Jay Michaelson
(c) 2001 Metatronics
 
 
 

              “Instead of reading a poem, I could be a poem.  Do I dare?”
                                                                 - Matt Eisenfeld  (1971-1996)
 
 
 

 What matters?

 Goethe said that “what matters most should never be at the mercy of what matters least.” 
But in order to order our lives in this way, the first task must be to identify what about our lives
is most real, most important. 

 The answers will differ for each of us.  For some, what matters most may be true love –
or perhaps just the grasping of another person’s hand at a moment in the theater, with the
knowledge that this is the person whose hand you most want to grasp.  For others, what matters
most is achievement, whether in scoring the big deal, alleviating suffering, or just knowing that a
good day’s work has been completed.  Painting your masterpiece, publishing your book, pursuing
the dharma, saving the rainforest – all of these may matter depending on our own circumstances
and the world in which we live.  For Wordsworth, what mattered most was a mystery “whose
dwelling is the light of setting suns/And the round ocean and the living air/And the blue sky, and
in the mind of man.”

 Whatever our answer, we know that, despite what Goethe said, what matters most is not
always able to be first and foremost in our minds or our lives.  We know that the world is not
only made up of tangents of infinity, of wonderful moments and meaningful connections with
other people.  There is also much in the world that is not-yet-good, not yet wonderful or
meaningful.  Sometimes it is cruel or unjust or even evil; more often it is just mundane.  The
television, the laundry.

 One of my teachers, Rabbi Yosef Leibowitz, suggested that we imagine this distinction
between ‘what matters’ and ‘the rest’ by rereading the creation myth in the first book of the
Bible.  We are told that the world is created “shamayim” (sky, heaven, infinite) and “aretz” –
land, world, finitude.  For Leibowitz, this dichotomy is present in all our daily lives, not just in
the ordering of creation.  On the one hand, there are transcendent values, idealistic longings, and
the moments at which we glimpse the meanings of our lives.  On the other hand, there are also
boundaries, appointments, chores, jobs – the ordinary world in which we all live every day. 

 We live in the aretz, in the world, and yet in one way or another it is an essential faculty
of the human being -- a mysterious longing which Abraham Joshua Heschel identifies as the root
of all our religious practice -- to yearn for something more.  We seek the shamayim, whether that
shamayim is ‘religious’ or ‘spiritual’ or purely secular, romantic, materialistic, athletic,
ideological, pharmacological, or in any other form.  This is not only the occupation of the
religionists.   All sensitive women and men are engaged in it, whether we are trying to chase our
dreams, or at least learn what they are; to seize the day; to pursue pleasure and have fun, if that
brings lasting joy; or simply trying to have a warm life, surrounded by a family or other people
whom you love.   Anytime we are doing something other than killing time or losing our way, we
are defining, and hopefully chasing, What Matters.  We are valuing.  From the surfer in search of
the perfect wave to the guru in the desert, we are in a struggle with our own ultimate aretz -- with
the knowledge that, within a century or so, we will be no more.  Our human existence is
conditioned by this polarity, this constant wandering between what we are and what we want to
be, what we know and what we dream.  We live it every day.

 And so, the Jewish mystics note, the first word of the Jewish Bible begins a Beit, the
second letter of the alphabet; the world exists from its first moments in two modes.  It is
impossible to conceive of the shamayim, the ideal, without the aretz, the clothing in which it is
manifested.  And it is impossible to conceive of the aretz, I have suggested, without imprinting a
notion of value on it.  Like Buddhists, Jews are suggested to see a dissonance between samsara
and nirvana, the world we know and the world to which we aspire.  And like some schools of
Buddhism, but unlike others, I will suggest that the Jewish approach to integrating shamayim and
aretz is not to reject one in favor of the other but to find a way to shape the aretz in the image of
shamayim; even an arbitrarily defined image. 

 Jews do not begin with a perfect world, subsequently ruined by Man, but with a
primordial dissonance in the world’s structure that humans are to heal.  To recapture that lost,
silent aleph – the unity, the wholeness, the emptiness, the only letter "spoken," according to
Midrash, by the divine breath at Sinai: that is the challenge.  To somehow build a place in our
finite world for the infinite; to repair, or to see beyond, all the mirrors and the opposites.  To
make “What Matters” matter to us in every day of our lives.
 
 

 Much religious talk makes this goal seem very lofty, surrounded by thous and thines, or
cloistered in a retreat amid scenic mountains.  And, for some, the reaction is to run: to renounce
the illusions of eating and breathing and making love, or to leave the world for a year, a month or
a weekend.   Or to run in the other direction and try to drown the longing in the pleasures of the
world.  But surely, making ‘what matters’ the center of your daily life should be no more lofty
than your daily life – the objects and people surrounding you now, the way you behave not while
on vacation but while at home and at work.

 This book contains several reflections on a Jewish way of going about this work.  It is
likely tied its time and place, and to my own experience.  But this is healthy.  Contrary to the
pretensions of fundamentalists, Jewish tradition says that its Torah has an infinite number of
faces, each varying not only with the external perspective but also with the internal orientation of
the receiver.  Judaism’s followers include Moroccan mystical saints and L.A. corporate lawyers,
caring pediatricians and abstract expressionists, and they all may be doing the Right Thing.  So
it’s good to be free of the modern aspiration to universalism.

 Since we will inevitably have different answers to What Matters, it is also important that
we remember the limits of our ability to define it.  Fundamentalists kill because their answers
differ from those of others.  Valuing involves our whole selves.  We can easily mistake the
stories we’ve made up for the reasons we made them up in the first place.  But we can also use
these stories, traditions, recipes, dance steps, languages, and cultural ties to build the “web of
significance” that Clifford Geertz identified as a defining characteristic of humanity. 

 This book is about how the Jewish religious and cultural traditions make What Matters
matter, and how, despite the many flaws in the way the Jewish system is lived today, some of the
vitality of that original message remains.  How, sitting with a group of friends on a Friday night,
talking about politics and drinking a little wine, I might in some way be living a life that has
meaning.  How we can understand general terms like “meaning” and “justice” without sacrificing
our intelligence or self-respect.   Surely, it shouldn’t have to cost us our intelligence to engage
with Jewish tradition, just as it shouldn’t have to cost us our Jewish values to exercise our
intellect. 
 
 

 Let us conceive of this dharma, this life-project, another way.  Many of us remember the
first words of the Torah from Sunday school.  B’reishit barah elohim et...  These words are
usually translated “In the beginning, God created...” and are followed by the direct object “the
heavens and the earth.”  But the Zohar, the masterpiece of the Kabbalah, rereads the phrase as
“With Primordial Wisdom (reshit hochmah) the Ineffable built a Palace in the Understanding.” 
What does this mean? 

 For the Zohar, it means that for the generation of the Godhead itself, for the infinite to
manifest itself in a mode cognizable to the finite, there must be a place for it to dwell.  On Earth,
this dwelling-place was the Mishkan, the tabernacle constructed for the Immanent aspect of the
Divine to “dwell” among the Israelites.  And the Torah spends dozens of lines intricately
describing how that mishkan is to be built.

