Rabbi Lew on Practice - Rosh Hashanah 5759 - Sept 1998

 

Sherril and I have been working on a book this summer. In fact we've sold it, and it will be coming out next summer. It is a kind of spiritual memoir, and it has gotten me thinking about my spiritual life -- its development and its broad movements. It seems clear that it has at least three major divisions.

I was born into Judaism. Judaism was the place where I lived, the religion and culture which permeated the streets of my native Brooklyn; the family and the larger sense of peoplehood from which I drew my identity, and finally, the synagogue, or the succession of synagogues in Brooklyn and then later in Westchester County which I came to identify as Sacred Space. This was a place I came to identify with God. Although I felt God's presence in the forest, and along lonely roads when I was hitch-hiking late at night and a storm would come up, the synagogue, the Sacred Space, was God's address to me -- the place where God could be reached most dependably. To the degree that I thought about it then, I defined my spirituality in terms of my place in this Sacred Space, and in the larger spiritual family I had been born to.

This situation prevailed until I went off to college. Then I embarked on the second great division of my spiritual life -- a period of seeking.

It is part of the American anthropology, that we seem to leave the religion we are born to behind at a certain point, and to cast out on our own -- to try to find our own spiritual path. This was certainly my experience. I had no unfriendly feelings towards Judaism then; at this point in my life, Judaism seemed to me, to be a minor wing of the Democratic Party, and I was a loyal Democrat, so what was the problem. I simply didn't see Judaism as a serious spiritual path, and so I set about looking elsewhere for spirituality. It was a kind of an undisciplined journey. I'm not even sure I knew I was on it at first. At college, it centered on aesthetics; music and art. In a secular culture, art tends to be the repository of spirituality, and certainly for me, in those years, art was my primary source of same. I had a great vision of stars listening to Beethoven late one night after a class in symphonic music, and reading the last chapter of Ulysses by James Joyce, the Molly Bloom Soliloquy, over and over again, something snapped in my mind, and then something opened up, and I experienced a great transformation. It lasted for weeks.

When I came of age -- when I finished graduate school in the late 1960's, these kinds of experiences had moved to the center of my life, and seeking became a conscious choice. I came to California -- to the Bay Area then, specifically to seek. I was looking for a spiritual path. Northern California was full of them. For some reason, an incredible proportion of the world's most important spiritual teachers had set up shop in the Bay Area. One could walk down an ordinary street in Berkeley, and in one house would be the world's leading exponent of Tibetan Buddhism, and in the next house would be the leading teacher of Hindu trance meditation, and in the next house would be someone who had made up his own spiritual practice a few years before, and he, of course, would have the largest group of all. Why was this the case? Why had so many significant spiritual teachers come to Berkeley and San Francisco and the surrounding area in those days? Someone once suggested to me that it was the zoning laws, but I'm not sure. In any case, Northern California was like a spiritual super market then, and I was sampling all the wares. I studied Hatha Yoga with a disciple of the great Indian teacher, Iyangar. I went to lectures and meditations with Muktenanda and Rudinanda, and I sent away for a correspondence course from Yogananda, who wasn't even alive at the time. I meditated with Tibetan Buddhists, danced with Sufis, and was almost kidnapped by the Reverend Moon and his followers, and the little fat boy, the Mahara-ji caused me to see white lights. I went from intense religious experience, to intense religious experience, but none of them adhered. None of them was transforming. My path had no integrity. I was just shopping. I was seeking.

After several years of this, a friend invited me to accompany him to the San Francisco Zen Center to hear a lecture by a well known Zen master who was visiting from Japan. Since he knew he would be speaking to an American audience, and since he assumed all Americans were Christian, this Zen master spoke on a text from the new testament (80% of his audience was Jewish of course, but how could he be expected to understand this? We don't understand it very well ourselves.) In any case, the text he spoke about was the line from the Gospels "Unless ye be like little children, you will not enter the Kingdom of heaven" and I remember that he kept saying "I mean little, little children. One week old, already too late." But it wasn't his speech that impressed me. It wasn't even him. It was the sense of the practice that surrounded him.

