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MANAGE YOUR SUBSCRIPTIONJudaism's Mystical Heart
An Interview With Dovid Din
Something’s been lost. It must have been, because when it was passed to me, I could have sworn the box was empty. Oh, I sang the proper songs, heard the history and the heartache; at thirteen I recited the proper scriptures to be declared a Jewish man (quickly, so the catered affair could begin), and then retired from Jewish life. Like most of the suburban American Jews of my generation, what was meant to be the beginning seemed to me the end. No need for active rebellion; when all you see are the laws of bagels-and-lox, one simply learns to look elsewhere for inspiration. And look I did. I stared at the world until it seemed to sparkle, embraced spiritual traditions East and West, and began to sense in each the same spark of holiness. Except one; I couldn’t quite forgive the empty box.
But still, nagging questions. Where was the life-blood of a tradition that has sustained so many for so long? Where was the frightening joy that set Jews dancing even in the cattle cars going to Auschwitz? Where was the universal spark in the peculiarly idiosyncratic ways of traditional Judaism? Three thousand years without a spark? Unlikely. And all the time, stooped over his prayer book in one inward corner of myself, that whitebearded Jew, head covered in reverence, eyes ablaze with messianic fervor — waiting. He has boxes also — on his head and arm ritual tefillin filled with scrolls of holy scripture, symbolically binding him to God’s service. I peer at him apprehensively, and lean forward to hear his whispered words. “Just remember,” he says, his body shimmering and fading, “the bush still burns. . . . Have you looked?”
This was an odd trip to be taking with my father. I was born in Brooklyn; he lived most of his life there, but has hardly looked back since moving the family to New Jersey more than 20 years ago. We got a bit lost on the way to Rabbi Dovid Din’s house. Dad remembered the street names but couldn’t quite place them.
“I have one question,” he said, as we wove through New York streets lined with double-parked cars and over-full dumpsters, Italian groceries, kosher meat markets, and beer joints. “Why do they have to dress that way?” He meant the Chassidic Jews and their distinctive broad brimmed hats, long black coats, black shoes, and hair grown in long locks over the ear. But behind the question was much more. There’s little love lost between the isolated communities of Chassidic Jews and their more assimilated brethren. The traditional ways and ultra-orthodox stance of the Chassids make them embarrassing reminders to many, like vestigial organs whose very purpose has been forgotten. Though Chassidism was founded in the early 18th century as a revitalizing current in Judaism — stressing joy, heartfelt prayer and mystical fervor — now it seems the rigid keeper-of-the-flame. I had never met Rabbi Din, and had no answer to my father’s question. But I would ask it — and many more questions of my own.
The interview was recommended by a friend in Berkeley, whose glowing words of praise were hard to ignore. He had told me that Dovid Din was a kabbalist — one who studies the inner teachings of Judaism — who had recently opened a public center for Judaic and mystical studies in Manhattan, called Sha’arei Orah (“Gates of Light”). He said he was a man whose very presence walking down the street made heads turn.
Two blocks from his house the neighborhood changed. It was much cleaner, obviously well-kept. Children with skullcaps played on the sidewalks, bantering with each other in Yiddish. My father dropped me off, and I climbed the narrow steps to Rabbi Din’s second floor apartment, where his wife Bracha met me with a sweet smile. “Dovid’s resting,” she said. “He’s been out working since early this morning.” She poured me tea while I waited. The Din’s youngest child joined me at the kitchen table, and, repeating after his mom, in Hebrew, the blessing for bread, gobbled a piece of cake. (There are four children in the family, aged three to eleven, who in the small apartment seemed omnipresent.)
Soon Rabbi Din appeared, and escorted me into his book-lined study. What struck me first was a certain gracefulness about him. Tall and slender, he seems to glide rather than walk. When he talks, his hands dance in front of him, tracing gentle elaborations in the air. His words are careful and probing. Though by nature intellectual, he seems constantly aware of the slipperiness of words, and their inability to adequately express deeper meanings. His perspective is sharply honed, his manner light, modest, and exactingly courteous.
Dovid Din was born in 1941 in northern England to Jewish but non-religious parents. Over the years he carved his own path into the Jewish tradition, and eventually studied in yeshivas [religious schools] both in Israel and America. Seven years ago, he brought his family to this Brooklyn community. Beyond that scant outline, Rabbi Din prefers to be none too specific about his past. While he draws great inspiration from the Chassidic master Reb Nachman of Bratzlav, he claims no allegiance to any specific Chassidic branch.
While Rabbi Din is at the forefront of the current Jewish mystical renewal, there is nothing updated or new-agey in his approach. He stresses the importance of not compromising the laws and norms of the tradition. “It’s not as people think, that there is a normative Judaism and then a mystical side,” he said in our interview. As we spoke the picture became clearer: in Rabbi Din’s understanding, the laws of Judaism are precise mystical teachings designed to bring man into alignment with God. “You are not apart from your environment, from the cosmos,” he said in one of his classes, “and to align yourself with it is 98 percent of the work toward enlightenment.” While acknowledging that “we all want to lick the spoon from the honey jar of mystical experience,” Rabbi Din attaches the greatest importance to individual actions in the world. “All the mechanisms of daily life are the hinges of holiness,” he says. This understanding creates “a truly religious awareness that doesn’t force one out of the context of reality.” It is this grounding of illumination in the details of daily life that gives Jewish mysticism its distinct flavor.
