Recovering Jewish spirituality

By Rabbi Michael Leo Samuel

CHULA VISTA, California — When one takes a gaze at the Jewish horizon, one gets the distinct impression that many synagogues find themselves confronted by a spiritual problem they can scarcely understand—much less articulate: Irrelevance. Judaism may someday die—not by genocides—but by apathy. Yes, as rabbis we love to sermonize about Israel, political concerns, and a host of other miscellaneous topics ad nauseam, but we feel too embarrassed to talk, or engage one another about one of the most important issues of our time: recovering Jewish spirituality.

The obstacles are daunting.

For one thing, talking about God exposes our prepubescence. Can a sophisticated and educated person who is schooled in science still believe in God? Some of us also feel awkward about our ambivalence. Didn’t Feuerbach, Freud, and Marx convince us that God is nothing more but a human projection? Didn’t Rabbi Mordechai Kaplan tell us that God is anything but “personal”? Yes, history also gives us pause to wonder. God poses a mighty problem for those of us who remember Auschwitz and Rwanda, or the legion of Jihadists, who delight in destroying innocent lives in the name of Allah. Although we speak about the great miracles of the biblical past, e.g., the splitting of the Red Sea, we find ourselves cynically asking, “What have you done for us lately, God?” Maybe as a result of our collective suffering as a people, it is too hard for us to imagine God as “personal.”

Any close brush with evil makes it exceedingly difficult to talk about faith. Martin Buber asked poignantly:

• In this our time, one asks again and again: how is a   Jewish life still possible after Auschwitz? I would like to frame this   question more correctly: how is a life with God still possible in a time in   which there is an Auschwitz? The estrangement has become too cruel, the   hiddenness too deep. One can still “believe” in a God who allowed those things   to happen, but how can one still speak to Him? Can one still hear His   word? Can one still, as an individual and a people, enter at all in a   dialogical relationship with Him? Can one still call on Him? Dare we recommend   to the survivors of Auschwitz, the Jobs of the gas chambers: “Call on Him, for   He is kind, for His mercy endureth forever?”[1]

Jewish tradition teaches us that anyone who lives in a cemetery could be considered insane according to mishnaic law.[2] I often wonder whether we have lost our sanity since Auschwitz. Nevertheless, the rabbinic proscription against sleeping in a cemetery ought to make us wonder: Is it possible that our concepts of God and the Bible might have been flawed to begin with? A friend of mine who is a large publisher of Jewish books confided with me, “Michael Leo, I cannot believe in a rabbi who does not believe in miracles.” In my usual Socratic style, I asked him, “Will you define for me, what you mean by ‘miracle’?”

We are so used to Hollywood defining what “miracles” are supposed to be–supernatural violations of natural law; as a result, we fail to consider the obvious. Miracle comes from the Latin miraculum “object of wonder,” and when we see something that awakens within us a sense of wonder, we experience the miraculous. From the religious perspective, the continuous survival of the Jewish people continues to surprise the world. When you consider the enemies that we have faced and out-survived, that too is a miracle. When one considers that the Jewish people bear witness to the reality of ethical monotheism despite the countless attempts of our enemies to destroy us, I am dwarfed by miracles.

There are no easy answers as to why bad things happen to good people, yet the continued existence of the Jewish people seems to point to something very majestic and profound—the God of history. Miracles are subtle. If a miracle can be subtle, I believe God is also subtle. Our childish images of Big Daddy God doing it all for us helpless fools, is passé—God is, for me, the Power that is giving shape to a good world. However, we are also God’s co-partners in Creation. Human generated evil would never be possible if we didn’t allow it to happen.  In my opinion, before we start pointing fingers at God, we need to start taking a sober look at our abdication as God’s shepherds and rescuers.

Lastly, when discussing spirituality, it is important to understand its Hebraic usage in the Torah and Tanakh. To be begin with, the “Spirit of God” רוּחַ אֱלֹהִים  (rûah´élöhîm) mentioned in Genesis 1:2 describes  רוּחַ as the life-breath and life-principle that transforms the chaos of creation into a cosmos. In theological terms, רוּחַ alludes to the most profound dimension that converts, liberates, and sublimates human existence. In practical terms, when we embrace this aspect of spirit within our being—we can transform even the darkest forces of chaos into an orderly cosmos that exist in our world. This has been our task as God’s witness in history. Isn’t about time we start learning to get in touch with this profound dimension of our life that can improve and transform our earthly and spiritual existence?

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Notes:

[1] Martin Buber and Nachum Glazer ed., On Judaism (New York: Schocken, 1967), 223

[2] Tosefta Terumot 1:3; BT Hagigah 3b-4a; JT Terumot 1:1 (40b).