So, the next week, I began the third of the three major divisions of my spiritual life-- the period characterized by spiritual practice. I am still in this phase, and I fully expect that I will be in it for the rest of my life. Zen, or at least the Zen I began to do that week, was essentially a practice -- an extremely disciplined practice. It wasn't a theology, and it wasn't a home, and it wasn't spiritual consumerism. It didn't promise great visions or spiritual epiphanies. It was a practice characterized by rigorous discipline -- by what we did, and how thoroughly and regularly we did it. I did this practice for ten years. For ten years, I woke up at 5 a.m. every morning and meditated for several hours. Then once a month, I did a seshin, a period of intense meditation that lasted all day. Then four times a year, I did weeklong seshins -- weeks of intensive meditation where we did nothing but sit, except for the three or four hours each night that we slept. When you are meditating all day long, you don't need much sleep. Finally, I went to the monastery, where we sat all year, interrupting our sitting only to do a few hours of manual labor each morning and each afternoon, so that our bodies wouldn't wither away altogether. During this time, our eating became practice, our work became practice, and our bathing and sleeping became practice.

So perhaps it's not surprising, that when I returned to Judaism, some ten years later, I saw it primarily as practice and I don't think this was much of a stretch. Judaism is, in fact, a spiritual practice of great depth and integrity. Daily prayer, Shabbat, Kashrut, The Yearly spiritual cycle -- these are the lineaments of an ancient and disciplined practice. These were the elements that had informed Jewish spirituality since the beginning of Judaism. But by and large, they had been discarded by American Jews in this century, who, ironically, now found themselves largely dissatisfied with Judaism, and were looking elsewhere for spiritual gratification in increasing numbers.

I think that little by little, we are recovering a sense of Jewish practice. For some, this means a return to orthodoxy, the branch of Judaism that retained this sense most successfully over the past century. For others, it means the renewal of Judaism, the carrying forward of the essential Jewish spiritual impulse in new forms-- in new practice settings, sometimes borrowed from other spiritual cultures, and sometimes carried forward from deep in the Jewish past.

And I think that if Judaism is going to survive in this country, it will be because it will have succeeded in retrieving this sense of practice. It will be because it will have come to see itself this way again; not primarily as an ethnicity, not primarily as an occasional church, not primarily as a dwelling place, but a practice -- a set of intentional gestures which have the effect of transforming us, of deepening our relation to the sacred.

Last December, I was featured on a report on the Jim Lehrer news hour on PBS about emerging models of religious practice. The PBS film crew took shots of our daily minyan and our morning mediation group, and they interviewed me at some length. Then they had a number of distinguished scholars commenting on what we were saying and doing. Among them was Richard Wuthnow, a sociologist from Princeton, whom I met in person this past summer at Kalamazoo, Michigan, where we had both come to teach at a retreat at the Fetzer Institutue. Wuthnow has a new book coming out this year. It is called After Heaven; Spirituality in America since the 1950's. He showed us an advanced copy this summer in Kalamazoo. It is an absolutely brilliant book. Why do I say this? Because he comes to many of the same conclusions I have come to -- namely, that practice-based spirituality is the at the core of the religious enterprise, and the spiritual model best suited to work in our time.

Wuthnow identifies three principal modes of spirituality: dwelling spirituality, seeker spirituality, and practice spirituality. In the last generation, dwelling spirituality was the prevailing mode. In a dwelling spirituality, God occupies a definite place in the universe and creates a sacred space in which humans can also dwell. To inhabit sacred space is to know its territory and to feel secure. In recent decades, dwelling spirituality has given way to a new spirituality of seeking, one which emphasizes negotiation; individuals search for sacred moments that reinforce their conviction that the divine exists, but these moments are fleeting. Rather than inhabiting a place, rather than knowing a territory, these people are continually exploring new spiritual vistas.

The dwelling model is more secure, the seeking model less constraining. Dwelling spirituality is the world of Aristotle, who claimed that the patriarchal family provides the fundamental model of social order. The seeker model draws from Plato, who believed that society originates in the varied gifts of the individual.

Durkheim, who follows the dwelling model, distinguishes sharply between sacred habitats and the profane world. Max Weber, a seeker, pays no attention to such distinctions. Max Lerner, also a seeker, wrote: "One might agree with Durkheim that the contrast between the sacred and profane is the widest and deepest the human mind can make. Yet for myself, I find all sorts of things to be sacred. Rather than being in a place that is by definition spiritual, for me, the sacred is found momentarily in experiences as different as mowing the lawn or viewing a full moon."

Reflecting the stability of its time, dwelling spirituality taught an orderly, systematic understanding of life that protects its adherents from chaos. The seeker spirituality which has by and large replaced it is far less likely to generate grand conceptions of the universe and more likely to invoke a pragmatic attitude that advises us to try whatever promises to work. It offers fleeting encounters with the sacred, like a sustaining force behind an individual felt momentarily as he or she teeters on a slippery rock in the river.

