An Introduction to Contemplation

A Ladder Set Upon the Earth:

From A Handbook for Contemplation in the Jewish Tradition

Rabbi Kennard Lipman, Ph.D.

Chapter I. The System of Four Worlds

The Image of God

What does it mean to be made in the Image of God? Does God have a
form such that an image could be made of it? What does this metaphor
tell us about our relationship to God? How does this Image help us
participate in the process and purpose of creation?

The Image of God is our connection, our bridge to God. We can partic-
ipate in the process and purpose of creation because we are made in
the Image of God.

What is this Image? According to inner Judaism, it is the structure of

our soul. It is how our soul is built or constructed. This construction is
a microcosm of the whole process of creation, which is itself a building-
process. Furthermore, the building-process of creation can be divided
into four steps, called ‘worlds’ in the macrocosm and ‘souls’ in us, the
microcosm.

The mystical movement known as Kabbalah (‘received tradition’) arose

in the latter part of the twelfth century in Southern France and North-
ern Spain. Kabbalistic teachings included intense speculations on the
mysteries of creation. The Kabbalists developed a series of mediating
worlds in order to answer the question: how are the infinite and finite
bridged in the process of creation? By the mid-16th century they had
developed a system of four worlds paralleling four levels of the soul in
the human being. The four worlds are: emanation, creation, formation,
and making. The four levels of soul are: life or higher soul of higher
soul; higher soul; spirit; and lower soul.

Kabbalists used several metaphors and analogies to illustrate this pro-

cess of the unfolding of the four worlds, beginning with the most spir-
itual and concluding with the most material. They made an analogy to
human, purposeful action. When we act, first there needs to be a will,
an intention to create some thing or act. Next, we need to think about
the thing or plan the action. After planning comes the motivation
needed to carry out the action. We may also need to communicate the
plan to others who may carry out the action, and they need to be moti-
vated as well.

Finally there is the execution and monitoring of the action.

This process goes on not only in large groups and in individuals, but
also in all purposeful action. Rabbi Aryeh Kaplan gives the example of
a computerized system for regulating traffic flow in a city (Kaplan, 34-
5). There needs to be the intention; then the computer has to be pro-
grammed; then its signals need to be sent out to substations and ulti-
mately to individual traffic lights; finally these lights need not only to
respond to the computer’s instructions but also monitor traffic.

As human begins we have will, thought, emotion and sense organs in

order to carry out such activities. In such actions, an inner intention is
revealed, externalized.

The relationship between body and clothing is another metaphor for

this process. Revealing an inner intention is like putting on clothing,
‘garmenting’. Thinking about how to carry out an intention is like in-
tention clothing itself in thinking; then thinking clothes itself in emo-
tional motivation; and finally such emotions clothe themselves in
physical actions. Clothing expresses something of the body underneath
it, but it also conceals it. In the same way it is difficult to fully reveal
our intentions to another. Closely related to this metaphor is that of
body and soul. Instead of saying that thought is the garment of inten-
tion, you could say that intention is the soul of thought.
Carving in stone is another elegant metaphor. First the artist makes a
tracing, which is so subtle it cannot be separated from its background.
This is the world of atzilut. Then she carves with a stylus, which reveals
more of the tracing. This is the world of briah, symbolized by the
Throne of Glory, a basis or site where differentiation begins to take
place. Next she hews from stone into forms such as circles and squares.
This is the world of yetzirah, symbolized by the ranks of angels hewn
from beneath the Throne of Glory, possessing forms of air or fire and
supporting the Throne. Finally she makes the completed piece. This is
the world of asiyah, the physical world, which is like the outer shell of
creation.

Finally, there is the famous symbol of Jacob’s ladder, which, the Bible
says (Genesis 28,12), is standing “in” the earth (that is, extending down
into our bodily nature), and reaching up to God. According to the Mid-
rash, this ladder has four rungs, indicating the four levels or dimen-
sions of our being. These are, in the simplest, most accessible terms:

1. sensation (including body-based feeling and vitality)

2. emotion (including imagination, which is closely linked)
3. intellect (including thinking and intuition)
4. will or guidance

Sensation/feeling relates to the world of matter; imagination/emotion

to the world of forms; intellect to the world of essences and free choice;
and will to the world of purposes or goals. We will explore the land-
scape of these worlds and how they are steps on the ladder to God.
These ideas will become experientially accessible to you through the
contemplative practices in this book.

Summing up the idea of the human being as a microcosm of creation,

Hayim of Volozhin (1749-1821), the foremost disciple of the Gaon of
Vilna, wrote in his Nefesh ha-Hayim: "This is the totality of the human
being: all his particular powers are arranged in relation to a particular
world and power. These powers are unified in a hidden structure that
contains all powers and worlds, and they are ordered, as it were, just
like the structure of a human being."
 On ‘Meditation’, Jewish and Otherwise

CCAR Journal, Fall 1999

Rabbi Kennard Lipman, Ph.D.
Hebrew Union College, Los Angeles

Many Jews, engaged in an attempt to recover and renew the ‘spirituali-

ty’ of our tradition, have assumed that ‘meditation’ is an integral part
of such renewal. But how shall we understand this term in the Jewish
context and how does it relate to its meaning in other contexts, par-
ticularly those of the great meditative traditions of Asia? What I will
argue here is that Jewish contemplative practices, whatever their su-
perficial similarity to those of Asian traditions (visualization of sacred
names, chanting, breathing exercises, etc.) are based on a particular
view of reality, which I call ‘duality in unity’. Furthermore, this ‘duality’
needs to be understood as created through the will of the Creator. An
understanding of this view will help us to situate Jewish practices
among those of other contemplative traditions, and thus avoid confu-
sion. I will also show that the practice of ‘meditation’ in our tradition,
whatever that may mean, is inseparable from understanding this view.

Renewal of interest in Jewish meditation, and more particularly, in its

relationship to Eastern forms of meditation, is still in its infancy. Some
Jews take a ‘we have it too’ approach. Some are researching and pre-
senting a wide variety of meditation techniques from various schools
and periods. Still others are introducing Buddhist forms of meditation
into Jewish retreats or services. Such activity is not confined to the
Jewish Renewal movement. Conservative and Reform synagogues have
meditation groups.1 However, a cross-cultural vocabulary about medi-

1 The fact that there exists no significant, sustained, scholarly study of the rela-
tionship of Buddhism to Judaism is a scandal, given the tremendous number of
Jews involved in Buddhist and other Eastern teachings. The only book-length
scholarly study I am aware of is by a Japanese Christian graduate of the Jewish
Theological Seminary, Jacob Teshima, Zen Buddhism and Hasidism: A Com-
tation is needed if we are to avoid confusion in the discussion and
practice of Eastern and Jewish techniques.

In the Indian philosophical and religious tradition, meditation is in-

separable from philosophy. The Sanskrit term darshana, which is
translated as ‘philosophy’, literally means ‘a way of seeing’. In Bud-
dhism (I received instruction according to the Tibetan tradition), the
‘path’ or ‘way’ begins with ‘a way of seeing’ which is implemented or
made real by ‘meditation’. Meditation or, bhavanna, comes from the
root ‘to be’. The ‘path’ then continues with ‘a way of behaving’ which is
set up by ‘a way of seeing’ and meditation. The culmination of the
whole process, of course, leads to a goal or ‘fruit’, awakening or Bud-
dhahood.

There are two important points here. The first I wish to emphasize,
and which my Tibetan teachers emphasized, is that meditation is the
application or implementation of a particular ‘view’. One must assent,
in some way, to that view for meditation to be effective. I said ‘in some
way’ purposely, because how this assent occurs depends on the quali-
ties of the individual. More intellectual people might start with an ab-
stract presentation of the view, such as learning the arguments estab-
lishing the truth of the ‘emptiness’ of all phenomena. Others might
begin with a more experiential approach (‘sit down and do this’). These

parative Study (Latham, Md.: University Press of America, 1995). There is cer-
tainly nothing like Barbara Holdrege’s Veda and Torah: Transcending the Text-
uality of Scripture (Albany: SUNY Press, 1996), or the excellent collection of pa-
pers, Between Jerusalem and Benares: Comparative Studies in Judaism and
Hinduism, edited by Hananya Goodman (Albany: SUNY Press, 1994). There is
an on-going Hinduism and Judaism group at the American Academy of Reli-
gion. Judith Linzer’s Torah and Dharma: Jewish Seekers in Eastern Religions
(New York: Aronson, 1996), for example, which was a Ph.D. Dissertation, is in-
teresting only as anecdotal material, because of its questionable research meth-
odology. There is a great deal of such material available in popular books on
Jewish spirituality.
Examples of contemporary books on Jewish meditation are Mark Verman, The
History and Variety of Jewish Meditation (Northvale, NJ: Aronson, 1996); Ste-
ven Fisdel, The Practice of Kabbalah: Meditation in Judaism (Northvale, NJ:
Aronson, 1996); Avram Davis, ed., Meditations from the Heart of Judaism: To-
day’s Teachers Share Their Practices, Techniques and Faith (Woodstock, VT:
Jewish Lights, 1997).
are merely different approaches to understanding the relationship be-
tween ‘view’ and ‘meditation’.

The second point is that the relationship between view, meditation and
way of behaving, changes depending on the level of the teaching or
student. On the lower levels, the relationship between these three as-
pects of the path is more linear; i.e., one progresses step by step along
the path to the goal. On the higher levels, view, meditation and behav-
ior approach a unity; this means taking a different perspective on the
nature of the path, which means that the predominance of view comes
to the fore. In other words, to speak about different levels is to talk
about different ‘views’.

Probably the most well-known illustration of this last point is the Zen
story in which the disciple is meditating and the teacher sits next to
him and starts polishing a black stone. The student says, “What are you
doing?” The teacher replies, “I’m polishing this stone to make it white.”
The student says, “You can’t make a black stone white by polishing it!”
The teacher shoots back, “You can’t make a sentient being a Buddha by
meditating!” The teacher undercuts the student’s linear conception of
the path through a seemingly simple, but actually very sophisticated
‘view’.

What do we mean by ‘view’? It means a direct vision of ‘reality’. ‘Reali-

ty’ here is inseparable from view, as we pointed out above in relation to
the notion of levels. When ‘view’ changes reality changes. An example
of view in Buddhism would be the “Four Characteristics of Existence”:
everything is transitory, everything is unsatisfactory (dukkha), every-
thing is without an essence, and nirvana is bliss. ‘Meditation’ would
then mean how one comes to implement, actualize or internalize the
truth of these four characteristics.

There is one more aspect of meditation in the Indian, and more partic-
ularly Buddhist tradition, that is helpful to understand. There are pre-
liminaries or preparations needed for practicing ‘meditation’ as bha-
vana, implementation of ‘view’ (darshana). To put it simply, these
preparations involve developing concentration with its attendant feel-
ings of calm and relaxation. But it is often precisely the preliminaries
which most people take meditation to be about.

In Buddhism, the primary means of developing preliminary forms of

concentration and relaxation is ‘mindfulness’ (smirti). The state of
calm and relaxation is called shamatha. Many Jews in the West have
learned ‘mindfulness’ meditation, focusing on the body, feelings,
thoughts, etc. However, there is great confusion about this matter, be-
cause most people learn this as part of Vipassana or ‘insight medita-
tion’. Vipassana means ‘direct insight into the view’. Some teachers
stress that mindfulness is technique-oriented, and relatively value-free,
and its purpose is to develop calm and concentration.

Concentration and ‘mindfulness’, and their attendant ‘calm’, are in-

deed universal forms of ‘meditation’; they are not particularly Bud-
dhist, although certain techniques may be. Mindfulness meditation is
amenable to research in the psychology laboratory. Mindfulness medi-
tation is also found in the Jewish tradition. For example, there is the
case of R. Kalonymous Kalman Shapira’s practice of hashkatah, quiet-
ing, which is done through observation of thoughts or the minute-hand
of a clock (a technique I have not seen in Buddhism). R. Shapira’s
technique has now been translated and published twice.2

The question is: what does the meditator do with the calm and concen-
tration? You begin to implement the ‘view’. The Buddhist would ‘medi-
tate on’ the ‘Four Characteristics’ mentioned above, or on the famous
‘Four Noble Truths’. The word ‘meditation’ here would correspond to
hitbonenut , or contemplation, in Hebrew. In R. Shapira’s hashkatah,
after the quieting, one proceeds to do a self-examination and chooses a
posuk, a sentence or verse from the Torah or liturgy. The posuk em-
bodies a midah, one of the divine qualities which one wishes to culti-
vate, such as Love or Faith.

2Kalonymous Kalman Shapira, Conscious Community: A Guide to Inner Work,

Andrea Cohen-Kiener, tr. (Northvale, NJ: Aronson, 1996), pp.101-105; To Heal
The Soul: The Spiritual Journal of a Chasidic Rebbe, Yehoshua Starrett, tr.
(Northvale, NJ: Aronson, 1995), pp. xxix-xxxii.
What we need to understand next is that Jewish and Buddhist ‘views’
involve very deep and comprehensive visions of reality. Since it is our
purpose here to introduce a way of thinking about Jewish ‘meditation’
and ‘spirituality’, we need not unpack all aspects of the view behind R.
Shapira’s practice, nor go through each of the ‘Four Characteristics’ or
the ‘Four Noble Truths’.3

Let me give just one simple illustration of my point and the attendant
confusion in contemporary understandings of meditation. Some expo-
nents of Buddhist ‘insight’ practice will present it as ‘scientific’ and
value-free. For example, they will say that the first of the ‘four charac-
teristics’, impermanence, corresponds to a scientific view of reality, an
objective truth we will ‘see’ if we sit down and ‘meditate’. This is apolo-
getics of a rather poor quality. ‘Impermanence’ is part of the Buddhist
view; it is an understanding of reality as ‘momentariness’ and part of a
complex theory of causation, that is meant to exclude, among other
things, a ‘Creator’.

