The Journey Home: Discovering the Deep Spiritual Wisdom of the Jewish Tradition - Hardcover

Hoffman, Lawrence

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 080703620X ISBN 13: 9780807036204

Publisher: Beacon Pr, 2002

Synopsis

Discovering the Deep Spiritual Wisdom of the Jewish Tradition
"Larry Hoffman is one of contemporary Judaism 's most perceptive and creative teachers."
—Lawrence Kushner, author of Eyes Remade for Wonder

Rabbi Lawrence A. Hoffman is widely recognized as a leader in bringing spiritual innovation into modern Jewish life and worship. Now, drawing on a lifetime of study, he explores the Jewish way of being in the world—the Jewish relationship to God and to questions of human purpose that lie just below the surface of biblical and rabbinic literature. This is Jewish spiritual wisdom—the wisdom that unites thousands of years of texts and ritual. In learned but accessible language Hoffman discusses:
the importance of blessings, that quintessentially Jewish form of prayer, and what they reveal about the Jewish worldview

the meaning of study in Jewish life, and what it tells us is sacred

the spirituality of being a "landed" religion, and what Israel stands for in the Jewish imagination

the significance of Jewish metaphors for shaping our lives

how Judaism speaks spiritually even to the suffering

The Journey Home is a book for spiritual seekers everywhere: Jews looking for the spiritual component of Judaism, Jews estranged from their roots, and non-Jews who wonder what Judaism has to say about life's great questions.

About this title

About the Author

Rabbi Lawrence A. Hoffman is professor of liturgy of Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion. He is a regular contributor to The Jewish Week and lectures widely to Jewish and Christian audiences. Author of Israel: A Spiritual Travel Guide, coauthor of What Is a Jew?, and editor of the My People's Prayer Book series, Hoffman is also the author of many scholarly works on Judaism. He lives in Rye, New York.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Chapter 1

Returning Home
Spirituality with Jewish Integrity

Return, O Israel, to Adonai, your God.
Hosea 14:1

Return again, return again, return to the land of your soul.
Current liturgical song