The movement from dwelling to seeking spirituality has been characterized by the movement from the denial of doubt to the definition of doubt as the essence of reality. God's presence, no longer a given, has to be verified with special appearances, such as near death or a visitation from angels.

In a dwelling spirituality, individuals were expected to conform to rules and internalize them and identity was manifested by the holding of predefined social positions. In the newer pattern, instead of talking about rules and status and roles, people talk about making decisions and searching among options. Status is attained by creating an identity and identity is only discovered through the active process of searching and selecting. Faith is no longer something people inherit but something for which they strive.

Dwelling and seeking are both part of what it means to be human. Many people associate God with churches and synagogues, and in turn, with the powerful feelings that are aroused by memories of home. A human habitat frequently takes on a sacred meaning and as we journey through life, we continually seek attachments to special locations. But equally strong is the human desire to be part of an unfolding process, to negotiate, to be on the road, to experience novelty and to grow.

In Shir HaShirim, we see both these human needs in the person of the Shulamite woman who extols the virtues of a settled home -- our bed is green, the beams of our houses are cedar and the rafters of fir -- but who then wanders restlessly seeking to find the lost warmth of her life. -- I will rise now and go about the city, in the streets and in the squares. I will seek the one I love.

The circumstances in which people live typically reinforce one or the other of these orientations to a greater extent in different historical periods. Settled times have been conducive to dwelling; unsettled times, to seeking. In one, the sacred is fixed, and spirituality can be found within the gathered body of God's people; in the other, the sacred is fluid and portable and must be pursued with a sense of God's people having been dispersed.

The circumstances of the past thirty years have produced a shift on many fronts from dwelling to seeking. We are not such a settled nation any more; rather we are a mobile nation; a nation of movers, commuters, recent arrivals, migrant workers, exiles, drifters, people who feel alienated or displaced, traveling salesmen, the lonesome surfer on the net, the homeless. More than likely, we grew up in strong neighborhoods and communities. More than likely now, we don't know our next door neighbor.

Economically, we have changed from a nation of producers to a nation of consumers and we can see a similar shift from spiritual production to spiritual consumption. At one time people identified their faith by membership; now they do so increasingly by the search for connections with various organizations, groups, and disciplines, all the while feeling marginal to any particular group or place.

It seems clear that both the dwelling and the seeking models of spirituality will persist into the next century. Many religious institutions will survive by offering a secure place to worship God in familiar ways. Seeker spirituality will also survive. American lives will continue to change at a dizzying rate, and Americans will continue to insist on choosing from among a variety of ways to worship.

But neither of these styles will prove satisfactory. A synagogue primarily offering a safe place to sleep, will itself fall asleep one day and never wake up. Dwelling spirituality encourages dependence on communities that are inherently undependable and fosters an institutional idolatry to the point that energies gravitate too much to these institutions rather than being deployed to the full round of human needs in a complex world.

A spirituality of seeking, on the other hand, is invariably too fluid to provide the stability and dedication required to grow spiritually and to mature in character. Its adherents flit from retreat to concert to conference. One event cancels out the other, and nothing ever seems to take root.

The facile shopping for quick fix solutions to spiritual problems has not served us well nor has the hope that people could solve their problems by simply settling into an established spiritual community.

So according to Richard Wuthnow, and I agree with him wholeheartedly, we are ready for the emergence of a third model, and fortunately for us, it has already begun to emerge. That is the model of spirituality as practice. Religious institutions which will flourish in the coming era, will be those which can move from dwelling and seeking to the ancient wisdom that identifies spiritual practice as the heart of the religious enterprise.

Spiritual practice is a way of retrieving the neglected middle in our understanding of religion. People who practice may be involved in communities or they may be sojourners, but the quality of their faith is determined not by the places they occupy, nor by the journey they are on, but rather, by the seriousness of the time they spend in worshipful communion with the divine and in the consequences of this time for the rest of their lives.

The spirituality of practice, is spirituality in time, not space. It occurs when people engage in intentional activities that deepen their relation to the sacred. Often they do so over long periods of time and devote significant energy to these activities.

These practices include prayer, meditation, contemplation, and acts of service. Their aim is to electrify the spiritual impulse that animates all of life, and to bring the light of God to the world, to this life. They are not necessarily mystical nor do they necessarily involve an inwardness, a turning away from the world. In fact, spending time cultivating our relationship with God seems more often to free us from material concerns and self-interest, so that we can focus on the needs of others. Additionally, we become better able to perceive the spiritual dimension in the people we serve. When our practice opens us to the realization that we are deeply loved by God, we want to return that love.

