When Oceans Merge: The Contemporary Sufi and Hasidic Teachings of Pir Vilayat Khan and Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi

INTRODUCTION

This book brings together the perspectives of two contemporary, universalist spiritual teachers and friends, Pir Vilayat Inayat Khan and Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi, and explores the deep commonalities between the mystical paths of Sufism and Hasidic Judaism, which are their respective traditions. They were both progressive thinkers and creative trailbrazers within their own traditions, fearlessly exploring the cutting edge of spirituality, redefining and renewing our concepts of the Divine, stressing direct experience and realization, and always striving to uplift the hearts and souls of those around them.

These two beloved spiritual leaders met in 1975 and initiated one another, rekindling a cross-fertilization of traditions which echos the thirteenth-century blending of Jewish-Sufism in the spirituality of Rabbi Abraham Maimuni, the son of Maimonides. This has, in the twenty-first century, given rise to a new Sufi-Hasidic lineage known as the Inayati-Maimuni Order.

I am deeply grateful for having had the opportunity to study with these two teachers and hope to convey some of the richness of their unique contributions to the field of contemporary spirituality. Their teachings reveal the profound mystical depths and universal foundations that connect these two vast expressions of the Abrahamic tradition at a time when many of their respective followers in mainstream Judaism and Islam have become entrenched in open conflict. These two traditions are like vast bodies of water formed out of one great ocean— certainly Christianity, which is my own birth tradition, is the third great expanse of this ocean, and its perspective will also be considered in this book. Sufism and Hasidism represent the inner teachings of Islam and Judaism, and emphasize the religion of the heart—the love, compassion, and joy that is their true raison d’etre.

From the modern convergence of these two great traditions—which are historically distinctive, but inseparably rooted in the realization of divine oneness—comes the metaphor that inspires the title of this book, When Oceans Merge. The phrase harks back to the title of a Persian treatise called Majma ul-Bahrain (variously translated as the merging of the two oceans, the mingling of two seas, and where the two oceans meet; ca.1654-55) by Muhammad Dara Shikoh, son of the Mughal Emperor Shah Jahan, the grandson of Akbar and builder of the Taj Mahal. Dara Shikoh was a champion of coexisting heterodox mystical traditions, and the title of his famous work refers to the affinities between the traditions of Sufism and Vedanta, which freely commingle in India. The title is equally applicable to the underlying wellsprings of Sufism and Hasidism, which have both come forth from the fountainhead of prophetic inspiration transmitted through Abraham, the one who, four millennia ago, in an age of polytheism, received the revelation of the Divine Oneness, the indivisible singularity of the Source.

In sixth-century Arabia, in the time of the Prophet Muhammad, the righteous ones who upheld the Divine Oneness in the universal tradition of Abraham were called the hanifiyyah. These hanifs were distinguished from Jews, who followed the Jewish law which was revealed to Moses hundreds of years after the time of Abraham, and from Christians, who saw Jesus as the fulfillment of the law and the second person of the Trinity. The earliest Christian community in Jerusalem, headed by James the Just, the brother of Jesus, recommended, as a minimum commitment for Gentile converts to Christianity, the observance of the seven laws of Noah,¹ which comprised less restrictive guidelines (for instance, omitting the Jewish requirement of circumcision) which were revealed for all righteous humanity prior to the more specific Mosaic covenant with the Jewish people. With the subsequent rise of Judaism, the waters of the great spiritual ocean separated, and Christianity and Islam (which was the original primordial religion of Abraham) trifurcated into three great related sacred traditions. The Qur’anic revelations that came through the Prophet Muhammad confirmed some of the Jewish dietary laws, prophetic revelations, and biblical and midrashic stories of Judaism, along with the exalted station of Jesus (Isa) and the Virgin Mary (Maryam)—with the understanding that Islam represented not a new separate faith or ism, but a continuation and renewal of the original Abrahamic tradition prior to its Jewish and Christian customizations. Reb Zalman once summed up this historical progression in conversation with a Sufisheikh in Hevron (Hebron, Israel), who was amazed that a Jew could accept Muhammad as an authentic prophet and would want to join in the mystical practice of zikr with his Sufi dervishes:

There was Ismail, the son of Ibrahim Habibullah, Abraham the friend of G-d. . . . Ismail still had the Tawhid, the knowledge of the oneness of G-d, but his children fell into the dark ages, into the jahiliya, into the unknowing. And so, they had lost their way to the oneness of G-d. So, Ya Rahim, Ya Rahman, the Merciful, the Compassionate, sent out a messenger to the children of Ismail to bring them back to Tawhid, to the oneness. I believe that he was a true messenger.²

