Jewish Spirituality Research Articles

Psychology of religion and spirituality in Jewish contexts: A synthetic review

Jewish spirituality and religion include dynamics that are different from other traditions and have important implications for relational forms of spirituality. Certain approaches to relational Judaism (e.g. Mussar) have offered insights for understanding the folk psychology of relational spirituality in Jewish contexts but have not generated empirical research. Existing research in the psychology of Jewish religion and spirituality draws on several theoretical frameworks and has generated helpful findings. In this synthetic review, we foreground the role of theory in psychological research and offer a brief review of several theoretical frameworks used in research on the psychology of Jewish religion and spirituality (cognitive-behavioral, psychodynamic, cultural psychology of religion, and positive psychology). The relational spirituality model (RSM) is summarized as a conceptual framework that could be useful for future research in this area. We use the RSM as a heuristic organizing framework to review several lines of prior empirical research on the psychology of Jewish religion and spirituality that fit within the RSM domains of spiritual dwelling, seeking, and struggles. The final section outlines future directions in research in this area based on the RSM, with particular attention to dimensions of diversity (e.g. gender, sexual orientation), diverse contexts of Jewish spirituality, Jewish spirituality in relation to both mental health suffering and flourishing, and historical trauma. We also highlight the need for research on Jewish spiritual development in communal settings (e.g. congregations, seminaries) to provide a deeper understanding at both individual and communal levels, and interdisciplinary integration with Jewish theology.

Veiling and unveiling: Caution in explicitly integrating Jewish spirituality in psychotherapy in Israel.

Veiling and unveiling: Caution in explicitly integrating Jewish spirituality in psychotherapy in Israel.

הסתגלות של הרוחניות היהודיות הצפון-אמריקנית בישראל

This paper focuses on the cultural translation and adaptation of North American Jewish spirituality (JS) in Israel. JS emerged in North America in the late sixties and early seventies and absorbed the universalistic, open and inclusive approach typical of the counterculture and of the subsequent New Age forms of spirituality. When JS entered the Jewish Israeli scene in the late nineties it was adapted by two different socio-religious groups: secular New Age Israelis and the National-Religious public. As adopted by secular Jews who belong to the New Age spiritual milieu it retains (most) of the universal values that characterize the North American JS. At the same time, it reconstructs Jewish rituals in accordance with Israeli New Age aesthetics. When it is absorbed by Religious-Zionist Jews, its Jewish particularistic affinities are accentuated and the universal-cosmopolitan aspects are blurred, or even, in cases like that of R. Yitzchak Ginsburg, obliterated, creating a nationalistic version of JS.

Secularize, psychologize, neoliberalize: The entangled Jewish self of North American Jews

AbstractThis article unpacks the construction of the Jewish spiritual self in three current projects of Jewish spirituality in North America—Jewish mindfulness, the neo‐Musar movement, and the nascent Positive Judaism—and explores their relations with the neoliberal economic regime and ideology. Based on the content analysis of 30 popular online and offline texts, among them promotional websites, podcasts, and published works, and data gathered during long‐term ethnographic study on Jewish spirituality in Israel and North America, the article argues that the highly individualized Jewish spirituality has become an institutionally mediated form of Jewish self‐expression. By building on anthropological works about the cultural implications of neoliberalism on the self and following the lead of the foundational works linking Jewish cultural production and neoliberalism in North America, this article offers a perspective on Jewish spirituality that recognizes the relations between neoliberalism, self‐cultivation, and community life. Fusing the spiritual, therapeutic, and neoliberal discourses, projects of Jewish spirituality package neoliberal ideals such as choice, emotional, resilience, well‐being, and happiness as Jewish spiritual commodities. At the same time, the subjectivity cultivated in these projects is a Jewish‐specific formation—a self that is highly individualized but remains strongly connected to its religious‐ethnic community and cultural tradition. Jewish spirituality is thus used here as a case study for how neoliberalism affects contemporary forms of religious practice and creates new ethical orientations to communal belongings.

“All My Thinking Has But One Focus”: Contemplative Seclusion in (Early) Modern Jewish Spirituality

This study investigates the way in which different concepts of contemplation and seclusion are negotiated in Jewish spiritual literature. Focusing on (early) modern examples, it particularly addresses the functions and goals of physical and mental exercises designed to achieve detachment from worldly concerns. It shows how practices denoted by the terms perishut (lit. “separation”) and hitbodedut (lit. “solitude”) serve as preparatory steps that enable individuals to approach the divine, with the ultimate goal of bringing about various experiences of oneness with the deity. Against this background, it elucidates how perishut and hitbodedut were considered by some authors instrumental to gain divine knowledge, and how this idea relates to earlier Jewish conceptions of prophecy. Lastly, it will illustrate how in contemporary sources, contemplative seclusion is presented as a practice that transcends the temporal framework to which humans are bound.

