You surround everything and fill everything.
You are the reality of everything and are in everything.
There is nothing beyond You and nothing above You,
Nothing outside of You and nothing inside of You.
—R. SAMUEL KALONYMOUS, SONG OF UNITY
ONENESS
What is Jewish Enlightenment? Well before the term entered common usage, and centuries before it became associated with rationalist philosophy, Jewish mystics pondered the prophet Daniel’s prediction that “the enlightened (maskilim) will shine like the radiance (zohar) of the sky.”1 The Zohar, the masterpiece of Kabbalah which takes its name from that verse, explains that the enlightened are those who ponder the deepest “secret of wisdom.”2 What is that secret? The answer varies from text to text, tradition to tradition, but in the Zohar and elsewhere, the deepest secret is that, despite appearances, all things, and all of us, are like ripples on a single pond, motes of a single sunbeam, the letters of a single word. The true reality of our existence is Ein Sof, infinite, and thus the sense of separate self that we all have—the notion that “you” and “I” are individuals with souls separate from the rest of the universe—is not ultimately true. The self is a phenomenon, an illusion, a mirage.
This view is called “nonduality” (“not-two”), and it is found at the summit of nearly every mystical tradition in the world. Nonduality does not mean we do not exist—but it does mean we don’t exist as we think we do. According to the nondual view, the phenomena, boundaries, and formations which constitute our world are fleeting, and empty of separate existence. For a moment, they appear, as patterns of gravity and momentum and force, like letters of the alphabet, momentarily arrayed into words—and then a moment later they are gone. In relative terms, things are exactly as they seem. But ultimately, everything is one—or, in theistic language, everything is God.
To be sure, this is a God very different from the ordinary one—a “God beyond God,” as it were, neither a paternalistic judge nor a partisan warrior, but Ein Sof, Being and Nothingness, without end or limit, and thus filling every molecule of this page and every synapse in the brain. God is who is reading these words and writing them, who is thinking and what is thought. (Indeed, this book could well be titled Ein Sof Judaism.) This is the world without an observer, with no inside and no outside, in which That (what seems to be without) and You (what seems to be within) are the same. And with this radically different conception of God come very different expressions of Judaism: elite, often hidden traditions quite unlike the mass religion of rituals, myths, and dogmas.
Moreover, because nonduality so flies in the face of everything we see—which is dualistic, divided into subject and object, self and other, and a thousand other antinomies—mere belief is insufficient, and a different kind of knowing is required, a more intimate intercourse with the truth. As a philosophical view, nonduality is but an interesting and debatable proposition. Internalized as a psychological reality, however, it can be transformative; it is the very content of enlightenment.
For example, it’s rather banal to be told, in Ram Dass’s analogy, that “you’re not a wave—you’re water.” But to inscribe such a view upon the heart, and to understand that the phenomena of body and mind are not mine, not me, and not self, is to simultaneously erase and enlarge the personality, and to transmute the present into the Presence of God. It can also be quite disorienting; if there are no distinctions in the absolute (e.g., forbidden and permitted, self and other, light and darkness, body and mind), then the religion of the relative, with its rules and prohibitions, suddenly becomes incoherent. This is true for all mystical traditions: mysticism blurs the boundaries which religion seeks to enforce. Thus nondual Judaism, like other such traditions, has been, for almost a millennium, carefully guarded and hidden.
Yet Judaism does differ in one important respect from other nondual paths. Whereas most traditions regard the knowledge of nonduality as the ultimate wisdom—the last stop on the road, so to speak; the final teaching—in the Jewish mystical tradition, nonduality is the beginning rather than the end of wisdom. Jewish mystics begin with the shocking, and proceed to the ordinary. Thus Kabbalah begins, rather than ends, with the Ein Sof, and devotes most of its attention to the finite, to the sefirot and their qualities, to the world and its demands. And the Jewish contemplative spends less time establishing nonduality than asking how best to live in its light. If the experience you are having right now is a dream of Infinite Mind, what becomes of God, Torah, and Israel? How can Ein Sof be known in the mind, heart, and body of the lover of wisdom? These are the primary questions, respectively, of parts 1 and 2 of this book.
Of course, some would say that to read a book on nonduality is like trying to wake up from inside of a dream. And yet, awakening does happen.
TWO QUESTIONS
To speak of nondual Judaism is to explore two complementary subjects: nondual Judaism, and nondual Judaism.
