I had an interview last week for the Wexner Heritage Program. It's bankrolled by Columbus industrialist Les Wexner. It's a two-year program aimed at cultivating Jewish lay leadership and deepening its participants' understanding of Jewish history and thought. The program rotates to a different city each year, and next year, it's Chicago.
Rabbi Jay Moses, who runs the program, was one of my interviewers. He had read my application, in which I said something about wanting to do whatever I could to bring more space and more silence into Jewish life, more Jews into contact with the contemplation and meditation that used to, and still can, undergird Jewish prayer. He said, "Perhaps 10 or 15 per cent of people are wired in a way that makes them receptive to meditation or to more mystical aspects of worship. What do you propose to do about the other 85 or 90 per cent?"
This is an interesting question. I doubt I answered it well, but here's what I think: the realm of the spiritual is its own ecosphere. Just as each species finds its niche and fills its role in a healthy ecosystem, so the realm of the spiritual always will -- always must -- have atheists, agnostics, fundamentalists, mystics and everything in between.
The prophets didn't want to turn everyone into a prophet. Buddhist priests don't expect or want all their students to become priests. The Buddha himself understood that his system of thought and meditation required different levels of adherents, "home-leavers" and "householders" alike. If someone never goes to synagogue -- or goes mostly to chat -- can get a glimpse of why we dance this dance to begin with, it might deepen their experience. They don't have to become a monk in order to better appreciate the conemplative (which is a good thing, since there's not much in the way of a monastic tradition in Judaism).
I have, from a very young age, had an awareness of a vast order to which I'm connected, whose source is a great Spirit or Intelligence. I call that intelligent spirit "God". Now, I may merely be delusional. Or, I could just be intellectually lazy. Or just plain wrong. But I never fix my flag too firmly in the ground of belief, or else I'll cease to wonder, contend, explore. My meditations will become silent exercises in self-justification.
I'll also cease to hear the voices of intelligent atheists and agnostics, fundamentalists and firm believers whose insights can help deepen my own.
My Judaism is the Magnetic North toward which my spiritual compass points. That doesn't mean it's True North for everyone.
And anyway, the idea of God is so often absurdly reduced and anthropomorphized that it ceases to make sense on any but the most simplistic level. Atheists, physicists and spiritual sages exist along a contiuum that our knowledge continues to bend -- the extremes are being pulled closer together.
When the shouting dies down, the silence will be lovely: revelatory, still, pregnant with new wisdom. We'll all be right. We'll each have found our place in the spiritual ecosphere.
What will we argue about then?
--T.A.
If your goal is to find a practice that people will regularly engage in, it could be that academic study would appeal to a broader slice of the Jewish pie, but not by that much.
But what if your goal is to find a practice which will allow for contact with the divine?
Do you think more people are wired to find G-d in academic study than they are to find G-d in a meditative moment?
Would Rabbi Moses suggest that we are better off focusing on the teaching of Torah than on prayer?
I certainly spend more time teaching Torah than sharing prayer, but I'm starting to think that it shouldn't be that way.
Posted by: Yehoshua Karsh | February 13, 2006 at 07:31 AM