 But we also build our own mishkanim, our own places where our own conceptions of the
infinite reside in the midst of our lives.  This mishkan is not a church with stained glass
windows, and it is not an authority-mediated set of truths that you must substitute for your own
experience.  Nor is it only one place or set of places in space.  It is potentially everywhere in
space and time: in the street where you meet a stranger, in the time set aside for "the holy," in
your family's house, when you're not fighting, and when the TV is off, when you see one another
as "yous" and not as "its."  Every thing that matters to you can Matter if we only allow it a space
in our lives’ geographies.  We’re not artists only when we paint, or write a poem.  We are artists
when we live.

 Easy to say such a thing, but audacious to try and actually do it.  Anyone can write prose,
or read a poem.  But to live a poem?  To live a poem requires something more than a cliche and a
formula.  It requires a structure that embodies value in the world, a way of living that is alive.

 I want to argue that the Jewish tradition tries to have us build our mishkan by demarcating
actions and zones of value that call our attention to this source of wonder, constantly turning our
attention upward, outward, inward.  I want to say that these structures, these trans-subjective
orderings of values, are – more than creed, more than myth – the center of Jewish religious
practice.  Being a Jew is less about belief in past events than enriching present ones.

 I also want to argue that the particular beams and spans of the structure -- whether it’s
Saturday or Friday, whether it’s kosher or treif -- are less essential for understanding the overall
edifice than the fact that the structure exists and points to something beyond, that it is a response. 
The architecture may even seem to us to be arbitrary.  But that it exists – then we can take shelter
under its eaves.

 And I want to argue that halacha, a trans-subjective spirituality that transcends our ego’s
desire to ‘feel spiritual’ and transforms the world into a mirror of the Divine mind, is our unique
spiritual discipline.  Rodger Kamenetz, author of The Jew in the Lotus and Stalking Elijah, once
told me that the Dalai Lama asked of Jewish leaders what Jews do to cleanse the mind, to clean
out the ego and the anger.  Some in the Jewish delegation knew of the meditative techniques of
Abraham Abulafia or the Baal Shem Tov's techniques for attaining hishtavut (equanimity). 
Others mentioned prayer.  But no one said halacha itself.  But in focusing our lives on matters
greater than ourselves, halacha can itself bring us to mindfulness and bittul ha-yesh (annihilation
of the self), right action and devekut -- holding fast to God.

 Finally, I want to argue that, as the many teachers of mindfulness always remind us, peace
is in every step.  Redemption is in front of us.  Being a decent human being, who is honest and
caring; who tries to make a life worth living, who loves -- this is the Jewish Chartres.  It matters
more than proud towers, more than whether a particular claim of dogma is true or false, more
than myths of sin and salvation, and even more than having your name up on the Donor Wall in
the synagogue.  It is a lived poem, and the Jewish way can provide the rhythm and the rhyme.
 
 

 For many of my generation, the basic contours of the Jewish project are completely lost. 
Most of our most sensitive souls are bored with Judaism, and rarely pursue it beyond
adolescence.  They may pursue other spiritual paths, or none at all, but who can blame them for
leaving the Jewish one when their childhood memories are of inexplicable prohibitions,
incomprehensible prayers, and unbelievable stories. 

 If Judaism is about infusing our daily lives with an echo of our own deep-seated awe, it is
not surprising that its contours mimic those of our daily lives.  So, if American life resembles a
visit to McDonald’s, so will American Judaism.  Our parents’ generation, for all their good
intentions, have created a wonderful religion of convenience; adaptable to whatever
circumstances, prejudices, and fears we might have.  It doesn’t ask much of us, and is tailored to
a particular form of mid-20th-Century American suburban experience, involving ordered hymns
and men’s clubs, pews and dress codes.  It fits between the 9 to 5 job on Friday and the football
game/mall experience on Sunday.  These are not criticisms; much of Judaism’s strength is in its
adaptability.  But it leaves many of us searching.

 The seventy faces of Torah are both conceptual and temporal.  Jews are always creating
their own "old-new words," in the language of the Kabbalah.  The Kabbalistic text known as the
Sefer haMeshiv (book of Redemption) speaks of the Bible as manifesting a different face to each
generation, as each generation struggles like Jacob -- struggling to become Israel, he who
wrestles with God.  Each hears in the aleph a different frequency of imperative, depending not
only on where she stands but when she stands as well: our culture, our access to information, and
our history is new.  Your father's Judaism will not be yours.  His books will speak to you, and
your mother's traditions can fill your life with beauty.  But just as you cannot destroy your own
history, you cannot fully inhabit it either.  "Lech lecha" is today.  Make it new.

 More than that: much of the revelation consists of relevation of self -- the Revealer and
the audience together form the act of revelation.  There is no "I" without a "Thou."  Thus each
generation's struggle with the texts and pasts of Jewish memory is a birth-pang of a new
revelation, and a revelation of self as well as Other.  Those who are the most alienated are often
among our most vital religious geniuses, for their passion for truth excludes the easy
contradictions of their upbringing.  On either side, the path is easy: accept without questioning
bizarre prohibitions on shellfish or cheeseburgers, or reject them without questioning.  What a
lonely path it often is to question.

 To understand, we need not to be convinced.  What did or did not occur in a Near-Eastern
desert thousands of years ago, if it even matters, can no longer be taught to sensitive souls from
the authoritarian voice of the pulpit.  Faith and piety may still be available to us today, but for
most of us in the West, they must be recovered, re-learned, and reclaimed for ourselves.  For
those who are content with unquestioned conventions, I offer only my admiration.  For the rest,
for those who grew up repulsed by ice sculptures at bar mitzvah parties and stilted responsive
readings, yet who still wonder if there is truth behind the mystery, I offer this book.
 
 

Chapter One.                            Rosh Hodesh Nisan
 
 
 

 Not long ago, I spent a week in the deserts of Jordan and Israel, a good part of it in Wadi
Rum, a vast depression in the southern part of Jordan.  This was before recent events made such
travel perilous, and I had time to explore on my own as much as I wished.  The last time I had
visited Wadi Rum, I was en route (like most tourists) to Petra, Jordan’s wondrous main
attraction, a Nabatean city hewed into red rock canyons.  Wadi Rum was just a short stop on the
trip, and ever since that first visit I wanted to give it the time I felt it deserved.

 On my first visit, what impressed me most about Wadi Rum was its vastness: there was
vacant, immense, silent space, stretching to the horizon.  At one point, our Bedouin guide drove
for half an hour of blank space – no trees, no geography just rocks and sand -- just to bring us to
the nearest mountain, which had seemed right on top of us relative to the distant ones.  Looking
out at the peaks further away, it seemed as though I was looking at the edge of the world.  Off in
the distance, there were two mountains, surrounded by nothing.

 I wanted to go there.  I wanted to have all that vast space around me.  Having felt a sense
of awe – what so many scholars of religion identify as the root of humanity’s religious sensibility
– I now wanted to immerse myself in the wadi’s emptiness.  I wanted to sense what Heschel
called ‘radical amazement,’ what Rudolf Otto called the trembling in the face of the mysterium
tremendum.  I wanted to climb the mountain at the edge of the world.
 