To meditate on ‘impermanence’ is to implement a Buddhist view. Im-

permanence is not just a platitude about how everything is changing
and life is short. To ‘meditate’ on such a view is, as we mentioned
above, in some way to assent to the truth of that view. I have had con-
siderable experience (first of all, my own) about the consequences of
taking up ‘meditation’ as value-free technique, without understanding
whether one has really assented to the view or not. Many problems can
arise when there is an unconscious conflict between an individual’s ac-
tual views, i.e., those they live by, and those embodied in a meditation.
By ‘individual’s actual views’ I mean deeply valued ones inherited from
tradition, which the person herself may not even be able to articulate.

At the very least, one needs to be aware of the relationship between

view and meditation in taking up any practice. At most, one needs to
understand that there are serious conflicts among the ‘views’ which lie
behind ‘meditations’ from different traditions. For example, in the In-

3 For an introductory account of these see, for example, Walpola Rahula, What
the Buddha Taught (New York: Grove Press, 1974). This otherwise excellent in-
troduction to basic Buddhism is marred by some annoying apologetics.
dian tradition there are different interpretations of the meaning of
‘oneness’. In the most famous contemplative tradition of Hinduism,
the Advaita Vedanta of Shankara, ‘oneness’ is understood as advaita ,
i.e., that Brahman, the ultimate reality, is ‘One without a second’. In
Mahayana Buddhism, ‘oneness’ is understood as advaya , the ‘non-
duality’ of the ultimate truth, nirvana , and of the relative truth, samsa-
ra . In another well-known Hindu school, the ‘oneness’ of advaita is
qualified so as to contain dvaita , ‘twoness’ or duality. 4 As explained
above, all these views have consequences for how one ‘meditates’. How
would one then talk about a Jewish view of oneness, such as that of the
Sh’ma , that God is ‘one’?

One very sophisticated view is found in Chabad Hasidism, which is

very close to the Hindu ‘dvaita-advaita ‘, ‘duality in non-duality’ view.
This example will illustrate for the Jewish reader the practical conse-
quences of adopting a view. According to Chabad, following the Zohar,
there are two ‘unifications’. The ‘upper unification’ is known as yihuda’
‘ila’ah and the ‘lower unification’ is yihuda’ tata’ah. In the upper unifi-
cation one experiences complete negation (bittul ) of individual self-
conscious existence (yeshut ) in the ‘oneness’ or light of God (YHVH),
like the rays of the sun at their source where they cannot even be re-
ferred to as ‘rays’.5 This seems quite similar to a variety of Indian views
of the ultimate reality or truth.

However, the Chabad philosophy has something quite remarkable to

say about the ‘lower unification’, which makes it more similar to the
Hindu view of ‘duality in non-duality’ than to the Buddhist view of
‘non-duality’. The ‘lower unification’ is done from the perspective of
duality, as an individual, self-centered being. One maintains a know-
ledge of the ‘higher unity’ without annihilating the dualistic perspec-
tive. Furthermore, Chabad tells us that while the ‘upper unity’ nullifies

4 These different approaches to ‘oneness’, or monism, are one of the salient fea-
tures of post-Shankara (8th century) Indian philosophy, and are discussed in
any survey, such as that of M. Hiriyana, Outlines of Indian Philosophy (London:
Allen & Unwin, 1970), chs. 13 and 14.
5 The second section of the Tanya , known as Sha’ar Hayihud Vehaemunah , is

devoted to an exposition of this doctrine.

individual self-centeredness (‘ego’), it does not change its perspective.
It is the lower unification, operating at the level of duality, that can
change the perspective of the ‘ego’. This change is called ‘refining’ or
‘sifting’ good from evil (birur).

Birur leads to the notable, and I would add characteristically Jewish,

conclusion that, “There is a tremendous advantage to the service of re-
finement, because the source for the body and animal soul [which exist
on the level of yeshut] is higher than the source of the Godly soul [the
level of the higher unification]. Therefore, [their refinement] contrib-
utes an added dimension of light and life energy to the Godly soul.” 6
What is characteristically Jewish here is the respect for duality and the
necessity of working on the dualistic level in order to reveal a unity
even greater than the upper one. The reason for this respect for duality
is, as I have indicated at the beginning of this discussion, that it is a
willful creation of the Creator, and not some accident, illusion, appear-
ance, mistake, etc.

To illustrate the practical consequences of views, let me give an exam-

ple from the world of psychology, where there has also been much con-
temporary interest (and there are many Buddhist-Jewish psycholo-
gists!) on the relationship of Buddhist meditation to psychotherapy.7
People involved in this work have noted that some individuals in ther-
apy may require ‘building up’ their fragile egos before they can engage
in Buddhist ‘non-self’ meditation. Hence the slogan coined by Jack
Engler: “You have to be a somebody before you can be a nobody.”
What I point out here as characteristic of the Chabad view (and Juda-
ism in general, I would argue), is that both the work of becoming a
‘nobody’ and becoming a ‘somebody’ are sacred work.

There is a difference between studying the structure of the self and its
development from an ultimate point of view, and studying it from its

6 Shalom DovBer Schneerson of Lubavitch, The Tree of Life: A Classic Chassidic

Treatise on the Mystic Core of Spiritual Vitality, Eliyahu Touger, tr. (Brooklyn:
Sichos in English, 1998), 59.
7 A notable example is Jeffrey Rubin, Psychotherapy and Buddhism: Toward An

Integration (New York: Plenum, 1996).

own perspective as a developing self. Furthermore, one work does not
necessarily come after the other, with no-self as the goal. In the
Chabad example, the work of becoming a somebody leads to an even
greater sense of completeness than the ‘nobody-work’ of the upper uni-
fication.

Obviously, this is a complex discussion which goes beyond the limits of

this brief essay, but I bring up this question of different types of ‘one-
ness’ to alert the reader to what is involved in entering into the ‘garden
of meditation’. We should bring just as much sophisticated knowledge
and reflection to this subject as we (post-)modern Jews do to other
contemporary political, social, cultural and religious issues in Judaism.

In summary, while one may wish to adopt and practice certain forms of
meditation from outside the Jewish tradition (which would not be
something new for us), it is essential to understand that meditation
practices implement a view or a way of seeing. This means that medita-
tion literally builds worlds and determines behavior. Assenting to a
view through a form of meditation that one does not fully understand
could in fact, as an epiphenomenon, make one feel better about oneself
and behave more carefully in the world. But it may also further remove
people, in subtle and profound ways, from the Jewish practices that
they so sincerely wish to recover and renew.
 What is Spirituality? - I
Rabbi Kennard Lipman, Ph.D.

The spiritual journey is not a success story or a career move.

It is rather a series of humiliations of the false self.
Thomas Keating, Intimacy with God

Spirituality is intimacy (da’at) with God. Spirituality is an approach to

life that recognizes that our normal state of self (‘I’), realized in normal
psychological development, is a false self (often called ‘ego’).

The term ‘false self’ comes from the pediatrician and psychoanalyst,
D.W. Winnicott, who taught that the infant begins life in an unin-
tegrated state in which there is no clear me/not me awareness. As the
infant begins to build up an awareness of continuity of being, due to
‘good enough mothering’ in a supportive environment, there is inevita-
bly some inappropriate contact or failure of support for this continuity.

Winnicott called this inappropriate contact between infant and envi-

ronment ‘impingement’, where the environment forces the infant to
react to outside pressure in a way that disturbs the continuity of being
and the spontaneous development of a true self. Impingement leads to
‘compliance’ and the loss of the spontaneity of being, along with the
development of a reactive, false self. This reactive, false self develops
defensive anger and guilt in dealing with impingement (what the psy-
choanalyst Melanie Klein called ‘the depressive position’). All this is
normal. It is not the fault of mothers and fathers. It is our existential
situation.

What we call the normal self or I is built upon this false self. It is, to
use another term from psychodynamic psychology, actually a ‘self-
representation’, a self-image constructed of memories and projections.
The true self is not an image or representation, but it is hidden by
them. Image has become reality. The normal, false self is a crippled,
wounded self, defensively reactive at its core.

I will give two examples from 20th century Hasidism. Adin Steinsaltz
said in The Thirteen Petalled Rose that

when we ask the question ‘Who am I?’ or ‘Where am I?’ one can
come to the point wherehis previous sense of his existence, that he
was its hero and king and god, is, besides being something of
asacrilege, an empty shell without content…. Only when a man can
relate his inner center to God as the first and foremost and only re-
ality, only then does his self take on meaning…. It is the self-
obliterating view of oneself that provides the true basis of all exist-
ence,… (147)

Rabbi Kalonymous Kalman Shapira said in regard to membership in

his spiritual Havurah, B’nei Machshevah Tovah,

This is our current situation. We are constantly distraught. What is

the point of our existence?… I am constantly preoccupied with
meaningless illusions. I hold myself completely responsible for this
tragic descent – from the precious nearness of God to this unset-
tling chaos…. We are distraught, but we do not know how to help
ourselves. This is why we have banded together…. It is important to
be explicit and clear that our society accepts into its ranks only
those individuals who share these concerns. If people know in their
hearts that they are not similarly burdened with these concerns, we
ask that they do not join our group. They will harm themselves and
others. (Conscious Community, 4-5)

The spiritual approach begins with this recognition and then proceeds
with methods for seeing through the false self. In religious terms, a
spiritual approach begins with an existential sense of distance and sep-
aration from God, and the basis for this distance in the false self. Any
approach, whether psychological or religious, that does not operate at
this level shouldn’t be called ‘spiritual’. It can be psychologically or so-
cially transformative, religious, ethical, pious, philosophical, but it is
not spiritual.

While this basis of spirituality is universal, it does not mean that all
spiritual traditions agree as to the outcome of the process of seeing
through the false self. They do not agree on the possibilities inherent in
transforming the false self or on the ‘nature’ of the true self, e.g., Bud-
dhist emptiness vs. Hindu atman, Neo-platonic universal soul vs.
Christian individual eternal soul.

In the Jewish context I prefer the term ‘inner Judaism’ to ‘spirituality’.

Traditionally, those who have practiced inner Judaism, whether they
called themselves Mekubbalim, Hasidim, possessors of sitrei torah,
Yordei Merkava, etc., generally regarded their ‘inner teachings’ as all-
inclusive, comprehensive understandings of all of Judaism. To use the
language of ‘Pardes’, the innermost level, sod, encompasses all the oth-
er levels of drash, remez and pshat. Today, however, we can no longer
make such a claim to all-inclusiveness. We live in a pluralistic world.
Both practically and theoretically, most of us understand that no one
can master all of Jewish learning. Inner Judaism must take its place
alongside other Judaisms. But at least inner Judaism is again available
to (post-) modern Jews, after its long suppression during modernity
and retreat into ultra-Orthodoxy.
 What is Spirituality? - II
Rabbi Kennard Lipman, Ph.D.

How can we begin to make sense of this contemporary buzzword,

“spirituality”? Must it remain either vague or esoteric? This word can
only make sense in context. We are all familiar with the simplest con-
text of this word: spirituality/materiality. But this dyad does not tell us
very much, probably because we tend to merely read it in modern Car-
tesian terms as the mind/body distinction. ‘Mind’ doesn’t necessarily
mean anything ‘spiritual’.

But there does exist a very rich Western, and more particular Jewish,
context for ‘spirit’. Dyads like spirituality/materiality inevitably lead to
the following question: how are they related? The answer usually
comes in the form of a mediating third term. We should not be sur-
prised that this is also the case here.

We can only begin to make sense of the contemporary ‘spirituality’

phenomenon if we restore its originating context in Western culture.
The context is an understanding of the human being as a three-level
microcosm. In other words, reality has levels. The three levels are often
referred to by terms such as: body-mind-spirit, body-soul-spirit, soma-
psyche-nous, nefesh-ruah-neshamah. These distinctions survive, for
example, in the division of modern psychology into the following ap-
proaches (‘survival’ is an anthropological term for cultural practices
that continue, often in a debased form, long after their originating con-
texts have been forgotten): behavioral, which deals with observable ac-
tions; psychodynamic, which emphasizes emotional life; and cognitive,
which stresses intellectual functions.

A reason that ‘spirituality’ is a confusing term, often both to its practi-

tioners and detractors, is that in the (post-) modern world we have lost
the sense of being a microcosm. We have lost our sense of ‘sacred to-
pography’ of both our inner and outer worlds. Freud, of course, with
his I (ego), It (id) and super-I (super-ego), attempted to create a scien-
tific topography of the mind. But for the most part we live in a flatland
or in a ‘dry’, secularized Protestant landscape in which there are only
two ‘spiritual’ realities: the individual self (ego) and God/Spirit.

A glimmer of meaning to the word ‘spirituality’ already begins to ap-

pear from this notion of topography. Spirituality indicates that there is
a dimensionality and hence a directionality (telos, tachlit) to human
being. I would isolate three basic meanings to the term ‘spirit’:

1. the highest or deepest level. [Sometimes a distinction is made

between spirit and oneness/God; e.g, neo-Platonism: soul-spirit-
the One, but this is quite esoteric.]
2. divine qualities or guidance emanating from the highest/deepest
level
3. the unity or wholeness of all the levels, often depicted as ema-
nating from a sacred center.