Searching for Jewish spirituality: the narrative identity of new age Jews in Israel

ABSTRACT This paper explores the identity narratives of three former members of New Age Judaism (NAJ) communities. By conducting an ethnographic study of the communities, the paper shows that these life stories are based on an intensive search for spirituality. This search prompted the narrators to experiment with disparate forms of Jewish and non-Jewish beliefs and practices and, consequently, to negotiate, challenge, and subvert the categories of the religious and the secular. By emphasizing their choice of a Jewish spiritual identity over a secular or religious one, the narratives illustrate the gradual inward turn taking place in Israeli Jewish society over the last two decades among non-observant Jews and the creation of a new hybrid category of Jewish identity.

Mystifying Kabbalah: Academic Scholarship, National Theology, and New Age Spirituality by Boaz Huss

Reviewed by: Mystifying Kabbalah: Academic Scholarship, National Theology, and New Age Spirituality by Boaz Huss Jeremy Phillip Brown Boaz Huss. Mystifying Kabbalah: Academic Scholarship, National Theology, and New Age Spirituality. Translated by Elana Lutsky. Oxford Series in Western Esotericism. New York: Oxford University Press, 2020. 200 pp. Boaz Huss has made original contributions to research on medieval Kabbalah, the long reception of the Zohar, North African Kabbalah, new religious movements, contemporary Kabbalah, and Jewish spirituality. Mystifying Kabbalah, which runs the gamut of Huss's research agenda, is ably translated by Elana Lutsky from Huss's 2018 Hebrew monograph, The Question of the Existence of Jewish Mysticism: The Genealogy of Jewish Mysticism and the Theologies of Kabbalah Research. The title of the Hebrew original drives from a 1906 letter written by Martin Buber, in which the grandson of the Maskil Solomon Buber made a fledgling argument for "the [mere] existence of Jewish mysticism." The letter is an apt point of reference for a book dealing with the "invention" of Jewish mysticism. Synthesizing several articles composed by Huss going back at least as far as 2007, Mystifying Kabbalah examines the discursive formation of Jewish mysticism as a modern category of analysis, an approach that finds inspiration, per the author's express claims, in the work of Talal Asad, Russell McCutcheon, and Timothy Fitzgerald. Huss's project is comprised of five main trajectories: (1) a genealogy of the modern construction of mysticism, which, per Huss, is based upon universalist presuppositions of a theological order, presuppositions congenial to imperialist sponsorship; (2) a reconstruction of how modern Jewish scholars, with Buber and Gershom Scholem in leading roles, assimilated this construction of mysticism [End Page 427] when casting Kabbalah and Hasidism as "Jewish mysticism" to promote Jewish national consciousness; (3) a daring account of how persevering in their use of a putatively uncritical category has served the interests of the author's own teachers and colleagues; (4) an analysis of how the scholarly construction of "Jewish mysticism" has nourished contemporary spirituality; and (5) a methodological indictment of the category, which seeks to liberate research on Kabbalah and Hasidism from its subordination to "Jewish mysticism." The book is structurally analogous to the conceptual genealogies of other scholars who have leveraged foundational interventions in the study of religion, such as Karen King's 2003 What Is Gnosticism?, or more recently, Daniel Boyarin's 2018 Judaism: The Genealogy of a Modern Notion. In this sense, the analytical mood assumed by Huss fits, like the modern concept of mysticism itself, within a broader historical moment of scholarly discourse. It is a moment, however, dedicated to exposing how broadly organizational categories of research are constructed in historically and epistemically contingent ways. To further qualify Mystifying Kabbalah's relationship to previous scholarship, the book is much indebted to the methodology modeled by Wouter Hanegraaff's 1998 New Age Religion and Western Culture: Esotericism in the Mirror of Secular Thought. Huss also takes a similar approach to Steven Wasserstrom's 1999 Religion after Religion: Gershom Scholem, Mircea Eliade and Henry Corbin at Eranos, but does not invoke this watershed critique of mystocentrism in the History of Religions. One criticism of this otherwise dynamic book is that it operates with a thin concept of theology. While Huss is precise in pinpointing many reasons that the category of Jewish mysticism is wrongheaded (perhaps the most urgent reason being that it generates artificial affinities in the comparative phenomenology of religion), exposing the tacit assumptions of research as "theological" does not in itself articulate the ideological limitations of scholarship. Critical theologians who are certainly practiced in the kind of genealogical analysis offered here may find this line of argumentation inadequate. Similarly, Huss supposes an automatic correlation of theological research commitments with apologetical tendencies. He claims, for example, "The relative lack of criticism toward Kabbalistic androcentrism and misogyny is connected to the theological paradigm of research, which demands an empathetic approach to the research data and glorifies Jewish mysticism as a liberating force in Jewish culture" (96–97). This claim is not just unpersuasive because theology is supposed to determine apologetical outcomes, but also because the research conditions in which the paradigm of "Jewish mysticism" prevailed have produced...