Centuries after the Prophet’s time, in thirteenth-century Egypt, Abraham Maimuni (Rabbi Abraham ben Moses Maimonides), along with his son, ’Obadyah, and other Jewish pietists of his time, saw the mystical path of Sufism—although practiced primarily by Islamic descendents of Ishmael—as having preserved the original spirit and praxis of the Jewish faith more faithfully than could be found in the Europeanized Judaism of the time, and thus looked to Sufism as an aid to Jewish renewal and restoration. As Pir Vilayat Khan recounts this history:

The longstanding interface between Islam and Judaism deserves our attention. During the flowering of Kabbalah in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, Kabbalists and Hassidim frequented the khanaqas of the Sufi mystics of Baghdad. Bahya ibn Paquda’s Duties of the Heart bears the unmistakable imprint of the Sufi exhortations of the time, although he has reservations about the self-annihilation found amongst some Sufi ascetics. While the Crusaders were besieging Jerusalem, a large number of Jews fled to Cairo, fostering a Jewish-Sufi movement; they were, no doubt, encouraged by the progressive philosophy of Moses Maimonides, and even more so by the influence of his son, Abraham Maimonides, whose attachment to Sufis is known. The Jewish Sufis found in Sufism a restoration of practices that had been prevalent in Israel in former times. Abraham Maimonides was quoted as having said, in reference to the Sufis: The latter imitate the prophets (of Israel) and walk in their footsteps. But it was in the Al-Maqalat al-Hawdiya (The Treatise of the Pool), authored by ’Obadyah b. Abraham b. Moses Maimonides, the grandson of the renowned philosopher, that deep familiarity with precepts reserved for the Sufi initiates evidences an initiatic affiliation with a Sufi order.³

Abraham Maimonides was one of the most respected Jewish authorities of his time, during one of the most creative and formative eras of Jewish mysticism. Author Tom Block ventures that

It would not be too far of a stretch to say that the Sufileanings of Abraham influenced virtually all mystical writings in Judeo-Arabic over the next two hundred years, the formative years of the Kabbalistic system! In fact, his works were still being studied by Kabbalists in sixteenth-century Safed, where the Lurianic Kabbalah was setting the scene for the entrance of Hasidism onto the Jewish mystical stage. . . . Jewish practitioners today of the Kabbalistic sciences and Hasidism certainly have no idea just how much of the Sufi Way is wrapped into their traditions.⁴

The mystical dimensions of Judaism which paralleled Sufism developed esoteric traditions based in part on the ancient oral transmission of the Torah, which was so important to the formulation of the Kabbalistic tradition, building on the visionary insights of Jewish mystics such as Moses de Leon, Isaac the Blind, and Isaac Luria. Then, in the time of Rabbi Israel ben Eliezer, the Ba’al Shem Tov (ca.1700-1760), a great wave of Jewish renewal appeared in the form of the Hasidic tradition in Eastern Europe, paralleling the mystic way of the Islamic Sufi orders, yet developing along distinctively Jewish lines. In Mughal India and the Ottoman lands, Sufism continued to expand its own traditions. Practitioners of both Sufism and Hasidism extolled love, engaged in regular prayers, sought the divine intimacy, studied and chanted the divine names, sang mystic hymns, spoke of the four worlds, emphasized allegorical, rather than literal, understandings of scripture, and both, to some degree, incorporated aspects of emanationism (in common with Neoplatonism), seeing all life as emanating from the One and Only Being and creation as an ever-ongoing emergence of the Source.

This reciprocal cross-fertilization, renewal, and development over the centuries has enriched the mystical traditions of both Sufism and Hasidism, as they have been handed down to the present generations. Likewise, in the Christian world, the Hesychasts and later monastic orders developed the inner teachings of Jesus and produced great teachers who shared commonalities with Sufism, such as St. Francis of Assisi, Meister Eckhart, and Thomas Merton. These three parallel mystical paths are currently undergoing fresh interpretations by forward-thinking teachers within these traditions whose love of the world’s sacred legacies often extends to other paths beyond the traditional boundaries of their faith, as today’s spiritual practitioners discover new dimensions of the sacred in a modern interspiritual Axial Age.

Pir Vilayat and Reb Zalman epitomize the new approach to spirituality. Both addressed the issues of exclusivism, fundamentalism, pluralism, and the modern contributions of science and psychology, reaching beyond the surface of the traditions to see the one essential religion, the one Divine Reality behind all the doctrines, creeds, and opposing claims on truth. They were futurists, steeped in the traditions of the past, yet dedicated to a vision of what spirituality could become in the coming centuries. They enjoyed deep friendships with spiritual teachers and progressive thinkers from other faith traditions, both Eastern and Western; and they studied and incorporated insights and practices from these traditions into their own teaching, bringing further enrichment, universality and fresh perspectives to their own path. Both authored multiple books, innovated within the traditions they represented, sought to update stale, literalistic understandings of the Divine, and were, to some extent, musicians—with music being an important ingredient in their method of sacred transmission and celebratory worship.

