Like many American Jews raised to obey the rules of their religion but not taught its deepest insights, Rami M. Shapiro went looking elsewhere for spiritual meaning. At a young age, he discovered Buddhist meditation, but, rather than go on to embrace Buddhism totally, he took what he learned from its practices and applied this new understanding of the world to his own tradition.
Now a rabbi and storyteller of Temple Beth Or in Miami, Florida, Shapiro has set out through his writing and teaching to revitalize Judaism for others.
— Ed.
The lecture hall was packed. We had come to learn about three of the world’s great religions. We were young and hungry for something new, some spark of insight that would rekindle souls cool with doubt.
The first to speak was the Catholic priest. He sat on a large, straight-backed oak chair with thick, rectangular arms and a red velvet seat. He spoke of theology and faith.
The rabbi was next. He sat on a metal folding chair that creaked as he squirmed around on it. He spoke of Jewish history, the Holocaust, Halacha (Jewish law), and human rights.
The Buddhist monk was last. He sat on brown cushions placed carefully on a carpet on the floor. He instructed us in meditation: sit up straight, close your eyes, and count your breaths from one to ten, over and over again. He invited us to try it, then closed his eyes and said nothing for fifteen minutes. When the time was up, he clapped his hands twice to call us back to attention. “This is Buddhism,” he said. “Any questions?”
It has been more than twenty-five years since I attended that lecture, and I’ve never forgotten it. The priest was remote and seemed very sure of himself; he provided us with answers but was not interested in our questions. The rabbi was passionate but abstract; he offered a sense of peoplehood, but we were still unsure of our selfhood. Only the monk took our seeking seriously; only he showed us what to do. And it was what to do that I wanted to learn.
Certainly, Judaism is filled with doing, but the rituals to which I was exposed as a child were performed without a real sense of purpose or understanding. My family observed the holy days and the Sabbath because we were commanded to do so. Fulfilling our obligations to God and tradition seemed to be the whole of Judaism. One was a good Jew if one conformed to the ways of the old Jews. I wanted something more.
Not long after my experience with the Buddhist monk, I attended a lecture by a rabbi who had just published a fiery call to reinvigorate Judaism with kabbalistic insights and practices. He spoke for an hour, outlining the key concepts of Jewish mysticism, then invited the audience to form a huge circle. In the middle, he lighted the braided candle of Havdalah, the ceremony that separates the Sabbath from the workweek, and asked us to focus on the flame. His voice softened and deepened as he led us into a light trance state. After a few relaxation exercises, he guided us through a fantasy world of our own making, helping us find the divine flame within each one of us.
The experience moved me deeply. I was elated to have finally met a teacher of Jewish spirituality. After the talk, I managed to get close enough to ask the rabbi, “When can I visit your synagogue and experience more fully what you teach?”
He laughed and said, “My synagogue? We don’t do this in my synagogue. To tell you the truth, I don’t know of any synagogue where you can practice Judaism this way.”
I was crushed, saddened, and more than a little angry. I felt like challenging the rabbi to practice what he had just preached, but the crowd pressed in on him, and I was pushed to the back.
I wanted a Jewish spiritual practice that would infuse my days with joy, peace, and a transcendent sense of meaning and purpose. Though I suspected that such a practice existed, I had no idea where to find it. So hungry was I for this spiritual Judaism that I vowed to create it myself if I had to: the chutzpah of a nineteen-year-old.
For a moment I was no longer aware of myself sitting on the lake shore. Everything — the shore, the lake, myself — was gone. There was nothing; not even an awareness of nothing.
I was fairly new to spirituality, having begun my study of world religions only three years earlier, while still in high school. I was fortunate to have two high-school history teachers who had just returned from a summer study program in India. Their enthusiasm was contagious. I read every book on Eastern philosophy I could find, and enrolled in a one-day introductory class on Zen Buddhism, where I learned to sit zazen, the meditation practice of Zen Buddhists. I dreamt hungrily of enlightenment.
My parents were worried. Their average Jewish teenager was turning into “a Zen,” as they and their friends called it. They feared for my Jewish soul.
In college, I majored in philosophy and religion, and continued to meditate daily. I felt myself being drawn deeper and deeper into Zen teaching and practice. At the same time, I felt a great deal of guilt about abandoning Judaism. I had done nothing overt in this regard, but my heart just wasn’t in it. I knew my parents were concerned, so to calm their fears I offered to study in Israel for a year. Really, I went to Israel in search of “Zen Judaism,” and discovered it in the teachings of the Hasidic sages of eighteenth-century Eastern Europe.