                             *          *         *

 For Heschel, radical amazement not about the beauty of a sunset or a quality of a smile – 
these objects of our fascination are immediate and comprehensible.  Rather, radical amazement is
like a gesture of wonder towards that which we can neither describe nor understand.  It points,
but cannot describe.  Although seemingly useless from an evolutionary point of view (Stephen
Jay Gould calls the religious impulse an anomaly – a drive that seems to serve no purpose at all),
this capacity for wonder is the source, Heschel says, of art, of conscience, of all our
quintessentially human activities.   “It is the sense of the sublime that we have to regard as the
root of man’s creative activities in art, thought and noble living.” 

 Wonder seems to demand a response.  At sites of great beauty, many of us hurry to fill the
vacuum with comparisons to other places we have visited, with calibrations of our cameras, or
with conversation.  Sometimes, we abandon these efforts and feel the yawning gap between what
we are witnessing and our ability to testify to it.  Other times, our encounters with beauty, or
tragedy, change us: we are moved to respond in a way that better conforms our lives to the
imperative we feel at these moments of ultimate meaning.  Sometimes these changes endure, and
sometimes they do not.
 

                             *          *         *
 

 It would be a mistake to suppose that a spiritual life is one which involves lots of
excursions to places wherein we can be inspired.  If our pursuit of higher spiritual purpose takes
us away from the world in which we normally live, why do we normally live there?  And what
are we saying, in retreating from it, about the ‘normal’ world’s value to us as human beings?

 Even for Heschel, who called religion “the art of learning to live in amazement,” the
meaningfulness of our awe depends entirely on how it influences our subsequent experience –
not how wonderful the desert is, but what we do when we reached the promised land.  The desert,
in the Hebrew Bible, is a cradle – not a harsh, hostile wilderness, but, as any desert hiker knows,
a quiet, clear place where priorities can be set in order.  It is a world apart.  The challenge is to
bring the insights of the desert, where all is clear, into the rest of the world, where all is not.
 
 

 And so, the story of my second trip to Wadi Rum.  This time, I had days to spend where
earlier I had only passed hours.  So, after spending a night in a Bedouin tent, I set out for the
mountains at the edge of the world.

 I knew, rationally, that the mountains could not be as they appeared, that I would not find
the two mountains I had seen from a distance surrounded by nothing at all for uncounted
hundreds of miles.  But, still, I had to see. 

 When I climbed the mountain (which may not have been a good idea from a safety point
of view), I naturally saw that what I had perceived as a lone, last mountain was in fact part of a
larger chain.  There was another mountain range beyond this one – invisible from my previous
vantage point because of the topography of the area -- and the ‘mountain at the edge of the
world’ was only one of a group of foothills.  So much for my glimpse of the infinite, and my
insatiable desire to have some unmediated contact with it.  It was just another mountain range.

 And yet, I did not feel disappointment.  On the contrary, I had a sense of contentment.  I
felt as though I had lain to rest a destructive myth: the idea that there was, on just the other side
of the horizon, a world of amazement, of significance, about which I could only dream.  I had
found, instead, that the ‘world of mystery’ greatly resembled the world I already knew.  The end
of the world pointed back to the world from which I had come, as if to say: this is where value
resides.  What did you expect?

                             *          *         *

 The imagination of a fantasy world of ideals is not an exclusively religious myth.  It is the
lie behind our cult of celebrity, the titillations of advertisements, and the many promises that
somewhere, someone is leading the life you must seek to imitate.  But it haunts our religious
consciousness in particular: that there is a Sugarcandy Mountain somewhere else, that this world
is only an entryway to the world that really matters, that there was or will be a Golden Age apart
from the ones we bring about through our own efforts.  All of these stories have their place and
use, but all also have the power to dim our eyes both to the wonder in our everyday lives and to
the suffering that we have the power to lessen.  They postpone, they defer, they deflect our
attention away from what is right in front of us.

 Hold a leaf in your hand so that the sun shines through it.  Which is more beautiful – the
pearled gates of an imagined heaven, or the network of veins in the intricately designed machine
between your fingers?  And then imagine this leaf, one of hundreds on a tree, on one tree of
thousands in a forest, in one forest among ten thousand on our globe.  Imagine, as the great
Jewish mystical teachers did, that each of these leaves, every blade of grass, sings a song to God,
and that the melancholy music of humanity can join in the chorus with them in a wondrous,
fourfold song, and that you, too, can contribute a verse.

                             *          *         *

 Rosh Hodesh Nisan was the Biblical New Year – Rosh Hashanah, originally Yom
Hazikaron (the day of remembrance), became the Jewish New Year only after our encounter with
Babylonian civilization.  It is an appropriate place to begin this reorientation, and to consider the
Jewish answer to the imperative voice which tells us: You Must Respond.

 Nisan inaugurates the cycle of Jewish holidays, which are focused around the liminal time
the ancient (some say imagined) Israelites spent in the desert.  I will have occasion to speak about
the themes of these holidays in due course.  But the overall trajectory is what is important now:
that they look forward, not backward.  The exodus from Egypt is a leave-taking, like Abraham’s
from his father’s house in Mesopotamia, but it is a leaving-from in order to go-to – to go to the
new society to be set up in Canaan.  The revelation on Shavuot contains the instructions for how
that society is to be built.  And the sheltering providence of Sukkot reminds us that the desert is a
temporary place, where we seek refuge (I am writing this now from my own sukkah), where we
prepare to undertake our project of translating wonder into action.  And so, to begin.
 

                             *          *         *

 If God were easily comprehensible, it would be a simple matter to dedicate our lives to
the Divine Service.  If God is a great father, in the sky, who thrives on the smoke from our
sacrificial bonfire, it would be an obvious task to keep the fires burning, keep the deity happy,
and go about our lives as we pleased.  Or, if we learned with some clarity that the source of our
wonder and amazement has a clear set of rules for us to follow – keeping separate dishes for milk
products and meat, ensuring that we do not mix our linens and our wool – we would be fools not
to scrupulously follow these rules, however inscrutable they may appear.

 For most of us today, these conceptions of Ultimate reality seem to ring false.  We can
understand them as metaphor, perhaps, but only fundamentalists would see them as truly
describing the interests of some entity in which we can truly believe.  All of us, I have suggested,
feel a sense of awe at beauty, or suffering, or intricate complexity – but this awe is hardly the
same as a faith in a set of narratives or propositions about the world.  How do the two intersect?

 Let us assume the Ineffability of the Ultimate, a quality which all the great mystical
writers of the world convey.  Sufis, Zen monks, ecstatic Kabbalists, medieval nuns, Native
American shamans, Hindu priests – all, in their moments of closest communion with the
Ultimate, say that they can no longer say, that they have reached the limit of their understanding. 
To be sure, mystics carry with them the associations and assumptions of their very different
traditions – there is no perennial philosophy uniting them all.  But they all seem to converge upon
the Cloud of Unknowing, and return unable to describe what lies beyond it.

 What, then, is our response to this Quality of the world?