Considering the Subjective Well-Being of Israeli Jews during the COVID-19 Pandemic: Messaging Insights from Religiosity and Spirituality as Coping Mechanisms.

Consistent with Terror Management Theory (TMT), COVID-19 has made us question our mortality and past studies have indicated the importance of religiosity to enhance subjective well-being (SWB), however, studies on spirituality’s impact are incomplete. The pandemic has created an environment where both religiosity and spirituality may play a vital role. Israel was selected due to the emergence of Jewish spirituality, a phenomenon that is growing in importance but understudied. In response to these caveats, the current study examines the mediating role played by spirituality on the SWB of the religious during the pandemic. Participants from Israel (n = 138) were recruited via Qualtrics’ online panels. Findings showed Jews’ religiosity was important to enhance their SWB, i.e., religious beliefs bring certainty and happiness to one’s life, especially, during the COVID-19 pandemic. More importantly, spirituality mediated the effect of religiosity on SWB, specifically, spirituality was important to enhance the well-being of low religious Jews. Implications for health messaging during a global pandemic are discussed.

Jewish spirituality in the face of illness, suffering and care

Jewish spirituality in its principles, its means and its practice offers the possibilities to cope with sickness, suffering and more broadly with the human condition.

American JewBu: Jews, Buddhists, and Religious Change by Emily Sigalow (review)

Reviewed by: American JewBu: Jews, Buddhists, and Religious Change by Emily Sigalow Steven Kaplin Emily Sigalow. American JewBu: Jews, Buddhists, and Religious Change. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2019. 280 pp. doi:10.1017/S0364009421000374 In the first section of her 2019 American JewBu, Emily Sigalow plots a clear historical trajectory of both American Judaism and American Buddhism through the lens of Jews who, in a variety of ways, engage with Buddhism. Eschewing histories that begin with the 1960s counterculture, Sigalow locates the earliest American JewBus in the spirituality movements of the nineteenth century. Her story commences with Charles T. Strauss, born Jewish, who publicly converted to Buddhism in Chicago during the famous World's Parliament of Religions. Sigalow finds in Strauss a Jewish exemplar of Buddhist modernism—empirical, scientific, universal—and the American Buddhist turn away from Asian Buddhist traditions and metaphysics. In chapters 2 and 3, Sigalow traces a JewBu tradition of Buddhist modernization, from Buddhism-interested Felix Adler at the turn of the twentieth century, to Julius Goldwater, an ordained Buddhist priest who took primary care of three Buddhist temples in Los Angeles during the Japanese internment, to more contemporary Jewish Buddhist teachers like Sharon Salzberg, Joseph Goldstein, and Ram Dass, who have each been instrumental in spreading Buddhist-inspired meditation to a broad American audience. Thus, Sigalow argues, JewBus played an outsized role in shaping American Buddhism as modern. Sigalow makes this point without losing track of broader historical or theoretical trends; she intersperses her descriptions of well-known JewBus with analyses of colonialism and anti-Asian racism, as well as theoretical assessments of relevant terms like spirituality and syncretism. Sigalow uses these historically compelling early chapters to sidestep the pervasive question in other writings on JewBus (Why are so many American Buddhists Jewish?) in order to ask instead how the Jewishness of JewBus is relevant to their Buddhism. Sigalow conjectures that because modernism and universalism were particularly important to American Jews, American JewBus were especially ready to pick up on these elements in American Buddhism and fashion them into core elements of the American Buddhist tradition. Sigalow does not so much portray JewBus as distinct from other non-Asian Buddhist modernizers but as uniquely qualified agents of the burgeoning movement. In this sense, Sigalow reveals seemingly marginal JewBus to be central figures through which the historical development of Buddhism in America can be delineated. [End Page 492] The second section of American JewBu focuses more on Judaism. In the fourth chapter, Sigalow reveals ways in which the prevalence of JewBus helped create the conditions for the growth of contemplative Judaism in the second half of the twentieth century. For example, Sigalow notes a handful of conferences, including the meeting of a Jewish delegation with the Dalai Lama in India, made famous by Roger Kamenetz's The Jew in the Lotus (HarperCollins, 1994), that brought together Jews and JewBus invested in spiritual seeking. Sigalow finds within these gatherings evidence that Jews in Buddhist circles had significant impact on Jews attempting to fashion a Jewish spirituality. Sigalow more fully fleshes out this relationship in the fifth chapter, in which she recounts her ethnographic fieldwork in the Jewish Meditation Center of Brooklyn, by arguing that Jewish spirituality utilizes Buddhism's most significant practice—liberalized, universalized meditation—as its own core practice. The Jewish meditation of contemporary Jewish spirituality, then, was made possible precisely by the de-Asianized meditation made popular by JewBus. By taking meditation out of particular Asian contexts and presenting it as universally psychological and spiritual, JewBus helped to create the conditions for a notion of meditation onto which Jewish spiritual seekers could place their particular Jewish traditions (e.g., likening the quiet of Buddhist meditation to the Amidah prayer). The sixth chapter contextualizes the previous two by mapping the concept of Jewish Buddhist spirituality. To some extent, this is in order to contrast the emphases of JewBu spirituality with popular, Protestant-derived understandings of the term. JewBu spirituality is not, Sigalow argues, focused solely on interiority and self-improvement but is necessarily communal and thereby as external as it is internal. However, this chapter reveals that JewBu spirituality likewise functions as a critique of common...

