Bringing Spirituality Down to Earth

By MICHAEL KRESS

Mindful Jewish Living: Compassionate Practice
By Jonathan Slater
380 pages. Aviv Press. $24.95.

Organized Judaism has had something of a tortured relationship with the contemporary notion of "spirituality." In a piece that's now a few years old entitled "The Fad That Would Not Pass," the well-respected, if always cranky Arthur Hertzberg has called the search for spiritual meaning part of Baby Boomers' "obsession with the self." According to Hertzberg, as well as many other members of the Jewish establishment, Jewish spirituality is to be found in following God and perfecting the world through Torah and mitzvot, period. Not through Kabbalah, meditation, Jewish Renewal, or anything else associated with "New Age" sensibilities.

To be fair, the spirituality movement has not helped itself in this regard, with its disdain for traditional rules and false dichotomy between "spiritual" and "religious." Too often, the spiritual quest has been all about the self, and with the commodification of spirituality—angels on TV, expensive meditation paraphernalia, the latest yoga craze—the movement too often is subject to ephemeral trends. But the Jewish world seems to have rejected the entire spiritual endeavor because of the excesses of some corners of the spiritual world.

So it's been left to the Renewal and Hasidic movements—the first self-consciously, the second incidentally—to speak the language of the most significant religious trend of our times, the personal search for meaning and transcendence in our spiritually diverse world and deeply skeptical times. That's not to say there are no good Jewish spirituality books out there, from Renewal, Hasidic, and even individual denominationally affiliated writers. But while many Jews, like their non-Jewish brethren, were seeking the type of experience one gets on meditation retreats or through the seemingly endless repetition of a soulful niggun, most mainstream rabbis and educators were wringing their hands wondering why fewer and fewer people are showing up for services or adult-ed classes.

The sole Jewish entry in the 2004 edition of The Best American Spiritual Writing tackles this very issue, framing the problem eloquently but coming up short when it comes to solutions. The piece is written by the Yale computer scientist David Gelerntner, and first appeared in Commentary. (It's too easy a pot-shot to point out that the book's sole Jewish essay was written not by a rabbi or Jewish educator but by a well-read, articulate layperson.)

Though Gelerntner is not my preferred spokesperson for Judaism, he sets up the problem facing Judaism ably enough: The great classical works of Jewish law, he writes, were published in response to the problem "I want to be Jewish but don't know how"; today, however, the dilemma is, "I want to want to be Jewish but don't know how." Judaism has generally been a religion of doing, not of thinking—mitzvot, not theology—and today we're seeking answers to life's big questions and demanding spiritual meaning from rituals and commandments that previous generations accepted on faith. People want to be Jewish, but they don't know where to start, or if Judaism is even up for responding to their needs.

His answer is to articulate what he sees as Judaism's four most vital themes, a sort of refocusing of Jewish expression for today's seekers. His four are: separation, as in the separation between sacred and profane created by halakhah (Jewish law); the veil separating God and humanity; turning inward, listening to the internal voice; and the male-female partnership. They are defensible if not convincing, with the last seemingly thrown in as a gauntlet in today's culture wars. Refocusing the public conversation about Judaism to center around these themes, Gelerntner proposes, will begin to provide an answer to the problem with which he began.

Thankfully Gelerntner's is not the only response to Judaism's struggle with the contemporary spiritual winds. In recent years, there have been signs that some parts of the denominational Jewish world are starting to take note of what's going on around them. "Carlebach" minyanim—prayer groups utilizing the heartfelt melodies of the late Hasidic songwriter Shlomo Carlebach—are popular, and kiruv organizations, which seek to bring Jews to traditional observance, have long emphasized individual inquiry and personal transformation, which are at the heart of what we mean by spirituality these days. The Reform movement's renewed emphasis on traditional ritual and its adoption of more soulful prayer tunes are likewise outgrowths of the spirituality "trend."