A system of ‘spirituality’ could employ all three of these senses. In ex-

plaining these various senses of spirit in the context of levels, we can
see that two principal metaphors are used:

1. Height, transcendence, going up and out: this may come from

our experience as upright creatures with binocular vision (depth
of visual field) and opposable thumbs (ability to grasp and bring
close)
2. Inward depths: going inward, emphasizing the personal and pri-
vate.

Outside of traditional religious circles, metaphor number 2 is highly

preferred, with metaphor #1 often being disparaged as patriarchal, an-
ti-body, separating God from the world, etc.. Metaphor number 2 is al-
so favored today because of its resonance with modern notions of indi-
viduality and autonomy.

But whichever metaphor is used to talk about spirit and its place in a
microcosm/macrocosm consisting of (at least) three levels (body-
mind-spirit, etc.), the first sense of ‘spirit’ outlined above is the highest
or deepest term, supplying direction, purpose and meaning to the
whole system. When we say that the topography contains a direction,
what this means is that the highest/deepest level, attracts. When peo-
ple talk of ‘spirituality’ in this sense, they mean a way of accessing this
level. Obviously, this sense can be used in traditional or non-
traditional contexts. But this means that the popular distinction, orga-
nized religion/spirituality, whose origin lies in radical Protestantism,
breaks down. One can be religious and spiritual, but one can also be a-
or anti-religious and spiritual.

But what does the rather functional word ‘accessing’ mean? Answering
this question leads us to an understanding of the second usage of ‘spir-
it’, the divine qualities or guidance emanating from the highest/deep-
est level. How does the highest/deepest level communicate its direc-
tion, purpose and meaning? The second meaning of spirit points to
this communication, and is an answer to the question asked above:
what mediates between spirit and matter? We shall return to this ques-
tion when we take up the meaning of the word ‘soul’ as a mediating
principle.

Another question leads us to the third meaning of spirit, the unity or

wholeness of all the levels, often expressed as the idea of a sacred cen-
ter. What unifies the triad? We all have the experience of being split, of
losing our ground or our purpose. How can we be unified? Answers to
these questions lead to another common form of contemporary spirit-
uality, the quest for healing as wholeness and re-unification.

From the little we have said about sacred topography, or the notion of
the human being as a microcosm, we can also begin to see what the
problem often is with modern holistic, New Age approaches. They use
the familiar body-mind-spirit triad, preserving the Cartesian dualism
of body-mind but adding a vague notion of spirit like the top layer of a
cake. They lump incommensurate discourses together in the hope that
future research will show how the levels are connected; e.g., T-cells in
the immune system and traditions of visualizing sacred images; new
disciplines such as psychoneuroimmunology; indiscriminate use of
Eastern notions such as prana or qi (‘energy’).
In order to understand spirituality we need to know the context of the
human being as a (three-level) microcosm. But this is not all. We also
need to understand the broad outlines of the three levels and that the
triad, body-mind-spirit, is inadequate for the task. This inadequacy is
evidenced by our critique of the holistic, New Age approaches just
mentioned. Body/mind is a modern distinction stemming from Des-
cartes: we consist of material substance existing in three dimensions,
and immaterial, mental substance without dimension. We need to go
back to a previous distinction, body/soul, in order to understand their
relation to spirit, and hence, contemporary yearnings for spirituality.
To understand spirituality we need to also understand soul.

What were pre-modern Western understandings of the body-soul-

spirit triad? I have said that this triad is not the same as body-mind-
spirit. Soul meant much more than what we today understand by mind
as thinking, speaking and sensing. What is soul?

In the context of the topography we have been talking about, not only
spirit but soul also begins to become more intelligible. Soul is the me-
diator between body and spirit. Soul is the carrier or vessel of spirit,
understood in any of the above three senses:

1. the highest or deepest level;

1. divine qualities or guidance emanating from the highest/deepest
level; or
2. the unity or wholeness of all the levels.

One problem in understanding the meanings of soul is the different

terminology found in traditional systems. Sometimes the words body
or soul refer to the lowest aspect; i.e., it is called the ‘animal soul’;
sometimes ‘spirit’ is called ‘intellect’; sometimes ‘soul’ is called ‘the
heart’.

Let me conclude by giving some examples of one sense of spirituality,

which centers on the third meaning of spirit: the unity or wholeness of
all the levels, often depicted as emanating from a sacred center. It is
difficult to use this third meaning without also referring to the others.
In the Sufi tradition, soul or heart is explained in the following way:
“The soul as conjunction of spirit and body, is the locus within which
all the perfections of heaven and earth become outwardly manifest….
Once the body became the companion of the spirit, a heart appeared
between the two. From the spirit the heart took subtlety and from the
earth gravity. It became the locus for the vision of the unseen….The
heart is like the Throne. It is the place where the spirit sits.” [Sachiko
Murata, The Tao of Islam (Albany: SUNY, 1992), 245, 295-7]

In Kabbalah and Hasidism, the lowest level is called the nefesh-animal

soul, centered in the liver, and represented by the lowest triad of the
first nine sefirot. Next came the ruah-emotive or inspired soul, cen-
tered in the heart, and represented by the middle triad of sefirot. Final-
ly, there is the neshamah-intellectual soul, centered in the brain, and
represented by the upper triad of sefirot. The following is a modern
statement of spirituality as harmony and wholeness, symbolized by a
sacred center (known as tiferet-harmony or beauty, the middle sefirah
of the middle triad):

The great ideal that gives beauty and meaning to creation is not per-
fection, but harmony. Harmony is a dynamic, on-going process.
This is symbolic of life. It is the very purpose of life, for it is man’s
mission to harmonize the threads of his being, his talents, this
thoughts, his actions, and his emotions so that he will be in harmo-
ny with God’s creation…. In this cosmic system of the ten sefirot,
the key to harmony is the central point, where all the lines from
right and left, above and below, converge, the sphere of Harmony,
that point at which material elements rising to the heights of spirit
meet the spiritual forces descending from on high to elevate earthly
life. R. Elie Munk, Ascent to Harmony (NY: Feldheim, 1987), vii, 10

Behind contemporary yearnings for spirituality lies a desire to over-

come the one-dimensionality of much of modern life. Whether this is
expressed as a search for world transcendence, inner depths or mean-
ingful ritual, we as Rabbinic leaders will not be able to serve as guides
in this search without some sense of the ‘invisible landscape’ that
makes up a sacred cosmos.
 Inner Judaism:
ma'aseh bereshit, ma'aseh merkavah
and the synthesis of Jewish philosophy and Kabbalah

Innerjew.com emphasizes the synthesis of Jewish philosophy and

Kabbalah following in the footsteps of R. Elie Munk, author of the well-
known, The Call of the Torah, who said in his last book, Ascent to
Harmony (Likrat ha-Tiferet):

…the intellect and the emotions are the essential tools of Jewish
philosophy…. The Rama writes that Jewish rational philosophy and
Kabbalah have a common meeting point, for there are striking simi-
larities between Maimonides’ philosophical writings and the exoter-
ic Kabbalistic principles of Tikkunei Zorah. This commonality has
been our guide throughout this work. (Munk 1987, viii)

In his earliest work, The World of Prayer, R. Munk said:

These ‘four worlds of the philosophers’, as Rabbi Isaiah Horowitz,

the great mediator between Kabbalistic and philosophical thought,
has pointed out, are none other than the ‘four worlds of the Kabba-
lah’: the sphere of material phenomena is ‘olam ha-‘asiyah, the
world of doing; that of the forms is ‘olam ha-yetzirah, the world of
shaping; that of the active forces is ‘olam ha-briah, the world of cre-
ating); and finally the world of pure ideas is ‘olam ha-atzilut, the
world of spirit). (Munk 1963, 11-12)

Ma’aseh bereshit (the workings of creation) and ma’aseh merkavah

(the workings of the chariot) are the two primary teachings of ancient
Jewish mysticism (see Talmud, Haggigah 11b ff.). Ma’aseh bereshit is
the esoteric interpretation of the first chapter of Genesis. It teaches us
about the basic constituents and order of creation, as well as how the
human being is an Image of God (tzelem elohim) and a microcosm of
this creation. Ma’aseh merkavah is based on the first chapter of Ezekiel
and related texts. It teaches us how to concretely realize how we are
made in the Image of God and thus achieve intimacy (da’at) with God.

Innerjew.com's approach is to present these two teachings through a

synthesis of Jewish philosophy and Kabbalah. Philosophy helps us to
clarify our view, our theory of reality; Kabbalah guides us into the do-
main of experiential investigations of reality. Without philosophy,
Kabbalah can become mired in a world of imagination and fantasy.
Without Kabbalah, philosophy can become a deadening rationalism or
speculation without practical implementation.

These esoteric subjects are best taught in a graduated manner, follow-

ing the advice of the Piacezner Rebbe, Kalonymous Kalman Shapira,
who said in his blueprint for a spiritual chavurah,

It is important to be explicit and clear that our society accepts into

its ranks only those individuals who share these concerns. If people
know in their hearts that they are not similarly burdened with these
concerns, we ask that they do not join our group. They will harm
themselves and others…. It is not even particularly usefu l that an
unmotivated person should read a book like this. (Shapira, Con-
scious Community, 5)
 Sheldon, Come Home:
It’s Time for Jewish Meditation to be Jewish

Rabbi Kennard Lipman, PhD.

By now you’ve probably heard the joke about the Jewish grandmother
from New York who makes a difficult trip to the Himalayas to see a
guru. ‘What does a Jewish grandmother want with a guru?’, you ask.
Well, after encountering many obstacles and delays on her long jour-
ney, she is finally ushered into the master’s presence and says, ‘Shel-
don, come home.’

This classic piece of ethnic humor has offended some JUBUs (Jewish
Buddhists), but I think it is right on the mark. This kind of good-
natured one-upmanship is characteristic of ethnic humor, along with
the self-deprecating jokes and stories of the fools of Chelm type. But
more to the point, it really is time for Sheldon to come home.

Why?

Actually, Sheldon has already made some tentative steps towards com-
ing home. Jews no longer have to go elsewhere to learn meditation. For
example, the UAHC’s Department of Adult Jewish Growth sponsors an
annual meditation Kallah. Many Jewish meditation teachers have
brought back what they’ve learned from the two most widespread
forms of Buddhism among Westerners, Zen and Vipassana (Insight)
meditation. These forms of meditation are now presented in the Jew-
ish context as universal forms of spirituality.

However, as we begin to accept the phenomenon of meditation in Jew-

ish settings, it is time to make some distinctions and ask some hard
questions. What is meditation? What is Jewish meditation? Are there
universal forms of meditation? Is Buddhist meditation kosher but
Christian meditation treif?
Having left Judaism as a teenager, I practiced Tibetan Buddhism for
twenty years. During that time, I also became a professor of Asian Re-
ligions. When I returned to Judaism, I searched for a practice of medi-
tation as profound and vast as the practice I had learned from my Ti-
betan teachers. In my search I did not merely seek out traditional Jew-
ish meditation techniques that would be like the Buddhist ones I
learned, nor did I simply try to introduce Buddhist meditation into
Jewish practice.

Neither of these approaches, which are quite common today, dig deep-
ly enough. For example, Buddhists chant mantras. If we Jews repeat a
verse from Biblical scripture many times over for meditative purposes,
does that make it a ‘Jewish mantra’? If Biblical angels have wings, then
we feel somehow comforted to learn that Tibetan Tantric deities have
wings too. But in finding such similarities do we even ask, let alone an-
swer, the questions: What is a mantra? What is an angel? What is med-
itation and what is it for?

I learned to ask this kind of question from my Tibetan teachers and as

a result of my academic studies. I learned this questioning from the
very intellectual approach of the Gelugpa school of the Dalai Lama. I
also learned it from the more experiential approach of the Dzog-chen
tradition that I practiced in depth with my principal teacher, Namkhai
Norbu Rinpoche. All of my teachers stressed the importance of the
question, ‘what is meditation for?’ in order to stay on the path to En-
lightenment and not get caught up in techniques.

My Buddhist teachers emphasized that meditation is the application or

implementation of a particular view of reality. One must agree, in some
way, with that view for meditation to be effective. This agreement hap-
pens in various ways depending on the qualities of the individual.
More intellectual people might start with an abstract presentation of
the view, such as learning the arguments establishing the truth of the
‘emptiness’ of all phenomena. Others might begin with a more experi-
ential approach, such as trying to stop the flow of thoughts in order to
learn the futility of such an attempt. These are merely different ap-
proaches to understanding the relationship between view and medita-
tion. View and meditation lead to a way of life, a mode of conduct. The
essence of the Buddhist way of life is compassionate activity. Compas-
sionate activity is the way you relate to the world based on understand-
ing the emptiness of all phenomena.

This triad of view, meditation and way of life shows us very clearly and
elegantly what the path to Enlightenment is in Buddhism. It is a clarity
that draws many of us to Buddhism.

There is another aspect of meditation in the Buddhist tradition that is

important to understand very clearly. There are preliminaries or prep-
arations needed for practicing meditation in its strict meaning, as im-
plementation of view. These preparations involve developing concen-
tration with its attendant feelings of calm and relaxation. For example,
concentrating on an object like a candle flame or one’s breath naturally
comes to exclude other objects or distractions, leading to a calming of
the mind and body. This is like tethering a wild horse to a post and let-
ting it run until it tires itself out. Trying to ride it into submission
would be like trying to actively stop distracting thoughts. But it is often
precisely these preliminaries that many people take meditation to be
about.

