Jewish Spirituality: A Brief Introduction for Christians
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About this ebook
A window into the Jewish soul—written especially for Christians.
“I invite you to explore with me some of the rich and varied expressions of the Jewish spiritual imagination. It is a tradition that may at times, for Christians, feel strangely familiar and will, for Christians and Jews, always challenge you to see yourself and your world through a new lens.”
—from the Introduction
Jewish spirituality is an approach to life that encourages us to become aware of God’s presence and purpose, even in unlikely places. “This world and everything in it is a manifestation of God’s presence,” says Rabbi Lawrence Kushner. “Our challenge and goal is to find it and then act in such a way as to help others find it too.”
In this special book, Kushner guides Christians through the rich wisdom of Jewish spirituality. He tailors his unique style to address Christians’ questions, and, in doing so, opens new windows on their own faith.
Jewish Spirituality is a window into the Jewish soul that people of all faiths can understand and enjoy. From the Talmud and Torah, to “repentence” (teshuva) and “repairing the world” (tikkun olam), Kushner shows all of us how we can use the fundamentals of Jewish spirituality to enrich our own lives.
Rabbi Lawrence Kushner
Rabbi Lawrence Kushner is one of the most widely read authors by people of all faiths on Jewish spiritual life. He is the best-selling author of such books as Invisible Lines of Connection: Sacred Stories of the Ordinary; God Was in This Place & I, i Did Not Know: Finding Self, Spirituality and Ultimate Meaning; Honey from the Rock: An Introduction to Jewish Mysticism; The Book of Letters: A Mystical Hebrew Alphabet; The Book of Miracles: A Young Person's Guide to Jewish Spiritual Awareness; The Book of Words: Talking Spiritual Life, Living Spiritual Talk; Eyes Remade for Wonder: A Lawrence Kushner Reader; I'm God, You're Not: Observations on Organized Religion and other Disguises of the Ego; Jewish Spirituality: A Brief Introduction for Christians; The River of Light: Jewish Mystical Awareness; The Way Into Jewish Mystical Tradition; and co-author of Because Nothing Looks Like God; How Does God Make Things Happen?; Where Is God?; What Does God Look Like?; and In God's Hands. He is the Emanu-El Scholar at San Francisco's Congregation Emanu-El and an adjunct professor of Jewish mysticism and spirituality at Hebrew Union College–Jewish Institute of Religion. Rabbi Lawrence Kushner is available to speak on the following topics: • Jewish Mystical Imagination • Rymanover's Silent Aleph: What Really Happened on Sinai • Zohar on Romance and Revelation • What Makes Kabbalah Kabbalah • Sacred Stories of the Ordinary: When God Makes a Surprise Appearance in Everyday Life Click here to contact the author.
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Reviews for Jewish Spirituality
22 ratings1 review
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Rabbi Kushner has written a brief treatise (105 pages) to present some of the most generalized perspectives of a good Jew in a way that someone outside that world can understand. He speaks directly to Christians. He puts forth some very clear distinctions between Judaism and Christianity. He does not need to see the Scriptures (Torah) particularly as a record of history to be interpreted literally. From the beginning of Genesis, he argues that what is important is to study the teachings in order to strive to conform one's behavior to that which is described in the Scriptures. Judaism is not strictly a collection of specific beliefs to which one must adhere intellectually. Rather than try to analyze and understand what they mean, we are to do and live according to its teaching. It is in that context that we can understand more and more as we dig into the deeper meaning of what is taught. He teaches that God is not about reward and punishment; instead God looks at how closely we live our lives toward the conformity of the Scriptures. Knowing we have done either well or not toward that end is the only reward we receive. His explains that nothing is more beloved before God than to do a holy deed. We are to give ourselves over to that deed completely. In that process we are to lose our self. Quoting from page sixty-eight we read, your self "must be willing to allow it to dissolve like a drop of water fallen in the ocean, so that it is no longer recognizable as a separate or discrete thing. Such a spiritual loss of self and fusion with the divine is called Devekut... The borders of your self are erased. You realize that you are (and indeed have always been) present within the divine! It's all God!"Kushner states, "For classical Judaism, the coming of the Messiah would not 'complete' Judaism;l it would bring an end to history and resolve every problem for every religion and every person. As a Christian, I find these ideas to stand in sharp contrast to my understanding of Scripture. I gave it a five star rating for two reasons. First the author speaks very clearly and directly to these issues. Second, his clarity helped me to expand my understanding of Judaism in a much more broad context than the most basic distinction embraced by many Christians, being the belief that Jesus is both God and Messiah. This is not an apologetic for Judaism; it is a clear basic explanation of some of the most fundamental Jewish perspectives.