 I have already expressed a certain distaste for the response of “More, please.”  If our
experience of the ultimate – whether aesthetic, religious, scientific, or any other theistic or non-
theistic mode – if this experience is totally disconnected from the rest of our lives, then the rest
of our lives are truly meaningless and irredeemable.  Consider: if what I have beheld is truly the
source of value and meaning, and if it has no relation to the rest of the world, then the rest of the
world has no value or meaning.  If what goes on in the Church, or at the Wall, or in the gallery
matters, then either it relates to the rest of the world in some way, or the rest of the world is
utterly insignificant.

 I’m reminded of our pop culture’s division of time into the work-week, which doesn’t
matter, and the weekend, which does.  Five days a week, fifty weeks a year, are not really living,
two days or weeks are.  Is this the way anyone who truly values their work really considers it? 
Or, speaking religiously, maybe you get the Inspiration once a year, or maybe once a week.  A
saint might be carried away from the ordinary world on a daily or hourly basis.  Lucky them.

 Let us suppose that this situation is inconceivable.  Let us imagine that there must be
some way to configure our lives – our ordinary lives, with post-its and french fries and visits to
the doctor – in a way that reflects, in some way, this source of Value. What would that way, that
Tao, look like?

 Depending on our culture, the Way assumes a myriad forms.  The Zen Buddhist learns
that the mountains are mountains, that this cup of tea is here, even as it is empty of substance,
that the chore in front of us is this chore.  The Christian charity worker sees Christ not as some
far-off man with a beard in a pearly palace, but in the work before her: in the poor and hungry
person here.  These are ways of seeing the infinite as reflected – or reflect-able – in the finite
world in which we live.  Let us now focus on a Jewish way.

 In the Jewish tradition, we begin, like this chapter, in the desert: at Sinai.  We have taken
leave of our slavery in Egypt, we are ready to be responsible for our own lives.  Importantly, the
revelation at Sinai, in the Jewish tradition, is not about the bells and whistles, the thunder and
lightning, that is so often emphasized in Sunday school classrooms.  It is, as the Torah describes
it, a moment of radical, collective amazement – a moment of transcendence for everyone who
witnesses it.  But it is all about what to do next: what the day after Sinai is meant to look like. 
That day after, and if not the day after then a month later or two months, people stopped gaping
at the skies the way New Yorkers gaped at their downtown after it was so suddenly destroyed, or
the way grieving widows feel the absence of their missed husbands.  Eventually, the Children of
Israel returned to squabbling, cooking, managing their herds – and that is what matters.

 The Jewish Tao is called halacha, which like the word ‘Tao’ means ‘the way to go.’  It
concerns every aspect of human life, from mundane biological functions to supernatural religious
ones.  And it is divided into two parts: responsibilities to God and responsibilities to other human
beings. 

 As I will have occasion to discuss later, I think the latter half is more audacious
theologically – it suggests that the Spirit of the Universe cares about human (and animal)
suffering.  But I will postpone discussion of it for now.  All of us, following Kant whether we
know it or not, can agree that there are certain ethical rules to which we ought to be bound. 
Whether they are best expressed in generalities (‘reduce suffering’) or specific laws, these ways
in which we shape our human world are familiar to every decent human being.  They seem not to
involve religion or theology.  And so they can be set aside for now.

 What would a ‘responsibility to God’ look like if we assume that God is utterly beyond
our comprehension?  Again, let us reject the fundamentalist reading of our sacred texts that says
that God has told us exactly what He wants.  If we can believe such a reading, very well, but let
us suppose that we cannot – at least not without more explanation.   What, then, do we do after
our moment of closeness to the Ultimate?
 
 

 Across the breadth of human experience, humans respond to the Ultimate by setting
something apart.  They build sanctuaries, carve idols, create art, dedicate portions of their lives or
livelihoods to It.  Sectarians can argue endlessly over which symbol is the most appropriate, but
it seems that the act of designation itself is the human response to radical otherness.

 That which is designated as relating-to-God in the Jewish tradition is called kadosh,
which means ‘dedicated’ or ‘set apart.’  There is nothing intrinsically different between that
which is kadosh and that which is not, except for the fact that the former has been designated as
such.   Linguistically, in both Biblical and modern Hebrew, the word can refer to a building that
is “mekudash” on the date the cornerstone is laid, a memorial that is “mekudash” in the name of
the person or event it commemorates.  The word is even used in the Bible to refer to pagan
women who were dedicated -- mekudash -- to serve as prostitutes in a holy rite.  Certainly, these
women were not kadosh in the sense of holier than you or me; they were k’deshim in the sense of
being dedicated for a particular purpose.

 The lines of holiness, in other words, are arbitrary.  There is nothing special about food
without pork, or the seventh day of the week.  Wearing a certain kind of skullcap or fringed
garment is not magical.  It is significant only because it is part of the process of signification.  It
might as well be something else – but then, if it were something else, it would not be part of the
trans-subjective, communal, and everlasting project of signification that is Judaism.  It would be
a whim.

 There can be no morphology between our world and the shape of the Ineffable Godhead. 
Any sign or symbol we use to designate a part of our world as referring to the Divine will be, of
necessity, arbitrary.  The Torah spends thousands of words describing how the tabernacle, the
mishkan, the dwelling-place for God’s infinite presence in our finite world, is to look. 
Prescriptions for architecture, for materials, for interior design, for what fabric is used for the
priestly garments, what animals are clean and unclean, how many times the lamb’s blood is
sprinkled in this direction or that.  Any non-fundamentalist student who’s spent time with these
texts has to wonder: Would it really make a difference?  Would it matter if the lamb’s blood
were sprinkled four times instead of three?

 There are two possible religious answers to these questions.  The first is that it is all
magic: the blood must be sprinkled three times, because that is the only way to make the magic
work.  The second is to deny anything special about the particular pattern of the blood, but to
insist that some pattern be prescribed.  And once it is prescribed, it is Ultimate, because although
the content of the act of signification may be seemingly meaningless, the importance of the
value-creating enterprise is paramount.  Nothing matters more than that which makes the world,
or a portion of it, matter.

 An example: the Torah prescribes that, in order to cleanse the children of Israel from a
certain form of impurity, the ashes of a red heifer must be employed, in a particular way, to
conduct the purification ritual.  (‘Pure’ and ‘impure’ are poor translations of their Hebrew
originals, tahor and tameh, because they imply some sort of flaw or corruption, when in the
original, two states of religious significance, or states of being, are all that is implied.)  Two
explanations of this ritual may be offered.  In the first, the ritual of the red heifer is voodoo: there
is a magical quality that the cow possesses, and the Torah is giving us the recipe for how to
employ it.  In the second, the red heifer is no different from any other animal – there is no
materiality to this impurity, after all; it is but a designation.  Yet its specialness, its being-set-
apart, renders the red heifer kadosh and thus authenticates the purification ritual.

 A possible answer: the kohen who handles the ashes of the red heifer himself becomes
tameh (impure).  If the red heifer were some sort of magical cleansing agent, why would the
kohen become impure by handling it?  Surely, if purity is a matter of material or magical
cleanliness, that which cleanses cannot also render defiled.  But if the red heifer is not a magical
cow but is significant only in its context, we can better understand the transformation of the
priest.