In Buddhism, the primary means of developing these preliminary

forms of concentration and relaxation is mindfulness. The state of calm
and relaxation is called shamatha. Many westerners have learned
mindfulness meditation, concentrating on the body, feelings, thoughts,
etc. However, there appears to be great confusion about what medita-
tion is because most people learn mindfulness as part of vipassana or
insight meditation. Vipassana means direct insight into the view, not
just calm of mind and whatever attendant clarity one may experience.

Meditation as mindfulness can be a technique-oriented practice that is

relatively value-free. The purpose of mindfulness is to develop calm
and concentration. Concentration and mindfulness, and their at-
tendant experiences of calm, are indeed universal forms of meditation.
They are not particularly Buddhist, although certain techniques may
be. Mindfulness meditation is amenable to research in a psychology
laboratory, where definite physiological effects of meditation are ob-
served. Mindfulness meditation is also found in the Jewish tradition.
For example, there is R. Kalonymous Kalman Shapira’s practice of
hashkatah, quieting, which is done through observation of thoughts or
the slow movement of the minute hand of a clock. Rabbi Shapira was a
twentieth century teacher murdered in the Holocaust, who buried his
books in the rubble of the Warsaw ghetto. They were discovered after
the war, and this technique has recently been translated.

The key question here is: what does the meditator do with the calm
and concentration realized by these methods? He or she begins to im-
plement a view. In Buddhism this means that meditation becomes ‘in-
sight’. The Buddhist would meditate, for example, on the famous ‘Four
Noble Truths’:

1. the truth of dissatisfaction and suffering

2. the truth of its origin, which is wrong views
3. the truth of its cessation, which is the outcome of right view
4. the truth of the path, which is developing and implementing the
‘eightfold path’ beginning with ‘right view’.

Under the influence of certain ‘New Age’ ideas, some teachers of ‘Jew-
ish meditation’ present teachings such as these as universal. Doesn’t
everyone want to get rid of suffering? They like to use the example of
different religions as paths up the same mountain, with a ‘perennial
philosophy’ of such universal wisdom at the peak.

It is useful to put such ‘New Age’ ideas in their historical and cultural
context. One important source of these ideas was the 1893 Parliament
of World Religions in Chicago, the first meeting of its kind. Its at-
tendees were overwhelmingly Christians who held the firm belief that
theirs was the true, universal religion. One attendee was a teacher from
the exotic East, Swami Vivekananda from India. The swami turned the
tables on his hosts by declaring Hinduism to be the non-dogmatic,
universal religion, possessed of great tolerance for a wide variety of dif-
ferent paths to God. Ever since then Eastern teachers in the West, such
as the famous disseminator of Zen, D.T. Suzuki, have picked up on this
theme. Zen or Vipassana or Vedanta is presented as universal spiritu-
ality, free of dogma and cultural trappings. This might be good market-
ing but it just isn’t so.

For example, as I’ve mentioned, JUBUs often present Buddhist teach-

ings about ‘suffering’ or ‘compassion’ as universal. But Buddhist teach-
ings on ‘suffering’ and ‘compassion’ are not just mere platitudes. They
are part of a very specific view. The Buddhist view of ‘suffering’ basical-
ly sees the fundamental problem of life as ‘attachment’ or ‘clinging’ due
to ignorance (the second Noble Truth of the origin of suffering). Reali-
ty, including our own selves, is an ephemeral, changing process that we
try to cling to because of our mistaken view that we can isolate a core,
an essence, of the fleeting phenomena.

Now, I’m not saying that this view is wrong. We even have similar
views in Judaism, such as the Hasidic teaching of bittul ha-yesh, the
annihilation of self-centered existence. But the Buddhist view of suffer-
ing based on attachment, is, from a Jewish point of view, partial. At-
tachment is a basic issue of existence. We all know it from the common
phenomenon of addiction, whether it be to drugs, alchohol or extreme
experiences. Therefore, we are attracted to teachings that deal with the
problem of attachment. Buddhist practices can be extremely valuable
in dealing with what I would call ‘over attachment’, a problem that we
all encounter in our lives. Of course we need to gain some detachment
from ourselves and from our objects of attachment. Of course we need
to learn to look at ourselves more objectively. But attachment is not the
primary problem we face.

From a Jewish point of view, becoming aware of ‘attachment’ is valua-

ble for the purpose of learning what we might call ‘right attachment’.
In Buddhism, the world of attachment is samsara, the wheel of birth
and death. In Judaism, the world of human life, a world of attach-
ments, was created by God on the sixth day and declared ‘very good’
(Gen. 1:31). If we do not experience it as ‘very good’, we must learn
‘right attachment’, that is, how to fix (tikkun) our attachments so that
they express the goodness of creation. To this end, our book of Genesis
is not filled with metaphysical statements, but it is mostly filled with
stories about the family relationships of our ancestors.

Just as ‘suffering’ is given a particular meaning in Judaism and Bud-

dhism, so is ‘compassion’. In Judaism ‘compassion’ (rachamim) refers
to the balancing of relationships between ‘love’ (ahavah or chesed) and
‘restraint’ (yirah or gevurah). Love wants to merge with the object of
attachment, while restraint wants to separate oneself from the other.
Our tradition has many teachings on these ideas. You might call these
teachings examples of the ‘secrets of Jewish survival’.

On the other hand, Buddhist compassion (karuna) is the response to

the suffering caused by attachment. It is not just kindness (maitri). It is
knowledge of how to remove the causes of suffering rooted in attach-
ment. ‘Compassion’ is part of the Buddhist view we have outlined
above.

Another example would be the difference between Jewish and Bud-

dhist views of the self. For the Buddhist, the self is another imperma-
nent phenomena to which we mistakenly cling. The example is given of
a chariot, or as we would say nowadays, a car. Where is the essence of a
car? What makes a car a car? If you take the car apart you cannot find
such an essence. The same is true for a human being. In a meditation
on the ‘emptiness of self’ you would inquire: where is your self, your
essence? Is it your body as a whole or part of your body? Is it your feel-
ings? Is it your consciousness? There is no essence, no self (atman) to
be found. This process of inquiry cuts off attachment at its root.

Once again, a Jew could see the value of such a meditation for lessen-
ing ‘over-attachment’. But it is a rather limited, mechanistic view of a
person. Yes, we often look at ourselves as made up of parts, but we are
not a collection of parts. We are a dynamic, organic whole, a person
made in the Image of God. From a Jewish perspective, the Buddhist
approach is only a partial insight into what it means to be a unique in-
dividual, created by God.
These are just a few examples of how a Jewish view differs from a Bud-
dhist one. We haven’t even tackled the God question – there are dis-
tinctions to be made there too. It is time to start making such distinc-
tions.

It has been valuable for Jews to learn techniques of relaxation based on

Eastern forms of meditation. But relaxation is not enough; in fact, it
becomes a trap if pursued for its own sake. The calmness of mind
reached through such techniques can itself be like a drug that clouds
the mind. The Buddhists themselves say this: calmness must be joined
to ‘insight’ (vipassana). But, as I have demonstrated, Buddhist insight
is not necessarily Jewish wisdom (chochmah or sekhel). We have our
own transmission of wisdom from Sinai, a sound and a voice that has
roared like a lion down through the centuries. There have been times,
such as the Holocaust and post-Holocaust era, when it has been diffi-
cult to hear that voice. I believe we can hear its profoundest depths
again now.

Sheldon, come home, there’s a telephone call waiting for you.

 From Buddhist to Rabbi
Rabbi Kennard Lipman, Ph.D.

In the summer of 1969, after dropping out of college at the age of 19, I
went to India in search of the ‘mystic East’. If someone had suggested
that I would have been better off thinking about Rabbinical school, I
would have looked at them as if they were crazy. That year, after hav-
ing studied the history and philosophy of religion at the University of
Chicago for three years, I’d traveled to India, met the Tibetans in Dar-
jeeling and become a Tibetan Buddhist.

My origins were quite ordinary, with nothing to suggest a future inter-

est in things Eastern and mystical, no eccentric theosophical uncles or
dynamic High School teachers inspiring an interest in things Other.
My world in the northeastern corner of Queens, New York, was a very
small town one, even though we were technically part of New York
City.

My Reform Jewish family lit candles on Friday night and went to shul
regularly on Fridays; we observed Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur and
the Pesach Seder (at least as long as Grandpa was alive). I learned He-
brew badly and was one of only a handful of kids at our Temple who
were confirmed. But, as we would say today, 'spirituality' was distinctly
lacking, so, when I went away to university at sixteen, even this rudi-
mentary participation in Jewish life disappeared. I had not had a bad
experience; Judaism just seemed irrelevant at the time. God was made
irrelevant. There was little in the way of soul or depth. Reform Judaism
seemed to me to be some kind of social activism, and with the sixties in
full swing there was a lot more exciting ‘social activism’ going on out-
side of Judaism than within it.

The Judaism I knew was hopelessly ‘bourgeois’, ‘conformist’, and ‘es-

tablishment’. It was the sixties, after all. The most exciting thing I can
remember about my Jewish education occurred outside the synagogue,
when, for a brief period, a bunch of secular, radical Jews took over the
Education Program at the local YMHA, we got to read Norman Mailer
and Ralph Ellison, go to midnight Mass on Christmas Eve (great mu-
sic) and the march on Washington in 1963. As human begins we have
will, thought, emotion and sense organs in order to carry out such ac-
tivities. In such actions, an inner intention is revealed, externalized.

After three years at the University of Chicago I went to India and after
much searching and adventures, I met the Tibetans in Darjeeling and
became a Tibetan Buddhist. Since I was most familiar with Hinduism I
began my quest by studying yoga, Hindu philosophy, etc., with various
gurus and swamis. I visited many wonderful places, especially around
the Arunchala Mountain in south India, where Sri Ramana Maharshi's
(a famous twentieth century Hindu mystic) ashram was located.

I decided to go 'check out' the Tibetans in the few remaining weeks I

had left in my Indian adventure. I took a plane from south to north-
eastern India, and then traveled the narrow-gauge mountain railway to
Darjeeling, famous for its tea and awesome views of the Himalayas. It
had also long been the home of a Tibetan Buddhist community. Upon
meeting the young monk who was the lama’s interpreter I immediately
felt a favorable difference between him and the Hindus I had met.
There was a directness and (I soon learned the proper Buddhist word)
a palpable ‘compassion’ that had been missing for me in my Hindu en-
counters.

I met with the lama, Kalu Rinpoche, who looked exactly the stereotype
of the Oriental sage: a thin, old man with angular cheekbones, a bald
head, smooth, yellowed-paper skin and eyes like laughing diamonds.
He instructed me in a meditation practice on cultivating compassion,
in which I was to visualize and chant the mantra of Avalokiteshvara,
the Bodhisattva who is the embodiment of compassion (more on this
kind of meditation later). I also ‘took refuge’, that is, formally became a
Buddhist. I ‘took refuge’ in the Buddha (teacher), Dharma (teaching)
and Sangha (community) as the means for realizing Enlightenment.
Eventually I met a couple of other westerners who were students of
Kalu Rinpoche or other local lamas.
One of the western students heard I was returning to Berkeley and told
me that there was a Tibetan lama who had just settled there, Tarthang
Tulku. When I returned I located him; he was just starting his "Tibetan
Nyingma Meditation Center". Thus began a ten-year relationship. I
was very young, but I was 'on the path'. I learned classical Tibetan.
There was a tremendous amount of excitement. Many famous lamas
came and taught, such as the Dalai Lama. Nowadays, the Dalai Lama
teaches to crowds of thousands or tens of thousands of people. In those
days, when he came to our meditation center, it was a matter of a hun-
dred. I was able to study with masters of all four sects of Tibetan Bud-
dhism. It was a remarkable time. I was able to study with the last gen-
eration of lamas to have been trained in Tibet, who were able to escape
the Chinese takeover in 1959. It was as if Rambam, Ranban and the Ari
had just stepped off a plane from the Middle Ages. I was incredible to
experience a culture that had a religion of wisdom permeating all as-
pects of life, a culture in which science, art, literature and politics still
formed an integrated whole.

It's not enough that Jews get involved in Asian religions; we also have
to become leaders. The same was true in my case: I went on to get a
Ph.D. in Far Eastern Studies and assumed a leadership role in the
community. I wanted to return to graduate school, and the Institute
needed to have a Ph.D. specialist, so in 1973 I went to Canada to pur-
sue an M.A. and Ph.D. in Far Eastern Studies, returning for the sum-
mers to teach and study at the Nyingma Institute and Meditation Cen-
ter.

Over the years, however, between 1973 and 1979 when I got my Ph.D.,
the situation had become cultish. I came back from my graduate stud-
ies with some trepidation to teach at the Institute. I stayed briefly, alt-
hough before I left I managed to start up a program to explore the rela-
tions between Buddhism and psychology.

At the end of 1979 I met another Tibetan lama named Namkhai Norbu
who had the unique ability to cut through the cultural trappings of
Buddhism to its essential message, to separate the wheat from the
chaff, as our 19th century Reform pioneers were found of saying.
Namkhai Norbu's message was clear: get to the heart of Buddhism, the
nature of one's own mind.

And he really taught how to do that, in painstaking detail. I don’t know

if I can convey to you how ‘dull, insipid, irrelevant and oppressive’ (to
use the words of A.J. Heschel) modern, liberal religion can sound in
comparison to what I was hearing from my teacher. He embodied a
whole religious civilization: he was a traditional scholar, doctor and
meditation master, as well as preserver of his nation’s literary and folk
traditions. It was like having the Rambam, the Besht and Bialik rolled
into one. He has established communities all over the world, traveling
between them. The largest of the communities have also acquired land.
His primary way of teaching is to hold retreats from a few days to sev-
eral weeks or more.

