Judaism as a Spiritual Religion:
Every Bush Is Burning

Jews are not selfish people. The poor are their cousins and brothers and sisters. They are torn by what the prophets are saying. They know that a better system needs to be put into place, but the Temple system is the only Judaism that they know. Who would provide sacrifices to God if the landowners stopped coming to the Temple? How would the priests survive if the long line of animals and grain stopped arriving? The prophets are obviously telling the truth, but what they say does not offer a fixed religion. They spurn the festivals and the celebrations that have kept Judaism alive for generations. Their words seem to fly in the face of religion.

Suddenly, one day, the predictions of the prophets become reality. Catastrophe comes. The Temple is destroyed. The priests and the wealthy are removed from their regularized routine and sent to a foreign land. This should be the end of Judaism. But it is not. It turns out that the teachings of the prophets have actually prepared the people and protected the Jewish way of life by showing that the Temple was not all that important and the ritual sacrifices were not the only kind of religion possible. The new idea of God actually takes root in a foreign land and the spirit of prophecy is turned into a new form of Judaism that can survive even by the banks of the river of Babylon.

Nor do the priests miss a beat. They immediately begin to build new structures even in Babylon. By the time of the return, a generation later, they are ready to build a new Temple. But this time, they will be more than ritual slaughterers. They will be the teachers of the laws of the Torah and the words of the prophets. They will be caught up in the work of organizing the holy books into a solidified Law and Prophets, a Bible.

The Second Temple

Much later, the conditions will worsen again, some of the priests will see the teaching and judging of the people as more important than the work of sacrifices in the Temple.

Under the heel of the Romans, new problems emerged. The old Torah, even with the books of the prophets, was not sufficient to tell people what to do. The old prophets had never imagined what it might be like for Jews to be unable to worship in their own land. New spiritual leaders or prophets arose -- some of them from among the priests and some of them from among the people --making a new coalition that called itself the Pharisees. The priests continued to control the system of sacrifices in the Temple, in the same tradition of strict adherence to rituals, even as they were performed in the early days of the priests when Tzadok was the High Priest. They even called themselves tzadokim, Sadducees. The Sadducees believed that they had hold of what was important in Judaism -- a religion of sacrifice and the teaching of the Law and the Prophets -- all of which was now frozen into a system of worship and practice that looked as though it had always been the religion of the Jews. But the Pharisees were now riding the crest of the waves beating at the walls of the Temple in Jerusalem. And they were saying that they knew what God wanted because God had given them another Torah, a different Torah from the one the Sadducees knew -- a Torah she be’al peh that had been passed on by Moses to Joshua, by Joshua to the elders, by the elders to the prophets, and by the prophets to the Great Assembly of Pharisees. And, you will notice, if you listen to that verse from Pirke Avot carefully, it specifically leaves out the priests!

There were a lot of bad words and even bad blood between the Sadducees and the Pharisees, but that is only to be expected. Priests are never kind to prophets and prophets are never kind to priests. They are both in the truth business -- and the truth business is always cutthroat. Yet it would be wrong to say that the prophets in the time of the First Temple were teaching a new religion or that the Pharisees in the time of the Second Temple were teaching a new religion. Neither prophets nor Pharisees wished to break away from an old Judaism. They just wanted to show that the heart of Judaism is always open to God and that God does not favor one kind of human worship over another. Meaning in our lives flows from our idea of what God expects of us. Communities don't think. Individuals do. When it comes time to organize a community, to decide what our Judaism must look like, we have to add together the insights and inspirations of many individuals. In the end, every Pharisee (and all of us) has an individual Torah --and the meaning of Pharisaic Judaism is a combination of the many individual Torahs, just as the meaning of prophetic Judaism has to be found in the writings of individual prophets.

Challenge and Response

I would love to go on through every period of Jewish life to show you how individual ideas swept away the bulwarks and harbors of priestly edifices. And also to show you how the new prophetic ideas were always seized upon by the priests whose way of life seemed to be destroyed, so that the priests could build up new structures that took in the revolutionary ideas of the prophets who demolished their old edifices. This is Quintessential Judaism: the ebb and flow of building codes of law brick-by-brick and then breaking through them with spiritual light. Anyone who thinks that today’s Judaism is the "true Judaism" had better stop living today because tomorrow the waves will crest again and a new shoreline will appear.

You can call this ebb and flow by two different names, depending on which side of the fence you prefer to see it from. If you like the structure of things to seem never changing, you could say that this is the gradual process of "Tradition and Change." If you are of a more prophetic bent, and you don't care about the outward appearance of stability, you could say that this is the process of "Challenge and Response."