Encountering transgenerational trauma through analytical music therapy

ABSTRACT Introduction: Transgenerational trauma is a theory asserting that traumatic experiences, including grief and loss, can be transferred from the initial generation of survivors to subsequent generations via complex post-traumatic stress disorder mechanisms. This applies to persecutory circumstances and genocidal events, which leave their mark and continue to resonate actively within the consciousness of descendants. Method: This article explores the role of analytical music therapy in working with transgenerational trauma. Illustrations of this work are provided via two first-person, retrospective vignettes of the author’s self-experiences in analytical music therapy, rooted in the author’s Jewish cultural identity, and in the inherited experiences of ancestors who faced existential threats of ethnic persecution in Eastern Europe during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The reflective process employed here serves to contribute to the development of a larger theoretical perspective on the role of music as a matrix for accessing, confronting, and working through elements of transgenerational trauma. Results: Each vignette provides ways in which the author’s own transgenerational trauma – as it manifested in his everyday life in various ways – was accessed and engaged through the relational, creative spaces of analytical music therapy. Each vignette also addresses how certain transpersonal resources discovered within these working spaces – each one meaningfully reflecting certain expressions of Jewish mysticism and spirituality – were mobilized by the author with personal and professional impact. Discussion: Clinical and cultural implications for future practice and research in this area are considered.

Ivan G. Marcus. “Sefer Hasidim” and the Ashkenazic Book in Medieval Europe.

Ivan G. Marcus’s “Sefer Hasidim” and the Ashkenazic Book in Medieval Europe is a rather unique book about a rather unique Jewish book from the Middle Ages. The Book of the Pietists [Sefer Hasidim], “written anonymously [in the thirteenth century] but attributed to Rabbi Judah b. Samuel he-hasid (the pietist) of Regensburg (d.1217),” has long been studied for its insights into the Jewish spirituality of a small circle of medieval rabbis and their students, and more recently for what the book reveals about contemporary social interaction between Jews and Christians in twelfth- and thirteenth-century Rhineland cities (1). Marcus himself has contributed significantly to scholarship on this latter aspect of the book. After efficiently recounting the evolving interest in Sefer Hasidim, Marcus heads in a new direction. This ability to see problems from a new angle is a characteristic feature of his scholarship; he has marked out new areas of research on Jewish education in the Middle Ages as well as Jewish reactions to Christian culture.