For two years, 1980 and 1981, I lived in Europe near my teacher,
studying with him and preparing translations of Tibetan Buddhist
texts. I would travel with him when he held retreats throughout Eu-
rope and the U.S. It was a very colorful, gypsy existence. In each coun-
try one would have an instant community, made of all types of people,
from very marginal types to very wealthy, conservative people. The
common denominator was that they were mostly people attracted by
what they heard as a radical message of libertarian autonomy, a kind of
super-spiritualized Kantianism. Realize the nature of your mind and
you will become a free, autonomous, self-legislating being, naturally
kind and compassionate. I wrote two books, translating Tibetan texts
and explaining this philosophy. Just go to Borders or Amazon.com and
look at the best-selling books on Buddhism and Asian religions: they're
mostly written by Jews.

The conclusion of his teaching was something even more extraordi-

nary. We teach about Elijah’s being taken up to heaven in a whirlwind
(II Kings 2) as some quaint hagiographic detail or symbolic tale. My
Buddhist teacher taught us how to die without leaving a body behind,
once again in painstaking detail, complete with a theory about how
such a ‘death’ is possible.
Heady stuff. But my teacher was a very down-to-earth person, who
taught us over and over again to ‘not let your wisdom exceed your
deeds’ (Pirke Avot). So I practiced meditation assiduously.

In the mid-1980’s I had a series of experiences that were the fruit of

many years of meditation practice. Generally speaking, in Buddhist
meditation one first quiets the mind and then focuses it on ‘ultimate
reality’ (as understood by Buddhism, of course). There are many dif-
ferent approaches to Buddhist meditation. The meditation practice I
learned was a very sophisticated development of basic Buddhist medi-
tation, where you first learn how to calm the mind and then focus it on
a particular subject, such as the radical impermanence of all phenom-
ena. Many people are fascinated with the trappings of meditation:
what do you wear, where and how do you sit, what do you look at or do
you close your eyes? What I learned was that it depends on what you
are trying to do.

The way to calm your mind is very subtle yet simple. I started with an
external object, like a flower, or a simple shape like a triangle or circle.
I gazed at it. If I was easily distracted I made my gaze quite concentrat-
ed. If I was not so easily distracted my gaze didn’t have to be so fixed. I
started with just doing it for five minutes at a time. I did not think
about the object, I just looked at it, and whenever I noticed that I was
distracted, I just came back to my gaze on the object. Eventually I
found myself relaxing without being distracted, because the concentra-
tion on the object had naturally tended to remove other concerns from
my attention. I also find it increasingly easy to increase the amount of
time I could stay in this ‘calm state’. ‘Calm state’ means that I could
stay focused without being easily distracted. It does not mean that I
did not have any thoughts. As my teacher would say, it’s like sitting in
the middle of a calm lake watching the fish (your thoughts) swim by,
but they don’t disturb you.

The next step I learned was to experience the same calm state by grad-
ually removing the object of concentration. In the first step I moved
from an external object to an internal object, like visualizing a letter of
the alphabet. Finally I experienced the calm state without using an ob-
ject at all, that is, I didn’t focus on anything: I would look into the
space in the middle of a room or into a clear sky. This can be very dis-
concerting or give rise to a variety of strange visual phenomena, but
that is not the point. The point is that by experiencing the calm state
without the aid of an object I came to realize that the calm state is not
dependent on any conditions. It is a natural condition of the mind. Life
became easier; the ups and downs of life didn’t so easily distract me.
Relationships with other people became more harmonious, although
not in time to save my first marriage.

But this was still only a preparation. A calm state is still a distinct
‘state’. It was still subject to changing conditions, like powerful emo-
tions and physical hardships. It still was not wisdom or enlightenment.
In trying to calm my mind and focus there was always a struggle going
on between the observer and the observed. I was ‘trying’ to be calm, us-
ing a technique that depends on an object of meditation in order to
calm the subject. In time I transcended that struggle by realizing that
the object was no distraction or disturbance at all. The object and sub-
ject arose together. There was just movement or ‘energy’. Furthermore,
I realized that what I considered the subject, my ‘self’, was itself an im-
age or representation in ‘my’ mind.

Buddhists consider this experience very important, because it is a mo-

ment of direct, and not intellectualized, understanding. And this was
certainly my experience. It was like experiencing a moment of relief
when you finally get to the top of the mountain and look out on a tre-
mendous vista and feel, ‘Yes, it is really like everyone has described it.
Definitely worth the climb.” I went from being a seeker to a being a
finder.

My parents had always been very accepting of my seeking and contin-

ued to do so, even if they did not understand a lot of what it was about.
My sister had also followed me onto this Buddhist path. I was living in
Berkeley and we were part of a small community of fellow students of
our teacher, many of whom were also our friends. It was like being part
of a chavurah, except your leader was someone like Rabbi Adin
Steinsaltlz who would teach and spend time with you periodically. We
also had bought some land in Mendocino County, California that we
developing for retreats.

After this moment of insight, my Buddhist path consisted of taking this

experience into all aspects of my life, not just in my thoughts and feel-
ings while sitting in meditation. For example, it is one thing to realize
that I couldn’t be distracted by the usual flow of thoughts in medita-
tion, but how about physical pain or emotional distress? But that’s ex-
actly what I began to do, to extend my realization into all aspects of
life.

So far my story is like many other JUBUs (Jewish Buddhists) who have
been written about in books like The Jew in the Lotus. But there the
similarity ends. Today I am a Rabbi and I do not sit in meditation on a
zafu, although I certainly teach Jewish methods of contemplation.
What happened?

The Buddhist path is a non-personal path, about being ‘nobody’ or ‘no

self’. This didn’t mean I could not be warm and caring, but the path
was not about my individuality, my personality. Having studied a lot of
Western psychology I was nagged by a persistent question that I asked
many of my teachers. In order to understand this question I must ex-
plain another kind of meditation that I learned. This meditation in-
volved the visualization of deities (symbolic representations of aspects
of enlightened mind, such as compassion) and the chanting of mantras
(Sanskrit syllables representing the essence of the deity). We would
visualize a deity, including their clothes, ornaments, etc. (all of which
had symbolic meanings) and chant their mantras over and over again
for a period of time ranging from minutes to hours. In Western terms,
the closest analogy would be to invoking angels by repeating their
names. You could also make an analogy to the way in which we chant
the thirteen attributes of compassion of YHVH (although we do not
visualize anything).

I was never bothered by the presence of many deities in Tibetan Bud-

dhism because I understood that the Tibetans were not polytheists in
the Biblical sense. They had a sophisticated understanding of the unity
underlying all the deities. Indeed, what I learned from the Tibetans
would later make it easy for me to understand such Kabbalistic teach-
ings as the unity of the sephirot (divine attributes).

The issue I had was a different one. This kind of meditation with dei-
ties and mantras is known as the way of transformation. In this ap-
proach one doesn’t reject negative thoughts and emotions such as
greed and anger, but rather transforms them into their underlying en-
lightened qualities. For example, greed or desire is transformed into
the aspect of enlightened wisdom known as discriminating awareness.
The Tibetans teach that there is a core of discriminating intelligence at
work in the way we are able to seize and focus on our object of desire.
(Once again, from this teaching I was later able to easily grasp a teach-
ing in Hasidism, the ‘elevation of strange thoughts’, in which negative,
distracting thoughts in prayer are not rejected, but ‘elevated’ to their
source in God.) But my question to my Tibetan teachers was: in order
to transform negative qualities like greed and anger, do we need to
identify them, i.e., now I am experiencing anger? And isn’t anger, my
particular anger, bound up with my individual history and personality
structure?

My teachers could never really understand my question or merely an-

swered ‘no, just do the meditation practice’, as if it was a kind of white
magic. Much later I was able to understand why this question and their
inability (to my mind) to answer were so important to me. For my
question presupposed a very Western (and Jewish) outlook: my par-
ticular, individual personality was important. Western (and Jewish)
‘enlightenment’ involves knowing the individual, because the individu-
al is an ultimate value, i.e., made in the Image of God. The Buddhist
meditations I had learned were great for gaining some detachment
from conflicting thoughts and emotions such as greed, hatred and de-
lusion, but they were simply not designed to explore the territory of the
individual personality, or to use the traditional term, soul.

There was also a communal aspect to my questioning. Not long after

this crucial series of experiences, in the mid-1980's I began to reflect
on the difficulties of forming a viable Buddhist community in the West.
My personal experience had been very positive: I had a genuine Tibet-
an Buddhist teacher familiar with the ways of the West, teachings that
were profound and inspiring, and I had had my crucial insights. These
experiences represented the first two elements of the Buddhist triad of
Buddha (teacher), Dharma (teaching) and Sangha (community). Why
was the third element, Sangha, community, so problematic? Everyone
in my community was very excited and involved when the teacher was
around, but otherwise there was a considerable gap between ideals and
practice. When the teacher was visiting, people ‘came out of the wood-
work’, but when it was time to organize and do meditation practice to-
gether when he was not present, it was often hard to get people to par-
ticipate. But more importantly, I felt that there was no way to work out
the inevitable personality conflicts that exist in any group. A combina-
tion of the presence and teaching of the teacher, as well as meditation
practice, was supposed to be able to solve any problem.

So I began to talk to three or four psychologists in the group. In the

70’s and 80's there was a great deal of interest in the relationship be-
tween psychology and spirituality. My friend, Dr. Lawrence Spiro, had
also brought a small Foundation with him when he moved from New
York to California. This foundation was devoted to promoting dialogue
between psychology and spiritual traditions, East and West. So I also
had a larger forum to explore these issues.

Now, if half the people in an American Buddhist group are Jews, then
you can be sure that 90% of the psychologists in the group are Jews.
Some of us noticed that here we were, a bunch of Jews talking about
these issues of forming a community and the interpersonal relation-
ships within the community: this was no coincidence. We realized for
us that these were particularly Jewish concerns. This was certainly a
surprise to me because I literally had not thought about Judaism for at
least fifteen years, even though I had a Jewish roommate in graduate
school who was the Cantor at the local synagogue!

A movement, started in California, called Transpersonal Psychology,

influenced many in the group. Influenced by eastern thought and prac-
tice, they basically said that Western psychology was fine for fixing
problems of the ego, but that psychology needed to talk about what
was beyond the ego or personal, the ‘transpersonal’. Their idea of the
transpersonal was basically a non-personal Absolute, as in Buddhism
or Hinduism. A psychologist, Jack Engler, summed up this point us
view in a slogan, ‘You have to be somebody in order to be nobody’.

I eventually came to the conclusion that a Jewish view of this slogan

would have to be the opposite: you have to be nobody in order to be
somebody! The Hebrew word for ‘to be nobody’ is bittul. Through
bittul one sees that the ego is a klippah, an obscuration. This idea could
seemingly be translated precisely into Buddhist terms, as my own ex-
perience confirmed: bittul would be the same as ‘no self’. However, in
the Jewish sense, bittul enables genuine relationship with God. To put
it another way, the recognition that one is not simply an ‘ego’ but a soul
created in the Image of God.

The development of the soul is the work of becoming a ‘somebody’,

which culminates in what is known in Jewish mysticism as the ‘Work
of the Chariot’ (ma’aseh merkavah). This work is personal. The notion
of the ‘personal’ beyond ‘ego’ is foreign to Buddhism; it makes no sense
in its categories, in which the personal is ego. The Buddhist way is
more about forgetfulness of self while the Jewish way emphasizes inte-
gration of self in relationship with God.

Another example of the kind of concerns I had were about religious

holidays. Tibetan Buddhists have their own ritual calendar, based ex-
clusively on the lunar calendar. It is based on natural rhythms and
days commemorating great saints. We would have special meditations
on new and full moons, for example (a bit inconvenient since they of-
ten fall on a weekday). No Shabbat. Buddhists do not believe in a crea-
tor God. Without a creator there can be no Shabbat as we know it. No
‘seasons of the soul’ as embodied in Jewish holidays. Our holidays
speak to different aspects of our soul; they nourish the soul just as our
holiday foods nourish the body. I had always struggled with the Tibet-
an ritual calendar. I began to understand that the Tibetan ritual cycle
did not speak to my Jewish neshamah.
I did not disengage immediately from my Buddhist community. I can
remember one incident that illustrates this. I had gone to one of the
full moon ritual practices I mentioned above, which lasted all day. We
had rented a little retreat center near the ocean. I left a little early so I
could drive to attend my first Passover Seder in twenty years. It was no
ordinary Seder, but one held by a small circle of friends who had also
gone east and were finding our way back. We looked at the Haggadah
in the light of Buddhism. This period, however, did not last very long.
Unlike many others, who to this day think they can be practicing Jews
and Buddhists, I was determined to find an authentic path of Jewish
meditation. I do not believe that one can be a practicing Jew and Bud-
dhist at the same time. (See Teshuvah on Meditation )

Once I realized that the issues I had were Jewish ones, I began to
study, encouraged by a member of our psychology group, my dear
friend, Dr. Lawrence Spiro, who also led that Seder back in the mid-
eighties. I highly recommend intensive bibliotherapy for the ‘recover-
ing JUBU’ or anyone wishing to recover the soul of our tradition for
themselves. Put yourself in a home with a good Jewish library, a com-
fortable chair and some good coffee if necessary. The neshamah will do
the rest. Then go find a teacher and ask them tough questions.