It boils down to this: Jews repeat over and over the words of the Shema: "Hear, O Israel, Adonai is God, Adonai is One." No matter how you translate this affirmation, it does not state that God is the commander of sacrifices, the guardian of kashrut, the giver of immutable laws, the arbiter of holy days and fasts, the special talisman of a particular movement or sect, or anything else that has to do with observance or ritual or tradition. It only says that God is what the Jewish community -- the living Jewish community, the Jewish community that can listen now -- agrees that God is. The issue of agreement is the important issue. It is only in the ways that we agree about the meaning of God that we can say God is One. All the ways that we disagree about the meaning of God or what God wants, are irrelevant to Quintessential Judaism and Quintessential Judaism is the only Judaism that lives on from generation to generation, the only Judaism that has ever represented the Jewish people as a whole.

We could say that there are two covenants just as there are two Torahs. One is the covenant of the priests. It consists almost entirely of prescriptions. It tells us what mitzvot should be observed by a Jew and how the mitzvot should be performed, what holidays should be observed and how to observe them, what life cycle ceremonies are important and how to conduct them, and what prayers are necessary to the Jewish liturgy and how to recite them. In honor of this covenant, we build synagogues and school buildings and maintain the elaborate and costly infrastructure of Jewish culture. Almost all present-day curricula is planned to convey the covenant as taught by the priests -- and today's priests are the rabbis and cantors of the synagogues and the civil authorities of the federations.

But there is another covenant, equally precious to Jews, and equally God-given, if you will. This is the covenant of those who ride the crest of the waves, the prophets. It is the covenant of the Jewish individual in the realm in which every Jew writes a Torah with his or her life. This is the covenant which does not take things at face value -- it does not accept the written Torah literally or the words of the rabbis of the Talmud without questioning. It is a covenant of questioning, and in its quest, it questions everything. The people who conceive this covenant never take organized religion on faith. To these seekers of God, even faith has no face value.

Do we stand at a time when the voices of the prophets are growing louder every day? Do we stand in an age of spirituality? The answer is "always." It is written and we recite, "The gates of repentance never close." But the meaning of this is unclear unless you know the Hebrew. For the word "repentance" in Hebrew is teshuvah, and teshuvah always carries the sense of "turning toward God." So, what is always present in Quintessential Judaism is the idea that "The gates never close for those who turn toward God." Every bush is burning, but only for those who turn to see this wonder and discover the angel of God speaking from behind the bush. Organized religion is part of Quintessential Judaism, too, but it withholds its deepest meaning from those who cannot see the spirituality behind it -- it is only a bush until we hear the voice of prophecy speaking from it.

Implications for Education

The implications of a full understanding of Quintessential Judaism for education are staggering. Abraham Joshua Heschel wrote,

What young people need is not religious tranquilizers, religion as a diversion, religion as entertainment, but spiritual audacity, intellectual guts, power of defiance. (Insecurity of Freedom, p. 53.)

But are we teaching defiance? Does our teaching make room for intellectual guts or spiritual audacity? We may be forgiven for saying that this is surely not central to most curricula in our religious or day schools.

It is useless to say that we have no time to add new things to our curricula. Without the element of spirituality, our present-day curricula is generally worthless. It may convey the facts and data of organized religion, but it does not convey the living being of Quintessential Judaism. Today's curriculum teaches the form of Adam laying lifeless in the mud -- it examines every aspect of the form from the head to the tips of the toes and says, "Isn't it marvelous?" But what the present-day curriculum teaches isn't nearly as marvelous as what happens when the breath of God fills the nostrils of the lifeless form and Adam springs up from the mud, male and female in one being, free to do good or to do evil. In that first instant of life, we learn more than in all the examination of things that took so long to accomplish.

There is a Jewish education theory that believes that if we just teach our students to put on tefillin or to light the Sabbath candles, they will soon learn the meaning of spirituality. So, we are inundated with books about God that have little to do with Quintessential Judaism. They explain how to do acts of tzedakah and lovingkindness in the hope that, if people will do these things, they will eventually learn the meaning of spirituality. There is some truth in this, but this is the shortcut that turns into a long road. There is another road that is open to us that seems like the long way, but reaches its destination more surely and more quickly. All the spiritual elements of Quintessential Judaism are contained in the history of our people -- again, not in the facts of that history, but in the meanings we impose on that history, in "faith enacted as history."

What we need is a new curriculum that includes organized religion because that is what the priests have built out of tradition and spirituality and that is where most people feel safe and secure. But it must also include the wild and God-crazy path of those who ride the crest of the waves, the prophets who are willing to land wherever God throws them on the shore. The new curriculum is a curriculum that teaches balance -- how to ride the wave of spirituality --  you can call it a curriculum of "spiritual awareness." It begins with the word hineni.