 In this view, the act of designation is not something that inheres in the object itself --
there are no magical cows.  Nor, indeed, is it something that springs from what we prefer or what
we feel.  The only content of the act of designation is the act of designation.

 If this is correct, our almost intuitive puzzlement at the cultic nature of rituals such as
these – and with enough critique, most religious rituals become equally perplexing and
mysterious – is appropriate.  The powerful symbols of religious devotion are, to our eyes,
random.  And yet, they are the means by which we gesture to the infinite.  How better could we
approximate the ineffable?
 

 An immediate contrary proposal arises.  If religious action is, from the perspective of
content, arbitrary – and recall we are only discussing religious action bein adam l’makom, not
ethics – then surely we could invent our own rituals and have the same effect.  The Torah (as we
interpret it) requires meat not to be mixed with milk.  Very well; I will require meat not to be
mixed with fish.  Cheeseburgers for all!

 There are several answers to this proposal.  The first is an immediate one to any who has
lived a religious life: such a world is devoid of community, and thus labors under the illusion that
each of us exists independently.  Significantly, Jewish origination myths relate that the Torah is
given to the entire nation as a whole.  Abraham, Moses, and other progenitors had their spiritual
experiences in the lonely solitude of individual faith.  But Divine legislation, according to the
myth, was granted to the entire people together.  Human life is social life; we exist in
communities, even if these communities are based upon the rejection of other communities.  To
imagine that our webs of signification could be utterly private is folly.

 Second, one might easily suspect that the totems and taboos chosen by the individual
religionist to be all-too-contiguous with that religionist’s private desires.  Suspicious, isn’t it, that
the foods this would-be Zarathustra prohibits are precisely those which he happens not to enjoy. 
Or that the rituals he requires of himself to acknowledge the presence of Ultimate Value take him
so little out of his ordinary routine.

 In short, for religious action to take us beyond our egos, it must be trans-subjective in
nature.  A religion that is constructed around our wants is not a temple to God; it is a temple to
our wants.  This is true not only for he who would create his own religion out of whole cloth but
also for any of us who claims that by observing ‘what feels comfortable’ to us we are truly
participating in something beyond our own desire.  When we cater our lifestyles to our desires,
when we abridge our communal observance patterns in accord with our own preferences, we are
serving a deity no larger and no more significant than ourselves.  We may prefer a religious
flavor of egotism to a materialistic or sensualistic one.  But if the purpose of all three is to gratify
the self, is there really any difference between them?

 True kedushah, then, must flow from somewhere outside our own ego.  But where?

 To ask this question is to search for foundations, for genesis.  And it is, in many ways, the
central struggle of the first two books of the Torah.  How can this nation come into being,
without being dependent on something that preceded it?  How can its laws come into being, if
not from the people themselves?

 For most Jews today, the notion that the Torah truly was dictated by a Heavenly voice is
difficult to sustain.  We know too much about its literary styles, its debts to other sacred texts of
the Near East, and its many contradictions, to maintain the literal reading of ‘Torah min
ha’shamayim,’ Torah from heaven.  We have lost our the luxury of such innocence.  But if we
take the myth as myth – if we accept that these arbitrary lines are “from heaven,” have we not
created a mythic superstructure within which our adoption of religious norms can take place? 
Jewish mythopoesis is not a matter of whimsically spinning fables; it is the project of a people, as
rich as the jurisgenesis which is our problem at present.  Let us take the myth as no more and no
less than a people’s foundation myth.  Let us accept that we can never wholly escape the human
origin of our mirrors to the Divine, but let us escape it nonetheless. 
 
 

The consequences of a trans-subjective religiosity are often startling.  Let us pursue three
examples.

 First is in the book of Leviticus, the book of the Torah centered on the responsibilities
and privileges of Israel’s priestly caste.  Nadav and Avihu, sons of Aaron himself, in line to head
the priestly family, are preparing what our Biblical commentators tell us was a spontaneous
religious expression – they sought to offer a sacrifice that sprang not from the prescribed list but
from their hearts.  But from the perspective of the Torah, what they were offering was “strange
fire” (or, perhaps more tellingly from a sociological-historical viewpoint, “foreign fire”).  They
are literally struck dead -- one of the very, very few times in the Bible where this actually occurs. 
To repeat, it is said by Biblical commentators that Nadav and Avihu had not actually acted with
evil intent; they were trying to better know and serve God.  But they did not do that which was
kadosh.

 Another story, this time even more outrageous.  The Ark of the Covenant is being
transported to Jerusalem, having been recaptured from the Philistines, who had carried it off in
war.  Suddenly, it slips from the beams that were supporting it on the convoy, and is about to fall. 
Immediately, a pious Jew rushes over and catches it, preventing what would have been a horrible
ignominy.  He too is struck down, instantly killed.  Why?  Was he not preventing the Ark from
suffering an indignity?  Perhaps yes, but there is no law regarding such a perceived ‘indignity.’ 
There are laws prohibiting touching the Ark.  Here, too, the pious Jew may have sought in his
heart to serve God and perhaps even follow the ‘spirit’ of some law or other, as he understood it. 
But in contravening the legal – even legalistic – prescription of what is kadosh, he transgressed.

 And finally, an outrageous tale of King David himself, who when the Ark was returned
danced in front of it, filled with joy and ecstasy.  What better act of religious fervor than this?  A
spontaneous dance of joy.  And yet, Nathan the Prophet later rebukes David for having danced in
this way.  It was unbecoming, Nathan says, because of how the King exposed himself in his
dances.  But worse, it was uncommanded.  Who is King David that he thinks he can institute a
new form of worship?  What is he doing presenting his own emotional response as being on a par
with that which is mekudash?  The source of that which is kadosh is God.  The source of our own
emotional responses is ourselves. 

 In each of these cases, someone has acted in accord with what we must surely agree is
true, sincere religious intent.  But in each case, they have equated that intent -- desire to serve
God, desire to save the Ark from desecration, desire to express joy -- with Divine command.  In
the first two instances, they actually contravened a Divine command, and were instantaneously
punished for it.  (To state the obvious, it doesn’t matter if we believe these stories; the point is
that they are myths trying to convey something about holy acts and objects.)  David did not break
any explicit commandment, and was not punished, but is nonetheless explicitly rejoined by the
voice of prophecy.

 Let us not minimize the seeming outrageousness of these narratives.  They seem to
contradict utterly what many of us may take for a commonplace: that religion is precisely about
the outpouring of the heart, or the ‘spirit.’  Even if we were to agree with the larger premise –
that the halacha is, as a system, an arbitrary, ultimate gesture toward the ultimate, and an effort to
shape the world into a reflection of it – surely this should not operate to the exclusion of
individual religious sentiment! 
 

