Judaism, at last. I’ve been dreading this moment. It was inevitable, I suppose, given my nominal Jewishness, but that does little to ease my apprehension. Or guilt. My crimes are self-evident. I have lusted in my heart, flirted with a bevy of exotic gods, dabbled in witchcraft. I feel like the wayward spouse, reeking of sweet perfume and cheap booze, sheepishly knocking on the front door after a lengthy and unexplained absence. Will Hashem have me? And, the more nettlesome question, Do I want to be had?
The truth is: I don’t know Him. How could I? Jews don’t talk about God. I’ve always found this oversight strange, given that love of the Almighty is central to our faith and that Jews will happily talk nonstop about basically anything. Why the sudden reticence? As for me, you could say I’m a self-hating Jew but that’s not quite accurate. In order to hate something you need to know it, at least to some extent, and I don’t know enough about Judaism to hate it.
I can’t be the only one who feels so alienated from my own faith. So I ask my friend Michael, a gastronomical Jew like myself, how he would sum up Judaism in a single word. Michael thinks for only a brief moment before answering. “Rules,” he says. “Judaism is about rules.” I nod. A sad commentary but, as far as I can tell, an accurate one. Eat this, not that. Do this, not that. Put on your right shoe before the left but tie your left laces before the right. (Really.) Rules upon rules upon rules. A never-ending litany of dos and, more often, don’ts. Judaism is the perfect religion for the obsessives and compulsives of the world.
Over the years, though, I had caught wind of another Judaism, a Judaism of the head and the heart. A Judaism that actually talks about God, that encourages us to talk to God, and without blushing, a Judaism that facilitates a direct experience of the divine. It’s called Kabbalah, and it is perhaps the only spiritual path shrouded in both mystery and celebrity. Whenever I ask people what they know about Kabbalah (Jews and non-Jews alike), I always receive a one-word reply: Madonna. That’s it. Surely, I thought, there must be more to Kabbalah than an aging pop star who refuses to age. And surely the heart of this ancient tradition, its axis mundi, must reside somewhere beyond the rolling hills and neon boulevards of Hollywood.
I board the flight for Tel Aviv with more than a little trepidation. I haven’t been to the so-called Holy Land since my days as a correspondent for National Public Radio. You’d think a few years in the Jewish homeland would strengthen my Jewish identity, extend it beyond the gastronomical realms to the spiritual. You’d think, but you would be wrong. If anything, I felt less Jewish living in Israel than I did in, say, India. Political conflict, twinned with naked tribalism, discouraged me from exploring Judaism. As a journalist, I was too busy remaining impartial to dip my toe into those waters. So I kept my head down, my heart closed, and did my job.
Yet here I am again, though this time on a very different mission. I’m waiting for a bus in an ultra-orthodox suburb of Tel Aviv called Bnei Brak. All around me is black. A wall of black, relieved only by the occasional glint of white. The only primary color within a five-mile radius is my berry-blue shirt, which, in this colorless environment, might as well be hot pink. Standing under the bus shelter, I feel eyes scanning me, judging. The bus finally arrives and it’s packed with the religious. Women, their heads covered with drab scarves; men, wearing bushy fur hats in the spring heat. And then there’s me, with my hot blue shirt and naked head. I feel invisible and exposed at the same time. Like a gaijin (literally “outside person”) in Japan. Or a dalit, an untouchable, in India. Then I am touched, bumped, by a woman. Sleecha. Excuse me, she says, as if she had just stepped in something untoward.
The bus wends through downtown Bnei Brak. Peering out the window, I see stores selling identical black suits and black dresses. We pass a nursery and I am startled by the lonely splash of green, of life. I spot a store called “Discreet” and that, I realize, sums up this place. Nothing is revealed. I have no idea what takes place underneath the fur and the black, no inkling of people’s inner lives. All I know is the exterior, and that strikes me as terribly dark and unhappy. Of course appearances can lie. Sometimes, as I learned in Kathmandu, what you see is not.
I reach into my pocket and finger my kippa, the Jewish skullcap. Good, it’s still there. I feel relieved, assured, the way a plainclothes cop feels, I imagine, once confirming the presence of his sidearm. I don’t like all kippas but I like this one. I like its heft and its not-blackness. (It is a modest gray but gray is a color too, a beautiful one that, as Chesterton extolled, reminds us of “the indefinite hope that is in doubt itself.”) When my in-law Avi handed it to me, he told me to wear it in people’s homes, and of course in synagogues. His urgent tone of voice, though, suggested that this was not only the proper thing to do but the prudent one as well, that this small skullcap doubled as a kind of talisman, protection against unseen malevolence.
As the bus trundles north, the Tel Aviv suburbs yield to open fields. I extract a few books from my bag and read about my destination. Tzfat (also spelled Safed), perched high in the hills above the Sea of Galilee, is one of those small cities that punches above its weight. Over the centuries, it has seesawed between the sacred and the profane. Tzfat has, at various times, been a hill-station retreat for Tel Avivians seeking to escape the summer heat, a magnet for gamblers and prostitutes, an artists’ colony, a sleepy Arab village, a battlefield. Its golden era, though, was the sixteenth century, when it was a hotbed of Kabbalistic thought and experimentation.
When the Jews were evicted from Spain in 1492, some settled in North Africa. Others in Italy. And some in Tzfat. Among them were scholars and mystics who had studied Kabbalah in Spain and France. They brought with them their passion for the subject, and soon several schools of Kabbalah took root. Theirs was not the parched Judaism that I grew up with but a fierce and experiential faith. These men were “mighty God seekers” and “daring stormers of heaven,” as historian Lawrence Fine puts it. They were refugees, like Rumi and Einstein, and possessed the same reckless creativity. They had the untethered disposition of the mendicant. They also engaged in some unusual, and controversial, practices: fasting for extended periods, spreading themselves across the graves of great rabbis, communing with animals, à la Saint Francis.
Sixteenth-century Tzfat was one of those rare places, like early-twentieth-century Paris or fifteenth-century Florence, where circumstances combined and, through a kind of alchemy, produced an extraordinarily creative atmosphere. Only in Tzfat’s case, the output wasn’t artistic or scientific but spiritual. “Tzfat,” writes scholar and translator Daniel Matt, “seems to verge on heaven.”
When the Egged bus finally pulls into Tzfat’s Central Bus Station, I am excited. I am a creature of place, and I sense this place could be where I finally make a spiritual breakthrough, where I find my God, or some reasonable facsimile. I am greeted by Eyal, head of an institute for Kabbalah and my guide to the mysteries of this path. Eyal is a large man and promptly gives me a large hug. “Welcome to Tzfat,” he says with seemingly practiced enthusiasm. Eyal is dressed in Hasidic black and, for a moment, I feel as if I have traveled nowhere. I follow him through the city’s cobblestone streets, a miniature version of Jerusalem’s old city. We pass shops with names like Kabbalah Jewelry and cafés that consist of no more than a table or two, serving impossibly fresh salads and juice. Soon we arrive at his office, located on the second floor of an old building, and stuffed with books. Not that long ago, such a sight would set my heart aflutter, but not now. Have I finally escaped my head?
Eyal is an intense man of indeterminate age with a biblical beard and eyes that frequently bug out of his head. He came here eighteen years ago. Not long before that, he was a DJ, completely secular, living in Tel Aviv, Israel’s sin city. Then one day he decided to keep the Sabbath. Just like that. And from there it was a straight line to the world of ultra-orthodox Judaism.
Eyal clearly loves Tzfat. He speaks effusively of the “transformative power of this place.” Every person is affected by this city, he tells me. “When I say ‘Welcome to Tzfat,’ their eyes open, and their souls too.” I have experienced no such transformation yet, but it is still early.
Eyal promptly plants me in front of a video, a sort of beginner’s guide to Kabbalah. A voice-of-God narrator intones: “Studying Kabbalah increases and develops self-awareness. People who study Kabbalah learn to use their spiritual power for personal development and their realization of their purpose in life. The Kabbalah brings joy and inner meaning to every aspect of life.” Sounds good, I think. Sign me up.
Then things get complicated. In a rapid-fire presentation, I am told of the ten sefirot, or “divine emanations”; about the tree of life; about how for centuries Kabbalah was studied secretly by an elite group (the word “cabal” comes from Kabbalah). Kabbalah, this deep, authoritative voice tells me, explains quantum physics, string theory, and the Big Bang. Wow. My head is whirling in ways it hasn’t since Istanbul. It sounds good but so…complicated.
Back in Eyal’s office, he tells me that over the course of the next few weeks I will not study about Kabbalah. I will study Kabbalah. That’s an important distinction, he assures me, though he doesn’t explain exactly why.
We hop into Eyal’s car, a beat-up mini van with a broken door handle, and drive through Tzfat’s cobblestone streets. We’re heading down, down, down, the spiritually incorrect direction, I know, but a necessary prelude to growth. As Karen Armstrong puts it: “There is no ascent to heaven without a prior descent into darkness.” So down we go.
I roll down my window. Tzfat is known for its air. That’s what everyone told me. The air in Tzfat is special. It does feel soft, what cotton would feel like, I imagine, if converted into gas.
Within seconds, I’m not sure how this happens (maybe it’s the air), we’re engaged in a heavy metaphysical discussion. God is not a spiritual entity, Eyal tells me. He’s above spiritual. There is simply no definition of God. Ein sof, as the Kabbalists say, literally “without limits.” Yet God is involved in every aspect of life. “There’s a specific divine providence over every matter, every molecule, every atom.”
“So God is a micromanager?” I say.
“Yes,” says Eyal, ignoring my sarcasm, “except freedom of choice is still granted. Just like nothing can obligate God to do this or that. The same thing applies to us; nothing obligates us to do good.”
“So life is not pre-ordained? We are not puppets of fate?”
“No, it’s not pre-ordained; it’s foreseen. Foreseen means God knows but that doesn’t obligate us in any way. You can screw up and He knows about it. What is unknown? The future is unknown, but He is above all that.” God, explains Eyal, is like a father teaching a child. He sees that you’re about to do something incredibly stupid but He lets you do it anyway, because we have freedom of choice and we might learn a lesson, provided, of course, this incredibly stupid thing we do doesn’t kill us.
Interesting, but frankly I’m not sure how deep Eyal’s faith runs. There’s something about his cartoonish hand gestures and bulging eyes that makes me wonder whether he means all this or is merely going through the motions, reading from a Jewish playbook. I say this realizing fully that it is folly to gauge the mettle of another man’s faith.
Eyal and I arrange to meet the next morning at ten. When I had suggested 9:00 a.m., he balked. Tzfat is not an early-rising town, an exception to the early-bird-gets-the-God rule. In fact, there is a tradition of studying Kabbalah at midnight, when the mind is quiet and the sky smeared with stars.