God-Readiness

The tradition of Hineni goes back to the very beginnings of our history. I want to call this section of the new curriculum "God-readiness." The underlying story here is that of Jacob awakening after dreaming the dream of the staircase connecting heaven and earth. This is the moment that Jacob chooses to react with wonder, saying, "Surely God is present in this place, and I did not know it!" The chances for a religious awakening are everywhere and any time. We need to be as ready as possible, as open as possible to the call of God. Jews need to learn when to say Hinenu, and what Hineni means when we say it. We learn it by studying how it was used in our faith history.

Hineni is the key to the story of the binding of Isaac. God calls to Abraham and Abraham answers, Hineni. Isaac speaks to Abraham on the way up the mountain and says, Hineni. The angel speaks to Abraham at the moment of truth and Abraham answers, Hineni. This is the word of readiness: Readiness to hear what God wishes us to hear, readiness to hear what others are saying to us. This is the word of presence. It says, "I am present" now, this instant, even if being present now means that the rest of my life will be changed forever.

Jacob speaks the word Hineni when he hears the voice of the angel of God telling him that God is protecting him. Jacob answers Hineni when God tells him that it is necessary for him to go down into Egypt. "I hear and I am comforted," Jacob says, and "I am present to be commanded."

Moses speaks the word Hineni at the burning bush and his life is transformed. Samuel is sleeping near the tabernacle when God calls to him and he answers Hineni and his life is transformed. Isaiah heard God ask, "Who shall I send?" and he answered, "Hineni, send me." Our God-readiness section of the curriculum must tell these stories of our faith history and begin to prepare our students for the critical moment when they know that they have found a new quest, have been commanded to follow a new path, have been ordered to ride the crest of the spiritual wave. They must be ready to say, Hineni, "Here I am. I am a Jew. I am fully present and I am ready to respond."

Mutual Respect

In the Genesis faith history there comes a moment when Abraham meets Malchizedek, the king of Shalem. And it is written there that Malchizedek is the priest of El Elyon. And Abraham received the blessing of Malchizedek and gave him a tenth of everything that he had won through his war against the evil kings. This is the thematic story that underlies the second part of our spiritual awareness curriculum. This is the part of the curriculum in which we teach "mutual respect."

But when we encounter the Malchizedeks of our time, we should recognize them as God-people. We should revere the faith of Mother Theresa even as we revere the weeping of Rachel. We should hear the words of Martin Luther King, Jr., with the same reverence that we hear the words of Abraham Joshua Heschel --  and, by the way, Heschel did hear King’s words calling to his Jewish soul -- he marched beside King to Selma, Alabama. We should give the same credence to the work of Albert Schweitzer as we do to the work of Maimonides. We need to teach faith heroes as those who are called and answer the call, no matter what religion they may happen to be. Our faith history demands that we be "a light unto the nations," but it does not leave us off the hook. We must also be willing to gather the light of all the nations and see it all as the light of the One God. This is true spiritual awareness.

In the curriculum of mutual respect, we must also help our students revere the work and find models in those who have excelled in healing people and restoring the world. Our way is the Jewish path, but it is not the only path to God, only the path that we as a people have agreed on. If non-Jews also light the way along our path, that is no reason for us to believe that our path is any less effective and appropriate than theirs. It is, however, a reason to rejoice in the fact that we are on the right road and a reason to welcome the models of those who happen to be on paths that join with us.

In the end of days, it is written, all will worship at God's holy mountain. It is not written that only Jews will get there. Our new spiritual curriculum has to prepare us with the mutual respect that is essential if we are ever to enjoy that promised time of peace in this world.

Partnership

The third part of our curriculum of spiritual awareness is "partnership." This is Tikkun Olam, but it is much more than that, too. In Genesis, we are told that we are created to rule over the world, the way that God rules over the heavens. You could say that Moses taught us ways to rule over ourselves, to help prepare us for ruling over the world. The rabbis spoke of us as God's presence in the world. Since we are God's creation, they said, we must be necessary to carry out God's plan. But it was Isaac Luria, the mystic, who made us understand the true meaning of partnership with God. So it is the story that Luria told which underlies the next part of our curriculum.

Luria recreated the story of creation and transformed it for all Jews for all time. Since his time, we have all come to agree that his is the story which makes the most spiritual sense. It was Luria who taught us that God had to make space for human beings and for the world by performing tzimtzum, the act of contraction. Whenever I make myself just a little smaller, it makes room for others to grow just a little larger. If I can think just a little less of myself, I will be able to think just a little more of others. Spiritual awareness depends on this act of tzimtzum. No matter how great you become, if you believe that the world depends on you, you have lost your place in heaven.

