Where Does My Spiritual Growth Go from Here?

Where do we go from here? That is the theme these High Holyday sermons explore. This morning: where am I going spiritually as a person and a liberal Jew?

Remember the pep rallies, the bon fires, the football players decked out in their spanking clean uniforms? Remember the cheer leaders with their pom poms, jumping and singing to pump the crowd up? Remember feeling part of something BIG, something important, something of such deep feeling that it swept you away? Ah, now that was spirit – school spirit, athletic spirit, joyful spirit!

But that is not spirituality. At most, pep rallies and other events like them are only “spirituality light.”

In Hebrew we call Jewish spirituality ruchaniyut, which comes from the word ruach, spirit, or breath.  Just as breathing is a process, not a place, so too with ruchaniyut.  There is no place to stop on our spiritual journey.  There is only the journey.

Definitions of Jewish spirituality, indeed, all spirituality, are notoriously difficult to pin down.  Two that make a good deal of sense to me are the ideas of Rabbi Lawrence Kushner that ruchaniyut  is “The immediacy of God’s presence,” and of Rabbi Kerry Olitzky, who writes that “Spirituality is the process through which the individual strives to meet God.” [Handbook, p. 10]

We are often so wrong, so uninformed about what spirituality is. It is unbelievably complex, and we want the easy path. As one teacher declared, “The world is a kind of spiritual kindergarten, where millions of bewildered infants are trying to spell ‘God’ with the wrong blocks.” [King Duncan, Lively Illustrations for Effective Preaching, Seven Worlds Pub.(Knoxville, Tenn., 1987),”Meaning”.]

A much better understanding of spirituality begins with the acceptance that we don’t understand, something particularly difficult for we who are so self-important, so full of ourselves to admit:

           There was a seminary professor who was much admired by his students because he always managed to keep his spiritual vitality at a high peak. One day, a student who was plagued with anxiety came to him and said: “You always seem so secure and so at peace with yourself. How do you do it?” The professor said, “I let the everyday things speak to me of the sacred. For example, I walk in the rain and throw my head back and let the raindrops fall on my face and I get a revelation.”

Sometime later, the student and the professor met again. The student said, “I tried to follow your example. I took a long walk in the rain and I threw my head back and I let the raindrops fall on my face and the water ran down my neck and I didn’t get any revelation and I felt like a fool.” “Well,” the professor replied, “what more of a revelation than that do you want the first time?” [The Preacher’s Illustration Service, Italicus, Inc., May/June 1996.]

The Buddhist path of enlightenment that so many Jews have been fascinated with, begins with the understanding that there is a lattice work, or a net, that lays across the universe. At the point where each vertical and horizontal strand crosses there is a “node of consciousness,” us. Enlightenment is, in a certain sense, to realize that not only are we inconsequential “in the greater scheme of things,” but even non-existent, a momentary blip of sentience in an eternal cosmos.

But we Jews have a path of our own. Better? Who can say. But it is our own. Why go elsewhere? Our mysticism, our primary source of spiritual growth, sees it somewhat differently. For us, the universe is God both without and within. We are like the waves, ripples in the wide expanse of the sea, sometimes breaking free for just an instant, but not really separate since we return to the source from which we came.

That’s what my colleague Rabbi Lawrence Kushner, professor of mysticism at our Reform Rabbinic seminary, says the story of Moses seeing a bush that burned but was not consumed, is actually about:

How long would you have to watch wood burn before you could know whether or not it was actually being consumed? Even dry kindling wood is not burned up for several minutes. This then would mean that Moses would have to watch the “amazing sight” closely for several minutes before he could possibly know there even was a miracle to watch!

The “burning bush” was not a miracle. It was a test. God wanted to find out whether or not Moses could pay attention to something for more than a few minutes. When Moses did, God spoke. The trick is to pay attention to what is going on around you for long enough to behold the miracle without falling asleep. There is another world, right here within this one, whenever we pay attention. [Lawrence Kushner, God Was in This Place & I, i Did Not Know: Finding Self, Spirituality, and Ultimate Meaning (Jewish Lights Publishing, Woodstock, Vermont, 1991), pp. 24-25.]

Pay attention. Learn to see the other world that is right here within this one. “What is most important to my teacher?” asks the Hasidic literature, “Whatever he is doing at the moment.” In Hebrew this is called kavanah, intention, purpose. Like much mysticism, it is a paradox. Live with such intention that you’ll see beneath the surface of the trivial and the ephemeral without knowing you’re living with such intention that you’re seeing beneath the surface of the trivial and the ephemeral. If you can understand that, without understanding you’re understanding it, your spiritual journey is well underway.