I spend the afternoon exploring Tzfat on my own. The only way to know, really know, a city is through solitary explorations. Nothing else will suffice. So that’s what I do, walking its cobblestone streets and alleyways, eating its falafels and shakshukas, dipping into its bookstores, sipping its café-hafuch, literally “upside-down coffee.”
I find a café where they make an especially good cup and tolerate my toddler Hebrew. I grab a table outside and watch the world go by. In some ways, it looks similar to the drab world of Bnei Brak, the same head coverings and muted colors. But there’s a difference. People here smile. They make eye contact. I see a woman dressed in the convention of an orthodox Jew—ankle-length dress, scarf-covered head. Only when she turns the corner do I notice the yoga mat slung over her shoulder. A few days later, walking through the old city, I see a Hasidic Jew, dressed in the traditional long black coat and hat, riding a unicycle, like the kind you might see clowns atop at a circus. I can’t believe my eyes. I’ve never seen such a display of overt whimsy and joy from a member of the ultra-orthodox.
The denizens of Tzfat are children of a less uptight God. Sure, they follow the rules, most of them anyway, but they’re not afraid to bend a few, to honor the spirit if not the letter. Tzfat attracts Jewish misfits, those who don’t feel at home in the straitjacket world of orthodox Jerusalem, nor in the anything-goes world of secular Tel Aviv.
What makes a place spiritual? Is there really something in the air? Is it that fuzzy-headed New Age catchall, energy? Or is it the cumulative intentionality that lends a place specialness? Does a place become holy because holy people choose to live there, or do holy people choose to live there because the place is holy? I’m not sure, and suspect these are unanswerable questions, but any place with a reputation for being “magical” and “transformative” bears a heavy burden. Holy places, like holy people, always contain the potential to disappoint. Tzfat does not disappoint. It may not be Heaven, not exactly, but the soft air and unhurried atmosphere lend a lightness to a heavy land, straining under the weight of all that history, and God. It’s one of those places people visit for a few days, on a lark, and next thing they know a lifetime has passed.
Tzfat is spiritual but it is still Israeli, so a base level of rudeness is maintained at all times. It’s the law. People elbow me without any apparent regret. I pay for goods and services without receiving even a simple “Thank you.” For Israelis, this rudeness is a strange source of pride. They don’t see themselves as rude but, rather, pleasantly informal and refreshingly honest. Look, we’re surrounded by enemies and living in a desert. Our national dish is ground chickpeas. You want polite? Go to Japan. Or they fall back on the old saw about the sabra fruit. We Israelis are like the sabra, the smiling tourist official will tell you: hard on the outside, soft on the inside. I once asked an Israeli woman whether this was true. She pondered it briefly, very briefly, before answering, “No, I’m pretty much a bitch on the inside too.” I had to respect her honesty.
The sun setting over the hills, I buy a bottle of kosher wine (the only kind available) and return to my hotel room. I sit on the balcony, sipping the not-bad wine, smoking little existential cigars, and studying Kabbalah—or, rather, about Kabbalah. Still, I learn many things. I learn that the Hebrew word Kabbalah means “receiving” or “that which has been received.” I learn that for centuries these received teachings were considered dangerous. That’s why they were restricted to married men over forty years old. Got that covered, I think smugly. I read on. “Other requirements included high moral standards, prior rabbinic learning…and mental and emotional stability.” Enough of this ancient history. I turn the page.
I learn that Kabbalah, as Daniel Matt puts it, “represents the revenge of myth.…The Kabbalists appreciate the profundity of myth and its tenacious appeal.” (Jamie the Witch would approve.) I learn that Kabbalists believe none of our acts are inconsequential. They reverberate, are amplified, in the divine realm. Likewise, disposition matters. Isaac Luria, the greatest Kabbalist of sixteenth-century Tzfat, took a dim view of sadness, considering it an impediment to mystical insight. This does not bode well for me. My depression has lifted slightly, owing to Tzfat’s soft air perhaps, but it remains an unwanted presence, the guest from hell.
I learn that Kabbalists share the traditionally Jewish thirst for knowledge, but it is a different kind of knowledge. It is knowledge that is not acquired but absorbed or, as one of the earliest Kabbalists, a great visionary named Isaac the Blind, put it: “The inner, subtle essence can be contemplated only by sucking, not by knowing.”
I put down my wineglass and take a deep breath. That is not the kind of passionate, somatic language I associate with Judaism. In my childhood synagogue, there was never any talk of sucking. I would have remembered that. I read on and learn that Kabbalists, like Christians, believe the one who strays and returns is better than the one who never strays at all, just as a fractured bone, once healed, is stronger than before the break. As someone who has both fractured a bone and strayed from my faith, I find great comfort in this. I pour myself another glass of Yarden wine, and soon I am asleep.
“You’re starting to have that look,” says Eyal when I meet him at his office the next morning, and as if to underscore his point his eyes bulge to the size of silver dollars.
“Really, I am?”
“Oh yes.”
I briefly worry that I might be displaying early signs of Tzfat Syndrome. A variation of Jerusalem Syndrome, Tzfat Syndrome is when people who come to this city become delusional, convinced they are some biblical prophet, or maybe the Messiah Himself. Or does Eyal say that to everyone he meets? It’s possible. We are susceptible to such spiritual flattery. We all want to be special, even if that specialness entails a hint of mental illness. Better crazy than ordinary.
Eyal is sitting behind his desk, gesticulating wildly, occasionally pivoting to check his e-mail. I’m eager to share with him what I’ve learned. I mention something I had read about how Kabbalah teaches that not only does man need God but God needs man. I find this fascinating. God needs us? I had never thought of it that way. If true, it catapults my search out of the realm of narcissism—what can I get out of this?—and into something else, something more noble. God needs me.
“Not that He needs us but that He wants us,” says Eyal, deflating me.
I mention another Kabbalistic concept: that God conceals Himself from us. (The Hebrew word for “world,” olam, shares a root with the word for “to conceal.”) It is a familiar idea, echoed in the other religions I’ve explored. Why, I wonder, does God insist on playing hard to get? I mean, if You want to be known, then please send us a sign. It is Your universe, after all. Surely You know our number.
Eyal senses my confusion and does what Jews often do when confronted with a particularly vexing question of great importance: He asks more questions. “Why did God create then conceal? What’s going on? Where is God?” Eyal scans the room. I find myself looking too, as if God might be under Eyal’s desk, or maybe behind the door. Eyal, though, also possesses the Jewish habit of asking questions without answering them. And so we never do find God. Not that day at least.
Then Eyal gives me advice that could have easily come from the lips of the Tibetan lama I met in Kathmandu. In essence, he says, I need to familiarize myself with my own mind. “It all starts here,” he says, jabbing his temple with such force I worry he might burst a blood vessel. “Learn your psyche. Know what is going on inside of you. Know your soul, know your godly soul. Know the animal soul inside you also. Know the higher soul, not the lower soul.”
I follow Eyal but only so far. Not seven-eighths. More like three-eighths, maybe. I need another teacher. Eyal understands and is not insulted. He is a busy man. He has eight children, and is constantly in motion. He suggests I get in touch with one Yedidah Cohen, an emigrant from Britain who is among the most popular teachers of Kabbalah. I call Yedidah, and find her British accent refreshingly polite and reassuring. We arrange to meet the next morning.
Of all the religions I’ve explored, Judaism is by far the oldest. Jews were praying to their one God for thousands of years before the Sufis were whirling or the Buddhists meditating or the Raëlians cross-dressing. Is that a good thing or not? I wonder. We like our technology new and shiny but our religion old and musty. Well worn. Longevity, of course, does not necessarily equal truth. People believed the earth was flat for a very long time. That didn’t make it true. But religion, I think, is true in a different way from the way, say, arithmetic is true. Religion is true the way a good poem or novel is true. We still read Shakespeare not only because his writing was good but because it was true. So, yes, in matters of faith, endurance counts. I silently add a few points in the Jewish score box.
Not only does Judaism have a past, but I have a past with Judaism, a history I do not share with, say, Buddhism or Wicca. This is good, and not. On one hand, I have a foundation on which to build. But that foundation is shaky, suspect.
Judaism never stuck with me, but it did with my younger brother, who, in his early twenties, underwent a dramatic transformation, from indifferent to religious Jew. I don’t know exactly how this transpired. The fact is we don’t talk about Judaism, and if anything his orthodoxy has driven us further apart, not closer. When my family visits his for the Jewish holidays, a vague but undeniable tension fills the air. I resort to my default strategy—humor—which only serves to heighten that tension. He once accused me of poking fun at his faith, an accusation that I initially bristled at but, upon reflection, couldn’t deny. I joke about his Judaism, though, not out of malice but because of my own troubled relationship—or, more accurately, nonrelationship—with it. If he had become, say, a Hare Krishna, I would no doubt find it fascinating and would pepper him with thoughtful and respectful questions about his chosen path. Instead, his embrace of the faith I abandoned triggers in me a response that is as predictable as it is lamentable: guilt.
My own faith is alien to me, but not alien enough. My knowledge, such as it is, keeps getting in the way. I encountered no such obstacle with, say, Taoism or Sufism. With Judaism, I know just enough to trip me up. Hebrew words, words like nefesh and mitzvot, trigger some long-dormant synapses in my brain, but these synapses, tired and rusty, misfire. The fact is I don’t really know what the words mean and never did. I’ve been too busy running away from a faith I considered at best irrelevant, and at worst something of an embarrassment, like the uncle at family gatherings who balances wineglasses on his forehead. Yet, Joseph Campbell tells me, evasion is futile. We never fully escape our indigenous mythology, he says, nor should we. “It’s a good thing to hang on to the myth that was put in when you were a child, because it is there whether you want it there or not. What you have to do is translate that myth into eloquence.…You have to learn to hear its song.”
I never thought of it that way. Reluctantly, I realize that is my challenge. To translate Judaism into not only a language I can understand but one I can sing. This won’t be easy. I have many wonderful attributes, or so my wife tells me. A musical ear is not one of them.
After some linguistic confusion, I manage to call a taxi. The taxi drivers are all Moroccans, happy men who live more and ruminate less than the angst-ridden European Jews, like me. My driver knows Yedidah’s house; she is a “vip” he tells me in broken English. The taxi climbs a long, winding road, up into the hills above Tzfat, before stopping in front of a small house. And there is Yedidah, waiting for me at the front gate. On the phone, she sounded so British but in person she looks very Israeli. Weathered skin. Unruly hair. No smooth edges, and what looks like a permanent tear lodged in the crease of her left eye. She reminds me of a character from The Hobbit.
“It’s a magic gate,” she says, pointing to the orange metal contraption before me. “Press down and see what happens.” I press down and it swings open without any further effort on my part. Like magic. It’s not the sort of magic that would likely impress Black Cat or Jamie the Witch—too rudimentary—but I enjoy it nonetheless.