New Children of Israel: Emerging Jewish Communities in an Era of Globalization by Nathan P. Devir

Reviewed by: New Children of Israel: Emerging Jewish Communities in an Era of Globalization by Nathan P. Devir Edith Bruder Nathan P. Devir. New Children of Israel: Emerging Jewish Communities in an Era of Globalization. Salt Lake City: The University of Utah Press, 2017. 310 pp. doi:10.1017/S0364009419001028 Nathan Devir's survey refers to a remarkable phenomenon in recent decades: a vast number of individuals or groups in Africa, India, and elsewhere, with no historical ties to Jewish life, who have chosen to become part of the Jewish people and to adopt Jewish traditions. Referring to pioneering scholarship on so-called Judaizing movements, Devir's comparative ethnographic study explores oral histories and heritage narratives, the historical background, and the circumstances of this motivation through case studies in Ghana, Cameroon, India, and other postcolonial places. He examines in depth the typologies and modalities of the inclusion of the "New Children of Israel" in the Jewish world and what this tells us about the contemporary construction of new Jewish identities. Leaving aside the evidentiary data that might corroborate claims of Israelite ancestry and the notion of the "authenticity" of these communities, Devir investigates the practical and symbolic ways in which these communities construct their ideas about what Jewishness means. The "House of Israel" community in Ghana claims that their heritage narratives indicate a precolonial Jewish history, which is emblematic of the first wave of African communities that asserted they are the heirs of the Lost Tribes of Israel. Through testimonies and interviews, Devir reconstructs a detailed description of how the journey of this community to normative Judaism began. From the discovery of similarities between the traditional customs of the Sefwi—including circumcision eight days after birth, a Saturday Sabbath, burial and food taboos, the ritual slaughter of animals, and menstrual seclusion of women—and those found in the Tanakh, the founders of this community have adopted and developed versions of their tribal history emphasizing that, prior to the arrival of colonial missionaries, they practiced a form of Judaism. As a result, they considered that their "lost" traditions have revealed that they belong to the Hebrew people. While Devir does consider the frequently mentioned commonalities between Ashanti and Jewish customs in the anthropological discourse, he emphasizes a series of interactions that relate to post-colonially influenced notions of chosenness in a context where colonists denigrated traditional religions. For the author, this rhetoric of Old Testamentism is the expression of a return-to-roots countermovement, even if it is not limited to that alone. Without taking into account any such apparently inherited similarities, the more recent adoption of Judaism of the Beth Yeshouroun of Cameroon at the beginning of the twenty-first century is construed along the lines of religious affiliation by spontaneous conversion. The study of Hebrew Scriptures is the basis of their belief. As noticed by Devir, this community's founding members were inspired by a deep spiritual desire and have freed themselves from a racial-genealogical definition of Jewishness. Globalized media and technology have played a salient role in the construction of this community, which began to practice [End Page 203] Judaism according to information found on the Internet, without any prior personal interaction with other Jews. That the Beth Yeshouroun adopted Jewish spirituality and traditions via online practice led Devir to point out the transnational and decentralized nature of the current communication paradigm and its effects on the evolution of Judaism and more generally on religions. As he relates, these "Internet Jews" have meticulously studied online videos of Jewish services abroad; they follow normative Jewish religious practice, and the religious service in their synagogue might seem identical to a Conservative or Modern Orthodox service that can be witnessed in Europe, Israel, or the Americas. They see the Jewish entity as a kinship group whose defining characteristics are to observe the commandments. In joining Judaism they became Jews and sought formal recognition as Jews. The case of the Bene Ephraim movement of south India enhances the comparative significance of Devir's research on new Jewish communities in the developing world. The Bene Ephraim are a group of formerly Christianized "untouchables" (dalits) who claim descent from a Lost Tribe of...

Nathan P. Devir. New Children of Israel: Emerging Jewish Communities in an Era of Globalization. Salt Lake City: The University of Utah Press, 2017. 310 pp.