Book preview
Jewish Spirituality - Rabbi Lawrence Kushner
INTRODUCTION
SPIRITUALITY IS RELIGION experienced intimately. It’s the core, the distilled essence of organized religion. Spirituality is where you and God meet—and what you do about it. It need not be otherworldly, pyrotechnic, angels singing Handel’s Hallelujah Chorus,
spaced out, Beam me up, Scotty,
or even ethereal. Indeed, for most people, spirituality is ordinary and everyday. I suspect it may have become our word for what earlier generations called sacred or holy. The late, great mystical theologian Abraham Joshua Heschel once suggested that spirituality is life lived in the continuous presence of the divine.
Our English word spiritual has its roots in Greek thought and implies a split between the material world and the realm of the spirit. (The opposite of spiritual is material.) Spirituality therefore seems, almost by definition, to invite the seeker to exit this everyday, material world in order to attain some higher, spiritual or holy domain.
It is not accidental, however, that classical Hebrew lacks such a distinction. For Jewish spirituality, there is only one world that is simultaneously material and spiritual. To paraphrase Psalm 24:1, the whole world is full of God. Everything, from prayers to garbage, is a manifestation of God. And everything is connected and conceals the Holy One of All Being. Jewish spirituality, therefore, is an approach to life in which we strive to become aware of God’s presence and purpose—even and especially in what might strike the casual observer as gross or material things.
In the words of the diesel mechanic down at Barden’s Boatyard near Cape Cod, where I keep my sailboat, Any damn fool can sail a boat in a hurricane. It takes a real sailor to make one go in no wind.
We all can find the presence of God on a sunny Sunday afternoon when everything is going just right. But the evolved spiritual awareness taught by Jewish spirituality challenges us also to try to find God’s presence in increasingly less obvious and unlikely places.
In the following pages I invite you to explore with me some of the rich and varied expressions of the Jewish spiritual imagination. It is a tradition that may at times, for Christians, feel strangely familiar and will, for Christians and Jews, always challenge you to see yourself and your world through a new lens.
For a Christian seeking an understanding of Jewish spirituality, the task is complicated by history. Judaism and Christianity share so much. Perhaps simply because there are so many Christians and so many varieties of Christianity, it can be easy for Christians to fall into the habit of thinking that Judaism is just another, albeit earlier, form of Christianity but without Jesus. This ultimately distorts Judaism’s teaching and deprives Christians of what might be a unique and vital perspective on their own faith. In the afterword I have tried to identify some of the ways Jewish spirituality understands itself in contradistinction to Christian spirituality.
To be sure, you can only have one religion at a time. But you can, from studying another one, even from the outside, learn to see your own spiritual tradition through a new lens. The following chapters are some suggestions for how Christians might do so through the eyeglasses of the children of Israel. But first, a personal story.
My Lunch
with Jesus
What little I know about Jesus I learned from Rob. He was the one who first helped me, over a quarter century ago, understand how God might really become a person. He and I were then young clergy; he was the Episcopal priest and I was the rabbi in a small New England town. We were cautiously fascinated by each other’s faith. We visited each other’s place of prayer; we visited each other’s home. At a Sabbath service, I even invited Rob to help me with the reading of the Torah scroll.
That Christmas Eve, as our family was about to order out for Chinese food (they were the only place open), the kitchen doorbell rang. Through the window, I could see a car with its headlights on, idling in the driveway. I opened the door; it was Robert. He was wearing his collar—a priest ready for one of Christianity’s holiest of nights, a rabbi in a sweatshirt about to pick up an order of take-out food.
"Rob, what are you doing here? It’s Christmas Eve.