Hasidism, from the word hasid, or “pious one,” was a revolutionary movement that attracted Jews hungry for something more than the dry erudition of the Talmudic scholars who dominated Jewish life in Eastern Europe. Where the rabbis spoke of law, Hasidism spoke of joy. Where the rabbis honed the fine points of the Talmud, Hasidism told stories about real people in real-life situations struggling to maintain a personal relationship with God. On the basis of the philosophy that the whole world is full of God’s glory, Hasidism grew and came to rival conventional Judaism for the soul of the European Jew.
In time, however, the movement stagnated. Its emphasis shifted from the spiritual lives of simple Jews to the mystical feats of the grand masters of competing Hasidic courts. With the rise of Jewish rationalism in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Hasidism began to merge with Orthodox Judaism to form a united front against encroaching secularism. Hasidic schools adopted a more mainstream Talmudic focus, and Orthodox rabbis decided that their differences with Hasidism were less important than the threat both faced from reason and science. Today, Hasidism is not a revolutionary movement but the extreme right wing of Orthodox Judaism. Few recall the spiritual creativity that was once the heart and soul of the Hasidic movement.
With the merger of Hasidism into the larger world of Orthodoxy, and the eventual victory of rational thought over mysticism, Judaism experienced a steady decline in mystical fervor. The God-filled world celebrated by the Hasidim faded from general Jewish consciousness, and with it the practices that had sought to make that world an everyday reality.
To be complete, God must contain all possibilities and paradoxes. To be complete, God must transcend the notion of opposites and reveal everything as one.
I am not a Hasidic Jew. I am a liberal, postdenominational Jew who is drawn to the richness of Hasidic teaching without feeling compelled to follow Hasidic practice. I grew up in an Orthodox environment, but my chosen Jewish lifestyle, though informed by tradition, is not bound by it.
I am, however, a Jew in search of God — not as an abstract idea, but as a palpable reality. Many years ago, while still a rabbinic student, I delivered a sermon on the necessary unity of God, woman, man, and nature. Immediately after the service, I was called into the office of the chairman of the philosophy department for a scholarly reprimand. Referring to my position that God and creation are one, the chairman said, “You, sir, are a megalomaniac.”
“With all due respect, Rabbi,” I said, “you are wrong. If I understand the term correctly, a megalomaniac thinks he is God. I, on the other hand, know I am God.”
What I meant to convey (and doubt very much that I did) was my deep conviction that God is not something living somewhere outside time and space. To me, God is all things in time and space. God is not something you pray to, but rather the greater reality to which you awake. For more than twenty years, first as a student, and now as a rabbi, I have allowed this nondual understanding of God and creation, and of how to awake to it, to define my spiritual teaching.
I first encountered the nonduality of God at the age of sixteen. I was spending part of the summer of 1967 at a friend’s home on Cape Cod, Massachusetts. My friend worked at the local post office every morning, and his daily absence provided the privacy I needed to continue my fledgling meditation practice. I had been sitting zazen for several months, and had found a shady spot near a small lake that made a perfect early-morning zendo. I walked there each morning at sunrise, folded several beach towels to make a cushion, and sat cross-legged on the sand. I then attempted to count my breaths from one to ten, over and over again. Most mornings, I alternated between counting my breaths and daydreaming. Nothing special happened, but I kept at it nonetheless.
One morning, everything changed. At some point my conscious mind stopped counting, and didn’t replace that activity with any other. For a moment I was no longer aware of myself sitting on the lake shore. Everything — the shore, the lake, myself — was gone. There was nothing; not even an awareness of nothing. When the moment passed, I was sweating heavily and laughing deeply. Something seemed extremely funny, but I could not tell what it was. Everything was bright; colors appeared more vivid; and whatever I looked at seemed to pulsate with a life force I had not noticed before. Without any mental discourse on my part, I simply knew that everything was a manifestation of the One Thing, and that the One Thing was not a “thing” at all. The books I was reading at the time called it Reality, Tao, Nature, the Universe. I called it God. I still do.
In a sense, my whole adult life has been dedicated to renewing that insight for myself and sharing the means of experiencing it with others. This is the single point I aim to teach: God is the source and substance of all reality, and God is experientially knowable. I do not believe in God as an abstract idea; I experience God as a palpable reality. I know this sounds strange coming from a rabbi. Yet it is not unique to me. Rabbi Yitzhak Epstein of Homel once wrote the following to a Jewish friend who questioned the authenticity of this nondual understanding of God:
Listen, please, my beloved friend! Do not say that what I am about to say is, God forbid, heresy or philosophy. . . . After doing all the goodly meditations while reciting the songs of praise and the Shema . . . it is sensed that, as we say in Yiddish, Altz is Gott, All is God.
I believe Reb Yitzhak is right. All is God. There is no thing or feeling or thought that is not God — even the idea that there is no God! For this is what it is to be All: God must embrace even God’s own negation.
Some people argue that God is a divine spark inside each being. Others claim that God is above and beyond creation. I teach neither position. God is not inside or outside; God is the very thing itself! And where there is only empty space? God is that, as well.