In writing about these two teachers, I detail various facets of their life journeys, their struggles, and their distinctive spiritual contributions, occasionally including in the narrative my own interactions, experiences, and dialogues with them, in an attempt to impart an experiential understanding of the progressive and changing spirituality in our times, as it flows forth from the mystical wellsprings of the Abrahamic tradition.

As for my own background, I was raised in a Protestant Evangelical Christian family, with a paternal grandfather who was a Wesleyan minister in Upstate New York and a maternal grandmother who started the first rescue mission in Nashville, Tennessee, in the 1940s. Raised in France and the United States, I studied liberal arts at Vanderbilt University and Peabody College in the early 1970s. I received initiation from Pir Vilayat in 1980 and met Reb Zalman the following year. Throughout the 1980s, I undertook an extensive study of the world’s religions, attending various retreats and spending as much time as possible with Pir Vilayat, Reb Zalman, and a host of other spiritual teachers. During this same period, I began to lead a Sufigroup in the Nashville area. In the 1990s, I received initiation from Sheikh Nur (Lex Hixon) in the Halveti-Jerrahi Order, an Ottoman Sufi tariqat (order) based in Istanbul, and was invested as a sheikh in that order in 1994.

In the following years, I began to bring together the rich spiritual resources to which I had been granted access, and to write about the spiritual path, not as an academic scholar, but as a spiritual practitioner inside these living traditions, who is drawn to document the evolving teachings and new perspectives that are currently renewing and infusing these time-honored sacred traditions with new life. Sufism, as I understand it, is a religion of the heart; as such, its approach is open and life-affirming, placing a high value on peace, love, and harmony between people, while rejecting any political or ideological interpretation of religion that encourages violence against other faiths in the spirit of intolerance.

Today, with the resources provided by the internet and mass communication, we have more and more access to the wisdom offered by these great traditions (as well as new unaffiliated spiritual systems); yet the institutions associated with these traditions have too often tethered the spirit to outdated precepts and culturally limiting parochialism instead of freeing the spirit and allowing it to rise in love.

My first two books (The Garden of Mystic Love and Lifting the Boundaries) conveyed the history and teachings of the Sufi path, presenting the essential transmission as I had received it and interpreting it in ways that might speak to a contemporary Western audience while accentuating the authentic underlying universality of the tradition. In this book, I endeavor to take the process further by going to the heart of interspirituality and chronicling two highly innovative teachers who represent a progressive window on the universal, timeless, yet evolving aspects of contemporary spirituality with its roots in the authentic mystical traditions of the Abrahamic faiths. This resonates with my own spiritual orientation which is aptly summarized by the words of the Sufi ’Abdul Allah:

Qur’an, the Bible, or a martyr’s cry, all these my heart can tolerate, since my religion is love alone.⁵

Pir Vilayat Khan was a Sufi murshid (guide or teacher) who possessed a great gift for lifting people beyond their limited assessments of things into the higher realms of meaning and glorification. Born in London and raised in France, he was endowed with a predilection toward the meditative attunement of the sannyasin (a spiritual renunciate, retired from the life of a householder) and an intense desire for spiritual liberation, both for himself and for others around him. Pir Vilayat’s genetic heritage made him a natural cultural bridge between East and West—with an American mother and an Indian father, he had sympathies for both worlds. A pioneer in the field of interspirituality, in the 1960s he launched an annual interfaith congress near Paris, founding a convocation of representatives of all the world’s major religions that would continue for two decades, and he was the inspiration behind the founding of Omega Institute in upstate New York.

Pir Vilayat’s father, Hazrat Inayat Khan, brought Sufism to the West in 1910 and bequeathed to the modern world a treasury of profound contemporary spiritual teachings that emphasized the universality of the spirit and the awakening of humanity to its own divine inheritance. This legacy became the touchstone for Pir Vilayat’s teachings as he traveled the world, leading retreats and seminars which drew upon the practices and inner teachings of the great mystics of all traditions, with an emphasis on Sufis such as Ibn al-‘Arabi and Mevlana Jalaluddin Rumi.

With his Oxford English accent and Indian robes, Pir Vilayat at times radiated an almost aristocratic air, which he balanced with a mirthful sense of humor. A master of meditation, he endeavored to uplift the consciousness of his listeners, reviving the memory of the soul’s glorifications in the heavens. This was facilitated through guided meditations, Sufi zikr, and the sacred music of inspired composers from J. S. Bach to Samuel Barber, all utilized in the service of attuning the individual to the transcendent, eternal dimensions of reality behind the everyday, pedestrian world, with all its problems. In his talks, Pir Vilayat occasionally highlighted cutting-edge insights from contemporary physics, but when he spoke of the great Sufi masters and led zikr practices in a retreat setting, one felt strongly the intimate attunement of the dervish lover lost in rapturous contemplation of the Beloved.