Spiritual practice is different from seeker-oriented spirituality; it is a more orderly disciplined and focused approach to the sacred. Spiritual practitioners have to choose what to do and where to focus their attention, and this permits them to cultivate a depth of spirituality and protects them from being blown about by moods, circumstance, or the chaos of constantly changing ideas. Practice oriented spirituality may involve exploration, but it is also a way of imposing discipline on personal explorations.

In Wuthnow's book, he follows several people who he identifies as exemplars of this new model of spirituality. Some of them were long time church and synagogue members who went from being occasional attendees of these institutions, to daily practitioners of the ancient traditions offered there -- traditional prayer groups, meditation groups, study groups, societies for visiting the sick and performing acts of loving kindness. Others had invented their own daily spiritual disciplines, putting together elements of prayer, meditation, yoga, body work and psychotherapy. But the point was, they did these things in a disciplined way- in a daily way, and this made all the difference. This added a palpable element of the sacred to their daily lives.

Practice oriented spirituality can be nurtured by religious organizations -- churches, synagogues like ours; but only if these places manage to make the shift from dwelling places to practice places; only if these places come to define their primary mission as strengthening the spiritual discipline of their members; only if these places strive to give their members both roots and wings-- roots to ground them solidly in the tradition of their particular faith, and wings to explore the mysteries of the sacred. But in this context, religious institutions become facilitators rather than ends in themselves and clergy must serve as models of practice rather than as guardians or shopkeepers or salesmen.

All this is quite apparent in the Jewish world. For the better part of the past century, the world of the synagogue has been the realm of dwelling spirituality. This is why the synagogue is in so much trouble. It has been swimming against the stream. When we consider that 80 per cent of the Jewish people no longer set foot in synagogues even on the High Holidays, we usually think in terms of loyalty. What's the matter with these people? How could they desert us this way? What's wrong with these people, is that they live in a world where dwelling spirituality no longer makes sense. They live in an unsettled world -- a world which spits out facile certainties as fast as we can frame them. And they are no longer interested in producing Judaism, they are far more interested in consuming it, or consuming some other more palpable and more accessible form of spirituality. This is why they are no longer here -- they are out seeking. In fact a whole Jewish movement, the renewal movement, has risen up in recent years to match the rise of Jewish seeker spirituality. But in the words of its founder, Zalman Shacter, in a kind of farewell address to his movement a few years ago in Boulder, Colorado, "We have succeeded in creating a holiday inn, when what we really needed was a home." It is interesting to me, that he identified the problem so accurately, but looked to the past, rather than the future, for the solution. I think what the renewal movement needs is not a home, but rather a practice. This Jewish seeker movement betrays all the pitfalls of seeker spirituality in general. It has created excitement -- it has pointed to the spiritual emptiness of mainstream Judaism, to a far greater degree than we are comfortable with, but it hasn't yet succeeded in creating a practice -- a disciplined form of daily spiritual practice. Its adherents go from peak experience to peak experience -- from retreat to workshop to Shlomo concert -- but there's nothing in between; no enduring disciplines, no daily, intentional invoking of the sacred, no methodology for deepening this sense.

It may very well be left to institutions like ours -- institutions which arose out of the old dwelling model but which nevertheless have inherited a serious culture of spiritual discipline -- to adapt themselves to this third wave of spirituality, the practice model; not only because it will enhance our chances of surviving, but because it will enliven us again. It will help us move from an urge for security, which grows more and more desperate as life grows less and less settled each day, to a practice which might bring us closer to the only sure sense of security there is -- a sense of the sacred.

I am always happy to see each one of you, and if you want to keep coming here once a week or once a year or somewhere in between, I will still be glad to see and to honor your choice as well. At the same time, it seems to me that with over 2000 members in this synagogue, over 550 family units, and many hundreds more who come here without being members, we ought to be doing a lot better than the 15 to 20 souls we are currently averaging for daily minyan. And while I would never disparage the level of commitment or participation of any member of this congregation, there is nevertheless no doubt in my mind, that more of you ought to be stepping up to support this activity -- not only out of a sense of what a more active minyan would do for our synagogue, but also out of a sense of what it might do for you. Our daily minyan is the soul of this synagogue. But more significantly, it can bring your soul into daily contact with the sacred which is something you need very badly. And it can do it in a very deep way. Maybe it will take a few weeks, or maybe even months or years for this to start registering on you, but it will happen, believe me.

