Holocaust by bringing into this world, right now, the practice of awakening to the holiness of the Other as a foundation from which to make justice a reality in the world through action.
Where Rabbi Lew’s inward journey kept spilling outward to sitting with the suffering of others, finding love by offering love, and joining in the flow of peoplehood and consciousness; Levinas’s obligation to the Other and work to make justice rely on the same consciousness. “One cannot, in fact, be a Jew instinctively,” Levinas argues. “One cannot be a Jew without knowing it. One must desire to be good with all one’s heart and, at the same time, not simply desire it on the basis of a naive impulse of the heart. … Belonging to Judaism presupposes both ritual and knowledge. Justice is impossible to the ignorant man [sic]. Judaism is an extreme consciousness” (“Ethics and Spirit,” emphasis and modified translation are mine, 6). Here I will extend Levinas’s suspicious of Hegelian synthesis to insist that it is not that the interior spiritual practice and the external ethical obligation and justice-work are reconciled and become the same thing. Rather, they both exist, both are essential and vital and necessary. At the same time, they are separate, and interdependent. Without one, the other becomes meaningless. Spirituality in this frame must be more than experiencing the MORE; spirituality is where the inner practice and the outer obligation orbit each other.
Notes and Bibliographic Do-Dads
(Note 1) The transcendentalist development of notions of spirituality was heavily influenced by Emerson and Thoreau’s readings in Asian religious philosophy, especially the Upanishads and the Bhagavad Gita, as well as Confucius and the Dao and several minor Buddhist works. Emerson mostly hid his influences in his philosophy; but Thoreau straightforwardly cited his sources. See Verluis (1993).
(Note 2) There was a generation of mid-20th Century Jews who went seeking spirituality and depth of meaning away from Judaism. Many of them found something in Buddhism, and indeed many of them remain to this day leading figures in American Buddhist movements, having studied with masters in Laos, Vietnam, Thailand, Japan, and India. See Gez (2011); and Marks (1999).
(Note 3) For the Jewish immigrants and refugees of the late 19th and early 20th century, Judaism and Jewish institutions had been centers of cultural continuity and safety, and sources of ethnic identification. This is a common function of religion within immigrant communities. But for their children and grandchildren, the Judaism they were raised in was rote practice, disconnected from their otherwise American lives, and they began to demand more from religion in general and judaism in particular. See Brodkin (1998) on the Jewish Americanization; and Sarna (2004) for an introduction to this post-war, mid-century transformation of American Judaism.
Brodkin, Karen. How Jews Became White Folks & What that Says about Race in America. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1998.
Gez, Yonatan N. “The Phenomenon of Jewish Buddhists in Light of the History of Jewish Suffering.” Nova Religio: The Journal of Alternative and Emergent Religions 15, no. 1 (2011): 44–68. https://doi.org/10.1525/nr.2011.15.1.44.
James, William. The Varieties of Religious Experience [1901-2]. New York: Penguin Classics, 1982.
Lew, Alan. Be Still and Get Going. New York: Little Brown, 2005.
Levinas, Emmanuel. “Ethics and Spirit” [1952] in Difficult Freedom: Essays on Judaism, trans. by Seán Hand. Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990.
—. “Messianic Texts” in Difficult Freedom: Essays on Judaism, trans. by Seán Hand. Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990.
Marks, Richard G. “Review of Jewish-Buddhist Meetings, by Rodger Kamenetz and Sylvia Boorstein.” Shofar 17, no. 3 (1999): 93–98. http://www.jstor.org/stable/42942901.
Sarna, Jonathan. American Judaism: A History. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004.
Versluis, Arthur. American Transcendentalism and Asian Religions. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993.
[Edited for typos and clarity on 6/17]
— Todd
lovingkindness, curiosity, and faggotry
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