Dear friends,
I heard from many people this week about The New York Times columnist David Brooks’s essay, “The Shock of Faith.” I won’t speak for him (he does that for himself in 2,000 words). Nor do I really want to have a conversation about whether Brooks, who talks about his Jewish life, is really a Christian at this point (he deals with that a bit in the essay). Instead, I want to respond to Brooks with gratitude, compassion, and an invitation.
Gratitude: I generally think we need more thoughtful discussion of religion and spirituality in American public life, so I’m grateful when someone writes a piece like this that prompts reflection and conversation. I’m grateful that Brooks discusses and centers, among other things, virtues like interconnection, compassion, justice, healing, and spiritual intimacy. I appreciate that he’s trying to open up some space for college-educated people (those of us with an “overly intellectual nature” — read: many American Jews) to consider how religion and spirituality might function in their own life. And I’m glad that his piece might introduce more people to wonderful contemporary thinkers and writers like Christian Wiman and Avivah Zornberg. Joseph Soloveitchik appearing on the Times Op-Ed page–even in a piece he might find problematic–is a good thing.
Compassion: My overriding thought on reading Brooks’s piece was something along the lines of, “I wonder what would happen if he came on a retreat with IJS.” Because so much of what Brooks describes in his piece sounds, to me at any rate, familiar: Someone raised in a Jewish home and in institutional Jewish life who didn’t find what he was looking for on a spiritual level and, eventually, sought it in other traditions. That was one of the primary motivations for creating IJS a quarter-century ago, to help seekers like Brooks find what they’re looking for in our own tradition–because, of course, we have these riches too, but they have often been obscured (there’s that “overly intellectual nature” again).
Brooks describes a literal mountaintop experience in which he was overcome by a sense of the Divine presence. Reaching for a Puritan prayer book in his backpack, he finds verses that speak to him. These included, “Let me learn by paradox that the way down is the way up”–which, for me, evoked the Hasidic concept of yeridah l’tzorech aliyah, a spiritual descent for the sake of ascent. Or another verse: “The broken heart is the healed heart,” which brought to mind the classic teaching of the Kotzker Rebbe, “There is nothing so whole as a broken heart.”
In the last section of his piece, Brooks identifies three “interrelated movements” of what he has come to understand as “faith”: Sanctification (in Hebrew: kedusha); Healing the world (tikkun olam); and Intimacy with God (devekut). He doesn’t use the Hebrew terms–and I wondered whether that was because he knew them but didn’t find them appropriate for this column, or that he didn’t know them. Over and over as I read his column, I found myself wondering if Brooks was aware that these same rich concepts exist in thick, rich Jewish language–that he could find many of the jewels he sought right in his own backyard. ‘
An example, from a text I taught at my local synagogue earlier this week: In his Sefat Emet (Genesis, for Hannukah 14:9), Rabbi Yehudah Leib Alter of Ger offers a provocative take on the Hannukah story. The Talmud, of course, teaches that we celebrate Hannukah because of the miracle of the oil that lasted for eight days. Yet the Sefat Emet points out that this hardly seems like the basis for establishing a holiday: After all, the Jews of the time weren’t actually under an obligation to light the menorah, seeing as they were unable to do so due to circumstances beyond their control. So why create a holiday to commemorate a miracle which enabled the performance of a mitzvah that they didn’t have to do in the first place?
He answers his own question: “The Holy One made miracles in order to raise the spirits of the children of Israel. As a result, they reaccepted anew the yoke of divine sovereignty, to joyfully be servants of YHVH. Thus by means of these miracles, they re-dedicated their Divine service–and that’s why the holiday is called Hannukah (i.e., ‘dedication’).”
When I taught this text this week, I found myself posing the question, “Why are you lighting Hannukah candles this year?” Because I think the Sefat Emet is challenging us. If we are only lighting the candles because “that’s what Jews do,” or some vague sense of rote obligation or commemoration of a distant historical event, then we’re not really doing it right. Instead, I would suggest the Sefat Emet is asking, even demanding of us, to try to tap into something far richer, far deeper: the miraculous, the holy, the “numinous” as Brooks calls it, that pervades the world, if only we slow down enough to attune ourselves to it.
That is the aim of our practice of Judaism, our dedication to a life of Torah. It is precisely to longingly, lovingly pursue communion with the Divine Presence, to make ourselves vessels for the Shekhinah. It’s to live out the verse from Psalms (42:3) that Brooks quotes, “As the deer pants for the water brooks, so my soul pants for Thee, O God” (which, by the way, is one of the standard songs we traditionally sing on Shabbat). Brooks quotes Christian Wiman: “Religion is not made of these moments [of sporadic awareness of the Divine Presence]; religion is the. means of making these moments part of your life rather than merely radical intrusions so foreign and perhaps even fearsome that you can’t even acknowledge their existence afterward.” Amen–he nailed it.
Which leads me to my invitation, which is extended to David Brooks and to anyone with whom his column resonated: These things you’re seeking are things we’ve been developing and teaching at IJS for decades, so please–come join us! The binary that Brooks posits, between spirituality on the one hand and religion on the other, is one we at IJS understand and, I think, subvert or upend on a daily basis. It is possible to be both spiritual and religious, to live (using the binaries Brooks quotes from Rabbi David Wolpe) simultaneously in touch with both emotion and obligation, soothing and mobilization, self-satisfaction and dissatisfaction with the world. That’s precisely what we try to do at IJS day in and day out.
Hannukah, perhaps more simply than any of our other holidays (it involves nothing more than lighting a candle in the darkness), provides us with an opportunity to attune ourselves to the Divine Presence in our lives and in the world. May all who are hurting find healing, may all who are feeling alone find communion, and may all who are seeking find inspiration in the lights of Hannukah this year.