I found the works of Gershom Scholem great therapy, a way back to a

Judaism that had soul and depth. Scholem showed that mysticism was
an integral part of our tradition and not a marginal phenomenon. I
learned that Kabbalists, like Joseph Caro or the Gaon of Vilna, were
also halakhists and pillars of the community. I learned that Maimoni-
des’ son, Abraham, studied with Sufis. I read the growing number of
translations put out by Chabad and Breslov Hasidism of the authentic
works of their traditions. I tried to read translations of traditional
works as much as possible, rather than relying on popularizations.

I came to understand that, like many other Jews, I went to Buddhism

because the inner wisdom of our tradition had been closed to me by
the excessive rationalistic prejudices of nineteenth and twentieth cen-
tury liberal Judaism. Buddhism is a wisdom tradition like ours and this
is what makes it so attractive to many Jews. But that does not mean
that the wisdom is the same. For me, Buddhism lacked the teaching
that we are individual, created souls, each with a unique purpose. Be-
coming a ‘somebody’ meant realizing that unique task God has set for
my particular soul. Becoming a ‘nobody’, seeing that the ego is a distor-
tion of my unique soul, was only the first major step on the way.

I have come to the conclusion that there are some important distinc-
tions between Judaism and Buddhism. These distinctions can be
grouped under the following areas:

1. Worldviews
2. Psychologies
3. Meditative Practices

World Views:

Religious practices, such as Jewish prayer or Buddhist meditation, are

a product of Jewish and Buddhist worldviews. A worldview consists of
a cosmology and a psychology that create an invisible landscape in
which the seeker lives. By examining Buddhist and Jewish creation
stories, or cosmologies, it is possible to discover what is most real and
valuable in each tradition’s world. The creation story holds the key to
answering the most profound and fundamental question: why are
things the way they are?

Buddhism views creation as a cosmic drama: the dance or play be-

tween the delusion of me and mine, and the liberation from that delu-
sion, which is enlightenment. Delusion is like the clouds in the sky. The
freedom and spontaneity of enlightenment are like the sky itself. In the
Jewish creation story in Genesis the Creator wills a limited cosmos ac-
cording to a divine blueprint. This blueprint exists within all of crea-
tion and is also the very structure of the soul of a human being. Human
happiness depends on discovering the blueprint. Through knowing the
blueprint you can also come to know its Architect.

The Buddhist search for spaciousness and spontaneity as liberating

forces is attractive to the contemporary religious seeker, who often
feels oppressed by the Jewish emphasis on norms and structures
(commandments) that are felt to be restrictive. The Buddhist view of
norms as conventions is equally alluring, in relation to the Jewish view
of norms as having a divine source.

However, all three Abrahamic religions share (along with Western sci-
ence and philosophy) a passion for discovering the hidden structures
that determine reality. This search for hidden structures is necessary to
understand and repair our broken world.

Such a view also brings a respect for limitations, since the Creator wills
them.

Psychologies:

Next, by examining Jewish and Buddhist religious psychology, it is

possible to determine the meaning of being human in each tradition.
According to Buddhist psychology, the I, the ego, is a mental construct
that we think is real and that we live within. In the Jewish view, the I,
the ego, is an immature, fragmented version of the person as made in
the Image of God.

The ego as mental construct is a powerful insight of Buddhism, and

liberation from ego is a crucial experience for the religious seeker. But
the Buddhist view of self as a construct is in conflict with the Jewish
view of the self as broken and immature. From the Jewish point of
view, changing the ego’s perspective, rather than going beyond it, is
foremost. In Judaism, the ego’s perspective is changed or matured by
working with its underlying structure, the Image of God in the person,
in order to repair it.

There is also the social dimension of the person. The Buddhist embrace
of monasticism is in conflict with the Jewish rejection of monasticism
and asceticism. Finally, the Buddhist conception of community as
Sangha, companions on the path to liberation, differs from the Jewish
understanding of people hood and land as the unit of salvation.
Meditation:

Once cosmos and psychology are grasped it is possible to enter into re-
ligious practice. Religious practices are applications of the cosmology
and psychology. Religious practices can lead us to achieve the ultimate
goal of human existence according to our tradition.

Based on its cosmology and psychology, Buddhist practice involves

methods for liberation from entanglement in mental constructs. At the
same time, Buddhist practice cultivates compassion in order to realize
and transcend the suffering that entanglement causes. Based on its
cosmology and psychology, Jewish practice, whether prayer, mitzvot or
meditation, is a means for repairing our broken selves and world ac-
cording to the hidden, divine blueprint.

Buddhism teaches invaluable methods for transcending self-centered

existence, practices that are very attractive to Jews who yearn for tran-
scendence as an experiential reality. But the Buddhist view that in
meditation distractions are meaningless conflicts with the Jewish view
of distractions as supremely meaningful. Distractions are meaningful
because they are part of Jewish practices for healing the soul, based on
the understanding that aspects of the ego (will, sensation, imagination,
etc.) are manifestations or distortions of divine qualities. Finally, the
Buddhist ahistorical goal of enlightenment differs greatly from the
Jewish view of the messianic age working itself out through history.

I left Buddhism in the late 80’s and immersed myself in the Jewish life
of the San Francisco Bay area. In 1997 I entered Rabbinical school and
was part of the first class to be ordained at HUC-LA in May 2002. I
have become a Rabbi, following in the footsteps of my great-
grandfather from the Ukraine. I could not have become a Rabbi with-
out the example of a Rabbi who lived his ‘inner Judaism’, Rabbi
Shledon Lewis of Congregation Kol Emeth in Palo Alto, California.
More than any texts he taught about Kabbalah or Hasidism what I
learned most from him was his constant practice of chesed and pa-
tience in dealing with all aspects of synagogue life. Perhaps I could do
this and thus bring my inner and outer worlds together.
During my time in rabbinical school I struggled to find an approach to
Jewish meditation as profound as what I learned from the Tibetans. I
was not satisfied by much of what was taught as Jewish meditation; it
was (and still is) a version of the calming meditation I described above,
except it made use of Jewish symbols. We need Jewish meditation that
has Jewish sekhel, that embodies a Jewish view of God and creation.
Through years of study of medieval Jewish philosophy, Kabbalah, Ha-
sidism, mussar and modern psychology, I believe I have found a way to
practice and teach ‘inner Judaism’.

What is ‘inner Judaism’? Since the time of Abraham there have been
people who desired intimacy (da’at) with God. Moses spoke with God
face to face. Moses, Aaron and the 'seventy elders' of Israel had a vision
of God on Mount Sinai. The prophets Isaiah and Ezekiel had visions of
God's Throne of Glory. Some of the most famous Rabbis of the Tal-
mud, like Rabbi Akiva, continued this quest. They left us with a defini-
tive statement of the two major ways of achieving this intimacy: 1)
ma'aseh bereshit, the work of Creation 2) ma’aseh merkavah, the work
of the Divine Chariot.

Ma’aseh bereshit deals with the inner meaning of the first chapter of
Genesis. It teaches us about the fundamental order of creation, as well
as how the human being is an Image of God (tzelem elohim) and mi-
crocosm of creation. Ma’aseh merkavah is primarily based on the vi-
sion of God’s Throne in the first chapter of the Book of Ezekiel. It
teaches us to concretely realize how we are made in the Image of God
and thus achieve intimacy with God. These two branches of knowledge
became the foundation for Jewish mysticism in the Middle Ages (Kab-
balah) and in Hasidism.

My journey to recover my Jewish neshamah and its holy purpose con-

tinues. I am committed to serving the Jewish people through acts of
kindness and, in particular, making ‘inner Judaism’ available to liberal
Jews. I have my first congregation, Brit Shalom, in State College,
Pennsylvania. I am a member of a CCAR task force on Spiritual Lead-
ership, which will soon issue its recommendations as to how to pro-
mote awareness and learning about the phenomena of spirituality
among Rabbis. As more Reform Rabbis learn about spirituality, it
should no longer be necessary for Jews to seek it outside of Judaism,
as so many others and I have done. It may not be for everyone but
'inner Judaism' is an authentic part of our tradition that should not be
closed to liberal Jews.

My experience as a Buddhist opened me up to the universal aspects of

the spiritual life, such as:

 the existence of multiple levels of reality;

 the mandala principle (sacred space: the symbolism of the cen-
ter and the four directions, such as in the Mishkan);
 the difference between esoteric (hidden) and exoteric (public)
teaching;
 the difference between rejecting (distancing oneself from) and
transforming negativity;
 the transmission of inner wisdom from teacher to disciple;
 the use of language as a creative power;
 the individual as a microcosm of creation.

Judaism, like other religions, has its own particular approach to these
universals. I have committed myself to helping modern Jews find their
way back to this 'inner Judaism'. I believe that the existence of 'inner
Judaism' is essential to the health of liberal Judaism. In the past Jew-
ish mystics regarded their teaching as encompassing all other forms of
Jewish learning and practice. Today we need to be more modest. No
one can encompass all forms of Jewish learning anymore. But 'inner
Judaism' deserves a seat at the liberal Jewish table in the ongoing con-
versation as to who we are and where we're going.
 Teshuvah on Meditaion
Rabbi Kennard Lipman, Ph.D.

Question: Many followers of Asian religions in the U.S. are Jewish.

Some of them consider themselves to be Jewish and Buddhist, for ex-
ample, or see no problem in combining Asian religious practices, such
as yoga and meditation, with their Judaism. This teshuvah will address
two related questions: 1) are these practices avodah zarah, and 2) if
not, is it permitted for a Jew to practice them?

Answer: These excellent and timely questions have not been seriously
treated in contemporary halakhic literature.8 Let us discuss the ques-
tion of avodah zarah first. In order to arrive at an opinion in this mat-
ter we must start from Rabbinic rulings regarding religions with which
the Rabbis were familiar, principally Roman paganism, Christianity
and Islam.

Historical Background

The Biblical prohibition against avodah zarah is very strong; its pun-
ishment is death by stoning, and it is one of the three things one can-
not transgress even on pain of death. The tractate of the Mishnah on
avodah zarah is concerned with what kind of relationships Jews could
have with their pagan neighbors in the Roman Empire. There is no ab-
stract discussion of the nature of avodah zarah; the concern of the
Mishnah was the kinds of economic and social relations the Jewish

8 To my knowledge the only responsum on the question of Buddhist meditation

is about Zen Buddhism, by an Orthodox Rabbi, Chaim T. Hollander, “Concern-
ing Zen - A Halachic Responsum”, in Heifetz, H., ed., Zen and Hasidism: the
Similarities between Two Spiritual Traditions (Hoboken, NJ: KTAV Publishing,
augmented edition 1996). This is an ill-informed example of a-historical, tri-
umphalist Orthodoxy, in a book originally published in 1978. The book as a
whole represents the state of ignorance about both traditions prevailing in the
1970’s at the start of the Jewish Renewal movement.
Rabbi Halevi’s responsum, discussed below, is found in his Aseh L’cha Rav, v. 2
(Tel Aviv, 1977), 169-179).
community could have with gentiles. The purpose of the laws was pri-
marily to limit contact in the areas of marriage, eating, and pagan holi-
days and practices. It is taken for granted that avodah zarah refers to
the practices of the Roman state religion of late antiquity. The word for
‘pagan’ would be oved kokhavim umazzalot, literally ‘worshiper of stars
and constellations’.

It was also taken for granted that such was the religion of the goyim,
the nations of the world. It should be noted that the pagan religion the
Rabbis of the time knew was the state religion of the Roman Empire,
which included worship of the Emperor and important days in the his-
tory of the Empire. This made the pagans doubly offensive to the Jews;
not only were they polytheists, but they blurred the distinction be-
tween the human and divine to bolster the prestige of their oppressive
empire. Finally, it should also be noted that the Jewish communities of
the time were relatively self-sufficient and separate from other popula-
tions in the Empire. Thus, these Rabbinic regulations reflected the so-
cial reality of Jewish life at the time.

By the time of the Middle Ages Jews had become scattered throughout
the Western world and increasingly integrated (in certain sectors of the
economy) into economic life. Practical reality began to get ahead of
halakhah as all kinds of forbidden associations became necessary parts
of life. Perhaps the most famous example was the wine trade, where
some Jews had risen to prominance. People also began to ask whether
all these complex laws regarding idolators needed to be observed re-
garding Christians. After all, were Christians idolators? Although the
times did not allow for an objective assessment of Christianity, hala-
khists began to exempt Christians from the category of idolators so
economic activity could continue. A special category needed to be cre-
ated, because previously the equation was: nations of the world =
idolators, and this included Christianity.

In the early middle Ages, authorities such as Rabbenu Tam and Rashi
cited such Talmudic dicta as, “Rabbi Yochanan taught: ‘the Gentiles
outside the Land are not idolators; they are but continuing the customs
of their ancestors’” (T. Hullin, 13b). Rabbenu Tam recognized, for ex-
ample, that while Christians swear on their scriptures, they do not dei-
fy them; that they acknowledge the ‘Maker of Heaven and Earth’; and
that Jesus of Nazareth is not necessarily a ‘strange deity’. Jacob Katz
sums up the changing Rabbinic attitudes at this time: “The assertion
that the Gentiles are not bound to uphold the strict unity of the God-
head opens the possibility of condoning the Christian adherence to the
doctrine of the Trinity so far as the Gentiles are concerned.”9

The famous disputation in Paris of 1240 furthered this process, where

the Jewish disputants argued that, “You did receive the Torah, and
your Lord did not come to abolish our Torah, and did not add to it or
diminish it.”10 They also reiterated the traditional Jewish belief that the
righteous of the nations will also inherit the world-to-come by accept-
ing the seven Noachide Laws.