 I want to defend exactly that outrageous proposition: that trans-subjective religiosity is,
indeed, greater than that which emanates from my particular subjectivity.  That sometimes, it will
not feel good to observe shabbat or the dietary laws, but that this reorientation is part of what
dedicates a life toward whatever imagination of ultimate good which our minds can conceive. 
The roots of our conceptions of the good are different for each of us, stemming from our own
subjectivity and contingency.  But our reflections of the good in the way in which we order our
lives – these, to be larger than ourselves, must originate from a place other than our preferences.

 More: to mix the definition of the Holy with ideas about magic or ideas about my own
personal spirituality (or, worse, my own personal preference) is to demean the idea of the Holy.
This term, this dedication, is supposed to set apart that which is holy from that which is not-holy. 
We must draw a line devoid of content in order to properly dedicate the Holy to the Infinite. 
Halacha is ontological, not psychological.

 An analogy.  A truly set-apart object has no instrumental value other than its set-apart-
ness.  It may be compared to Walter Benjamin’s autonomous work of art.  The work of art for
Benjamin is not beautiful because it plays well off the sofa or because it reminds you of the
summer you spent in the mountains.  These are the functions of kitsch.  The work of art is
significant in and of itself, apart from its “function” in the world.  The best art has no function at
all. 

 So too the kadosh.  It has no purpose: no magical purpose, no personal purpose, no
practical purpose.  It is a line drawn only because it is an arbitrary, ultimate way of making the
Transcendent Immanent, making the infinite present.

 What is an example of this?  In application, this process of dedication and setting apart
occurs in the Jewish world hundreds if not thousands of times a day.  We ourselves say to God,
every time we perform a commandment, that God has “kidshanu b’mitzvotav”, has made-us-
holy, or designated us, or set us apart, by God’s commandments.  It is by performing these ritual
and ethical acts that we make our lives dedicated to God. 

 Interestingly, when such an act is otherwise arbitrary -- lighting candles, for example, or
wearing tzitzit -- we say the “kidshanu b’mitzvotav” language.  When the act is not arbitrary --
eating, going to the bathroom -- the bracha usually refers to the content of the act.  So we
acknowledge God as having created fruit, or having set our bodies in order, but we don’t “thank”
God for the candles or the tzitzit.  And  indeed, we’re not even allowed to use a kishanu-
b’mitzvotav object for any practical purpose.  We’re not supposed to use the shabbat candles for
light; they are mekudash for God and shabbat.  We’re not supposed to wear the tzitzit as just an
extra layer when it’s cold; they are mekudash for God and the remembrance of God.  We ritually
wash our hands before eating even if they are clean -- and, because of the limited way in which
that act can be performed, most people really wash their hands first, with soap and so on, if they
need to, and only then do the ritual act.  Some people might find this ridiculous, but that’s only if
they think that the ritual washing is about being clean.  It’s not.  It’s about preparing ourselves in
a certain way, setting ourselves apart. 

 The a priori rules of the halacha – a priori because they seem not to depend on any value
in the world, but rather confer value on things in the world – are functionally the same as the
architectural details of the mishkan in the desert.  Could they be otherwise?  Of course, and of
course not.  The occasion of awe – at beauty, at nature, at tragedy, at history – demands some
response.  If our awe is truly at the transcendent, then no particular response can articulate its
essence.  And yet, we are called upon to respond.  We search for foundations, and have only the
Torah min ha’shamayim, delineating lines among and between the substance of this world.  It
will have to do.
 
 

 Is the heart, then, of no interest whatsoever to the man or woman of halacha?

 Surely, even if what goes on between our ears is less important than what goes on in the
world – even if halacha is concerned with how the material objects of the world are arranged, not
how we happen to like the arrangement – surely, we are meant to be uplifted and edified by the
religious project!  Surely there is a difference between a golem, a drone arranging the objects in
the world like the settings of a table (no coincidence that the preeminent codification of Jewish
law is called the Shulhan Aruch, the set table) and a sensitive, thinking, caring human being
performing acts of kindness or ritual out of a deep sense of spiritual awareness.  Surely the
halacha cannot only be about checking off boxes and delimiting arbitrary spaces in the world. 
Where is the spirit?

 What do we mean by the term ‘spirit’?  To that there is a ‘spirit’ of something has at least
two meanings.  On the one hand, it has a simple meaning -- when you do something with spirit,
you are engaged and enthusiastic about what you are doing, as opposed to when you simply carry
something out by rote or out of compulsion.  And yet there is a deeper meaning, one all-too-
frequently conflated with the simpler one: the spirit of the law, the soul of the human, that which
is real, that which we can feel and somehow sense.  This, latter spirit is precisely that which
makes us human, or so we are sometimes told; it transcends our body, it is What Matters to
Western religion, we are sometimes told.  Why?

 All of us know that, sooner or later, our bodies will crumble and rot.  We know that
material things are impermanent, and we want something more than that.  We so desperately
want to believe, like the Ancient Greeks, that human beings are not entirely encased in their
brains and bodies but have something eternal in them.  And that that eternal something is what is
real.  Someone who merely fulfills the strictures of the halacha without cultivating her spirit is
neglecting precisely that which is most enduring – in this view.

 But suppose we questioned this rather anti-scientific conception of the non-material
human soul.  Suppose we thought that reality of our lives is that they are defined by birth and
death, by first names and last names, by nothing more (and nothing less) than the random facts of
our fleeting existence.  And that, correspondingly, What Matters religiously is not the soul but is
in fact this body, governed by literal, material laws.  That, yes, we do change, and yes, we do die,
but that during that process there are still ways of valuing.  Still a covenant with God.  Does the
‘spirit,’ then, matter as much as the way the real, material world is constructed?

 We are used to thinking dualistically because doing so has been the dominant mode of
philosophical thinking in Western culture since Western culture began.  The Platonic idea of
form, for example, was only the most sophisticated of Greek attempts to answer this problem. 
Several earlier philosophers had sought to identify the constant in a given thing -- water, or fire --
and some simply said rather paradoxically that the only thing that is constant is change. For
Plato, what was constant was the form of a thing -- the chair-ness of a chair, the humanity of a
human.  This ‘form’ was only approximated by a particular chair or a particular human being, but
it was nonetheless that chair’s or human’s essence.  The rest – the uniqueness of this human
being apart from another one – was seemingly real, but actually inessential.

 Rather than relearn the assumptions of the Greeks, let us focus on a more recent, and
more cognizably Jewish, struggle with the same issue: that between the Hasidim and the
Mitnagdim.

 Historically – which is not our interest – Hasidism developed in the late eighteenth
century as a series of challenges to traditional Judaism.  And Mitnagdim were Hasidism’s
opponents.  The Hasidim sought to reinfuse Jewish life with the ecstatic, mystical, and often
magical elements of Judaism heretofore restricted to elites.  Drawing on kabbalistic doctrine,
they emphasized the ‘kernel’ of the mitzvot rather than the ‘shell.’  They held that a glimpse of
redemption was available in every moment, that ecstatic prayer and devotion to the tzaddik could
bring one closer to the Divine.  And before Hasidism grew conservative, in response to the
challenges of the Jewish enlightenment, it was a profoundly revolutionary movement, upsetting
existing standards of hierarchy, learning, and merit. 