Now here comes the Conservative Rabbinical Assembly's new publishing arm, Aviv Press, taking on the spiritual buzzword du jour, "mindfulness." Generally defined as living consciously in the moment, mindfulness is a concept that The Dallas Morning News recently said "has become to the 2000s what angels were to the 1990s. Maybe bigger." (To those new to the spirituality scene, angels were hot, hot, hot to seekers, spiritual teachers, and culture-mongers not too long ago.) The book is Jonathan Slater's Mindful Jewish Living: Compassionate Practice. In it, Slater—co-director of programs at The Spirituality Institute—shows what it means to live a life of mindfulness in the context of Torah, traditional Jewish values, and halakhah.

This is not an instance of merely throwing some Jewish terms into an otherwise nonspecific discussion of a spiritual trend. The very structure of the book, with three of its five chapters focused on Torah, Avodah (worship), and Hesed (kindness)—the others are on meditation and Teshuvah (repentance)—recalls the foundations of Jewish practice, as articulated in Pirkei Avot: "On three things the world is sustained: on the Torah, on Avodah, and on deeds of loving kindness." Passages from traditional Jewish sources, the Talmud, Hasidic literature and others pervade Slater's chapters. (The exception is the chapter on meditation, which is so central to Slater's prescription for mindful Jewish living; though he asserts that meditation has played an important role in Judaism, he disappointingly does not prove or illustrate this.)

Case in point is Slater's treatment of the idea of commandment, something of a dirty word to many spiritual seekers today, because of its connotations of requirement and submission to authority. Mitzvot, however, are integral to Slater's understanding of mindfulness. Mindful Jewish living, he writes, can be expressed in two traditional Jewish sources: "Truth is the seal of the Holy One" (Talmud, Shabbat 55a) and "Know the God of your father and serve Him" (1 Chronicles 28:9). Seeking truth means seeking an awareness of God. And where does this lead? Not to some self-defined journey away from tradition, as so many mainstream Jews fear, but "what we learn in the moment of awareness is how we are to act." In other words, mindfulness leads to commandedness, not away from it. And, to bring the idea full circle, the purpose of the commandments, Slater writes, is to aid us in knowing God—not exactly a radical concept, but not necessarily normative either. To explain how this is accomplished, Slater relies on Hasidism, with its teachings of absolute monism, the idea that "there is no place that is devoid of God," a phrase he borrows from a Hasidic text. "The ultimate goal of study and practice," Slater concludes, "is to see beyond the layers of the physical world (and all other conceptions of it to realize there is nothing but God, not even we ourselves."

Confused? It's not the easiest of books to digest, especially to people accustomed to more straightforward works of Judaism. And he certainly engages in his share of New Agey ruminations, though always keeps them grounded in traditional Jewish teachings. But taken slowly and in small enough doses, there's a lot here to enrich our understanding of Jewish spirituality.

Slater's book is proof, once again, that Judaism is strong enough, diverse enough, universal enough to absorb and adapt the significant intellectual and spiritual themes of every generation. From Maimonides' Aristotelian philosophy to Samson Raphael Hirsch's modernist articulation of Orthodoxy, from the sectarianism of Second Temple Judaism to today's denominational splits, Judaism always has bent but not broken, incorporated new ideas and shifted focuses without losing its core, its essence. In other words, it has adapted and changed, but always, always on its own terms. Slater points the way to incorporating the contemporary notion of mindfulness—and by extension, the language of spirituality itself—into traditional Jewish observance.

In the last century, Reconstructionist Judaism was the little movement with the big influence. Always small in numbers, the core beliefs of this "fourth denomination" (Judaism as a civilization) were at least tacitly accepted by its three much-larger denominational cousins. In the 21st century, that role might very well be played by the tiny Renewal movement, whose eager adaptation of the contemporary spiritual quest to Jewish practice will likely continue influencing the entire Jewish world for years to come.