But it is not until the 14th century, with R. Menachem Ha-Meiri that
we get a clear Jewish philosophy of religion which recognizes that
Christians are not idolators, based on extra-halakhic principles. The
Meiri referred to Christians as “nations which are ‘restricted by the
ways of religion’ (ummoth ha-geduroth be-darekhey ha-datoth) and
which believe in the Godhead.”11 They are not “contaminated in their
deeds and tainted in their dispositions” like the pagan idolators of old;
“idolatry has disappeared from most places”. 12 Relying on the philoso-
phy of religion of the Rambam, the Meiri viewed Christianity as con-
taining the positive aspects of practical and theoretical religion which
were accessible to reason. What they lacked was the revelation of the
Torah which supplied the elements which reason could not furnish.

9 Katz, J., Exclusiveness and Tolerance: Studies in Jewish-Gentile Relations in

Medieval and Modern Times (New York: Schocken Books, 1961), 36.
10 Katz, 111
11 Katz, 117. A very peculiar article on the Meiri’s view of Christianity by J. David

Bleich, “Divine Unity in Maimonides, the Tosafists and Me’iri” (out of place in
the collection Neoplatonism and Jewish Thought, Goodman, L., ed., 237-254),
assumes that Me’iri could not possibly had a generous view of mainstream
Christianity. He speculates on all the possible heresies in southern France as the
basis for Me’iri’s assessment of Christianity. There is no historical evidence that
Me’iri was referring to heretical Christian views, such as Docetism.
12 Katz, 116
The Meiri’s assessment of Christianity was much more positive than
the Rambam’s: “they believe in God’s existence, His unity and power,
although they misconceive some points according to our belief,” such
as the Trinity.13

In a teshuvah on entering churches and mosques, a contemporary Ma-

sorti Rabbi, David Frankel, cites aspects of the Meiri’s position. First
he notes that prior to the Meiri the Tosaphot held that Christian wor-
ship of Jesus was not avodah zarah because their intention was di-
rected to the Creator of heaven and earth:

According to this interpretation, the words ‘although they associate

the name of heaven and another entity’ (‘af al pi sh’mishtalfin shem
shamayim u’dvar acher), the association is not to the service of God
and Jesus as two entities, rather they swear by Jesus as identified
with the Creator of the world and by their holiness.14

Frankel also quotes the position of R. Moses Rivkash, the Be’er Ha-
Golah, on Choshen Mishpat, who distinguishes between the pagans of
Talmudic times who did not believe in such scriptural truths as the Ex-
odus from Egypt and the unique Creation of the world, while the Chris-
tians do believe in such fundamentals of religion. A statement by R.
Samuel ben Joseph, the Ba’al ‘Olat Tamid, also cited by Frankel, is ex-
tremely important for our discussion:

The Cuthites [the nations] were not warned about associationism,

that is to say, that when they speak about a hierarchy of aspects
within the Godhead (zeh l’ma’alah mi zeh [pen achat shel ha-elohut
l’ma’alah m’pen acheret]), they do not damage the oneness of
Hashem.15

13 Katz, 121; also quoted by Frankel, 220.

14 Frankel, David, “A Responsum on the Matter of Entering Mosques and
Churches”, in Responsa of the Committee on Law of the Rabbinical Assembly of
Israel, Vol. 6 [Heb.], R. David Golinkin, ed. (Jerusalem, 1998), 219. Cf. Ellenson,
David, “A Jewish Legal Authority Addresses Jewish-Christian Dialogue: Two
Responsa of Rabbi Moshe Feinstein”, American Jewish Archives, forthcoming.
15 Frankel, 221.
In other words, while we might not agree with trinitarianism, it is a
genuine theological position among the monotheistic faiths. While avo-
dah zarah is forbidden according to the Noahide laws, associationism
(shituf) is not.

Frankel also points out that the Meiri’s position also takes into account
the fact that Christians obey the moral law. This removes them from
the category of idolatry, while the Rambam’s negative attitude is based
purely on their wrong philosophical belief. If we were to judge Chris-
tians purely on theological grounds, we could level the same kinds of
charges against the Kabbalists and their sefirot, for example, as was
done by the Rivash (1326-1408) and R. Eliahu Delmigido (1460-1497).
Belief alone cannot determine this question. 16

With the Meiri we get a new category of non-Jewish religion other than
idolatry, one still ‘limited’ or ‘restricted’ in some way, but clearly moral
and (relatively) monotheistic. He also makes another statement, which
is very important for understanding this issue, regarding who is an
apostate and how shall he be treated. His position is that if someone
converts to one of these non-idolatrous religions, he is to treated like
any other member of that religion. The person is only a ‘heretic’ if he
“retains the name of Israel and frees himself [from his Jewish obliga-
tions]; then he has no positive religious status and one has no human
obligations towards him.”17 It is better to leave altogether than sit on
the fence. One must remember here the principle that even the apos-
tate remains a Jew and can return.

To sum up: a category of non-Jewish religion other than idolatry was

created for religions such as Christianity and Islam, which were mono-
theistic, although they were still regarded as inferior to Judaism. These
ideas made possible the modern ideas of the Haskalah towards other
religions, and today we can continue to affirm this category, minus its
pejorative connotations. We can also continue to affirm the category of

16 Frankel, 226.
17 Katz, 124
idolatry, as paganism continues to exist in modern forms, often with
anti-Jewish overtones.18

R. Chaim David Halevi on Transcendental Meditation

R. Halevi was asked whether the practice of Transcendental Medita-

tion (TM) is forbidden according to Jewish law. A yeshiva student had
learned TM and wanted to teach it to several of his friends. The ques-
tion is actually more precise: is the technique itself forbidden, or only
the ritual, in which the mantra is bestowed on the disciple by the guru?
Can a Jew, who has learned the technique, teach it to others without
the initiation ritual?

First, R. Halevi describes the ritual in which a mantra is given by the

guru to the disciple. He makes two important points: 1) the ritual is
part of an ancient Indian religious tradition, and is not the same as the
technique of TM, and 2) the mantras, which are repeated over and over
during 20 minute sessions of meditation, contain the name of Hindu
deities. According to R. Levy, there is no doubt that Hinduism is avo-
dah zarah because of its gods (elilim). Although we cannot agree with
him that Hinduism, in general, is avodah zarah, but belongs in the
same category as Christianity, i.e., shituf, the distinction between the
ritual and the technique will be an important one for our decision, and
figures in R. Halevi’s as well.

R. Halevi next notes that the TM technique is tied to a belief about the
soul (neshamah). The technique involves concentrating ‘one-pointedly’
on the mantra; forgetting one’s surroundings, one’s thoughts are re-
moved from everyday worldly troubles. “In the end, one plunges into
the depths of a tranquil consciousness”.19 This is the intent of the tech-
nique. But R. Halevi very astutely asks about why this state of con-
sciousness is cultivated in this technique. “In the teaching of TM there

18 Paganism is alive and well within the New Age movement. For an excellent
survey see Hanegraaff, Wouter, New Age Religion and Western Culture: Esoter-
icism in the Mirror of Secular Thought (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1996).
19 Aseh L’cha Rav, 176.
is no clear reason. It is up to us to clarify this matter further.” 20 He
then presents a Jewish view of meditation, which includes a theological
critique of TM.

The inner nature (p’nimiyut) of the human being, the soul, is good.
Evil, the outer, external nature (chitzoniyut), arises as soon as a person
is born: “sin crouches at the door”. Man is ‘surrounded’ by evil: “the
impulse of the thoughts of his heart is only evil continually” (Gen 6,5).
It is this evil that a person needs to ‘forget’, in order to ‘absorb’ some of
the goodness of one’s soul. One can do this “several times a day, even
without understanding the depth of what it means” (while TM is based
on going to “the depths of a tranquil consciousness”).

R. Halevi then states his halakhic conclusion, “This technique in itself

is not forbidden, when a person does it without the introduction (given
by the guru), the ritual and the mantra, if he finds for himself some
‘mantra-like word’ (lit. a magic or fascinating word), or practices in si-
lence.”21 He then says that a Jew has no need for such a technique,
since we have our own method of meditation, i.e. prayer with kava-
nah. He describes a kavvanah for meditating on the Elohai Neshamah
prayer at the start of Shacharit. As a result, “If a person merits to have
the proper intention in prayer he reaches the final rung (which medita-
tion accomplishes, as it were), plunging into the depths of tranquil
consciousness.”22

R. Halevi concludes with a rather unfair comparison about the ‘great

difference’ between Jewish meditation, i.e. prayer, and TM. TM emp-
ties the mind of ordinary thoughts by using a word, the mantra, that is
empty of meaning, “emptiness for the sake of emptiness. But if Juda-
ism, arriving at the same mantra, would empty man of all the thoughts
which trouble him, it would be in order to fill him with feelings of the
holiness of divine existence.”23 Hinduism has its own theology of what
‘fills’ a person when the mind is ‘emptied’. This is not the crucial point.

20 Aseh L’cha Rav, 177.

21 Aseh L’cha Rav, 178.
22 Aseh L’cha Rav, 179.
23 ibid.
What is important is that R. Halevi has acknowledged some usefulness
to the technique. This brings us to our ruling on the matter of Buddhist
meditation.

Our Ruling

Most forms of Buddhism and Hinduism clearly fit into the category of
non-idolatrous religions of the nations of the world. The Buddha is not
a ‘god’ who is worshipped, although one becomes a Buddhist by ‘taking
refuge’ in the Buddha, Dharma (teaching) and Sangha (the communi-
ty) as the means of salvation. Buddhism is also a doxic religion like
Christianity. By taking refuge in the Dharma, one is accepting the basic
‘view’ of Buddhism, which is the “Four Characteristics of Existence”:
everything is transitory, everything is unsatisfactory (dukkha), every-
thing is without an essence, and nirvana is bliss. All Buddhists accept
these, although their interpretation varies widely. ‘Meditation’ in Bud-
dhism means how one comes to implement, actualize or internalize the
truth of these four characteristics.

In the Indian philosophical/religious tradition, ‘meditation’ is insepa-

rable from philosophy. The Sanskrit term which is translated by ‘phi-
losophy’ is darshana, which means a way of seeing. In Buddhism, the
‘path’ or ‘way’ begins with a way of seeing which is implemented or
made real by ‘meditation’ (bhavanna , which comes from the root ‘to
be’). The path then continues with a way of behaving which is set up by
these two, and the culmination of the whole process, of course, leads to
a goal or ‘fruit’, awakening (Buddhahood).

The point I wish to emphasize is that ‘meditation’ is the application or

implementation of a ‘view’, and you need to assent in some way to that
view for meditation to be effective. I said ‘in some way’ purposely, be-
cause how this assent occurs depends on the qualities of the individual;
more intellectual people might start with a more abstract presentation
of the view, while others might begin with a more ‘experiential’ ap-
proach (‘sit down and do this’), but these are merely different ap-
proaches to understanding the relationship between ‘view’ and ‘medi-
tation’.
For example, Western apologists for Zen Buddhism, many of whom are
Jewish, unfortunately present Zen in extreme universalistic terms as
having no dogma, etc. (They are following the strategy first developed
by the Hindu teacher Vivekenananda at the 1893 World Parliament of
Religions in Chicago. He very cleverly turned the tables on the Chris-
tian organizers of the event by claiming Hinduism was the universal
religion.) Zen is still about the relationship between ‘view’ and ‘medita-
tion’; it merely takes a more radical approach to the relationship of
view and meditation. Probably the most well-known illustration of this
point is the story in which the disciple is meditating and the teacher
sits next to him and starts polishing a black stone. The student says,
“What are you doing?” The teacher replies, “I’m polishing this stone to
make it white.” The student says, “You can’t make a black stone white
by polishing it?” The teacher shoots back, “You can’t make a sentient
being a Buddha by meditating!” The teacher undercuts the student’s
linear conception of the path through a seemingly simple, but actually
very sophisticated view.

There is one more aspect of ‘meditation’ in the Indian tradition, that

we need to understand. There are preliminaries or preparations need-
ed for practicing ‘meditation’ as bhavana, implementation of ‘view’
(darshana). To put it simply, these preparations involve developing
concentration with its attendant feelings of calm and relaxation. But it
is precisely these preliminaries which most people take ‘meditation’ to
be about. In Buddhism the primary means of developing these prelim-
inary forms of concentration and relaxation is ‘mindfulness’ (smirti),
and the state of calm and relaxation is called shamatha. Many people
in the West have learned ‘mindfulness’ meditation, focusing on the
body, feelings, thoughts, etc., and there is great confusion about this
matter, because most people learn this as part of Vipassana medita-
tion. Now, Vipassana means direct insight into the view. You could say
that mindfulness is technique-oriented, and relatively value-free, and
its purpose is to develop calm and concentration.

Here we come to the crux of this argument. ‘Mindfulness’, and its at-
tendant ‘calm’, is a universal form of ‘meditation’; it is not particularly
Buddhist or Hindu, although certain techniques may be. It is amenable
to research in the psychology laboratory. It is found in Judaism; for
example, recent attention has been drawn to R. Kalonymous Kalman
Shapira’s practice of hashkatah , quieting, which is done through ob-
servation of thoughts or the minute-hand of a clock (a technique I have
not seen in Buddhism). It has now been translated and published
twice.24 The question is: what do you do with the calm and concentra-
tion? You begin to implement the view. The Buddhist would ‘meditate
on’ (here you can see how vague the word is; its meaning here would
correspond to hitbonenut in Hebrew) the ‘Four Characteristics’ men-
tioned above, or on the famous ‘Four Noble Truths’. In R. Shapira’s
hashkatah, after the quieting one proceeds to do a self-examination
and choose a posuk which embodies a middah , one of the qualities in
the Jewish version of imatatio dei , which one wishes to cultivate.