 Thinking ahistorically, we can imagine the Hasidic and Mitnagdic responses, totally
opposed to each other, to the following challenge: Why Be (observantly) Jewish?

 A Hasidic response might be: A Jewish life drips with the emotional joy and spiritual
fulfillment that comes about from a life of Torah.  It is wonderful.  The sense of serenity and
holiness that fills a Jewish home as the shabbat candles are lit, the ecstasy one feels as one
approaches God in prayer, these forms of Cleaving to God are the ultimate end of the law, and by
approaching the Jewish life with the right spiritual intention, the experience is accessible.  What
you are looking for is here; the law brings about not only true freedom but also joy, love, spiritual
fulfillment.  Every mitzvah, every prayer, offers a way to contact the ayin, the ineffable,
transcendent Nothing that permeates out existence.  Your life can become filled with this
awareness of the "extension of the Infinite into everything," to paraphrase the late Lubavitcher
Rebbe's definition of the essence of Hasidism.  Each ritual act, and for a Jew that means every act
there is, unites these worlds -- the shamayim and aretz.

 A Mitnaggdic response might be: Are you after a life centered around Ultimate value,
around holiness, or just a feeling that you happen to enjoy?  Yes, challah is delicious and so is
chicken soup, but a ‘spiritual feeling’ might not be the point.  Holiness might have more to do
with the way the world looks – whether you are observing the mitzvot, for example – than the
way the inside of your brain looks.  It might be that some of this religious enthusiasm, though
important in its place, can obscure the real point, which is to order one’s life in a way that echoes
eternity.  And the God is in the details, in the complex logical webs of the Talmud, in clarifying
the nature of our obligations.  While it is interesting, it is rather beside the point to ask what the
‘meaning’ of the mitzvot is, because the mitzvot are meaning. For a Mitnaggid, the beauty of the
stars is important, but what is more important is what they mean to us as Jews; what they signify
in our holy project of life-ordering.  Not so much the wonder of the stars, but in trying to count
them. 

 A comparison, on the same set of images.  The Hasid is Walt Whitman:

 When I heard the learn'd astronomer,
 When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me,
 When I was shown the charts and diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them,
      When I sitting heard the astronomer where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room,
 How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick,
 Till rising and gliding out I wander'd off by myself,
 In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,
 Look'd up in perfect silence at the stars.

The mysticism of the night air fills the Hasid with wonder, and with silence.  He sees the stars,
and the details of the astronomer fade from his contemptuous memory.  And how true this is! 
How mediocre are our efforts  “to add, divide and measure.” 

 But the Mitnaggid is Rav Soloveitchik:

 When halakhic man looks to the western horizon and sees the fading rays of the setting sun
 or to the eastern horizon and sees the first light of dawn and the glowing rays of the rising sun,
 he knows that this sunset or sunrise imposes upon him anew obligations and commitments...
 When he goes out on a clear, moonlit night (until the deficiency of the moon is replenished),
 he makes a blessing upon it.
 He knows that it is the moon that determines the times of the months
 and thus of all the Jewish seasons and festivals,
 and this determination must rely upon astronomical calculations.

Surely, this is more difficult to understand.  I remember when I first read the book from which
this text is taken, Halachic Man, when I was a teenager, it confirmed everything that I loathed
about Judaism.  Here was the response of one of the foremost traditional religious thinkers of the
last century to a beautiful sunset and starry sky, but instead of lofty speculation on the majesty of
God, we got details, law, obligations.

 Yet the Rav’s use of these evocative images is intentional.  It is a radical idea that one
might be trying to count the stars not to fill oneself with wonder but rather to see if the three stars
that signal the end of the Sabbath have come out yet.  But let’s imagine for a moment that our
own pleasure might not be the highest value: what a remarkable, de-egoizing revelation!  That in
place of the neurons in the hasid's brain jiggling a certain way, from which the hasid infers a
contact with the infinite, the Rav sees the process of world-creating as an effort to bring that
“infinite” into the world of the finite.  Instead of running away from the world to the transcendent
on the one hand, or running away from the transcendent and burying oneself in the material of
the world on the other, the halachic man seeks to bring the two together.  He seeks to create the
footprint of God in the world.  To do that means that the ordering of the way things are in the
world is a religious quality.  It matters that this time signifies that religious value, because in
building a world of these values we are God’s agents.  To repeat, the Mitnaggid does not look
silently at the stars.  He tries to count them – and in so doing, he partners himself with God in the
sublime act of making his own life significant.  His verse is contributed to the play of life not by
padding his own ego, but by participating in a larger-than-ego project of building the world.

 And of course, when done right, the twin goals of immanence and transcendence unite. 
Trying to count the stars is an act of wonder as well as of religious signification.  These goals are
not mutually exclusive.  As much as I may now seek to rescue Mitnagdism from my own earlier
rejection of it, the Hasidic view has played a tremendous role in my own personal turn to
Judaism, and it animates the daily life of most Jews who have come to their observance
voluntarily.  The Hasidic ‘answer’ that I discovered was that the same inner truths that attracted
me to other religious traditions like Buddhism and Taoism were “within” the ritual structure of
Judaism.  That is, keeping Shabbat was a way of turning off materialism, of renouncing the
desire to change the world -- it was a day of living the Tao instead of fighting it.  At the core of
Hasidic worship is the concept of bittul, of self-annihilation, which I analogized to Buddhist
recognitions of non-self and subsuming oneself in the All.  And, I learned from experience,
anyone who thinks that Jewish laws are slavishly obeyed without any sense of religious
enthusiasm has simply never had a decent shabbos.  If this includes you, go have a decent
shabbos!  Go to a tisch!  See the joy, dance the dance, find out what it’s all about.  Or at least
read The Sabbath, by Heschel.  Listen to Rav Shlomo, read Reb Zalman – there is much to do.

 But let us return to Rav Soloveitchik, and to the questions of the material and the spiritual
with which we began.  The Hasid values the spirit, values the transforming effect Jewish (and
other) life can have on our spirit.  But, if all of religious activity is a means for attaining a certain
kind of consciousness, wouldn’t drugs do just as well?  Or if not drugs, then, say, golf?  You
enjoy davenning; I enjoy the back nine.  You keep shabbos; I keep my weekly game, which
relaxes me, brings me out into nature, and makes my heart glad.

 Each of us personally can agree or disagree with this challenge.  For me, the perception of
transcendence I have in a good davening is as real as my perception of objects in the world
(contra drugs) and is more closer to my own essence than I can ever imagine a golf game being. 
But at the very least, the skeptic’s challenge forces us to defend our cognitive experience of
‘God’ as being in some way qualitatively superior to a good golf match or rave – and that is very
difficult to do.  If religious practice is just a means to transforming consciousness, then why not
any other means?

 Worse yet, not everyone has, in H.L. Mencken's words, "a talent for religion."  You see
infinite worlds of complexity and compassion by observing kashrut and elevating the act of
eating to a Divine level.  But I don’t get that feeling.  Am I excluded from meaningful religious
life, because I don’t have the same sensibility as you?  You say that this is an excitement of your
‘spirit,’ but I don’t see any spirit anywhere – I see your pleasure, and my pleasure, and that is all. 
I see bodies, in this world, trying, as Vonnegut said, to get through this, whatever it is.