Both Pir Vilayat and Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi lived long lives, just short of ninety years. Born of Jewish parents in pre-Holocaust Poland, Reb Zalman escaped with his family to America, where he continued his Hasidic training with the sixth Lubavitcher Rebbe, received ordination as a rabbi, earned degrees in psychology and religion, and, after a decade as a congregational rabbi, went on to become a university professor and progenitor of the Jewish Renewal Movement.

Both Reb Zalman and Pir Vilayat passed through the alchemical fire of suffering and struggle at an early age, Reb Zalman and his family narrowly escaping Hilter’s regime, and Pir Vilayat losing his father at age ten, then his beloved sister, Noor, at the hands of the Nazis during his twenties, followed by the sudden death of his fiancé a few years later. In Reb Zalman’s case, he not only lost close relatives, but saw the annihilation of many of the great Jewish rebbes of Europe in the smokestacks of World War II. The resultant Jewish anger at God over the Holocaust and the subsequent migration of so many contemporary Jews to Eastern religions and secularism fueled the spiritual fallout and impoverishment within modern Judaism that Reb Zalman longed to redress and heal throughout his adult life.

While Reb Zalman has been called the father of the Jewish Renewal Movement, he was also known by the affectionate monikers, the hippie rabbi and the cyber rebbe. Possessing a penetrating mind and a big heart, Zalman’s spiritual ecumenicism and modernizing tendencies, all in the service of revitalizing and updating Jewish spiritual practice, inevitably outgrew the insular restrictions of traditional Hasidism. He counted as friends practitioners and leaders from many other spiritual paths, including, along with Pir Vilayat: Thomas Merton, the Dalai Lama, Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche, Father Thomas Keating, and Jean Houston, among many others. Though he founded a Jewish-Sufi order late in life, he never wavered in his goal of revivifying his root tradition of Judaism and reacquainting his followers with the neglected mystical depths of Kabbalah.

Reb Zalman endeavored to inspire fellow Jews to reach beyond the post-Holocaust wounding and rationalistic flattening of worship so prevalent in modern Judaism, striving to unveil the tradition’s true universal, generic core, and mystical dimensions, without abandoning the distinctive Jewish practices, insights, humor, and love of knowledge which characterizes it. He opened up Kabbalistic teaching to non-Jews as well, reaching out to find common ground with other faiths. In later life, he championed spiritual eldering and women’s ordinations, pointing to the duty of authentic religion to advocate a proactive eco-kosher approach to the environment in order to help heal Mother Earth. Like Teilhard de Chardin, he saw religion, the universe, and even our God concepts as always changing, growing and evolving toward an ever-greater expression of divinity.

Reb Zalman reflected on his own journey, saying,

It was not my achievement that I have a foot in the past and a foot in the future; it was my given. I was uniquely placed to comprehend and bridge many worlds both by historical events and personal disposition. My real achievement was that I held fast to both.⁶

His friend and longtime colleague, Rabbi Arthur Green, described Reb Zalman’s prolific intellectual pursuits as including the language of psychedelics and New Age consciousness in the sixties, humanistic psychology in the seventies, Marshall McLuhan in the eighties, Ken Wilber and Integral Studies in the ’90s, environmentalism and Gaian language in the new century, [and] more recently the latest studies in brain physiology and the relationship between brain, mind, and consciousness,⁷ all of which he was anxious to translate and infuse back into the language of the religious traditions which he loved. As Reb Zalman once remarked in reference to the currently available harvest of spiritual possibilities and our opportunity to consciously participate in the emergence of planetary consciousness, In the history of our earth there are only a few times like ours. What a blessing to be incarnated now!⁸

May you, dear reader, whatever your tradition, experience in this account of two modern spiritual innovators and their teachings, new and helpful seed-thoughts to ponder and assimilate on your journey to union with truth.

ENDNOTES

[1] Acts 15:1-31

[2] Schatcher-Shalomi, Reb Zalman, Reb Zalman Among the Sufis; excerpt of a 3/19/94 audio recording at the Hillel Foundation in Berkeley, CA; co-sponsored by the Aquarian Minyon, transcribed by Reuven Goldfarb with the assistance of Eliyahu (Khaled) McLean. Available at: http://sufi-tariqah.de/tarchiv/rebzalman.html.

[3] Khan, Pir Vilayat, The Ecstasy Beyond Knowing, Kindle edition, chapter 6 on