She shows me to her study, which is floor-to-ceiling bookshelves. I scan for titles and my eyes land on Sacred Geometry and Tips for Longevity. The centerpiece, though, is the complete Zohar, all twenty-one volumes. The Zohar is the mysterious, virtually impenetrable canonical work of Kabbalah. “Every word is a gold mine,” Yedidah says, pouring two cups of mint tea—always tea, not coffee, a vestige from her British upbringing.
She tells me her story. She was born into a religious family but never connected to the rituals. “There was this feeling that we do this because we do it,” she says, and I nod knowingly. She was, though, an emotive Jew in a land that frowned upon such displays. She was thirsty to know more of her faith, to burrow deep. She taught herself Hebrew riding London’s Northern Line. Trained as an anesthesiologist, sensitive to the pain of others, she came to Israel in 1981 during the First Lebanon War. She worked in the emergency room at Hadassah hospital. “I felt, here’s my place.” She also felt something was missing from her spiritual life but didn’t know what it was. Then, at the suggestion of her husband, Mark, she went to Findhorn, the eclectic spiritual retreat in Scotland, despite her father’s vociferous protests. He saw it as a betrayal of her faith. She saw it as an affirmation of that same faith. “I wanted to make peace. I didn’t want to put my spirituality in one box and my Judaism in another. I wanted it in a whole way.” In Findhorn, she found what she was looking for, and soon returned to Israel, this time for good.
“Why Tzfat?” I ask.
“It came to me in a dream. It sounds crazy, I know, but I got this picture of golden sunlight around the name of Tzfat.”
“But how did you fall into Kabbalah?” I ask, reaching for a cookie.
That, she says, is a story for another time. She will teach me Kabbalah. We agree to meet at her house, just past the magic gate, every morning at ten. But not tomorrow. Tomorrow is the Sabbath, and that special day possesses, as I would soon discover, a magic all its own.
In one of the many ironies that is Judaism, the hours before the day of rest are marked by frantic activity, the storm before the calm. Downtown Tzfat is a buzz of escalating energy. It’s like Washington, DC, before a snowstorm. Everyone is stocking up, feeling the press of a rapidly approaching deadline. Tzfat is in motion but it is not random motion. Everyone is heading to the same place—or, rather, to the same time. The Sabbath exists in time, not space. I too am in motion. I buy a falafel and a bottle of Yarden wine just before the stores close. I like the way the shopkeepers, strangers, say Shabbat shalom, good Sabbath. A softness in this hard land.
Eyal calls. He sounds harried. We’re going synagogue hopping, he says.
“How should I dress?” I ask.
“It doesn’t matter,” he says. “What matters are the garments of the soul.”
I’m tempted to fire off some quip about my soul garments being at the dry cleaners, or no longer fitting, or something smart-ass like that, but I refrain, recalling that smart-assness is an impediment to spiritual growth.
At 5:20 p.m. a quiet swaddles Tzfat. The cars have vanished, as if swooped up by the Elohim’s spaceships. I could safely lie down in the middle of the city’s busiest street.
At 5:45 p.m. my hotel goes into Sabbath lockdown. The elevator stops running. The staff disappear. The TV in the room next door, normally blaring, falls silent. I use my Swiss Army Knife to open the bottle of Yarden, my last act of labor before the Sabbath officially begins. I pour a glass, step onto the balcony—and listen. I hear birds chirping, a flag fluttering and, off in the distance, a goat bleating. Otherwise, nothing but silence—not an eerie silence but a ripe, plump silence that feels like a benign presence. On the question of silence, the Kabbalists have much to say. “Speech is worth a penny, silence is worth two,” advises the Zohar. The Jews, the people of the mouth, also have a rich tradition of silence. Who knew?
At 6:37 p.m. a siren sounds. The Sabbath has officially begun. For once in my life, I am going to observe the Sabbath, and step foot into what Abraham Heschel calls “a sanctuary in time.”
Time. We don’t know what to do with it. We can find time, waste time, make time, spend time, do time or, if we’re feeling especially vindictive, kill time. On the Sabbath, we do none of this. On the Sabbath, we dwell in time. We ease into this dwelling as we ease into a warm bath after a hard day’s work. On the Sabbath, we are up to our neck in time, and nothing else.
At least that is the idea. On some level, I, like most people I think, fear time. Not the existence of time but, rather, its finiteness. I equate time with death. (Indeed, if time were infinite, if we literally had all the time in the world, I wonder if religion would exist at all.) I agree with Heschel when he says, “We suffer from a deeply rooted dread of time and stand aghast when compelled to look into its face.” The Sabbath forces just such a confrontation with time, one that I typically lose in grand Chicago Cubs fashion.
Here, though, my odds are better. Here it is not only me against time. I have thousands of allies, and that makes all the difference. Back home, whenever I entertained the idea of observing the Sabbath, I was always overwhelmed by the fear of what I’d be missing: soccer games, tennis matches, shopping sprees, the latest movie, countless opportunities for leisure and self-improvement. I was overwhelmed by the opportunity costs, the price of things not done. In Israel (or at least in religious Israel), the Sabbath comes with no opportunity cost. I’m not missing anything. I can turn off my cellphone, knowing full well no one is trying to reach me. I can turn off my laptop, safe in the knowledge that my inbox will remain unmolested.
Heschel says our reaction to the Sabbath defines us. “What we are depends on what the Sabbath is to us,” he writes. What am I? Is my ability to observe the Sabbath some sort of test, an exam devised to gauge my talent for doing nothing? Ah, the old ego at work. It can transform anything, even the most spiritual of impulses, into an opportunity for self-aggrandizement, or self-loathing. No, I vow to resist that impulse. I am tired of testing myself. Even if I pass those tests, it still comes at a cost. The Sabbath is beyond performance, beyond good and bad, beyond success and failure, even beyond doing and nondoing. It is pure being. That is the idea at least.
At 6:47 p.m. I walk down the stairs, enjoying the mild exertion, and meet Eyal in the lobby, as we had planned. He is dressed in all black—black hat, black trench coat—and has a vaguely mischievous grin, as if he knows something that I don’t, which may very well be true. I follow him through the alleyways of the old city. “Shabbat is not about what you don’t do,” Eyal says as we walk along the deserted streets. “It’s about what you do.”
“What do we do?”
“We disengage from the world so that we can engage with God.”
We enter a tiny synagogue, a simple square building with black plastic chairs arranged in neat rows and a low wooden partition separating the genders. (Men in front, women in the rear, where they are heard, not seen.) It reminds me of a synagogue I once visited in New Delhi during a very brief and unexplained bout of Judaism. It too was a small cement-block structure. There must have been seventy of us packed into that hut of a building, no larger than a kindergarten classroom. There was no air-conditioning, only a couple of squeaky ceiling fans swirling impotently through the hot Delhi air. About half of the congregants were Indian Jews, the remainder diplomats, Israeli backpackers, and sundry expats like myself. Outside those concrete walls stood a crowd of others: some 600 million Hindus, 130 million Muslims, a few million Christians, Sikhs, Buddhists, Jains, Parsis. Something stirred in me, something unfamiliar and not entirely unpleasant. Maybe it was an embryonic spirituality blossoming, as it sometimes does when we find ourselves suddenly out of our element. Or maybe it was simply a primal surge of belonging, an ancient tribalism that resides deep in our reptilian brains and derives binary pleasure from the us-against-them equation. I don’t know, but I am sure of one thing: Never before or since have I felt more Jewish than I did that warm Delhi evening.
Eyal and I push our way through a sea of black and fur and take our seats. Language is a barrier. I don’t understand a word of what is said. Eyal finds me a siddur in English and points to the page in the prayer book from which the rabbi is reading. It’s the usual stuff about how Hashem is King of Kings, Lord of Lords, a force to be obeyed and feared. It’s the kind of overwrought biblical language that has always turned me off. It’s also long. I’m bored. I’m starting to devise an exit strategy when I feel a hand on my shoulder. Suddenly, inexplicably, I’m in a circle of sweaty men, chanting, aye, aye, aye. And then just as suddenly and inexplicably I am chanting too. Well, sort of. I feel like a fraud, a spiritual poseur. I fear that at any moment someone in the crowd will shout: “Hey, he’s not a real Jew! He’s mumbling the words! He doesn’t know what he’s doing!”
That doesn’t happen, though. Instead, a sense of joy permeates the small synagogue, though what sort of joy, tribal or spiritual, I couldn’t say. We chant some more and then the men start davening. Bending at the knees, they rock back and forth, rapidly, feverishly, as if they suffered from some sort of nervous condition. I feel compelled to join them, partly out of a need to be here now and partly to relieve the unbearable pressure to conform. I’m swaying back and forth, terribly self-conscious, and am reminded of that syndrome where orphans who are deprived of physical affection develop this habit of rocking back and forth. Self-soothing behavior, psychologists call it. I wonder if davening—indeed all spiritual exercises—is really a sort of self-soothing behavior for adults. And if so: Is that so bad?
I’m back in my plastic chair. We sit. We stand. We sit again. This goes on for what seems like a very long time. “That was only a prelude,” Eyal whispers to me. “Now the real prayer begins.”
Oh no. I’m not going to make it. I pass the time by surveying the sundry headgear on display here. There are plain knitted kippas, bold rainbow kippas, large black ones that cover the entire crown of the head, elegant fedoras and giant fur hats. I see a girl, maybe two years old, cradled in her father’s arms, playing with his beard and pointing to a man wearing one of these giant fur hats. She smiles, and no wonder. It must look like the man has a large animal squatting on his head. At that moment, I know, without a doubt, that she is the most joyous one here.
We walk back to Eyal’s house. Downhill. Chesterton lodges in my head again: “A man going down and down until at some mysterious point he begins to go up and up.” How much further down must I go, I wonder, before I reverse trajectory?
Eyal’s house is nice, simple. His wife, Natalie, introduces herself. I am careful not to extend my hand. I have a strict policy when traveling in religious circles. I never offer my hand to a woman until she offers hers first. Natalie does not offer hers.
Natalie is a bal tschuva, someone who has returned to her faith. Born in Venezuela, she was raised in a completely secular household, like Eyal. Then, on her way to college in Boston, she stopped over briefly in New York. A cousin suggested she join her to see Rabbi Schneerson, leader of the Lubavitch sect. For his followers, he was, and is, a modern messiah. Natalie had never heard of Schneerson, had no interest in meeting him, but she reluctantly agreed, just to humor her cousin. They waited for hours to see him and then there he was. He looked her in the eye and wished her good luck at the religious school. What was he talking about? Religious school? She was on her way to Boston to study architecture. But those eyes, those luminous eyes, had an inexplicable effect on her and, sure enough, she found herself enrolling in the religious school, much to her mother’s horror. That was years ago. Now she has eight kids, wears a wig, and sits behind a partition at synagogue.
We sit down to a fulsome meal of fresh salads, tuna fish, hummus, and other dishes, which we wash down with Fanta served from large plastic bottles. (I don’t know what it is about orthodox Jews and Fanta but I’ve detected a definite connection.) I notice that the table is segregated, boys on one side, girls on the other. Also here is a young man named Asaf. He has an impressive beard, long payot, curlicues of hair that dangle below his ears, and steady brown eyes that say: “I know things.”