Reviewed by: New Children of Israel: Emerging Jewish Communities in an Era of Globalization by Nathan P. Devir Edith Bruder Nathan P. Devir. New Children of Israel: Emerging Jewish Communities in an Era of Globalization. Salt Lake City: The University of Utah Press, 2017. 310 pp. doi:10.1017/S0364009419001028 Nathan Devir's survey refers to a remarkable phenomenon in recent decades: a vast number of individuals or groups in Africa, India, and elsewhere, with no historical ties to Jewish life, who have chosen to become part of the Jewish people and to adopt Jewish traditions. Referring to pioneering scholarship on so-called Judaizing movements, Devir's comparative ethnographic study explores oral histories and heritage narratives, the historical background, and the circumstances of this motivation through case studies in Ghana, Cameroon, India, and other postcolonial places. He examines in depth the typologies and modalities of the inclusion of the "New Children of Israel" in the Jewish world and what this tells us about the contemporary construction of new Jewish identities. Leaving aside the evidentiary data that might corroborate claims of Israelite ancestry and the notion of the "authenticity" of these communities, Devir investigates the practical and symbolic ways in which these communities construct their ideas about what Jewishness means. The "House of Israel" community in Ghana claims that their heritage narratives indicate a precolonial Jewish history, which is emblematic of the first wave of African communities that asserted they are the heirs of the Lost Tribes of Israel. Through testimonies and interviews, Devir reconstructs a detailed description of how the journey of this community to normative Judaism began. From the discovery of similarities between the traditional customs of the Sefwi—including circumcision eight days after birth, a Saturday Sabbath, burial and food taboos, the ritual slaughter of animals, and menstrual seclusion of women—and those found in the Tanakh, the founders of this community have adopted and developed versions of their tribal history emphasizing that, prior to the arrival of colonial missionaries, they practiced a form of Judaism. As a result, they considered that their "lost" traditions have revealed that they belong to the Hebrew people. While Devir does consider the frequently mentioned commonalities between Ashanti and Jewish customs in the anthropological discourse, he emphasizes a series of interactions that relate to post-colonially influenced notions of chosenness in a context where colonists denigrated traditional religions. For the author, this rhetoric of Old Testamentism is the expression of a return-to-roots countermovement, even if it is not limited to that alone. Without taking into account any such apparently inherited similarities, the more recent adoption of Judaism of the Beth Yeshouroun of Cameroon at the beginning of the twenty-first century is construed along the lines of religious affiliation by spontaneous conversion. The study of Hebrew Scriptures is the basis of their belief. As noticed by Devir, this community's founding members were inspired by a deep spiritual desire and have freed themselves from a racial-genealogical definition of Jewishness. Globalized media and technology have played a salient role in the construction of this community, which began to practice [End Page 203] Judaism according to information found on the Internet, without any prior personal interaction with other Jews. That the Beth Yeshouroun adopted Jewish spirituality and traditions via online practice led Devir to point out the transnational and decentralized nature of the current communication paradigm and its effects on the evolution of Judaism and more generally on religions. As he relates, these "Internet Jews" have meticulously studied online videos of Jewish services abroad; they follow normative Jewish religious practice, and the religious service in their synagogue might seem identical to a Conservative or Modern Orthodox service that can be witnessed in Europe, Israel, or the Americas. They see the Jewish entity as a kinship group whose defining characteristics are to observe the commandments. In joining Judaism they became Jews and sought formal recognition as Jews. The case of the Bene Ephraim movement of south India enhances the comparative significance of Devir's research on new Jewish communities in the developing world. The Bene Ephraim are a group of formerly Christianized "untouchables" (dalits) who claim descent from a Lost Tribe of...

Like a Dark Rabbi: Modern Poetry and the Jewish Literary Imagination by Norman Finkelstein