What is the other world “right here within this one?” God. In the clouds, God. In the dust, God. In the person who wins a Nobel prize, God. In the sponge on the side of my kitchen sink, God. Everywhere and everything, God.

Hasidic fondness for song and melody is based on this ideal. A particular melody of plaintive yearning, “soul music,” is called a devekut niggun, an attachment melody, which Hasidim repeat over and over again in order to cultivate this state to the highest degree possible for ordinary worshippers. [Dr. Louis Jacobs]

The aim of our spiritual journey, its purpose, is called devekut in Hebrew, cleaving to God. Such connection, such attachment, creates incredible bliss as well as profound wisdom. In the Hasidic community the leaders, the rebbes, are the people who are seen as farthest along this path.

The means to proceed on this spiritual journey is meditation. Here is an account of a disciple being led into a mystical experience by his uncle:

Carrying a candle, they climbed the ladder to the attic, to the small place under the roof. Each of them put on the white trousers and white over-shirts hanging from pegs on the wall.

“Make your heart a shelter from the evils of the world and your soul a Tabernacle,” the uncle, Azariah, chanted.
Micah took the pen, the ink, the writing board, sitting down on the floor with his back against the wall. He was supposed to think of the letters of the alphabet, roll them around in his mind until they had written a message from the Almighty.

“We begin,” said Azariah. “Say this after me: ‘These are the letters on which the unformed Void stood firm, [These are the letters on which the unformed Void stood firm…] a conduit through which blessings flow to the world. [a conduit through which blessings flow to the world… ] They were restored below and in every generation the world was embraced by the letters [They were restored below and in every generation the world was embraced by the letters...].’ Now breathe slowly, clear your mind. Breath in, out, slowly…”

Micah slowed his breathing as he’d been taught, found the quiet place inside him that was no thing, no thought. He did what one does in such a place: he waited.

Micah began to recite the letters: aleph, bet, gimmel… There was a small aleph hanging in the air a few feet in front of him, a letter that had no sound of its own, the first letter of the alphabet. It waited, waited for something to give it a sound. Then there was a bet, a bayit, the second letter whose translation was “house.” A small house floated through the air, stopping in back of the aleph. The door opened, the aleph floated up to it, looking inside, it seemed, then rose up to sit on the house’s roof. A gimmel, a gammal, a miniature camel, came galloping through the air across the room, stopped beside the house, hunkered down on all four legs to look at Micah as if waiting for further instructions.

“Micah, that’s enough. You are done for now,” said Uncle Azariah

“No, not yet. There are many more letters in the alphabet.”

Before Azariah could protest Micah put himself back into the state of quiet wakefulness, intending to recite the alphabet from where he left off, but never had the chance. The rest of the letters jumped into the air on their own. They took on shapes and colors, changed colors, circled as if in a dance. They sang. They chanted. They laughed. Micah held out his hands with the palms facing each other as the letters swirled between them like he was winding yarn, then spun free, flying around the room.

He saw himself seeing himself. He was looking down from somewhere near the ceiling, saw himself sitting there, eyes more than half closed, chin drooping forward onto his chest. He reached down, took the quill, wrote words on the board that seemed to come from somewhere else.

When he opened his eyes the tablet was on his lap with words written on it. It was morning.

And one last brief story to try and help elucidate what this profound idea we call spirituality is all about:

A powerful King was grateful to two simple poor people for their devotion, and decided to show his gratitude. The poor laborers had never been into the palace before, but had only seen the King at state occasions. After receiving their invitations to see the King, in trepidation and excitement, they approached the palace. As they entered, they were amazed to behold the magnificence of the palace. One servant was so enamored of these riches, that he stopped in the great halls to delight in their beauty. He never progressed beyond these chambers. Meanwhile, the other servant was wiser, and his desire was only for the King. The beautiful ornaments did not distract him, as he entered the inner chamber, where he delighted in beholding the King himself.

So, that’s where ruchaniyut, our spiritual journey can go from here:

-Kavanah – Intention: exquisite, purposeful attention to the details of everyday life.
- Devekut – Cleaving, experiencing the immediacy of the king, the immediacy of God’s presence and the incredible bliss that provides.
- Meditation – The path of introspection and no-mind that will bring us towards closer to devekut, closer to God.

Where does our spiritual journey take us from here? Towards the palace of God’s presence.