Natalie brings more food. I thought that the salads and the hummus and the fish were the main course, and had devoured them as such, but apparently those were only the appetizers. “Just like the prayers at the synagogue,” says Eyal drily. We make small talk. Natalie tells me how much she likes living in Tzfat, but worries when her teenage kids go to the beach. “It’s not safe,” she says. “There might be Arabs there.” She says this in the same way one might say, “There might be sharks in the water.” Her comment rattles me, and reminds me that underneath Tzfat’s undeniably spiritual surface lurks the old bugaboo: tribalism. I feel anger welling up inside of me, but I don’t want to insult my hosts, not directly at least. So I resort to my favorite strategy under these circumstances: passive-aggressiveness. I tell them about my flirtations with various goyim Gods: Buddhism, Taoism, Catholicism, and, the kicker, Islam. I go into great detail, knowing full well that my explorations constitute a form of heresy. An uncomfortable silence fills the room.
Finally, it is Asaf who speaks up. He wants to tell me a joke. Good, I could use some levity.
There was this Jew. Let’s call him Moshe. Moshe decided one day he wanted to become Catholic, so he walks to the local church and says, “Father, I’d like to be Catholic.”
“No problem,” says the priest. He sprinkles water over Moshe and says, three times, “You’re not Jewish, you’re Catholic.” He then sends Moshe on his way but with a warning: “We Catholics only eat fish on Fridays. Okay?”
Moshe assures him that is no problem. Except a few days later, on a Wednesday evening, Moshe develops a huge craving for fish. He can’t resist so he slips off to a local restaurant. There, the priest happens to see him tucking into a huge fillet of halibut.
“Moshe! What are you doing? I told you to only eat fish on Friday.”
Moshe, without missing a beat, says, “This isn’t a fish. It’s a carrot.”
“What are you talking about, Moshe? I can plainly see it’s a fish.”
“No, it isn’t. I sprinkled water on it and said, ‘You’re not a fish, you’re a carrot, you’re not a fish, you’re a carrot…’”
Everyone at the table laughs. Except me. What am I to make of the joke? Am I a fish and always will be? Or am I a carrot with fish tendencies? Or some sort of carrot-fish hybrid? The obvious moral of the story: Go forth and meditate with the Buddhists, do yoga with the Hindus, pray with the Muslims, if you must, but you’ll be back. You have a nefesh, a Jewish soul, and nothing you do will ever change that.
Walking back to town, Asaf and I talk. He tells me how not that long ago, I would not have recognized him. He had dreadlocks down to his butt and a wild side. He had done everything, everything, in this world, and his tone of voice makes it clear that any further inquiries about exactly what that everything entailed are ill advised; my “suburban American mind” might explode.
When it comes to Judaism, he says, he was like me. He used to think that Torah was about a bunch of silly rules—a kind of prison—but then he realized that no, this life was the prison. The answers to all of life’s riddles can be found in the Torah, he tells me, and then looks at me with the most steady unblinking eyes I’ve ever seen and says: “Everything is good.”
The next morning. The Sabbath day. There is nothing to do, nowhere to go. Exertion is futile. So I lie in bed, reading about Kabbalah and listening to the sounds of Hebrew prayers, wafting into my room like a cool breeze on an August evening. I enjoy a day of blessed nothingness. The next morning, I shower and prepare to see Yedidah for my first official lesson into the mysteries of Kabbalah.
I’m not sure what to expect. I like Yedidah. She seems adequately sane and sufficiently skeptical (a physician after all) yet with a big, Sufi-ish heart and a sense of humor, albeit a quirky British one further warped by several decades in Israel.
My taxi chugs up, up, up then drops me at her house. I press down on the magic gate and enter the garden.
Yedidah is waiting for me. She seems awfully chipper, suspiciously so. She has a routine, she says by way of explanation. She wakes at 5:00 a.m., makes herself a pot of mint tea, sits in her rocking chair, and says the Shema, the most important Jewish prayer, savoring the silence before her children stir and chaos follows. She doesn’t meditate. She prays.
She packs her two daughters off to school. Her grown sons, Suffy and Iggy, are in the Israeli army. Suffy is in tanks. That’s how she puts it—“he’s in tanks”—as if he lived in a tank, which may not be far from the truth. Iggy does something else, which I don’t understand, though I’m fairly sure it does not involve tanks.
Four years ago, Yedidah’s routine was dramatically and irrevocably altered. One evening, after the children were put to bed, she noticed that the house was unusually silent. Where was her husband, Mark? After a brief search, she found him on the toilet, dead of an apparent heart attack. A life together suddenly erased. Just like that. For a long time, she blamed herself, a physician after all, for not noticing that something was wrong, that his listlessness that evening was more than the flu or jet lag.
All of this I learn before we crack a book or even mention the word “Kabbalah.” We’re sitting in her study. A large wool blanket covers her desk. She puts on the kettle and makes a pot of mint tea. She offers me a cookie. I accept, and the world outside recedes.
I feel honored that Yedidah is teaching me. She is particular about her students. She doesn’t teach people who are interested in “magical Kabbalah.” She doesn’t teach impatient people looking for an “insta-God.” She does teach people in crisis, and people who “don’t know why they are Jewish.” Confused fish, lost carrots. People like me.
Pouring more tea, she warns the work will not be easy. “We’re not just making nice here,” she says. “We’re not making mutzy-putzy.” She says that a lot. Mutzy-putzy. I’m not sure if it is some Hebrew term, or a British-ism, or a Yedidah-ism. In any case, I quite like it.
“It’s important to keep breathing during the lessons,” she says, sounding more like Yedidah the Anesthesiologist than Yedidah the Kabbalist, and then we hit the books. I read aloud while she listens intently, correcting even my smallest mispronunciation. The words are difficult to follow. There’s much talk of vessels and light and “the will to receive.” That last one I find especially baffling. Personally, I’ve never had trouble with my willingness to receive. It’s the giving part that trips me up.
It’s not that simple, she says. There are different ways of receiving. You can receive begrudgingly, contemptuously, and even aggressively. Or, says Yedidah, you can receive with love. Most religions focus on the giving, but Kabbalists consider receiving the more important, and less easily mastered, art.
In Kabbalah, words matter. They are slippery, though. Often, what you hear is not. Yedidah reinterprets Hebrew words that have always befuddled me, put me off, in more meaningful ways. Melach, for instance, literally means “king” but actually refers to “the channel of goodness,” she says.
“But I always pictured a man with a long beard and a jeweled crown.”
“That’s because you don’t know the code.” The Zohar, like most Kabbalistic texts, was written in code. Nothing means what you think it means.
“So it would be like me trying to read Chinese?”
Worse, explains Yedidah. The words are intelligible but their meanings scrambled. The texts are intentionally deceptive. This strikes me as odd, and possibly cruel. But Kabbalists had their reasons. These teachings were so powerful, the rabbis believed, they posed a real danger to those not ready to receive them. By encrypting their work, the rabbis reached the “right” people while everyone else dismissed their tales as nothing more than nice stories about kings and their crowns. So the modern Kabbalist is, first and foremost, an expert code breaker.
Yedidah loves it, though, not despite these obstacles but because of them. She is not a masochist, she assures me. She simply knows what most of us have always suspected: Insights unearned don’t stick. It’s our sweat and blood that provide the glue, preventing these wisps of clarity from floating off into space. It might take her a full day to “get” one sentence, but then she owns that sentence, forever.
More tea is poured and cookies consumed. We tackle the basics, but even these prove tricky. What is Kabbalah? It is not a body of knowledge, Yedidah explains, but a way of being. It’s not what you do but how you do it. Specifically, says Yedidah, how you “put yourself in the state of consciousness to be inspired.”
“Inspired by what?”
“Never mind the what. Focus on the how.”
Okay, I can play that game. “How did you fall into Kabbalah? You promised me a story.”
Yedidah sips her tea, then unfurls a tale worthy of a magus.
It was her father’s yahrzeit, the one-year death anniversary that Jews observe. She wasn’t on good terms with him when he died. He never forgave her for her time at Findhorn, the spiritual retreat. As so often happens, Yedidah had unfinished business with the dead. She visited a rabbi in town and said she wanted to do something to mark her father’s death. He suggested lighting a candle or donating money to charity. Neither idea spoke to her. So he said, “Okay, meet me at the cave tomorrow.”
Yedidah knew the place, inside a synagogue dedicated to Rabbi Luria, the lion of Tzfat. But why should she go? That she didn’t know. She went anyway. Inside the cave, the rabbi handed her a book and told her to read. She did. The words were alien, and familiar. “Know that before the creatures were created, there was one light filling all reality. And there was no empty space, everything was filled with the same, simple light of the infinite, and it didn’t have a beginning and it didn’t have an end. Everyone and everything was one simple light.”
The words hit her “like an atom bomb.” For the next three days she couldn’t function. She was in a state of complete chaos. She couldn’t sleep. She couldn’t eat. She couldn’t care for her children.
“What’s happening?” she asked the rabbi when they met again. “I can’t function.”
“Oh, this is good,” he said. “This is very good.”
“What is possibly good about this?”
The rabbi explained that when you climb a ladder you must let go of one rung before you can grasp the next and there is a brief moment—so brief we don’t usually notice it—when you are no longer grasping the old rung but have not yet taken hold of the new one. This moment, this chaos, is a kind of birth pang. And those words in the cave? They were from the Zohar. Yedidah knew she had found her way.
“Wow,” I say lamely. “You were that certain?”
“I knew totally that I was born to learn this material, that I had waited incarnations for this material.”
“Wow,” I say again, even more lamely, reduced, apparently, to monosyllables. Maybe that’s where I am, between rungs, adrift. Where, though, is that next rung? And how do I know I’ll successfully grab hold of it and not plummet to a terrible death?
Every religion has its creation story, and the Kabbalists are no exception. Theirs is as colorful and fantastical as any I’ve encountered. Basically, it says, God dropped the universe. He was creating it when—oops!—the pieces shattered. We are now living among these shards, and it is our duty to repair the world, to put Humpty Dumpty back together again.
Thus a key concept in Kabbalah (and Judaism in general) is tikkun, or “repair.” Kabbalists believe we each have a unique task, an assignment, to help repair the world by repairing ourselves, our consciousness. There is a multiplier effect, the Kabbalists teach. Every mitzvah, or good deed, performed in the physical realm reverberates in the divine realm.
Now, I am not an especially neat person—more of a mess freak than a neat one—so the idea of all these broken shards lying around doesn’t particularly bother me, and tikkun haolam, repairing the world, sounds like a lot of work, a bit too much. The Buddhists say: Just be. The Taoists say: It just is. The Raëlians say: Just do it. And what do the Kabbalists say? Just get to work already. Kabbalah views the world as one giant renovation project. Like all such projects, this one will no doubt run behind schedule and over budget. Jews have no desire to escape the physical world. They embrace it, all of it, even the bad parts. As the poet Allen Afterman says: “The Jewish way is to know the world, to deny nothing—holding the Holocaust, holding the anger and the bitterness—and sing.” In spite of, he might have added.