My first brush with spirituality came with an unexpected question, back in
1975. Literally and metaphorically, I was far away from home giving a guest
lecture to the Theology Department of the University of Notre Dame, on the
rituals of Passover. "What is the spirituality of the seder?" a woman wanted
to know. "You have talked for a week, covering every conceivable aspect of
the Passover experience, but not once have you addressed anything
spiritual. Isn't there such a thing as Jewish spirituality?" Unbelievable as it
may seem a quarter of a century later, I was at the time completely stumped:
I had no idea what to say.
The next day marked my return in more ways than one. I was
newly committed to discovering the spiritual foundations of Judaism, and my
journey home to Jewish spirituality is still in process.
More than twenty-five years have passed since then, but the
curiosity over Jewish spirituality has only grown. Now, not only Catholics at
Notre Dame want to know what it is. Everyone is asking the question. And
they are mostly getting the wrong answers.
The search for spirituality is endemic to North American society.
Its sociological roots lie in the demise of extended families, neighborhoods,
and ethnic communities. Demographically, It is an outgrowth of baby-
boomers reaching middle age; their parents living longer in retirement years;
and the generation in their twenties and thirties postponing marriage and
looking for some abiding principles of life as they change careers and try out
new identities. It comes from the information explosion which instantly
connects us with far-off traditions that we once would have considered alien.
It arises from the panoply of worldwide religious traditions migrating from
countries we never heard of to our own neighborhood and work place. It is a
consequence of feminism, which has successfully critiqued the solo voice of
corporate men in church and synagogue seminaries and boardrooms. It is
the result of a national distrust of institutional wisdom, and a concurrent
failure of denominations to speak as compellingly as they once did.
Psychologically, it grows from the "me-generation" claim that each of us has
a self; that the self is sacrosanct; and that the self needs nurturing within, not
just without.
It is especially important to see just how pervasive the spiritual
search has become. It is not just a leisure-time project of intellectuals;
spirituality has become big-business, fueled by rampant marketing in a
popular vein. Book shelves stock every conceivable tract on the life of faith. I
have yet to encounter The Underground Guide to the Babylonian Talmud or
Thomas Aquinas for Fools, but I know they are coming. They will sit
alongside an undifferentiated melange of offerings on such topics as returning
from the dead, health foods from the Bible, channeling and rolfing.
Spirituality was mainstreamed in the 1990s. A 1994 Newsweek
cover trumpeted "The Search for the Sacred: America's Quest for Spiritual
Meaning," and two years later, it diagnosed America as "hooked on the
paranormal." By 1998, even The Wall Street Journal ran a lead story about
executives who hunt down spiritual directors to monitor the state of their soul
for "internal movements of God"; and as late as July, 2001, Fortune
Magazine carried a cover story entitled, "God and Business: The Surprising
Quest for Spiritual Renewal in the American Workplace."
This popularized spirituality was a far cry from what anyone could
have predicted back at Notre Dame in 1975. My serious questioner at that
lecture would have been astounded at the quiet giant of a man whom I was to
meet years later and who identified spirituality as the inherent quality of
crystals to reverberate sympathetically with the body's hidden reservoir of
wholeness; or another air traveler who thought she was spiritual because she
could identify colored auras around the head of would be passengers, and
from them, determine whether they would arrive safely at their destination.
Maybe some people do benefit from crystals; maybe the magnetic
field that does indeed surround our brains is visible to some. I don't know. I
remain open on these things. But I am suspicious of pop interpretations that
claim falsely to be scientific, and miss the really serious side of the spiritual.
Jewish insights that go back two thousand years to the Rabbis, and before
that, to the Bible itself may not be scientific; but they are not unscientific
either. They avoid the intellectual pablum that passes for truth these days,
and offer genuine wisdom instead.
What I find especially troublesome is the way the suspiciously
spiritual spirals down into the occult – the realm of Tarot cards, teacup
leaves, and the entrails of animals. I am no hardened Philistine, mired so
deeply in modernism that I cannot get beyond religion reduced to radical
reason. I count myself among the many who suspect they are being had,
however, by the more extreme rhetoric of spiritual access to special powers,
but who do not on that account want to give up the belief in a kind of
spirituality that is very real, consistent with science, supremely important,
and (in my case) Jewish to its core. Ever since my Notre Dame lecture, I
have been coming home to these authentic roots of Jewish spirituality that
had somehow eluded me for so long, but that now sustain me. I am
discovering that on this, my journey home, I have lots of company.
Jewish spirituality begins with the Bible's claim that there is a
region of experience called the Holy. It surfaces in times of awe, or in daring
notions of harmony, hope and goodness -- in the prophet Isaiah's vision of
the heavens, for instance, and in his older contemporary, Micah"s demand
that we live profoundly here on earth. This biblical spirituality was adopted
and then transformed by the Rabbis of late antiquity who made it part and
parcel of the historic quest for meaning that we now call Judaism.
By the nineteenth century, the claim to holiness was being
echoed more loudly than ever, but it had been divorced from its spiritual
moorings. My own branch of Judaism, the movement we now call Reform,
championed the sacred but denounced the mystical. It restricted Judaism to
the bounds of modern liberal ethics and the syllogistic sterility of logical
rationalism. That was why I was so taken aback by my questioner in the
Notre Dame lecture hall. Spirituality? In five years of rabbinic school and four
more years of graduate study, no one had ever so much as mentioned the
word to me. No wonder I didn"t even comprehend the question.
The 1990s spiritual revival is epitomized in Mollie, a Jew by birth
and training, who seeks spirituality but not religion, from which she is
alienated. She has launched her own private search for a spiritual home. She
wants to recapture her Jewish soul, thinks of herself as a Jew, but is
investigating other faiths as well, to find some generic sense of God and
wisdom enough to unify her world within and the world without. Mollie's
spiritual testimony sounds mushy, soft and soppy, but that is just because
she never learned "proper" theological language to describe it. It is the Mollies
of the world who become Jewish Buddhists -- Jew-Bus, as they are known --
when they find a ready Buddhist rhetoric for the objects of their inchoate
quest; the Mollies too who love the idea that Judaism might also somewhere
harbor meaningful mystagogy (as Catholics call it) -- mysteries, that is, to
satisfy the soul. Too bad synagogue Sunday schools had all been clones of