It was also Luria that taught us about the evil in our world. It is nothing more than that which must be repaired and that which must be restored. It is the klippot, the shards, the mistakes that are made and the harms that are done. Luria explained that we must inevitably find these strewn along our path. No one lives who does not find pain and suffering. But the pain and the suffering can be offered up as our sacrifice and redeemed as our healing. Unless we understand this, the world we live in makes no sense. Unless we know this truth, Judaism is no more useful than atheism. We cannot deny pain and suffering, but we can learn to affirm them; and, wherever it is within our power, we can learn to heal them.

Tikkun Olam is not just doing tzedakah, although that is certainly part of it. It is learning that we Jews have been chosen to be partners in healing the world. It may mean saving the whales or it may mean saving ourselves. It may mean speaking kindly to those who would choose to hate us or it may mean helping our neighbors plant a new tree in their garden. It is any and every opportunity to place a smile on someone else's lips or ease someone else's pain a little with words of comfort. Surely, it means taking care of the widow and the orphan, sharing whatever wealth we have with those who have less, and being responsible for others whether they are Jews or not. Maimonides was correct in saying that tzedakah must begin with those who are close and that it is often most difficult to give to people who are kinfolk, but Luria is even more spiritually attuned because he makes no distinction at all. Klippot are where we find them -- the shattered pieces in God's world lie all around us. All of God's world, not just the Jewish neighborhood, is in need of repair.

To the extent that we see ourselves as God's partner in creation, our lives are filled with the meaning of creating a world of peace. Even our prayers take on new significance when we feel ourselves partners in whatever task we ask God to help us accomplish. If there is One God, then the proof of it is that the world is not just a Jewish world, it is a world that Jews share with others. We hope that they will practice tzimtzum, that they will make a place for us in their world. In return, we should never stop practicing tzimtzum, making a place for them in our world. The partnership is not just between us and God, but between us and all of us, too. In my world, I practice tzimtzum especially when it comes to having patience for those Jews who fail to understand this simple lesson and place Jews above all others.

Alerting Our Senses

The fourth section in our new curriculum of spiritual awareness is "alerting our senses." Here, students can often teach us even more than we teach them, because some people find this the most natural thing in the world. These are the people who stand transfixed by a sunset or who daydream wonders as they sit at their desks. But all of us need to learn that there are things that we cannot see, hear, or feel with our external senses. Love, fear, desire, awe, and anger are all very real. The Quintessential Jew feels these as ways of learning to balance while riding the crests of the wave. We sometimes hear people refer to this as "listening to the heart."

The story of Elijah is the faith history of "alerting the senses." It is Elijah who stands at Horeb as God passes by. First there was a great and mighty wind, splitting mountains and shattering rocks; but God was not in the wind. Then there was an earthquake; but God was not in the earthquake. After the earthquake, there was fire; but God was not in the fire. But after the fire, there was a still small voice. Before Elijah, God was pictured as thundering forth from the mountain, so that the people following Moses were afraid even to hear the word of God directly. But Elijah teaches that everyone hears the word of God directly. It may not be loud or come in earthquakes or tornados or fires, but if you listen closely, a still small voice is speaking.

In fact, the less God seems to be in a place, the more powerful God's presence really is. When Jews celebrated Passover in the ghettos and reached out to help one another in the concentration camps during the Holocaust; when the Refuseniks made Hanukkah menorahs out of potatoes and saved their rations of fats to burn as candles, their senses were alert to the still small voice.

Our job as educators is to help our students alert their senses, help them to hear the unspoken sounds within their hearts, help them to see the unseen places in the corners of our dreams, help them to stay alert to the still small voice. Then, like Tevya the Dairyman, we can commence a conversation with God which is an ongoing dialogue with our heart. The Jew who can do that can learn to hear his or her dreams.

Bearing Witness

There is a fifth segment to our new spiritual curriculum. It is an old and venerated part of Quintessential Judaism which was passed on to Christianity and to Islam, too. Today, we hear it more from the lips of Christians and Muslims than from Jewish lips. And this should embarrass us -- not because we thought of it first, for the odds are that it was an idea that was ancient even before Jews became a people -- but because it is an idea that is essential to anyone who seeks God. I call this part of the spiritual curriculum, "bearing witness."