Before circling back to Judaism, Yedidah had dabbled in eastern faiths. She tried watching her breath and contemplating nothingness, but it did nothing for her. Kabbalah does share some similarities with eastern faiths like Buddhism. Both are methods as much as theologies. Buddhism is a method for stilling our monkey mind and squelching desire. Kabbalah is a method for receiving God’s light. Both believe in nonduality—that our separateness is only an illusion. Both Kabbalah and Buddhism (Tantric Buddhism, at least) see every one of our actions, no matter how seemingly “unholy,” as fuel for enlightenment.
But there is at least one key difference. Kabbalah doesn’t ask that we extinguish our ego. As Yedidah says: “It tells me that I have an ego and it is good to have an ego. Wow! What a relief. And it is okay to be me. Why would we nullify it? It is God’s precious vessel of inspiration and light.” Another difference: The aim of Buddhism is to transcend the physical world, to become nothing. No-thing. That doesn’t sit well with Yedidah, who is very much an everything. “I can’t become nothing and I need to be honest and I want to say to God, ‘You created me with all the problems I’ve got. It’s Your fault. I want to know why You did that. If You didn’t want me to get mad or angry, then why did You create me like this? It’s Your problem. And I want You to know that.’”
Instead of abolishing the ego, Kabbalah calls on us to transform it from an entity capable of receiving only for itself to one that serves as a conduit for God’s love. The aim of Kabbalah is not to check out of the physical world but to transform it, to sanctify even the crudest of physical acts. Unlike Buddhism, Judaism does not believe desire is the root of all suffering. Desire can be good.
I tell Yedidah about my pet depression. She is sympathetic and recommends I talk to myself in the third person, something I do already and have always found to be something of an embarrassment. Oh, there goes Eric again, talking about himself in the third person. I’ve always considered it a sign of pending madness, but Yedidah says no, it’s the opposite. “When I do that one-step back, I’ve got room to breathe and I don’t feel guilty. We have to understand ourselves.”
That’s when she mentions the mystical falafel. I am a big fan of falafel; it is, as far as I’m concerned, the best possible use of mashed chickpeas ever devised by Man. But mystical?
“Absolutely,” says Yedidah, as if there were any doubt. This ought to be interesting.
“We have to acknowledge our part in something much bigger than ourselves. We are part of the unfolding of the universe. Let’s say you go to a falafel place. You don’t know why you went to this particular falafel place, but you did, and in walks Mr. X and you have no idea that Mr. X will be so important in your life. You meet Mr. X and you and he become fast friends. That friendship is part of the universe unfolding.”
“Some would say it is simply coincidence.”
“But it isn’t.”
My skepticism bubbles to the surface. Is Yedidah suggesting that God is a puppet master and we are the puppets?
“No, that’s not what He’s interested in. In fact, in Kabbalah we believe God is hidden. Otherwise, if the light of God were always present we’d be in total bliss all the time.”
“And this is a problem because?”
“I used to think the same thing. I asked my teacher about this and he said, ‘No, you wouldn’t want that.’ And I said, ‘Yes I would.’ And he said, ‘Well you think that, but’—and this is a very profound Kabbalistic question—‘Why did God create, then go to all this trouble to hide Himself? Why?’ The answer is so that we can come to God through our own work and our own free will. Otherwise it is like getting something for nothing, and nobody appreciates that much. The truth of the matter is that deep down we are tough mutts and we want to do this ourselves.”
“So the fact that God is hidden is a good thing?”
“It’s a fabulous thing.”
Two hours have flown by. I sip my last sip of tea, press down on the magic gate and, as I climb into the taxi, wonder: Have I found Judaism’s lost heart?
I head to my favorite café, order an upside-down coffee, and attempt to digest my hours with Yedidah. I like her even more now. I’m not sure, though, if she is teaching me Kabbalah or about Kabbalah—or, more likely, about Yedidah. Sometimes, it’s difficult to separate the teacher from the teachings. Sometimes, there is no difference.
Later, I have some free time, so I dip into Eliezer’s House of Books, the only bookstore in town with a selection in English. An odd selection it is, though. There’s an inordinate number of books concerned with the issue of interfaith marriage: the no-nonsense How to Stop an Inter-Faith Marriage, for instance, and the cheekier Dear Rabbi, Why Can’t I Marry Her? I knew assimilation was a concern for some Jews; I didn’t realize it was also a genre. I keep scanning the shelves and spot a copy of Aryeh Kaplan’s Jewish Meditation. This is a classic. It’s the book that many of the people I’ve met in Tzfat tell me drew them to Kabbalah in the first place.
When I first heard of the book, I didn’t know what to think. Jewish meditation? I pictured a group of middle-aged men and women sitting in the lotus position, silently worrying that their children won’t amount to anything. Thankfully, I was wrong. There is a genuine tradition of meditation that, Kaplan informs me, dates back to the days of Moses. These meditative practices, varied and rigorous, have dwelled in the nooks and crannies of Jewish teaching, keeping a low profile so as not to raise suspicion.
This being Jewish meditation, many of the exercises have a verbal component: repeating certain mantras, or concentrating on certain, supposedly powerful, letter combinations, such as YHWH, the tetragrammaton for God. I flip through the pages and find one exercise that seems simple enough. I am to repeat these words: Ribbono shel Olam, Lord of the Universe, over and over, for thirty minutes. That’s it. Normally, this is exactly the kind of feudal language that turns me off (Who made you Lord of the Universe?), but I set aside those concerns, putting them in the same lockbox where I put my inhibitions about cultivating my chi and protesting at abortion clinics and dressing like a woman. It’s a large box.
I try to get comfortable in my hotel room. How should I sit? My modified lotus position doesn’t seem right (too Buddhist), and neither does lying on the floor (too Raëlian), so I opt for simply sitting on a chair. I take a few deep breaths then begin: Ribbono shel Olam, Ribbono shel Olam, Ribbono shel Olam. The thing about these repetitive exercises is that they are very…repetitive. My mind protests: This is stupid. Why are you saying these words over and over? You don’t even know what they mean. You’re an idiot; I knew you wouldn’t amount to anything. Then at some point—around minute seventeen—something happens: My mind gives up. It surrenders to the sheer monotony of the mantra (Okay, fine, You are Lord of the Universe), and this act of surrender yields an alien and not entirely unpleasant sensation that some people call “relaxation.”
Not quite that alien, actually. I felt something similar after the Sufi dhikr, or remembrance, La ilaha illallah. “There is no God but God.” One mantra is from the Jewish Torah, the other from the Muslim Hadith, yet they produce remarkably similar results. Clearly, there is something about the repetition of a simple phrase that triggers a relaxation response, or something akin to that, in the human brain. I wonder, though: Does the content matter, or is it the sounds themselves that do the trick? As I’ve discovered, certain languages, like ancient Sanskrit or modern Arabic, are vibrational. The sound of the words themselves elicits a physiological response. All sorts of words vibrate, though. Yabba-dabba doo, for instance. What if I repeated that for thirty minutes? Would I also feel relaxed, transcendent? There’s only one way to find out.
I sit in the modified lotus position and repeat yabba-dabba doo for thirty minutes. It goes well. Nobody calls the meditation police. I feel better afterward, more relaxed, more present. Better, but not as better as with the Jewish or Muslim meditations. The reason, I think, is that when uttering those religious mantras my mind’s eye conjured up vague images of majesty and awe. I raised myself. When saying yabba-dabba doo, my mind conjured up very specific images of Fred Flintstone. I lowered myself. Words operate on a number of levels. The somatic level of vibration and sound, the cerebral level of meaning and context. It’s the interplay of these two levels that converts mere utterances into mantras and prayers.
Words matter. Kabbalah takes words familiar to me—words like mitzvah and Shabbat—and turns them upside down, like the café-hafuch that I so love. As Jewish mystics say, “The world is wrong names.” And what are we to do with these wrong names? Who can set the record straight? It is not the scientist’s job, nor the theologian’s nor even the linguist’s. This is the poet’s work. Kabbalah is poetry. Good poetry. Like all good poetry, it speaks to us through image and sound, bypassing our critical mind, surprising us with what we already know, and leaving us sated and thirsty for more. Always more. Ein sof.
One day, sitting in Eyal’s office, I notice a painting hanging on the wall. I’ve never seen anything quite like it. It’s a brightly colored wheel, like a mandala, only with Jewish instead of Buddhist iconography. It’s a gift, explains Eyal, from one of Tzfat’s best-known artists, an American immigrant named David Friedman. I need to meet him, I tell Eyal.
We walk a short distance to the Kabbalah Art Gallery. There we find David, baseball cap and neatly trimmed beard, giving a lecture to a group of tourists from Brazil. He’s pointing to a painting and explaining how you can read it forward or backward. A few minutes later, the tourists gobble up paintings like so many chocolate brownies. David’s wife, Miriam, can barely keep up, counting dollars and shekels, swiping credit cards. David’s art favors bold colors and sharp geometry, often using letters in the Hebrew alphabet as subjects. Some paintings look like molecular models. Others are overtly psychedelic. One, where Hebrew letters form a circle, mandala-style, is called The Big Bang. The Brazilians are effusive with their praise, and I notice how David accepts the compliments graciously—not overly proud but not too humble either. Clearly, this is a man well practiced in the art of receiving.
Once the Brazilians have left, David and I sit and talk over coffee and homemade pickles. He tells me how years ago, when he was still an ultra-orthodox Jew, he visited a doctor in Jerusalem, an oncologist. The doctor plopped his CT scan on the desk and offered David a cigarette.
“No thanks,” said David. “I don’t smoke.”
“Maybe you should start,” the doctor said. That was his way of telling David he had cancer, at age twenty-eight, and the prognosis was not good. David’s illness, and the questions it raised, accelerated his departure from the cloistered world of the ultra-orthodox. Ultimately, though, it was a jar of mayonnaise that tipped the balance. Well, not exactly a jar of mayonnaise but a billboard depicting one. Some of his Hasidic friends were arrested for spray-painting over billboards that showed scantily clad women or other forbidden images. One of his friends had spray-painted over a picture of a jar of mayonnaise.
“Why would you spray-paint mayonnaise?” David asked him. “It’s not forbidden.”
“But I couldn’t look at the billboard in case it was a picture of a woman, so I just spray-painted it. I didn’t know it was mayonnaise until afterward,” explained his friend. That is when David knew he had to find a new path.
Today, still religious, but on his own terms, David describes himself as an “ultra-paradox Jew.” Like Yedidah, he rarely attends synagogue, choosing to begin the Sabbath with a walking meditation in the woods. He owns a variety of headgear—baseball caps, Bukharan hats, and others that he wears rather than a traditional kippa. He doesn’t want people to put him in a box.