Reviewed by: Like a Dark Rabbi: Modern Poetry and the Jewish Literary Imagination by Norman Finkelstein Daniel Morris (bio) Like a Dark Rabbi: Modern Poetry and the Jewish Literary Imagination By Norman Finkelstein. Cincinnati, OH: Hebrew Union College Press, 2019. 275 pp. I'd like to get away from earth awhileAnd then come back to it and begin over.May no fate willfully misunderstand meAnd half grant what I wish and snatch me awayNot to return. Earth's the right place for love:I don't know where it's likely to go better.I'd like to go by climbing a birch treeAnd climb black branches up a snow-white trunkToward heaven, till the tree could bear no more,But dipped its top and set me down again.That would be good both going and coming back.One could do worse than be a swinger of birches. —"Birches" (1914) by Robert Frost Beginning a Shofar review on Jewish poet and literary scholar Norman Finkelstein's Like A Dark Rabbi with "Birches," Robert Frost's chestnut about a boy swinging on a branch in the woods? Really? Can a goyish pastoral pass as Jewish poetry? After reading Finkelstein, who argues Jewish poetry represents ambivalence toward the realms of earth and sky, I now think Frost, the New Hampshire woodsman who depicted purportedly un-Jewish tasks like chopping wood, mowing hay, and picking apples, may don the Dark Rabbi mantel. Think of "Mending Wall" as Frost's crypto-cabbalistic take on tikkun olam. Align "Acquainted with the Night" with Finkelstein's reading of Hugh Seidman and Michael Heller, Dark [End Page 319] Rabbis who, like Frost, convey uncertainty, rupture, and loss. With its representation of a boy swinging "towards heaven," but wanting to land because Earth is the "right place for love," Frost's "Birches" prefigures the work of Jewish-born authors like Chana Bloch's "Furniture," which, Finkelstein writes, "intertwines the divine and the domestic, the cosmic and the ordinary: the thunder in heaven is like moving furniture" (144). Finkelstein attends to poets who signify Jewishness when they embrace liminality. Heller, paradoxically, regards "between" as "foundational" and diaspora as a "new kind of homeland" (114). (An exception would be Allen Grossman, who defined holiness as contingent on acts of separation; Heller sees holiness as "revealed at the heart of the secular" [108].) Describing Heller's "Ode to the Sky on the Esplanade of the New" as a "Buddhist Ode to the West Wind," Finkelstein notes how Heller modulates from "transcendental heights to a poetics grounded in history" (123). Jewish ritual, quotidian action, and an appreciation of language as a crucial form of mediation between persons and realms of experience inform Heller's poetry to the point "no one can safely say where the sacred leaves off [and] where the profane begins" (123). The phrase "Like a Dark Rabbi," from the Pennsylvania Dutch-bred modernist Wallace Stevens's "Le Monocle de Mon Oncle" (1918), by itself indicates Finkelstein's open mind about who can write a Jewish poem. Like other philosemites such as Robert Duncan and Joseph Donahue, whose poetry Finkelstein treats in his study, Stevens is not a Jew by birth, ethnicity, or religious practice. In fact, as biographer Paul Mariani writes, Stevens was xenophobic and antisemitic. Nonetheless, Stevens expresses a "fascination and strong affinity with Jewish spirituality and Jewish texts" (222). In "Auroras of Autumn," for example, he writes of "that crown and mystical cabala" (162). Finkelstein's interpretation of Stevens, Duncan, and Donahue as practitioners of a Jewish poetics turns on his definition of rabbi as an Emersonian scholar. Describing Stevens as a "seeker of occult wisdom" (226) who views "imagination as emanation" (231), Finkelstein places him "somewhere between, if not beyond, the religious and the secular" (226). Like Frost's speaker in "Birches," Stevens is a rabbi because he seeks extraterrestrial wisdom "for human purposes" (223). [End Page 320] Regarding "Auroras of Autumn" as imagining a "post-religious space of redemption," Finkelstein aligns Stevens with Jewish-born poets ranging from objectivists such as Charles Reznikoff and George Oppen to the contemporary formalist Henry Weinfield to Bloch, the Israeli anti-Zionist author and...

Jewish Spirituality, Modernity, and Historicism in the Long Nineteenth Century: New Musical Perspectives

Jewish Spirituality, Modernity, and Historicism in the Long Nineteenth Century: New Musical Perspectives

Introduction, The Jewish 1968 and its Legacies

Introduction, The Jewish 1968 and its Legacies Ari Y. Kelman (bio), Tony Michels (bio), and Riv-Ellen Prell (bio) Sensing that 1968 was a critical, but underexplored, turning point in the reenvisioning and reimagining of Jewish life in the United States, we organized a conference on "The Jewish 1968 and its Legacies." Fifteen scholars gathered at Stanford University on February 15–16, 2015, to discuss the impact of that pivotal year on American Jewish historiography, feminism, Zionism, politics, and religion. We argued that 1968 marked a turning point in the development of American Jewish culture, politics, and religion; we called it "the Jewish 1968" in order to reference both that iconic year of worldwide youth protest, and the particular Jewish dimensions of it. We were especially interested in the ways in which both the year 1968 and the era of which it was a part launched the unraveling of the Jewish liberal consensus identified by historian Arthur Goren in his article "A Golden Decade for American Jews: 1945–1955."1 Though his article has been challenged on the grounds that the period was more complex and somewhat less golden than he claimed, it nevertheless laid out a strong case for a public consensus about American Jewish life in the decade following World War II.2 We suggested that American Jewish baby boomer activists, who were deeply involved with various aspects of Jewish life, were among the most important catalysts for those changes.3 They created a surge of activity that set into motion innovations that, over subsequent decades, transformed Jewish life. These activists did not create ideas, activities, and organizations as a systematic program. Nor was the American counterculture, which they embraced, uniform and coherent.4 Rather, their innovations came from a fertile engagement [End Page 1] between the counterculture with which they deeply identified, and the Jewish milieus in which they grew up. The era's complex politics, psychology, sexuality, theology, and spiritual practices all shaped how they reimagined their Jewish lives, communities, and cultures. We were mindful that many historians view 1967, because of Israel's victory in the Six-Day War that June, as a crucial turning point in Jewish history with different significance for the various Jewish communities of the world. Its importance for American Jews is often associated with moving Zionism to the center of American Jewish life and a new, emergent expression of Jewish identity linked to Jewish nationalism. We wanted to explore the significance of 1968 as a marker of the emergence of a Jewish youth movement that was built on the rejection of the dominant formulations of Jewish life by the postwar generation. How, if at all, did the global youth revolution also significantly change Jewish life? While debates persist among historians about the precise impact of all of the events that lined up in 1968, most would nevertheless agree it constituted a watershed, as young activists and radicals challenged the power and authority of many global powers, leading to both political and cultural repression and change.5 Zionism was one of the conference's most important examples. Following the Six-Day War, Zionism became central to Jewish life in the United States, but in complex and contradictory ways. On one extreme, Radical Zionists revived the Marxist tradition in Zionism through the lens of the New Left. Its place in Zionist history is often overlooked, if not forgotten, but it was a powerful force for Jewish activists and the emergence of the peace movement. On the opposite end, the Jewish Defense League (JDL) merged the right-wing nationalism of Revisionist Zionism with the styles and postures of Black Power. That fusion was deeply disturbing, but also remarkably compelling to many young Americans. Although most rejected his political program, JDL's charismatic leader Meir Kahane's evocation of "identity politics" and "ethnic pride," resonated powerfully in this era. We were interested in exploring [End Page 2] the ways that these expressions of Zionism emerged and developed in light of the youth movement.6 With respect to religion, young Jews experimented with and participated in the larger turn to spirituality among American youth. Sometimes subsumed under the label of "Renewal," the new Jewish spirituality...