To bear witness means to share our experience of God, to talk about God, to be willing to open ourselves to others to enhance our encounter with God. It was through actions that Abraham conveyed the spirit of the Presence. And those who came into close contact with him were captured by an awareness of God. Likewise, there is a strong sense throughout the Jewish tradition that great sages should be judged as much by their actions as by their wisdom. While it is undoubtedly true that the Jewish tradition demands that we study and prepare ourselves for the acquisition of wisdom, it is equally true that the Jewish tradition recognizes that wisdom can be found even without the acquisition of knowledge. Our knowledge of God is drawn from those who act wisely, not necessarily from those who can turn an elegant phrase.

So, the midrash (Genesis Rabbah 63:6) says that "visiting a sage is like visiting the Presence." A sage can act in ways that give us a glimpse of God. As we act in God-like ways, we bear witness to God and more of God is revealed to the world.

"In every action," said the Berditschever, "a person must regard his body as the Holy of Holies, a part of the supreme power on earth which is part of the manifestation of the Deity. … Whenever a person lifts his hands to do a deed, let him consider his hands the messengers of God" (Newman, Hasidic Anthology, pp. 254-5).

Our hands are powerful tools. If we choose to do evil, we know that people will point to the evil and say it is proof that God does not punish the evil-doer, God does not do justly, God is unfair, or even that God does not exist. But when we choose to do what is just and what is right, when we act in God-like ways, we bring evidence of God's existence into the world. God's mercy is in our acts of loving-kindness. God's justice is in our honesty and our integrity. It is only through the actions of those who behave spiritually that God is magnified at all. In Isaiah we read,

You are My witnesses, said God, and My servant whom I have chosen; that you may know and believe Me, and understand that I am the One; before Me there was no god formed, neither shall there be after Me (Isa. 43:12). [Rabbi Simeon bar Yohai taught:] When you are My witnesses, I am God, but when you are not My witnesses, I am not God. Similarly, you say, Unto You I lift up mine eyes, O You that art my enthroned one in the heavens (Ps. 123:1). If not for me, You would not be sitting in the heavens (Sifre Deuteronomy, #346).

There is a great mutuality, a common need, in the spiritual union between God and us. As we bear witness to God, we keep God's Presence fresh in the hearts and minds of others --  and fresh in our hearts, too.

The Spiritual Curriculum

These are five segments of the spiritual curriculum:

(1) God-Readiness, which means knowing how to answer with your whole self when you hear God's call.

(2) Mutual Respect, which means knowing that everyone else who is searching for God is on the same road or at least on a road which intersects with yours and knowing that all of them may give you clues and omens that may speed your quest.

(3) Partnership, which means that we are required to make space for God and others, even as God makes space for us; and that we are partners in the work of repairing and restoring the shattered shards of evil in the world.

(4) Alerting Our Senses, which means learning to use the still small voice as a compass to guide us on our path. And

(5) Bearing Witness, which means acting and sharing in the world in such a way that we not only study Torah, but become Torah so that our words and our deeds become proofs of God's presence.

Quintessential Judaism is concerned with spirituality as much as it is concerned with ritual and commandment. In the story of Jacob, the stranger who wrestles with him blesses him by naming him Israel because, as the stranger says, "you have struggled with God and man." Before there can be a community that wrestles with God, an Israel, there must first be individuals who are not afraid of facing their "stranger." The risk we take in entering the spiritual fray is actually discovering that we are wrestling with God and being commanded by God to wrestle with human beings. As Martin Buber put it, "God does not want to be believed in, to be debated and defended by us, but simply to be realized through us." It is God-wrestling that leads to world building. The true repair of the world is not undertaken by the passive and the submissive, but by the person who seizes freedom, responds to the command of the Voice, and becomes Torah.

The true Jewish educator is not the one who teaches what Judaism is today, but the one who seizes on what Judaism has always been and will always be --Quintessential Judaism* -- the Judaism that is shared by the priest and the prophet.

* I borrow the term “Quintessential Judaism” from my friend and teacher, historian Dr. Ellis Rivkin. His book, The Unity Principle, is a primary resource for understanding the ebb and flow between priest and prophet.

Seymour Rossel is the founding director of Pathways Foundation, which is currently creating the curriculum described in this paper. Rabbi Rossel is the author of more than thirty books, many of which influence the curriculum of the modern Jewish religious school. His latest book is Bible Dreams: The Spiritual Quest (SPI Books, 2003). He lectures widely on Bible, Jewish mysticism, and spirituality; and conducts teacher workshops for communities, day schools, and synagogues. His work is featured at www.rossel.net. This lecture was commissioned as a "CAJE Classic" for the 29th Conference on Alternatives in Jewish Education, Hofstra University, August 2004.

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