the no-nonsense schools of rationality described by Charles Dickens in Hard
Times; all their principles named Mr. Gradgrind; their teachers, Mr.
McChoakumchild; all duly appointed "commissioners of fact" (as Dickens
puts it), Jewish fact, we should say, "who will force the [Jewish] people to be
people of fact, and nothing but fact." From People of the Book to People of
the Fact, and for most Jews who grew up the way I did, spirituality failed
the "fact-test": it was unlike Jewish history, say, or Hebrew grammar. When
we went to enroll my eldest son in a Jewish day school, and asked the
principle what the school's philosophy was, he replied, "Like the Talmud
says, `When they"re young, stuff 'em like oxen.'" Mr. Jewish
McChoakumchild: alive and well.
The problem was that my five years of seminary training and four
years of doctoral work had been given over entirely to "getting stuffed like
oxen" on data -- in my case, the history of Jewish prayer and related
literature. I could date familiar prayers to their time of origin, trace the history
of Jewish prayer books, explain liturgical revision, discuss medieval prayer-
book art, and even think through the way prayer worked once upon a time
when the absence of cheap paper made a written prayer book inaccessible to
all but the elite. But I had never considered Jewish spirituality -- the very idea
of which sounded strange to me that day.
It was as if someone had asked me to discuss "national
migraines." I know what the words "national" and "migraine" mean
separately, but I do not automatically think of combining them. Only after
thinking about it for a while, does it occur to me that there might be a
category of things aptly described by them both": road construction coast to
coast, perhaps, or a garbage strike in every city across the nation. Similarly,
I recognized both "Jewish" and "spirituality" as perfectly good English words,
but it did not occur to me that the two of them went together. The
adjective "Jewish" (I thought) described myself and what I and others Jews
teach about my tradition; "spirituality" (I imagined) was a particular
something-or-other (I wasn't sure exactly what) that Christians talk about.
Only relatively recently have we begun to see that spirituality is not just
Christian. It is not like Christmas carols, the Eucharist, and the Gospel of
Luke -- things really Christian in their essence. Spirituality is more like ethics
and theology, the sort of thing you find in many religions, but clothed in
particularistic religious garb that make then Muslim or Christian rather than,
say, Hindu or Native American.
Once upon a time Jews would have responded equally quizzically
to the idea that there could be Jewish ethics and Jewish theology also, not
because Judaism dismisses morality and belief, but because English is so
dominated by 2,000 years of Christian thought that Christianity has cornered
the linguistic market that describes them. So too, although the classical
western literature on spirituality is monopolized by Christian authors, there is
no reason to think that spirituality cannot be Jewish. It is just that Jews have
not generally thought through what their own kind of spirituality is. No one
ever asked. But that day at Notre Dame, someone did, and as a result, I can
now see what was not clear to me back then. I know now that "Jewish"
and "spirituality" do go together to describe something real.
What the Notre Dame questioner wanted to know (although I am
not sure she knew that she wanted to know it) was how learned and spiritual
Jews would talk among themselves, if they were to have a readily accessible
vocabulary of Jewish spirituality; and how I could describe Jewish spirituality
to others in a way that remained true to Jewish experience but
understandable to outsiders. She was not the only person who wanted to
know that, however; I did too! There had to be some form of Jewish
spirituality, but I needed proper words for it: something other than the
Christian lexicon that defined Christian experience in the light of Christian
theological concepts, but was tangential to what Jews know as familiar
experiential landmarks of their lives.
What most of Western thought takes as spiritual rhetoric is
largely foreign to traditional Jewish discourse which, unlike its Christian
parallel, did not emerge from the schools of the Roman empire where Greek
philosophical thinking was modified for theological debate. The closest Jews
come to that Hellenistic ideal is Philo, a first-century Alexandrian philosopher
whose topics are marginal to rabbinic Jewish consciousness. By contrast,
his Christian counterparts, like Clement and Origin, were central to early
Christian rhetoric. Over the centuries, Christians specialized in talk about the
things the philosophers debated: essences, truths and absolutes. Jews did
not. I could
not readily answer my questioner at Notre Dame, because the language of
spirituality (like the language of theology) is a foreign implant for Jews. It is
not that Jews have no ideas that correspond to Christian theological topics
like revelation and salvation, but it takes a sort of translation process to arrive
at what our parallels are, since we do not normally think in those terms. By
now, one hundred years of Jews doing theology has modified the foreign
sound of theology; not so -- not yet, anyway -- spirituality. We have learned
to make Jewish sentences about "salvation through works, not just faith," for
instance. Parallel sentences about spirituality still sound strange to Jewish
ears, like tomorrow's spring fashions imported from a Christian designer and
being tried on for size. We may be like women trying on men's jeans when
they only wore dresses and skirts. It was not as if you couldn't wear them,
but they weren't exactly contoured for women's bodies. It took good
designing to reshape jeans as women's wear.
So too with ideas clothed in words. It is not as if Jews can't use
those words. But it takes work to make them fit. With words and ideas, the
redesign is best thought of as translation.
Here is the problem: Jewish categories can end up being
translated in such a way that they become utterly Christianized, in which
case they cease being descriptive of what Jews actually experience. Or Jews
can answer questions about Christian categories by simply translating old
Hebrew documents into modern English and then pointing to them as if to
indicate how the Rabbis would have talked if they had lived in our time and
spoken English. These two pitfalls can be called, respectively, "Satisfying the
Anthropologist" and "Going Native."

Satisfying the Anthropologist and Going Native

I keep a cartoon on my office door, picturing a family of natives
living in a thatched hut in some far-off jungle. They are frantically carrying off
their television set, freezer and stereo system to a hidden alcove of a back
room, with the warning, "Quick! Get these out of sight; the anthropologists
are coming, the anthropologists are coming."
Inquiring about Jewish spirituality is like being an anthropologist in
a strange culture called Judaism, in that we want to know what Jews have to
say about topics they never actually talk about. Anthropologists who set up
camp in a strange village might, for instance, be interested in family
relationships, which they h...

Edition details

• Publisher: Beacon Pr
• Publication date: 2002
• ISBN 10: 080703620X
• ISBN 13: 9780807036204
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 223