Picture a soup bowl in your mind and try to define what is the bowl. Is it the material that forms its sides? Or is it the empty space that fills with soup? Without the space, the bowl is useless. Without the sides, the space is useless. So which is the bowl? The answer is both. To be a bowl it must have both being (sides) and emptiness (space).
It is the same with God. For God to be All, God must have both being and emptiness. In Judaism we speak of being and emptiness as Yesh and Ayin. Yesh (being) is that manifestation of God that appears to us as separate entities — physical, psychological, and spiritual. Ayin (emptiness) is that manifestation of God that reveals all separation to be illusory: everything is simply God in differing forms. This teaching is called shlemut: “the completeness of God.” To be complete, God must contain all possibilities and paradoxes. To be complete, God must transcend the notion of opposites and reveal everything as one.
God is not just this oneness, however. God is Yesh and Ayin and that which transcends both in a greater wholeness. It is not that God changes; it is our perception of God that changes. When we look at the world as comprising separate entities, we see God as Yesh. When we look at the world as a seamless unity, we see God as Ayin. Both are parts of God, but neither is the whole of God. God cannot be reduced to Yesh or Ayin, or even to the combination of the two. God is that which embraces both being and emptiness in an even greater unity.
To illustrate this idea, I often make use of a bar magnet. A magnet has two poles, one positive and one negative. A magnet cannot be otherwise and still be a magnet. Even if you cut the magnet in half, it will manifest these two poles. No matter how small you slice the magnet, its nature dictates that it will have both positive and negative poles.
Now think of Yesh and Ayin as the poles of God. God cannot be God without them both, and they cannot exist without each other, or without God. This is what is meant by God’s shlemut, God’s completeness. All things are contained in and necessitated by God. Everything we encounter is a unique manifestation of God. Nothing we encounter is separate from God. Seeing both being and emptiness as expressions of God is called d’vekut, or “God-consciousness.”
The relationship between God and creation is like that between an ocean and its waves. Each wave, while unique and distinct in time and space, is part of the same ocean.
The idea that all things are linked in a greater unity is troubling to many. Without a clear distinction between you and me, and between God and creation, some fear that individuality will be devalued and nature diminished. The implication of nonduality, however, is just the opposite.
The essence of reality is an all-encompassing unity that not only embraces but generates diversity. It is not that you and I are creatures fashioned by God. Rather, you and I are temporary manifestations of God. We are real. We are worthwhile. We are unique. But we are not eternal, separate, and independent. We are God, though certainly not the totality of God.
The relationship between God and creation is like that between an ocean and its waves. Each wave, while unique and distinct in time and space, is part of the same ocean. Without the ocean, there could be no wave. Yet waves are no less real for their having no existence outside the ocean. And waves are no less distinct from each other for their all being part of the same ocean.
Similarly, you and I, and the myriad details of creation, are no less distinct for being manifestations of the one God. Our separate reality is momentary, transient, and relative, but that does not make it illusory or unreal.
The aim of Jewish spiritual practice is to become conscious of both the wave and the ocean, the relative and the absolute. The Jewish mystic celebrates the self even as she experiences its transience. She honors the other even as she recognizes it as part of the greater unity from which both arise. Jewish spirituality is not an either-or proposition; it is profoundly and unrelentingly “both-and.”
Jewish spiritual practice does not supplant the self with the One, but rather awakens the self to its inseparability from the One. Jewish spiritual practice awakens you to the One and the Many as equal manifestations of God, and allows you to function in the relative world of separate selves while at the same time encountering through that relative world the absolute world of inseparable unity.
It is not that the relative is either more or less real than the absolute, but that both are authentic expressions of God.
Rabbi Aharon haLevi Horowitz taught this idea centuries ago:
God’s only desire is to reveal unity through diversity. That is, to reveal that all of reality is unique in all of its levels and in all of its details, and nevertheless united in a fundamental oneness. The main point of creation . . . [is] to reveal the wholeness of God from the opposite perspective. . . . For it is the nature of completeness to include all opposites in the One.
Rabbi Aharon’s point is crucial to understanding Jewish spiritual practice. The goal is not to exchange one opposite for the other, but to see that all opposites are manifestations of God, the one true reality. Heaven is no more divine than earth. An angel is no more holy than your neighbor. A rock is no less a manifestation of God than a rabbit. There is a profound equivalence among the animate and the inanimate, and at the same time a profound difference. One must hold the relative and the absolute in the mind simultaneously, seeing them both as manifestations of the greater nondual reality of God. This is the essence of Jewish spiritual practice. It cannot be done by retreating into one half of the whole or the other. It can be done only by allowing each half to take its place in the whole.