I found myself both attracted and repelled by the obvious power and coherence of his vision. My running hypothesis has always been that the key to right action lies in following the stirrings of my own heart and conscience. In orthodox Judaism that still, small voice is indeed one to be reckoned with, but its dictates are decidedly within the context of the traditional laws. This seems to be a contradiction, but I sense the possibility that it doesn’t have to be (or isn’t).
The second part of our interview was taped on the front porch, with the elevated subway roaring overhead, and children scurrying noisily around us. (“Raising kids is my life,” Rabbi Din said. “Teaching is just a side job.”) As sundown approached, I still had more questions; Rabbi Din invited me to come with him for evening prayers — perhaps we could talk more later. It was bitter cold as we walked briskly through the neighborhood toward the temple. Rabbi Din cautioned me not to feel intimidated if the other worshippers ignored me. They’d have nothing to say to an outsider, especially one who didn’t speak Yiddish. I marveled at the ease with which Rabbi Din straddled both worlds. Obviously. this was his home — this community set in the heart of New York, yet living almost entirely by its own rules, relatively untouched by the tumult all around it. Brought up outside the community — with both an early secular and later religious and kabbalistic education — Rabbi Din is in the unique position of knowing both languages, and being able to translate the inner workings of the tradition to those outside. While this in itself is a trifle unorthodox, it seems apparent that the people here love him and respect what he is trying to do. The sincerity in his work is unquestionable. At the temple I clumsily washed my hands in ritual fashion, and read the prayers through in English, watching the swaying, impassioned praying of the others.
I had wanted to follow up our interview with more personal questions, but there wasn’t time. “Besides,” Rabbi Din said with a smile, “I’m sure I would have found a way to fill them with hot air also.” Well, abstract as the following interview tends to be, it is full of anything but hot air. The glimpse of living Jewish spirit and wisdom moved me profoundly. No, the encounter didn’t answer all of my questions, but I can say that now I’ve begun to take a look.
— Howard Jay Rubin
Rubin: I’m told that the two intersecting triangles in the Star of David imply an understanding of “As above, so below.”
Din: That’s a phrase from the Zohar [The Book of Splendor].
Rubin: The idea that every action and event on earth has enormous implications — could you speak about this?
Din: You spoke about it so well. What more can I say?
Rubin: To get more specific — in Judaism there are laws governing the way you eat, the way you wear clothes.
Din: Now I sense the direction you mean. Judaism conceives of the universe as a vastly integrated system. That’s a philosophical point that our present scientific tradition also endorses, but it’s still a platitude there. That same scientific and psychological tradition has worked very hard to fragment the image of man, with very disastrous results. People have sensed that fragmentism and have come away with problems of identity, and alienation, and just not knowing who they are and where they are going.
Now, the whole system of the Torah [traditional law] is one that places the greatest possible emphasis on life in a very real context. It does not seek to “spiritualize” at all. Of course it does, but it’s like a wave which instead of breaking straight on the shore, will hold back in order to gather more water. The Torah insists that all the mechanisms of daily life are the hinges of holiness. So there is a vast system of sanctification of food called Kashruth, concerned with what is kosher and what is not. The Torah is also very concerned with the sanctification of time — through the Sabbath and the holidays, through certain periods of prayer — which to some extent all religions are, but Judaism has it worked out to a dance. And thirdly, it is concerned with the holiness of various kinds of actions and functions and objects of daily life.
The whole purpose behind it is that a person must deal with the world as it is, and out of that can be distilled a true religiosity. Across the board, among the common people, it will produce an extremely high level of ethical sensitivity. For this I can only give you a word in Yiddish — Ehrlich-Keit — a certain kind of basic, high level integrity. That means a kind of purity. Not what you or I would think of from deeper studies in other areas as enlightenment, but something that approaches it, and has about it one extremely conspicuous authentic characteristic — it is not self-conscious. It’s not a postured, “I have to sit and look spiritual. I have to move like a lily.” That’s also a discipline, but the problem is that when such things are too self-conscious, there is too much self-attention on achieving something, rather than having it flow out of what’s happening, out of the core of one’s real being.
Judaism is very concerned with the natural rhythms of things, and is therefore prepared to deal with all the realities of life, like crying children, and the pulse of family life. It insists on family life, and is very cautious of the ascetic or celibate life — which may be an important route, but it’s not real. Normally life does not flow like that. In practicing Judaism, Jewish orthodoxy is very careful not to tamper with the naturalness of family life, not to inhibit the birth of children or use birth control, because it believes in a very essential way that the family is a sacrament of divinity. The Western religious traditions, and the Far Eastern also, have implied that a person who seeks religious depths must isolate himself in order to commune with God in the pure realm of spirit. Judaism would say no, maybe at some point, but the first step is through the natural processes of nature, which are in effect the processes of Torah. The Torah is an extrapolation of the laws of the universe in a kind of artistic mosaic, but the processes are the same. The vicissitudes of life in a large family, the crying, the screaming kids, are really a means within nature toward achieving the balance necessary on the human level to perceive the divine.
The Torah in its spiritual discipline is like yoga. The person comes to a yoga master and says, “Swami, I want to learn yoga.” And the Swami — whose name might well be Schwartz — looks him straight in the eye and says, “Go home and do this and that exercise. Then come back.” The boy looks back at the Swami and says, “But I don’t want to do this exercise.” So the Swami says, “Good, don’t do the exercise, but this result you won’t have. You might get something better, but this result you won’t get, for the plain reason that you didn’t do what it takes to get this result. You won’t get water unless you turn on the faucet.” The Torah as a system compels one to do the exercises and guarantees the results. Guarantees it. And the result truly authenticates its nature as a religion; it produces a truly religious awareness that doesn’t force one out of the context of reality.
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