TO SUBSCRIBE: CALL (877) 568-SHMA ONLINE www.shma.com EMAIL [email protected] 44/708 April 2014 | Nissan 5774 n response to the recent passage of a Knesset bill mandating that Haredim serve in the Israel Defense Forces, outraged ultra-Orthodox leaders argued that yeshiva students, by Inside Ifocusing on Jewish study and prayer, already perform a spiritual service that is crucial for Cultivating Spiritual protecting the country. No matter how we might weigh-in on this matter, or on the argument’s Intensity legitimacy, it offers a vivid example of how the term ‘spiritual’ carries in it both personal as well Arthur Green as communal implications. The many different meanings of spirituality are the focus of this issue Awakening the Heart .....1 of Sh’ma. Rabbi Arthur Green, rector of the Rabbinical School of Hebrew College, opens up the Tzemah Yoreh issue with a powerful call for spiritual engagement that seeks to update the tropes of Hasidism Still Singing at Sinai .......3 — where the focus of attention is on the personal encounter with the divine. I’ve invited several Joel Hecker rabbinical seminary heads and others to respond to his call with questions and arguments of The Torah as God’s their own. How spiritual practice works without a commanding God, and whether such exercises Garment ........................4 are serious — perhaps even narcissistic — are among the questions explored. Other writers Deborah Waxman ask whether a focus on a spiritual quest deflects attention from the concrete world around us. Multiple Some of us find ourselves returning to just these questions again and again over the course Conceptualizations of the Divine ..................6 of our lifetime. Others might be inclined to look beyond them, even flee from them. But it is Scott Perlo difficult to ignore how one’s relationship with God and prayer intersects with how we relate Comrades in Prayer ........8 to others, how we grow families, build communities, and describe ourselves as Jews. Here, Asher Lopatin in these next pages, mysticism, a farm, the Shabbat dinner table, a painter’s canvass, and Beyond Ourselves, FaceTime, all play a role in this conversation. — Susan Berrin, Editor-in-chief the Community ..............9 Judith Margolis ‘Difficulty Praying’ .......10 Awakening the Heart Aaron Panken A Techno-Savvy ARTHUR GREEN Theology .....................12 Responses by Arthur Green mong my many sins in the course of My own turn toward an inward, religion- and Tzemah Yoreh .....14 my life is the responsibility for making of-the-heart-centered reading of Judaism Yisroel Bass Athe word “spirituality” respectable in stemmed from a long love affair with the The Wheat Harvest the Jewish community. When I was soliciting sources of Jewish mysticism, especially Story ...........................15 articles for my two-volume Jewish Spirituality Hasidism. That love was surely born of my Discussion Guide .........16 collection in 1983 (part of a 25-volume World own temperament and needs. It was certainly Aryeh Bernstein & Spirituality series), several scholars dismissed not intended as a strategy for Jewish survival. Joey Weisenberg the idea, insisting that there was no such thing. But now, as I watch other rationales for an Music as Spiritual Practice: A Conversation ............17 The concept was Catholic, they told me, and ongoing commitment to Judaism slip away, I distinctively not Jewish. I therefore articulated believe that this neo-Hasidic or spiritual orien- Gabe Greenberg, Sara Miriam Liben, a clear and tradition-rooted definition of what tation will become ever more important in our Gary Goldberg, I meant by the term: a religious life that recog- future religious language. Emilia Diamant nizes and cultivates the human soul, seeking in Traditional religion fought two great bat- NiSh’ma ......................18 daily life the holiness originally associated with tles across the earlier part of the 20th century. Jayne K. Guberman sacred space, time, and personhood. Over the One was the struggle against Darwinism, by & Jennifer Sartori years (especially with the help of my friends at which I mean not only evolutionary biology, Ethical Dilemmas in Adoptive Parenting ......20 Jewish Lights Publishing), the language of spir- but also the whole emerging picture of the Jon Leener & Avram Mlotek ituality has gained wide credence. “Spiritual universe and the history of the earth as de- Reimagining Jewish but not religious” is now a very widespread picted by astrophysics and geology. The other Spirituality: Acts of Loving- self-categorization among Jews under 40. Even battle was focused on biblical criticism and the Kindness....Digital Edition those uncomfortable with the word now have human authorship of sacred scripture. This to pay attention. continued on next page battle engaged Jews more than the struggle to emerging generations? with Darwinism, for the authority of tradition Here, I return to the language of spiritual- seemed