The thirteenth-century Spanish kabbalist Abraham Abulafia spoke of this in terms of pouring a jug of water into a flowing stream. The water from the jug is no less present now that it is in the stream, but neither is it separate from the stream. Through sustained spiritual practice, you can pour your ego into the stream of God and fulfill your humanity by realizing your divinity.
For now he [the awakened individual] is no longer separated from God, and behold he is God and God is he; for he is so intimately adhering to God that he cannot by any means be separate from God, for he is God. See now that I, even I, am God. He is I and I am He.
This is the voice of spiritual awakening: “He is I and I am He.” It is an ecstatic overcoming of ego-centered consciousness by a greater boundariless awareness. It is not so much that the ego is gone for good, but that it no longer defines itself in opposition to the other; rather, it is a manifestation of the whole.
Being a manifestation of the whole obligates you to the whole. Knowing that you are not separate from the rest of creation awakens you to your responsibility to creation. Too often people imagine that the absence of separate selfhood means that nothing matters; the world is a game, an illusion, a worthless place from which the soul seeks to escape. This is not the Jewish view.
All opposites are manifestations of God, the one true reality. Heaven is no more divine than earth. An angel is no more holy than your neighbor.
The fact that you are a temporary manifestation of God does not mean you are unimportant. On the contrary, you are a unique and unreproducible expression of the Divine that is endowed with irreducible value and holiness. You are a vehicle of godliness placed here to bring godliness to bear on every aspect of life as you encounter it. And that means recognizing and honoring the godliness of all other things.
There is a mistaken belief among many that spirituality is opposed to the concerns of this world. Many cling to spiritual practice in order to transcend this world, to escape the ordinary and find refuge in the extraordinary. In Judaism, however, there is no dichotomy between everyday life and holiness. Your charge is to be holy and to make the world holy. Your spiritual practice reveals your interconnectedness with the world and the interconnectedness of the world with God. No longer deluded into seeing yourself in opposition to others, you cannot separate yourself or your actions from the impact they have on others. The awakening to unity is accompanied by a powerful sense of shared suffering, a deeper compassion, and a compelling need to do justice in the world. Awakening is not an escape from the world, but a deep and compassionate embracing of it. You are challenged to uplift the world with justice and compassion, not to transcend it with mystical revelry.
Judaism, perhaps more than any of the world’s other major religions, is a religion for householders. It is not something you do instead of marrying, raising a family, managing a career, and paying bills. Judaism is the way you do all these things. You are asked to manifest holiness in the ordinary events of your everyday life: Make eating holy. Make conversation holy. Make sleeping holy. Make sex holy.
Judaism . . . is a religion for householders. It is not something you do instead of marrying, raising a family, managing a career, and paying bills. Judaism is the way you do all these things.
Making life holy requires that you see all things as manifestations of God, the source and substance of all that was, is, and will be. Making life holy obligates you to live your life, and to help others live theirs, according to the highest ethical and moral standards. You do not meditate in order to see beyond the suffering of your neighbor; you meditate in order to see the suffering of your neighbor as clearly as you see your own. You do not practice Judaism to escape the pain of ordinary living; you practice Judaism to alleviate that pain for both yourself and the world. But you cannot do this if you continue to see your neighbor as apart from yourself.
When I teach this idea to children, I often use a jigsaw puzzle depicting the earth amid the deep black of space. I pour the pieces onto a table and ask the children to put the puzzle together. What they don’t know is that I have removed one piece and put it in my pocket. It is a small piece of black space, one among dozens of the same color.
After a while the puzzle is complete, except for the missing piece. I ask the children how they feel about the puzzle. They are frustrated: all that work and they can’t finish.
“But it is such a small piece,” I remind them. “There are so many just like it. You can certainly see what the whole puzzle looks like without that missing piece.”
“Yes, but it isn’t done. It has a hole in it.”
“But it is such a small hole — one missing piece among hundreds. Can it really matter that much?”
“Yes!” they cry, upset at my apparent lack of understanding. “Without that piece nothing is right. It just isn’t right!”
Then I take the piece out of my pocket and wait for the groans to subside.
“Look at this piece. It is so small. So simple. And not so different from the others. In fact, when we place this piece in the puzzle it will be hard to tell exactly where it is; it will blend in so evenly. And yet how you missed it. How important it was to you. How necessary to your completion of the puzzle.
“Now, listen very carefully: Each of us is just like this piece. We are not so different from all the other pieces of the universe; looked at from outer space, we blend in. And yet, just like this piece, we are absolutely essential to the whole.
“If we care so much about this little piece of the puzzle, how much more must we care about ourselves and each other.”
“In Search of Zen Judaism” is excerpted from Minyan: Ten Principles for Living a Life of Integrity, by Rami M. Shapiro. © 1997 by Rami M. Shapiro. It appears here by permission of Harmony Books, a division of Crown Publishers, Inc.