David’s approach to Kabbalah, though, is very different from Yedidah’s. He leads with his head, not his heart. This approach, he believes, renders the teachings more accessible, more transferable, than ones that rely on a teacher’s—even a brilliant teacher’s—mystical insight.
The Kabbalists of sixteenth-century Tzfat didn’t just make this stuff up, says David, they discovered it, they saw it. David sees “an incredible, logical consistency that goes into amazing detail.” It is a grammar of God and, like all grammars, there are plenty of exceptions and irregular verbs but at its core lies a discernible, learnable pattern. This clearly appeals to David, who has the mind of a scientist and the spatial bias of an artist.
“It’s like looking at a beautiful jigsaw puzzle. It’s all interconnected,” he says. That is one word he is fond of and where Kabbalah, again, shares common ground with eastern faiths—the belief that nothing, and no one, exists independently. Everything is connected.
David reminds me of Wayne of Staten Island. Patient. Comfortable in his own skin. Both were born Jewish. One drifted and found a home in Buddhism. The other drifted and circled back to his own faith, albeit a do-it-yourself version of that faith. William James would say that both men underwent a conversion. James defined conversion as “the process, gradual or sudden, by which a self hitherto divided or consciously wrong, inferior, and unhappy becomes unified and consciously right, superior and happy.” In that sense, David is a convert to his own faith. Such a thing is possible. Conversion, after all, means “to turn,” and we can turn away from something or toward it or, as the Sufis taught me, we can turn in a circle, returning to where we started, the same yet not.
The way David explains it, God created this messed-up world, shattering the vessels on purpose, in order to provide a teachable moment, the ultimate teachable moment, an opportunity for all of us to do God’s work. I am still intrigued by this concept that God needs us. Does He? Not exactly, says David. He needs us the way a teacher needs students. If my daughter’s kindergarten teacher gives her an assignment, say, to draw a cow, she doesn’t “need” Sonya’s help. The teacher could do it on her own. But then my daughter wouldn’t learn how to draw a cow.
Family, says David, is how most of us practice tikkun, repair, and I’m reminded of what Brother Crispin told me: Your family is your apostolate. I am guilty, I realize, of looking for my spiritual nourishment elsewhere. I put family in one box and spirituality in another. Not so, these two souls say. Same box.
I tell David my Tokyo story, about how I awoke in a state of utter joy, saying over and over, “I didn’t know, I didn’t know.” David listens patiently, revealing nothing, then walks over to a bookshelf and extracts a hefty-looking tome. He turns immediately to a page, and reads: “And Jacob woke from his sleep and said, God is in this place, and I did not know it.”
The passage is from the Bible (Genesis 28:16). Jacob later changed his name to “Israel,” which means “one who wrestles with God.”
“Interesting,” says David, tilting his head upward slightly and arching his eyebrows.
“Freaky,” I say, again at a loss for words. Tzfat is managing to accomplish in a few short days what others have failed to do over a lifetime: render me mute.
David agrees to teach me Kabbalah. I feel a bit like I’m cheating on Yedidah, which is silly, I know, but there you have it. The sessions are very different. David uses terms like “the science of Kabbalah,” which I can’t imagine Yedidah ever uttering. He draws diagrams of the sefirot, the ten emanations of God, that remind me of something from high school chemistry and produce an identical throbbing in my head. Then there is the code, which is even more complex than Yedidah let on. Kabbalists believe that every sentence, letter, word, and even accent mark in the Hebrew Bible contains hidden meaning, and that this meaning can be deciphered by assigning a numeric value to each word. Words with similar numeric values are thought to be related in some way.
My lessons with David are fascinating, and I always leave his studio intellectually sated, but half an hour later I’m confused again. He’ll be talking about a particular sefirot and how it relates to the ein sof and I get it, I really do, for about ten minutes then—poof!—it’s gone forever. Nothing sticks. The pickles, though, are quite filling.
My days in Tzfat fall into a routine. I forage for coffee in the morning, then take a taxi to see Yedidah. Afterward, I break for lunch, eating a mystical falafel, sipping an upside-down coffee, and attempting to digest what I’ve learned. Then, sometime in the afternoon, I drop by David’s studio for homemade pickles and metaphysics. David feeds my head, Yedidah my heart.
My favorite time of day is late afternoon. That is when the Tzfat air is at its softest and the Tzfat light its most brilliant. Closest to Heaven. I sit on my hotel balcony, smoking my little existential cigars and reading the writings of the great Kabbalists, who, only a few hundred years ago, walked these very streets and asked the very questions I ask: Where did we come from? What happens when we die? Why can’t you get a decent cup of coffee in this town before 8:00 a.m.?
Kabbalah makes all of the other faiths I’ve dabbled in so far seem like child’s play. “Maddeningly abstruse” is how the poet Rodger Kamenetz describes Kabbalah. (When poets accuse you of fuzziness, you know you’re in trouble.) If Kabbalah were part of any other faith, I’m sure Jews would dismiss it as nothing but a bunch of mumbo-jumbo. Yet they don’t. As one orthodox rabbi put it: “Kabbalah is nonsense, but it is Jewish nonsense and therefore worthy of consideration.”
Here I’ve finally found a path that honors my love of books, and yet I’m still lost. More lost than ever. It’s one thing to fail at Buddhism or Taoism and another thing altogether to fail at my own faith, especially now that I’m giving it an honest try. It’s this blasted code! Aramaic translated into Hebrew translated into English and, from the outset, intentionally deceptive. It’s like some warped game of telephone, which would be fine if I could just write off the person on the other end as a lunatic, but I can’t. Sure, it’s all interesting—in the way that, say, nuclear fusion is interesting—but where is it getting me? How does it help salve this dull ache in my heart? I put my book down and stare blankly at the horizon: a few wispy clouds, an Israeli army watchtower, a road slicing through brown hills that look like the backs of sleeping animals. That’s when I spot the hawk.
It’s riding the air currents, so effortlessly, propelled not by exertion—its wings remain perfectly still—but by its intuitive understanding of the laws of thermal dynamics. It is an example of pure wu-wei, effortless action. My mind drifts to Lao-tzu and Chuang-tzu and the gentle wisdom of the Way. No. That was another experience, another place. I am here in Tzfat. Be here now, Eric, place your mind in your body, as Wayne of Staten Island would say. No, that was Kathmandu and Buddhism. Wrong religion, again. Listen to your heart, Eric. No, no, that’s Sufism.
My head is spinning—clockwise, I believe, in the Buddhist direction, though I’m not sure. I’m not sure of anything. Might I be suffering from what psychiatrist and author M. Scott Peck calls “spiritual confusion”? Is the sum of all these religions I’ve sampled less than their parts? Am I overdosing on God? The not-still voice in my head is prodding me, taunting me. Just pick up the book, the one right there, called Kabbalah and Consciousness. Read that and all will become clear, the voice says. Yes, that’s what I ought to do.
Someone, I don’t remember who, said that in the spiritual realm there is no compulsion. As soon as we think I ought to do this, whatever “this” is, however noble and therapeutic, it’s game over. Ought has ambushed more spiritual journeys than all of the charlatan gurus, New Age pap, and fuzzy-mindedness combined. So I put the book down and watch the hawk. I do this for a long time. I’m not sure exactly how long but when I finally decide it’s time to go inside, it is still up there, swooping and diving, like a child playing in the surf.
I meet Baruch, a musician, who, like others I’ve met here, seems happy, happier than any Jew has a right to be. We sit and chat in his living room, a cave-like house with arched ceilings and pictures of dead rabbis on the wall. It’s a good talk. I’m about to leave when he invites me to join him at the mikva, a Jewish ritual bath. I’ve never been before. Why would I? Water makes me uncomfortable—my swimming style is best described as a controlled flail—and so does Judaism. Not surprisingly, the combination of these two activities has never held much appeal.
“You’ve never been to a mikva?” says Baruch, incredulous, the way my friends back home might respond if I had told them I had never eaten sushi or had a hot-stone massage. “You’re missing something magical,” he continues, a glint in his eye. “I’ll be reading a certain passage, won’t be getting it, simply can’t get it, then I’ll dip into the mikva and suddenly it becomes clear.” After a dip in the mikva, he says, the sun shines brighter.
He had me at magical. Adding to the mystical quality of what I’m about to experience is the fact, as Baruch informs me, that the word mikva has the same numeric value as “womb.” So, in the Kabbalistic interpretation, I am about to return to the womb, which is something I’ve been meaning to do for a long time now. Another interpretation, Baruch tells me: I am going to be reborn, not on the physical level but on the level of consciousness. This seems an awful lot to ask from a tub of water, but I know by now that such skepticism won’t get me anywhere. We don’t see what we are convinced does not exist.
We walk down a narrow path to a small simple structure. We pay the mikva-keeper a few shekels and go inside. There are towels laid out drying and, a few feet away, a small pool the size of a hot tub, the mikva. Outside, I hear birds chirping, the wind.
I watch as Baruch bends down, naked, touching his forehead to the chipped blue stone floor. He looks at me, his eyes saying, “Okay, it’s your turn.”
I confess to Baruch that I don’t know what to say. “Just be honest,” he says. “Prayer is a craft, and all craft requires a high degree of honesty.” I never thought of it that way. I always thought of prayer as a kind of test, not a test of God’s abilities but of mine. I kneel on my right knee, naked, and silently say the only word that comes to mind, one that William James believed was the source of all religious impulses: “Help!”
The water is bracing. I close my eyes before submerging. If this is the womb, it’s nothing like I remember. Not nearly as warm and enveloping. Within a few minutes, we’ve toweled off and are walking back up the hill, the Tzfat air soft, the sun still high in the sky, perhaps a bit brighter than I recall, or maybe that’s just my imagination.
Viewed from outer space, by aliens (the Elohim, perhaps?), the scene I just described would look like this: A middle-aged human, bald, with a slight paunch but a fairly good specimen nonetheless given his age and genetic background, takes off his clothes, touches his head against a tiled floor, and then submerges himself in an element that is two parts hydrogen, one part oxygen, which earthlings call “water.” That is a perfectly accurate description of what transpired. It is incomplete, though, for it fails to take into account one important factor: kavanah, intention. Kavanah bridges crude physical action and larger meaning. Kavanah explains why some gifts we receive feel like gifts and others feel like an obligation, a quid pro quo. Our legal system explicitly recognizes kavanah. Someone accused of murdering a person with intention faces a harsher sentence than someone who committed the same act but without such intent. Kavanah, the Kabbalists believe, is what is too often missing from contemporary Judaism. Some even believe that to perform a mitzvah, or commandment, without proper intention is worse than not doing it at all.