to stand or fall with it. Traditional ity. A radical spiritualization of Judaism’s truth, religion decisively lost both of these battles. begun within Hasidism some 200 years ago, Among college-educated people in the Western needs to be updated and universalized to ap- world, the conclusions were clear. And with peal to today’s Jewish seeker. This would offer this disillusionment, the twin pillars of classi- the possibility of a religious language that ad- SHMA.COM cal Jewish theology — Creation and Revelation dresses contemporary concerns while calling for — were challenged. This, combined with the a deep, faith-based attachment to the essential greatest of all challenges to Jewish faith, the forms and tropes of Jewish piety. It will do so Holocaust, left us reeling. How could we Jews (unlike traditional Hasidism) without insisting proclaim faith in a God of providence and his- on indefensible historical or scientific claims. tory, especially one who had chosen Israel for Mystical religion, by its very nature, shifts special love and protection, after 1945? the focus of attention away from the positive/ historical and inward toward the devotional/ “Do you experience God creating the world each day, experiential. Here, the question is not: “Do you encountering a divine presence in the natural world around believe that God created the world, and when?” but rather: “Do you experience God creating you? What does that encounter call upon you to do?” the world each day, encountering a divine presence in the natural world around you?” For the next half-century, we Jews were Such a religious experience also asks: “What mostly too busy surviving and rebuilding does that encounter call upon you to do?” We our lives to worry much about theology. The will not be concerned with whether the tale of emergence of Israel, especially the surprising Egyptian bondage and liberation is historically victory in the 1948 war, created some talk of verifiable or not. The question is rather: “Have miracles, and a certain combination of reli- you come out of Egypt?” referring to whatever gious Zionism and civic pride in Jewish people- it is that keeps the individual in the narrow hood and our accomplishments (including the straits of his or her own mitzrayim. Perhaps Rabbi Arthur Green is the remarkable rescue of Soviet Jewry) served as most transformative for Judaism, we will not founding dean and, now, a sort of ersatz religion, as described by Jacob ask, “Did Israel hear God’s word at Sinai, and rector of the Rabbinical School of Hebrew College in Neusner and others. But that replacement how much of the Torah was given there?” but Newton Centre, Mass., and for faith had run its course by the turn of the rather: “Can you feel yourself standing before its Irving Brudnick Professor 21st century, largely for demographic reasons. the mountain as you hear the words of Torah? of Jewish Philosophy and American Jews raised after 1967, the fourth Can you say, ‘We will do and we will listen’ in Religion. He has taught and fifth generations after immigration, were this eternal Sinai moment?” Jewish mysticism, Hasidism, and theology to several no longer swayed by loyalty to the traumas of The “events” of Israel’s sacred narrative generations of students at the their grandparents’ generation. They felt fully are here read unapologetically as myth rather University of Pennsylvania, the at home in America, and were quite distant than history, but that makes their voice more Reconstructionist Rabbinical from the ancient faith toward which even the powerful rather than less. To be a religious Jew College (where he served as preceding generations had maintained such a means entering into that myth in a way that both dean and president), tepid and ambivalent relationship. Among the calls forth a deep personal engagement and Brandeis University, and Hebrew College. Green is the significant number who did have spiritual lean- commitment. founder of Havurat Shalom, an ings, newly imported versions of Eastern teach- The God of this religion is not the com- egalitarian Jewish community ings were often more attractive than Judaism. manding Other who rules over history, nor the in Somerville, Mass., and he Where, then, are we left? We know that God of reward and punishment. Rather, God remains a leading independent we are the bearers of one of the world’s great- is found in the still, small voice that calls us figure in the Jewish Renewal movement. He is the author est spiritual traditions, one often maligned and to open our hearts and turn our lives toward of more than a dozen books, misunderstood. We care deeply about its sur- goodness. This sort of new mystical or Neo- most recently Radical Judaism: vival; some form of “ve-shinantan le-vanekha” Hasidic piety turns toward the natural world Rethinking God and Tradition — “teach them diligently to your children” — as a source of inspiration, seeing existence (Yale University Press, 2010).