 Where is the spirit now?
 
 

 There are more than ontological objections to a religion of the ‘spirit.’  Even if we grant
agnostically that some inner essence of the human being is that which is the ground of all that
matters, do we really seek to have no text beyond our hearts that governs the actions we take that
affect one another, and that effect our relationship with God?  Are the rules that govern my
relationship with you to be construed according to my conscience, springing from my history,
rather than from a trans-subjective text to which we can both appeal?

 Or, consider: within Jewish law and legend there are countless explanations for the
meaning and purpose of given practices or stories.  Do we really seek to make one of these,
above all others, canonical?  I am in shul to approach the Source of Inspiration; the person next
to me is there to fulfill a command from God; the person next to her is there to feel a sense of
community.  There are seventy faces of Torah, even though the halacha is finally decided
according to a single path.  You are also free to see the mitzvot as unlocking the divine channels
between the sefirot, or as helping to create good bourgeois citizens, or as reflecting the
Indwelling of the infinite.  All paths are open.  Do we not prefer this democracy of spirit, where
the external observance of a given practice brings us together, leaving us free to create webs of
internal meaning for ourselves?

 And set aside even the interpretations and meanings of others: even one’s own views as
to the meaning or essence of a particular practice will doubtless change over time.  The purpose
for an act at age twenty is likely to be different from the purpose for that same act at age fifty. 
And yet, the generations -- and the stages of life that we ourselves pass through -- are bound
together by the external, non-spiritual, quite literal mitzvot which organize their paths to truth. 
Jewish rituals much of their vitality and beauty from precisely this fact – that as we change as
individuals, the meanings with which we imbue our actions will change as well.  Yet throughout
this human evolution, halacha provides an overarching structure in which to contextualize this or
that insight, to inscribe this or that belief into a behavior.  Conversely, halacha forms a seawall
against cacophonous doubt in times of uncertainty, allowing for free-ranging self-questioning
without the angst that accompanies behavioral life changes. 

 Speaking personally once again: there have been moments when I have kept the shabbat
doubting the existence of God and sure of the foolishness of what I was doing.  But I kept the
shabbat, hoping that at some point the meaning which I once felt intuitively would return in some
way, if only to my intellect.  Were those uninspired shabbatot serving as a crutch nor a damper
on my own inner godwrestling?  On the contrary, I felt as though the postponement of
consequences gave me space to more fully and more honestly test myself and my priorities. 
During times of God’s eclipse, the formal ritual allows structure for reflection; during times of
God’s closeness, it is filled with light.  Would I really seek to tie my observance to the moonlike
waxing and waning of my own religious consciousness?

 And in light of the growth of extremism and zealotry in our own time, do we really seek a
world in which everyone pursues “the right thing” with every ounce of their spirit, all the time,
with no outer boundary of piety?  At some point, the world is healthier if we can say: enough! 
You have fulfilled your obligation.  Rest.

 Conversely, many times we need to be roused beyond our concerns – even our spiritual
concerns.  True, the path of a monk meditating on a mountaintop is preferable to that of a crass
man of business accumulating possessions.  But if the monk rejects the imperative to alleviate
suffering in the world because he prefers to perfect his own enlightenment, can we really say that
the world is better off because he is alive?  A life of the spirit can often take us away from the
suffering of the real.

                              *         *         *

 One must not overstate the case: there is always interiority to religious practice, and one
hopes it is an interiority of love, compassion, and sincerity.  Religion does not work perfectly. 
As Maimonides noted, Naval bi’reshut haTorah, a vile person may be within the boundaries of
the Torah.  It is quite possible to do nothing more than the law requires, worm one’s way out of
problematic requirements, and live a low life.  And for certain mitzvot – prayer, for example –
personal engagement is part of the legal requirement.  Rabbi Eliezer said: "If one's prayer is a
fixed obligation it is not a prayer.”  If you are only trying to be yotze (the state of having fulfilled
an obligation) you can never be yotze.

 But let us not restrict our spiritual lives to those who can best get in the mood.  Let us not
create a New Age elitism where only those who enjoy a particular mode of ‘getting in touch with
their feelings’ count religiously.  And let us not throw ourselves on the mercy of those who say
‘love your enemies,’ and then define ‘love’ in ways that we are hard put to understand.  I care
less that a person love or hates me than whether a person strikes me, or pursues me, or persecutes
my kin.  Let me confront the irresolvable Other-ness of the “You” with whom I am confronted;
and let me not expect that I can understand him.  Or her.  I cannot.

 Finally, there is great freedom in escaping from the trap of the whole world having to
make sense to you – to know that, even if the objective lines of signification drawn on the world
are arbitrary, they are not dependent on my mood today, or my working up enough inspiration
every morning.  Value can exist outside my own subjectivity and my own whim.  Whether
something makes sense to my brain at every moment is not the test of its truth.  What a liberation
to believe it so!

                              *         *         *

 We might now be able to re-define the traditional, unsatisfactory answer to why the
mitzvot are kadosh – namely, that God commanded them.   We might now say that the mitzvah is
performed because the arrangement of acts in the world is kadosh when it is performed.  The
tautology is the point.  If we understand God as a transcendent One unified with an immanent,
present (and even personal) description of the way the universe is when the universe is good,
then the previous sentence is exactly what it would mean for God to "command" one
arrangement rather than another.  That is, if God in some transcendent way embodies the Good,
then God in God's immanence requires/commands an arrangement of the immanent that reflects
that good.  And of course, since we are speaking in terms of acts, the "reflection" is dynamic; it
strives to the Good.

 We have rejected the magical proposal that some things in the world are holy and others
are not.  We have sidelined the claim that that which is holy is that which makes us feel a certain
way.  We are left with the possibility that the entire world, filled with God’s light, is to be
organized in such a way as to be nothing more or less than “Just So.”  The “So” could be
different, but it is not.  The “So” depends not on our perception but upon the way the world
actually is.  The historical ‘truth of the matter’ is not important for our foundation myths -- what
matters is that they are the foundation for a life-project of building a place for the infinite, ideal,
shamayim in our finite, imperfect aretz. 
 
 

 To postulate a value that exists beyond the preferences of the subject does not come
without costs: often we find ourselves with practices that no longer resonate with our souls, with
precedents in the halachic process of law-finding from which we would very much like to depart. 
There is much left to answer: how humans play a role in unfolding ‘God’s will.’  How that will
may be more procedural, in fact, than substantive.  Whether there is anything that I believe about
the natural universe that an atheist does not.  But we begin, on Rosh Hodesh Nisan, with the
imperative that calls to us from whatever mountains we have each been fortunate enough to
climb: Care.  Matter.  Create value. 

 The Jewish means of marking the world with lines of signification may depend on an
origination myth in which few of our generation can ever believe, but origination myths are not
reasons; they are only ballast to steady the ship of our symbolic significations.  What happened at
Sinai was less important than what Sinai can make happen today.  The mountain at the edge of
the world is less important than those beyond it.