Israel: O Melting Pot Judeu? Israel: The Jewish Melting Pot?

Analysis of cultural practices in Israel and approach to the history of Judaism and its practices. The importance of Jewish spirituality and the diversity of the Jewish population spread around the world. Formation of the state of Israel and analysis of the cultural diversity present in the modern state of Israel assessing the percentage of ethnicity of the population with specific focus on the religions concerned. Reflection on the issue of minorities and the problems they face in society and the importance of respect that must exist in the face of plurality of cultures.

Martin Buber, Hasidism, and Jewish spirituality: the implications for education and for pastoral care

There is a legal requirement that schools engage with the spiritual aspects of education, which encompasses pastoral care. This reflects the ethical sensibility that is present in individuals and underlies interactions with Others; and which should be part of the ethos of all educational institutions and especially schools. This is because spirituality is important to leading a moral life and to understanding the Other. The article considers specifically the potential of Jewish spirituality, and uses Martin Buber’s thought, to gain a better understanding of its contribution to education and to pastoral care. In the first part, we comment on the ‘basic words’, I-Thou and I-It, which are connected with Hasidism, the Jewish spiritual movement which had a great influence on Martin Buber. Hasidism understands that it is our duty to find and connect with the ‘divine sparks’, as genuine relations merge with the Divine, and when humans relate genuinely to one another, they relate to God. This is crucial for understanding the superiority of I-Thou relations over I-It relations. In the second and third parts of the article, we consider the implications of this understanding of Jewish spirituality for education and for pastoral care. This is done through highlighting the importance of I-Thou relations if the spiritual aspects of education and of pastoral care are to be encouraged and fulfilled.

To Reshape the World: Interpretation, Renewal, and Feminist Approaches to Jewish Law and Legal Ruling in America and Israel

This article explores the writings of three prominent contemporary Jewish feminist thinkers—Rachel Adler, Tamar Ross, and Ronit Irshai—on halakhah (Jewish law) and psak (legal rulings). It employs “On Interpretation,” the classic essay written by Shimon Rawidowicz, to frame their works. Rawidowicz had argued that Jewish thinkers in every generation were required to hear the imperative “Interpret or perish,” if Judaism was to maintain its vitality. In our day, no thinkers have done this more than Adler, Ross, and Irshai. They have attempted to reshape the world of halakhah by exposing many of its assumptions and expanding its concerns. There is a tension between “continuation and rebellion, tradition and innovation,” in their work as they seek to create “a new halakhic story.” They see themselves as bearing responsibility for Jewish continuity and spirituality even as they forthrightly acknowledge the novel turns their writings take within the framework of Jewish textual and legal tradition. By bringing their arguments together in dialogue with one another and by discussing their critics, this essay presents and highlights their views in a way that has implications for the moral shape of the Jewish community and Jewish law now and in the future.