The forms of Buddhist meditation many Jews are engaged in, Vipas-
sana (‘Insight’) which comes from the Theravada (‘Elders’) tradition,
and Zen (from the Chinese Ch’an, from the Sanskrit dhyana, ‘medita-
tion’), do not themselves involve the use of images, although images of
the Buddha and other beings are certainly made use of in these tradi-
tions. The same is true of most forms of yoga taught in the West, such
as Iyengar Yoga, which come from the second century B.C.E. system of
Patanjali. Patanjali’s system was influenced by Buddhism and is very
similar to it. All remarks made about Buddhist meditation here would
also apply to the practice of yoga. Most individuals practice yoga to re-
ceive the benefits of its effects of calm and concentration, and do not
involve themselves with the ‘view’.

In regard to the question of idolatrous images, which would arise even

more strongly in the case of Hinduism, Pure Land Buddhism, Tantric
Buddhism, or Taoism, it is important to understand that these tradi-
tions clearly recognize a principle of ‘oneness’, although they are not
hesitant to depict a variety of manifestations of this ‘oneness’ in the
form of various Buddhas or avatars (manifestations or emanations). In

24Kalonymous Kalman Shapira, Conscious Community: A Guide to Inner Work,

Andrea Cohen-Kiener, tr. (New York: Aronson, 1996), 101-105; To Heal The
Soul: The Spiritual Journal of a Chasidic Rebbe, Yehoshua Starrett, tr. (New
York: Aronson, 1995), xxix-xxxii.
the Indian tradition, for example, there are different interpretations of
the meaning of ‘oneness’. In the most famous contemplative tradition
of Hinduism, the Advaita Vedanta, ‘oneness’ is understood as advaita ,
i.e., that Brahman, the ultimate reality, is ‘One without a second’ (often
called ‘acosmism’ in the Western mystical context). In Mahayana Bud-
dhism, ‘oneness’ is understood as advaya , the ‘non-duality’ of the ul-
timate truth, nirvana, and the relative truth, samsara. In another well-
known Hindu school, the ‘oneness’ of advaita is qualified so as to con-
tain dvaita , ‘twoness’ or duality.25 All of these are clearly not polytheis-
tic, although in the Hindu context they are clearly compatible with
‘henotheism’, the term coined in the nineteenth century by Max Muller
to denote the phenomena of an ‘individual deity’, such as Vishnu, as-
suming the status of unique symbol of oneness in the pantheon, only to
be replaced by another figure, such as Krishna.26 This does not, howev-
er, disturb the fundamental principle of oneness.

The closest analogy in our tradition would probably be to emanated

sefirot of the Kabbalists. There is also some analogy to ‘angels’ or ‘sep-
arate intelligences’, the worship of which was condemned both by
Rambam (Hil. Avodat Kokhavim 2:1) and Ramban (on Ex. 20:3), even
though the worshipper also acknowledged the existence of God. It is
also important to point out here that the Indian ‘oneness principle’ is
what I would call a ‘strong’, ‘active’ oneness, unlike, for example, a
oneness that might be found in ancient Greco-Roman paganism
known to the Rabbis. There the oneness was represented by a ‘weak’
principle of ‘order’ which passively ruled even over the Gods.

25 Any good survey of Indian philosophy contains a presentation of these views.

See for example, Hiriyana, M., Outlines of Indian Philosophy (London: Allen
and Unwin, 1970), ch. 13, 14.
26 The case of the Hare Krishna, or some forms of Japanese Pure Land Bud-

dhism such as Nichiren Shoshu, are exceptions to the ‘oneness’ principle we

have articulated, because of their exclusivistic view of their sect. They are clearly
idolatrous. As in all halakhic matters, one sometimes needs to consult a special-
ist to determine specific cases.
Conclusion

In conclusion, ‘meditation’ or other practices to calm the mind is not

prohibited, because they do not belong to any particular religion. In
this we follow R. Halevi, who made a distinction between the purely
technical aspects of meditation and its religious background, whether
it be a ritual of initiation or a philosophy. One finds meditation groups
of this kind at Reform and Conservative synagogues today. Judaism
has always borrowed from other cultures and traditions; however, once
one gets involved in vipassana meditation per se, this requires assent-
ing to the Buddhist view. This would involve oneself in the practice of a
non-Jewish, non-idolatrous religion, and is prohibited, because it in-
volves ‘taking refuge’ in the Buddha and his teaching, which means as-
senting to a particular religious tradition and its view of reality. This
would be no different than adopting fundamental Christian practices.
It is important to stress this, in order to counter the extensive ‘New
Age and ‘perennial philosophy’ apologetics, which universalize and
spiritualize all religious practices, and which often accompany the
presentation of Asian religious teachings. Of course, this does not pro-
hibit study of these traditions, whose philosophical views on ‘oneness’,
for example, are of considerable interest.

I would also hold, following the Meiri cited above, that it would be
preferable for a Jew to become a Buddhist, where the possibility of
teshuvah is always open to him or her, rather than fancying oneself a
‘Jewish-Buddhist’, which does justice to neither tradition. Buddhism is
a universal religion, like Christianity, which sees no problem in such a
dual identity, since it is so certain about the universal, all-
encompassing nature of its message. Contemporary teachers, such as
the Dalai Lama, have even encouraged Western Buddhists to look into
their religious backgrounds. Judaism, however, is a particularistic tra-
dition, where identity in the group is a critical category, determining
privileges and obligations by birth or conversion. Acts which blur that
identity are a serious issue, such as performing intermarriages, to
which many in the Reform movement object, such as Eugene Borowitz.
Only a crude Jewish triumphalism could today still resist the category
of ‘non-idolatrous religion of the nations of the world’. On the other
hand, some Jews might have no problem with people being ‘Jewish
Buddhists’, taking up an extreme universalistic position. But
Borowitz’s statement regarding intermarriage applies in our case as
well:

“In so doing [officiating at intermarriages] they symbolize and com-

municate that it makes no difference what religion one espouses. Thus
they dissolve the Covenant of the bnei yisrael into that of the bnei
noach. That clearly constitutes a threat to the survival of the Jewish
people and its covenant, and exceeds my liberally capacious plural-
ism.”27

27 Borowitz, E., Renewing the Covenant (Philadelphia: JPS, 1991), 299.

 Go and Study
Kabbalah, Hasidism and Mysticism

Because there are so many books on the Kabbalah and the sefirot,
Innerjew.com presents here only those which will be most useful for
your practice. Book titles with an asterisk (*) are in print and available.
Titles with a double asterisk (**) are out of print but available in lim-
ited quantities, or used.

I. General Introductions/Overviews:

1. Elie Munk, Likrat Hatiferet: Ascent to Harmony** (Feldheim, 1987),

Introduction, Part I, vii-24.

This is a beautiful little book in which a modern master sums up his

legacy: a profound and vast understanding of orthodox Judaism. In all
his works Munk seamlessly weaves together philosophy and Kabbalah.
Part I discusses in simple language how creation in the Image of God
means that the human being is a Microcosm made of the Four Worlds
and the Sefirot. Ascent to Harmony, along with Adin Steinsaltz’s The
Thirteen Petalled Rose*, are the two best traditional introductions to
“inner Judaism” available.

2. Aryeh Kaplan, Innerspace: Introduction to Kabbalah, Meditation

and Prophecy* (Moznaim, 1990), chapters 2-9, 9-77.

These lectures, by one of the pioneers in the resurgence of Jewish med-

itation and spirituality, are an in-depth overview of the approach to
Kabbalah of its most celebrated practitioner, Rabbi Isaac Luria (1534-
1572). Chapters 2-9 each discuss a sefira in detail and should only be
studied after having read some introductory material on Kabbalah and
the sefirot.

The reader needs to keep in mind that the system of Luria, known as
Lurianic Kabbalah, is very complex and represents a synthesis of hun-
dreds of years of Kabbalistic learning. Rabbi Kaplan also introduces
the Hasidic understanding of Kabbalah as spiritual psychology into his
presentation. Therefore, this book may be read together with those
listed under section III. R. Kaplan is particularly skilled at bringing out
some of the psychological implications of the sefirot without “psychol-
ogizing” them, that is, bringing them down to the world of egoistic im-
agination and fantasy.

3. Norman Lamm, The Religious Thought of Hasidism -Text and

Commentary (Yeshiva University Press, 1999) An excellent collection
of annotated translations of fundamental Hasidic texts.

II. Sefirot as Spiritual Psychology - Kabbalah:

1. Moses Cordovero, The Palm Tree of Deborah**, L. Jacobs, tr.

(Sepher-Hermon Press, 1981), chapters 2-9, 70-121.

This sixteenth-century classic presents a Kabbalistic understanding of

the “Imitation of God”, of how God’s attributes can become intellectu-
al, moral and behavioral guidelines for us. The first part of the book
takes the thirteen divine qualities shown to Moses in the Book of Exo-
dus (Ex. 34, 6-7) as a model of conduct. The second part, of interest to
us here, gives practical suggestions on how to embody each of the
sefirot.

Although there are an extensive Introduction and footnotes by the

well-known translator, Rabbi Louis Jacobs, this book also should be
read after more introductory material. Because of its practical orienta-
tion, this book was able to spread Kabbalistic ideas to a wider audi-
ence. It has also served as a bridge to the more overtly psychological
ideas that we find in Hasidism two centuries later. Many of its sugges-
tions, which reflect a medieval outlook, are no longer relevant (or even
offensive, as in the case of its view of women) to the modern reader.
Nevertheless, the reader will get a powerful sense of how Kabbalistic
ideas can be made into concrete psychospiritual practices.
III. Sefirot as Spiritual Psychology - Hasidism:

1. Kalonymus Kalman Shapira, A Student’s Obligation: Advice from the

Rebbe of the Warsaw Ghetto** (Aronson, 1991), chapter 10, “To Trans-
form Bad Character into Light”, 80-7.

Rabbi Shapira was the last Rabbi of the Warsaw ghetto, who buried his
unpublished writings in a metal box shortly before being deported to a
labor camp, where he was killed. Miraculously, the box was found after
the war and sent to his brother in Israel.

A Student’s Obligation, published in 1932, is a brilliant statement of

Hasidic educational theory and practice. In this book, Rabbi Shapira
shows students, teachers and parents how to bring the Image of God in
each student from potentiality to actuality. Chapter Ten is a brief ex-
planation of how “our character traits are, in actuality, supernal sefirot
that have been drawn into us.” Although they have been “damaged and
corrupted”, Rabbi Shapira shows how they can be transformed into
their divine attributes.

2. Menahem Nahum of Chernobyl, Upright Practices, The Light of the

Eyes*, A. Green, tr. (Paulist Press, 1982), 40-42, 104-112 (on Abra-
ham), 176-184 (on Isaac), 216-227 (on Jacob).

This nineteenth century work is written in the form of a commentary

on the Book of Genesis. It is a good example of how Hasidic Rabbis
used Scripture as a starting point for their often original ideas. It is
very important to become familiar with how traditional commentators
read Scripture. While they saw the text as divine in origin and un-
changeable, they read it in astonishingly different ways. The selections
I have chosen will show you how the figures of Abraham, Isaac and Ja-
cob were interpreted as representing the three divine qualities (sefirot)
of Kindness, Severity and Harmony.

3. Louis Jacobs, Hasidic Prayer *(Schocken Books, 1978), chapter

Nine, “The Elevation of ‘Strange Thoughts’”, 104-120.
This important study chronicles the struggle of Hasidism to create a
contemplative approach to prayer, both public and private. Chapter
Nine discusses a traditional basis of my work: the elevation of “strange
thoughts”, negative feelings, images and thoughts that occur in prayer
and meditation. The early Hasidic masters taught that they need not be
pushed aside but can be transformed if one has the proper method.
Rabbi Jacobs shows how this radical notion, drawn from Kabbalistic
ideas, was progressively pushed aside in later generations of Hasidism.

4. Israel Baal Shem Tov, Tsava'at Harivash: Testament of Rabbi Israel

Baal Shem Tov*, J. I. Schochet, tr. (Kehot Publication Society, 1998),
Introduction, xxvi-xxxvii.

Closely related to the previous reading, this is a translation of sayings

attributed to the founder of Hasidism, Rabbi Israel Baal Shem Tov
(1698-1760). It is one of the earliest collections of the master’s sayings,
published in 1792 or 3, and contains some of the radical notions just
mentioned. The translation is by a well-known teacher of Habad Ha-
sidism, the largest contemporary Hasidic sect. The Introduction is ex-
tremely interesting because of the translator’s discomfort with the no-
tion of “elevation of strange thoughts”. He goes to great lengths to ex-
plain the idea and its potential dangers. Thus it is a valuable resource
for both understanding this idea and its history in Hasidism.

5. Yoram Jacobson, Hasidic Thought* (MOD Press, 1998), chapter

Ten, “Three Kinds of Devekut” and chapter Eleven, “The Raising Up of
Alien Thoughts”.

This volume, originally a University course broadcast over Israeli radio

by a professor at Tel Aviv University, is the finest philosophic introduc-
tion to Hasidism available in English. Given the vast amount of mate-
rial on the subject, this is indeed remarkable. Like Kaplan’s
Innerspace, it is both an overview and an in-depth study. Jacobson is
able to do both because he focuses on central ideas and pursues them
clearly. Chapters Ten and Eleven deal with this same issue of trans-
forming negativity. Professor Jacobson uncovers the radical implica-
tions of the Hasidic ideas that have inspired the apporach to contem-
plation found in this web site.