Another morning, another session with Yedidah. She had warned me that we would be engaging in “circular learning,” and oh was she right. Our lessons are like jellyfish: squishy, with no discernible structure, but managing to maintain a forward trajectory nonetheless. We read from the Zohar, or one of the rabbinical interpretations of it, then break for tea and cookies, then trade anecdotes about our travels or our families, then read another passage, then make more tea, and before I know it two hours have passed.
I don’t know how to classify our time together. Officially, she is teaching me Kabbalah, but she also acts as therapist, tea maker, taxi dispatcher, friend. All the while, she says things that are incredibly wise or blindingly obvious—or both, wisdom being nothing more than common sense in drag. “You cannot dance on one foot,” Yedidah says one morning. “Start where you are,” she says another. She says some things that, at the time, make no sense—“The opposite of sadness is not happiness but clarity”—but later, over an upside-down coffee, ring true. She says things that make me smile, like when she suggested I spend time “resting in God” and I immediately pictured the Almighty as a goose-down comforter. And she says things that hint at a benevolent and mysterious force. “Your needs will get met, but differently, in unexpected ways, in ways you never thought about.”
On this particular day, I have a question I’ve been meaning to ask but have yet to screw up my courage. It’s a question I’ve posed to others—Raëlians, Wiccans, and the like—without any hesitation but here, among my own faith, I balk. Oh, what the heck. I take a stiff sip of tea.
“Yedidah, forgive me, but can I ask a question that might sound, a bit, well, blasphemous?”
“Oh, those are usually the goodies,” she says, inching forward on her chair, like a teenage girl eager to hear the latest school gossip.
“Well, what if it is all, you know, just rubbish? What if you’ve been misled? What if all Kabbalists have been misled and the Zohar is just, you know, the fantastical invention of some rabbi smoking dope out in the desert?” I brace myself for an earful that never comes.
“It’s a very good question,” she says with complete sincerity. “I tell my students to ask themselves this: After studying Kabbalah, are you more patient with your husband, with your children? Are you less angry? For me, the answer is yes.” A different accent, a different God, but once again the same sentiment that William James uttered a century ago: Truth is what works.
This is all well and good for Yedidah, who has a close working relationship with God, but I don’t. “We’re not on speaking terms, God and I,” I say.
“I don’t believe that.”
She’s right. He did talk to me once, that night in Tokyo, but He doesn’t call anymore. “Look,” I say. “He’s just not that into me.”
“Well, hold on just one second. When you picture God, what comes to mind?”
I explain how it’s either one of two very different images: God as the Cosmic Male Parent, long white beard and all, or else God as the Infinite Whatever, a milky nebula, formless but vaguely benevolent. That’s it. One of those two.
“But there is a third image, and that is this: Your inner essence and the essence of God are one.”
“Are you saying I am God?”
“There is a part of you, yes, which is God, and it’s called soul. One of the most helpful things about Kabbalah is it says specifically we do not know what God is. It says we cannot know what God is, even the highest angels do not know what God is. But God manifests in His actions, okay? For some people, God manifests Himself through creativity. For others, it is through their families, or through voluntary work. For you I think I would say God speaks to you very much through the arrangement of people you meet.”
“I do meet interesting people.”
“You really do. It is very amazing. And you seem to have some inner guidance system, an inner GPS that somehow steers you in the right direction, which to me is very phenomenal. I think God is actually speaking to you. It’s just that you don’t call it God.”
“So we are on speaking terms?”
“Yes, in fact I think God loves you very much. I don’t know why. But He does.”
“And my sadness?”
“That is a kippa, a shell.”
During one of our last sessions, Yedidah teaches me how to pray. Normally, this is not something that I thought needed to be taught, any more than breathing or masturbation needs to be taught. Either you know how to do these things or you are in a world of trouble. No, Yedidah assures me, prayer is learned.
First of all, she says, synagogues are nice but hardly necessary. She doesn’t go very often. Her study is her synagogue, her rocking chair the altar. “Prayer is mobile,” she says, and of course she’s right. We live in a world that worships mobility, as all those BlackBerrys attest, yet we largely persist in the belief that God is confined to certain buildings. Surely, the Almighty has gone wireless.
As she had mentioned, she begins her day with the Shema, the mother of all Jewish prayers. It’s blissfully short, but extremely powerful. Hear, Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord is One. She likes those words but likes those that follow even more: And you shall love.
“Okay, shall we say it?”
Predictably, performance anxiety kicks in. Talking to God makes me nervous, especially when I think He might actually be listening. “Well, how should I say it? With feeling?”
“With intention. Kavanah. It is the key to everything.”
She’s right, again. When we are caught up in feeling, we are a passenger. It might be a bumpy ride or a pleasant one but we are still a passenger, passive. When we do something, anything, with intention, we are the driver—and the passenger.
I try, but stumble horribly. When I speak Hebrew, I am thirteen years old again, gangly and pimple-faced, wearing a polyester suit at my Bar Mitzvah. I don’t want to be thirteen again. Once was enough.
“Okay, listen to me.” The way she says it is with such passion—Shema Yisrael—her voice strong and resonant. Yet the words are also infused with an undeniable sadness. The prayer, like all prayers, is both celebration and lamentation, a dirge for “life’s sad incompleteness,” as Immanuel Kant puts it.
“Try it again, with all of the chazak you’ve got.”
I have no idea what chazak means, but I give it all I’ve got. This time it feels better, more real.
“Very good,” she says, like a first-grade teacher praising the slow student. “Now I’ll teach you a real bit of Kabbalah.” She says the prayer again, this time her voice alternating between a full-throated bellow and a whisper. The whisper, though, is no less intense; in fact, it is more intense, the same amount of energy squeezed into a smaller container.
We pray again, over and over, our voices rising and falling together, until our session is over and, once again, I slip through the magic gate and take a taxi down, down, down to Tzfat and the café where a mystical falafel and an upside-down coffee await me.
During one of my last lessons with David, I notice a coffee mug in his kitchen that I hadn’t seen before. It reads “Kabbalah blah blah blah.” His friend Daniel, a potter, made a few of them, but only a few, and they tend to keep them hidden away, lest outsiders suspect that all of this “Jewish nonsense” is just that. The existence of the mugs, though, belies a pleasing whiff of self-deprecation among the Kabbalists. They pass the Chesterton test: They can laugh at themselves.
David, it turns out, is quite fond of religious humor. One of his favorite jokes is about the rabbi and the fingernails. Students at a yeshiva, a Jewish seminary, noticed that the chief rabbi always cut his fingernails after he bathed in the mikva—never before. This confounded the students, who were certain the rabbi’s habit contained some important truth.
“Why, Rabbi,” they finally asked, “do you only cut your fingernails after bathing in the mikva, never before?”
“Because,” said the rabbi, pausing for dramatic effect, “they are softer then.”
Of all the trip wires lining the spiritual path, the most treacherous is overreaching, reading great significance into events or people that contain no such significance. We are so busy looking for the big signs, the revelations, that we miss the smaller ones, the glimpses of the divine that, collectively, might add up to something very big indeed. And despite David’s intellectual approach to these teachings, Kabbalah, like all mystical traditions, remains intensely personal, wholly subjective. As Gershom Scholem, the great scholar of Kabbalah, put it, “There is no such thing as mysticism in the abstract.” That is what makes the mystical path so beguiling—and frustrating. Questions about the insights attained by others are inevitably met with these words: You had to be there. Fine, I think, but what if I wasn’t?
On my last Sabbath in Tzfat, David invites me to join him on his walking meditation.
“Walking meditation? Sounds awfully Buddhist,” I say.
“It is,” says David, “but it’s also Jewish.” Back in the sixteenth century, Rabbi Luria, a man many consider a mystical genius, would walk with his followers, hundreds of them, to the fields outside the city and welcome the Sabbath like subjects welcoming their queen.
David and I walk to the head of a trail, where we meet his friend Daniel, the potter. The sun is slipping beneath the horizon. The Sabbath siren has already sounded. The day of rest has officially begun. We walk normally for a bit, making small talk. Tzfat small talk, that is, which in this case is a lengthy discourse on the etymology of the modern Hebrew word for “electricity.” Not for the first time, I wonder: Are these people capable of having an inconsequential thought? All of this profundity must grow tiresome. (I was later pleased to learn that David has a soft spot for donuts and college football. There may be hope for him yet.)
“Okay,” says David, pausing at a bend. “We begin here.” Our task is simple. We are to walk slowly, very slowly. Simply be aware. We are to take one breath for each step. One breath, one step.
We begin. Breath, step. Breath, step. I pull into the lead, which I briefly find exhilarating until I realize that, no, this is not a good thing, not now. We’re engaged in a kind of inverted race, with victory going to the slowest. Only this is not about victory, of course. It is about awareness. On this score, the Buddhists and the Kabbalists concur. The Kabbalists, though, take it a step further. More than awareness, they say, it is about sanctification. It is about taking an everyday activity—in this case walking—and raising it, elevating it from the physical realm to the divine. It is about making Heaven manifest on earth. It is about doing God’s work, one step at a time.
Which is not easy, of course. At first, I exert a huge amount of mental energy as I attempt to recalibrate my walking speed from its usual frantic pace to something more human. It’s like trying to stop a huge cruise ship; it takes time for all of that forward momentum to dissipate. It is physically painful; I am aware of each muscle in my calves expanding and contracting. Soon, though, I get the hang of it and, lo and behold, actually enjoy it. I am consciously aware of how I walk not only with my legs but also with my shoulders, with my entire body. I’m aware of the variety of terrain. What before I saw as only a dirt path I now experience as much more complex and varied topography: stubborn rock, crunchy gravel, a soft carpet of pine needles.
I become intensely aware of the auburn light, infusing everything around me with a plush glow. And the sounds. My God, the sounds! I hear everything: a lone car swooshing by on a distant highway, a bird chirping, a man praying. Where were these sounds before? It’s as if I had been wearing a pair of those noise-canceling headphones popular with frequent fliers. These headphones work by producing a converse sound to that which needs blocking; they block noise with noise. Our minds work much the same way. We miss so many sounds not because we fail to listen but because we’re too busy talking—to ourselves. Our chattering minds produce a steady stream of countervailing noise; other sounds don’t stand a chance. Now, though, I have removed the headphones, and I can hear again.
Breath, step. Breath, step. Then I experience the strangest sensation. I am no longer walking on the ground. The ground and I are walking together. The walking is—how to describe it?—interactive. The earth is an active participant. The path is pushing back, meeting me, pressing against me. I’m in control but not totally. There is another willful entity here. It’s like riding a horse. Or perhaps another activity that involves a kinetic interplay. A well-known Sufi master, Pir Zia, once told me that whenever he walks he imagines himself “making love to the earth.” Now I know what he means.