And you know when I give meditation retreats -- a staple of seeker spirituality -- they sell out within a week of being advertised, and usually the advertising consists of a few casually distributed flyers. People flood these things. But our daily morning meditations are not so flooded. A very small group has been coming regularly for almost four years now -- very, very small. Yet if I took what has happened to these few people, and put it on a scale against what has happened to the hundreds of people who have attended my retreats, I'm quite sure the balance would tip in favor of this tiny group. Their experience of meditation has grown profoundly. They have grown. Their sense of the sacred has grown profoundly. More than they know.

I have been practicing daily prayer for more than 20 years now. When I daven each morning at minyan, many times I daydream through the service; many times nothing happens at all. I have been meditating for over 30 years. When I meditate in the morning, sometimes, I daydream through that as well. Sometimes nothing happens there either.

But at least once, each morning at minyan, a word or a phrase from the prayer service will suddenly sneak up on me and burst into relation. Each day it will be a different word or phrase, and it will stay with me all day, and I will see its meaning permutating as I go about my life, shedding unexpected shades of meanings on that life and lending it a depth and a density. One day last week, it was the phrase karov hashem lishburey lev -- God is close to the broken hearted -- and as I went through the day, I was keenly aware of a sense of the sacred hovering over the broken hearted as they came into my office for counseling, and as I comforted them at a shiva minyan. Last Rosh Chodesh, a phrase from the Hallel leapt up and grabbed my attention. Ci Hitzalti naphshi mi mavet, v'et ragli midechi -- Because you saved my soul from death, and my legs from stumbling. And all day long, I walked around with a palpable sense of what a miracle it was that my life was being sustained and that one foot knew to step in front of the other.

And on those days when I can, in fact, concentrate on the prayers, they act like a mantra, sweeping my mind clean of all incidental language, and leaving it empty for the sacred to enter.

And when I step back three times, and then forward three times to begin the Amidah, the sacred, in fact, enters. I often feel myself in contact with the transcendent then -- a sense of encounter which also remains with me all day long. And later in the day, if I am feeling particularly desperate, or for some other reason, in need of communing with the transcendent, I go back to my makom kavuah -- the spot in the chapel where I pray every day. And because I pray from this spot every day -- because I address God from that spot every day -- because I encounter the transcendent from that spot so often, when I return to that spot later in the day, the associations I feel standing in it -- the way the light hits my eyes, the way the air feels there, the feeling my body has in that very particular setting -- immediately puts me in a frame of mind that is conducive to encountering the transcendent, and the more my practice goes on, the more days and months and years I pray from that spot, the deeper all this gets; the deeper the original feelings, the deeper the associations, and the more it stays with me as I go about my life.

And sitting in meditation for 30 years now, I penetrate the present moment more deeply, the more I sit -- and now even to be awake for one moment in meditation -- even to be alive to one moment of present experience, changes everything for the rest of the day; attunes me to the experience of my life -- makes it much more difficult for me to write anything or anyone off.

This is the life of practice spirituality. This synagogue came into being as a domicile for dwelling spirituality. Many of you have been coming here for several generations. And you continue to come her, because this places continues to communicate a sense of the sacred to you, and continues to communicate a sense of security and a sense of place. And no one is interested in taking any of that away from you. This is a beautiful thing -- a sacred thing -- and it will always be here for you. But at the same time, we must acknowledge that here in California, here in the United States at the end of the 20th century this is not the norm. Spirituality is no longer about finding a secure place in the social cosmos. For most of us, there is no such place anymore, and a spirituality which reflects this model is simply no use to us any more. Nor is the spirituality of the seeker, the spirituality that goes from one peak experience to another without ever making anything of them, very useful to us.

What we need today, what will be useful to us, is a synagogue which supports practice; which supports Shabbat, and daily prayer, and meditation; a synagogue which sees itself not as a social institution, nor as a source of security, but rather, as a path to God.

Such a synagogue will stand, not in space, but in time. It will prevail beyond the dwelling and the journey -- it will transcend its institutional trappings and connect us to our source in the sacred again.

It will help us realize the fundamental mission of the Jewish enterprise -- to bring a sense of the divine -- of the sacred -- into every moment of this life, every nook and cranny of this world.

It will stand not like a house but rather,

c'eitz shatul al palgey maim -- like a tree planted by streams of water

asher piryo yiten b'ito -- which yeilds its fruit in its season

v'aleihu lo yavul -- whose leaves never fades

v'cal asher ya'aseh, yatzliach -- and whatever it does, will flourish

Shanah Tovah Tikatevu