I’m now in last place, behind David and Daniel. Good. Never before have I derived so much joy from lagging, and I make a silent commitment to lag more often. David’s final words before we began were: “Just let go.” Watching the two of them walking in this ethereal, almost ghostly, manner, I am intensely aware of their inevitable death, and mine too. They are walking a few steps ahead of me. That makes sense. They are a few years older, but I am not far behind. I imagine the three of us walking to our death right now, part of an unbroken chain of human beings who have come before and who will come after. The inevitability of death dawns on me in a way it hasn’t before. That and its naturalness. As it was, is now, and will be forever. For once, the thought of death, the knowledge of it, does not terrify me.
We are back where we began. Our walking meditation is over. I look at my watch; twenty-five minutes have passed. It seems like only five or ten. We stretch and say Shabbat shalom, good Sabbath, to one another. I feel a lightness descend upon me like pixie dust. That, and a faint but undeniable urge to smoke a cigarette.
Later, I join Daniel and his family for the Sabbath dinner. It’s the nicest I’ve ever had. There is none of the unacknowledged stiffness that I’ve encountered at other Sabbath dinners. The four of us—me, Daniel, his wife, and his grown son—are crammed into his eat-in kitchen. We are eating by candlelight. Daniel blesses the bread and the wine, and then he blesses his son, placing both hands on his head and saying these words: “May God bless you and watch over you. May God shine His face toward you and show you favor.” I know without a doubt that I am not witnessing a man fulfilling some tribal obligation, or parroting empty words because some rabbi said he must. No, I am witnessing a man expressing love for his child, a love so strong and precious that he calls upon something bigger than himself—call it God, Hashem, Yahweh, the Way, the Infinite Whatever—to collaborate in this love, to amplify it. It is an act of great self-assertion and great humility at the same time and, if the Kabbalists are right (and I hope they are), it is an act that rippled across this world, and others too, in ways we cannot begin to fathom.
At that moment, I vow that when I return home, I will bless my daughter in the same manner, with the same intention. What I am witnessing, and partaking of, this Sabbath is so different from the OCD Judaism I had encountered all of my life, and I say as much to Daniel. He thinks about this for a moment then pronounces: “Judaism is like driving.” I’m not sure where he’s going with this.
“If you learn to drive, you need rules. You need to know what a red light means and what a yield sign means. You need to obey the speed limits. But it would be silly to view driving as only a collection of rules and nothing else. You drive in order to get to a destination, someplace special perhaps. You drive for the sheer pleasure of driving. The rules are only part of the story of driving.”
He had me, but I wasn’t ready to surrender yet. What about the overtly silly rules of Judaism, like putting on your right shoe before your left? Surely, those serve no purpose.
“The right represents kindness, the left rigor. We start our day with kindness and only then do we add rigor. It’s just a reminder.”
I cry uncle, and recall what James Hopkins had said about Buddhist rituals being “Post-it notes for the brain.” Maybe all religions are simply a collection of these Post-it notes. They come in different sizes and languages, but that’s what they are: fluorescent reminders that “hey, you’re not the only one on the planet” or, “Yo! How would you like to be treated the way you treat others?” These reminders are almost always brief and to the point, small enough to fit on a Post-it note, big enough to stick.
My last session with Yedidah. After our lesson, we decamp to her kitchen for tea. I now feel comfortable enough with her to be brutally honest, so I point out that her kitchen is a complete mess—a collage of dirty dishes, pita-bread fragments, and various unidentified substances.
“I know,” she says. “But my kitchen is a metaphor for the process of creation.”
It’s nonsense, of course, but it is Yedidah nonsense and therefore worthy of consideration.
She has an errand to run at the post office, so we walk down the hill together. It’s a perfect, cloudless day, and for the first time I can see the Sea of Galilee below us, close enough to touch, it seems. The sun feels warm on my face. We reach the post office, and find it’s closed, even though, according to the sign, it is open. Yedidah is confused. Another woman arrives, and is equally confused. There is much harrumphing, Israeli-style. “Ma Kara? Ze lo tov.” (What happened? This is not good.) Yedidah is upset too, but then she lets it go. It’s God’s will, she says, the universe at work. Maybe the guy who works there, a nice guy, is sick or has some other good reason for closing early. She will go do some grocery shopping instead. It is a generous explanation of the situation. It is also a Kabbalistic one, though I couldn’t tell you exactly why.
It’s time to say goodbye. I want to hug Yedidah but am not sure if that’s appropriate. She is both British and a religious Jew, not exactly a hug-friendly demographic. So I am pleasantly surprised when she opens her arms and briefly envelops me.
I decide to walk into town rather than call a taxi. It’s a gorgeous day and, besides, I’m experiencing pangs of happiness and don’t want my good mood, which I’ve worked so hard to achieve, ruined by some happy Moroccan taxi driver who achieves his contentment with no apparent effort. I walk, not exactly in a meditative way, but it feels good nonetheless. As I round a bend, I pass a police station then a building that, according to the sign, houses the Ethiopian Absorption Ministry. I smile at that. New immigrants to Israel aren’t merely welcomed or integrated or even assimilated. They are absorbed. When something is absorbed by a larger entity it is transformed, but not fully. Something of its indigenous self remains. When it is the nation-state doing the absorbing, we attain citizenship. When it is God doing the absorbing, we attain—what? Enlightenment? Heaven? I take a deep breath and, as Yedidah advised, address myself in the third person. Take it easy, Eric, it’s only a sign. Not all signs are signs. Sounds like you’re coming down with a touch of Tzfat Syndrome there, big guy.
It’s important to know when to travel to a holy city. It’s just as important to know when to leave such a place. It is time for me to leave Tzfat. The next morning, I board the Egged bus, heading south for Jerusalem, a city that, over the centuries, has also attracted its share of carrots and fish, trying to find their way.
I know there is one person I must meet there. During my time as an NPR correspondent, I knew Yossi Klein Halevi mainly as an astute analyst of Israeli politics. He is much more than that, though, a religious man in the best sense of the word, a spiritual iconoclast, and now that I’ve dropped my journalistic armor of objectivity, I am eager to see him again.
I meet Yossi at a sushi restaurant in a trendy neighborhood in Jerusalem. To look at him, one could easily conclude he is a typical orthodox Jew: knitted kippa, unruly beard, plain white shirt. But if I’ve learned anything in my travels it is that appearances can lie. What you see is not. Yes, he has his rabbis but he is “totally freelance.” Over the decades, he has fashioned his own Judaism, incorporating what works, dropping what doesn’t. Like Yedidah and David, he rarely attends synagogue, and observes the Sabbath in his own way. For a while, he was not using electricity at all, but he found that made him more, not less, stressed, defeating the purpose of the Sabbath, so he turned the lights back on. Yossi’s practice is Jewish, his reading eclectic. He is especially fond of the great Hindu sages.
The waitress brings us menus, chunky tablets that would make Moses proud. Then it dawns on me: God is to religion as food is to a menu. Both the menu and the religion suggest a variety of options, and while the waiter can make recommendations, ultimately the choice is ours. To say you know God because you are religious is like saying you have dined well because you read the menu. One act may lead to another but not necessarily. Both the menu and religion entice us with promises they don’t always fulfill, and overly elaborate descriptions of the delights that await are to be treated with suspicion, as anyone who has ever ordered the artisanal farm-fed beef carpaccio can attest. Good religions, like good menus, tell us u pfront what price we must pay, and that price, while high, is always one we can bear.
Our food arrives. I know better by now than to just dig in. I wait for the blessing.
“We say this blessing because—”
“Wait,” I interrupt, eager to show off my knowledge. “To raise our consciousness.”
“Yes,” says Yossi, “but also to raise the consciousness of the food.”
This is a new one. I’m not sure how we can raise the consciousness of a small slab of dead tuna. Yossi explains: “The Kabbalists believe everything is alive, so as they eat, they think of the sacrifice that their food made. Your food is the sacrifice and you are the altar. Kabbalah, at its best, fills the practitioner with a constant sense of responsibility, awe, and love.”
We say the blessing together. Yossi leading with the Hebrew and me repeating, with kavanah, and fresh appreciation for my tekka maki.
I tell Yossi about my brush with gas, about the nurse and The Question—Have you found your God yet?—that demanded an answer. I tell him about how I meditated like a Buddhist, whirled like a Sufi, prayed like a Christian. I leave out a few bits, like shaving my legs in Vegas, but am otherwise comprehensive in my recounting. I tell him how I came to Israel in hopes of checking off the Judaism box and moving on but then came the fish-and-carrot story, and my time in Tzfat, which actually revised my dismal view of Judaism, a view that hasn’t seen an uptick since I was eight days old and that mohel lunged at my privates with a knife.
“So, Yossi, am I a fish or a carrot?”
“You are a fish but you have definite carrot tendencies, and you need to honor those as well. If you searched for five years and came back and told me you found that your heart is Buddhist, I would say ‘Be blessed’ and mean it. The way of the soul is mysterious and I can’t judge a Jewish soul that feels it needs to be fulfilled in this incarnation through Buddhism. But if people like you turn away from Judaism, Judaism will die. It will be smothered by the rote-ists.”
I had never thought of it that way. Maybe God doesn’t need me but the Jews do. My search so far has been a bit—what’s the word?—selfish. I’ve been looking for God, in His many guises, in order to dampen my fear, scratch my spiritual itch, fill my God-shaped hole. It never occurred to me that others might have a dog in my hunt. Yossi has appealed to something very real, and very Jewish.
“Are you guilting me, Yossi?”
“I prefer to think of it as appealing to your sense of responsibility.”
I was afraid of that. My sense of responsibility is stunted—not absent, mind you; that would be better. Then I could behave selfishly and sleep at night. No, I have just enough of a sense of responsibility to stoke my guilt but not enough to do anything about it.
I was so convinced of my carrot-ness, I never stopped to question it. I am a seeker, a man of the world’s religions. Judaism is for the parochial among us. It is for the Fanta drinkers and the observers of petty rules. I am much more interesting than that. Yet as we eat and talk, Yossi’s words continue to chip away at my carrot identity, and I begin to eye the tuna dangling on my chopsticks as, perhaps, family. Every religion, he says, is a language, “a language of intimacy with God,” and once you have mastered one it’s easier to learn others. The implication is that I set off on my search not knowing any language, yet expecting to acquire others. It doesn’t work that way. It’s one thing to be a skeptical universalist and another to be a spiritual dilettante. The universalist stands on solid ground and explores; the dilettante stands nowhere and gropes.
We talk for hours, covering a lot of territory. We talk about belief (“an irrelevant term”) and about Jerusalem (“If this city can be holy then any city can be holy”) and about the concept of the soul (“Who knows what a soul is? We are talking about matters we know nothing about”). When we eventually say goodbye, though, it is not Yossi’s words careening through my mind but, oddly, those of the ancient Greek mathematician Archimedes: Give me a place to stand and I shall move the world. Yossi clearly has a place to stand. Do I? It’s a question that, until now, I had not considered the least bit relevant. Stand? Who had time to stand? I was a man in motion.
It’s a warm day, and I have nowhere I have to be, so I decide to walk back to my hotel. I walk slowly, attentively, aware of the ground beneath my feet, solid and well trodden.