On the one hand, we may approach nonduality from within a Jewish perspective, and ask questions about how it is expressed. Where did it appear in Jewish history, and why? How does it relate to the fundamental topics of God, Torah, and Israel? How does it function in the religious life, whether conceived traditionally or nontraditionally? There is no claim here that all Judaisms are nondualistic at heart. There are nondual Jews, dualist Jews, and many more Jews who have never thought of the issue at all. So what might be the benefits, or costs, of being a nondual sort of Jew?
On the other hand, we may pose questions from the nondual perspective, and ask what relevance Judaism has, if all is really one. That is, we might ask not “why be a nondual Jew” but “why be a nondual Jew”? For some, the question is beyond the bounds of normative conversation. For many of us, however, it begs to be asked. If nonduality, in whatever expression, enables one to be fully awakened from the dream of separation and to live a loving, compassionate, wise life, then why involve oneself with Jewish language, text, and tradition—so much of which is dualistic, distracting, and occasionally disrespectful of other paths? If everything is God, why be Jewish?
In my own life, both nonduality and Judaism have been deeply transformative, and correspond roughly to absolute and relative, universal and particular, head and heart. As we will see, there is little separating the nondualistic philosophies of Judaism from those of Hinduism, Buddhism, and other traditions—not nothing, but little. Nonduality, if true, is necessarily a universal truth, and all schools and teachers are but skillful means of apprehending it. However, as we will also see, nonduality does not erase the world in a hazy cloud of oneness. All is zero (ayin), and all is one—but one manifests as two. The general takes the form of the particular; the One wears the drag of the many. And so, as the world is reborn, our particularities matter anew, and with my background and accidents of birth, the Jewish way continues to resonate in my heart.
At times along the nondual path, I have surrendered all that is particular: not just all that is Jewish, but also many important particularities of gender, sexuality, class, and ethnicity. Yet when I “return to the marketplace,” to paraphrase the Zen ox-herding parable, all these forms return. Jewish forms are neither superior nor necessary. But they are superior and necessary for me because they are the vocabulary of my heart, and the technology of my body.
The “benefit” of nonduality is ending the tyranny of the egoic illusion and awakening to the truth. The “benefit” of Judaism is responding to that truth with acts of love and devotion; integrating it into a culture, community, and ethical tradition; and naming it as God. The world of yetzirah, the domain of the heart, needs its forms, its faces, its God. As Rabbi Arthur Green, one of today’s leading progressive nondual teachers, has written, “the step from ‘wonder’ to ‘God’ is not an act of inference, but an act of naming.”3 Judaism provides, for some of us, the grammar and vocabulary of that utterance.
Nondual Judaism is at once quite old and quite new. As an esoteric doctrine, it has been around since at least the twelfth century. It animates much of the Kabbalah and was a central tenet of Hasidism. But more Jews are nondualists today than at all other times in history put together. In Israel, nonduality is in the mainstream of contemporary spirituality; pickup trucks drive by with bumper stickers that say “Ein Od Milvado” (There is nothing but God), and the phrase is shouted at shrines and in forests. In America, nonduality is a central feature of neo-Hasidism, Jewish Renewal, and other new forms of Kabbalah and Jewish mystical revival. And the concept of nonduality clearly echoes the notion, popular in the 1960s, that “all is one.”
Of course, exploring nondual Judaism necessarily involves the concept known in English as “God.” As we will explore in detail, particularly in chapter 3, this concept can be extraordinarily misleading. To begin with, there have been many God-concepts in the last twenty-six hundred years of Jewish tradition. Sometimes, God is an anthropomorphic warrior, or gardener, or mother, or father, with preferences and emotions. Other times, God is a cosmological creator, perfect and unchanging; and at others, God is a provider, an abandoner, a schoolmarm, or a scold. Sometimes Jews say we experience God in judgment; other times we experience God in love. But really, what we have been doing, all these centuries, is embellishing different experiences with the name of God.
The nondual understanding of God as Ein Sof, Infinite, at once negates and reaffirms all of these images. On the one hand, Ein Sof refuses all category, including that of “God.” If you have an idea of God, that’s not It. And yet, because God is Nothing, God is the true reality of Everything, and refractable in an endless number of prisms. The nondual God is at once entirely transcendent (“surrounding all the worlds,” in the language of the Zohar; the “upper unity” in the Tanya, the nineteenthcentury Hasidic text which we will explore in some detail.) and entirely immanent (“filling all the worlds”; the Tanya’s “lower unity”). It is the only mask there is.
I like to think of it this way. First, if you have some belief in God, drop it. Let the atheists, or your own doubt, totally, utterly win: there is no one minding the store, just matter and energy combining and separating. There is nothing in this moment that cannot be explained by science and reason.
But then, take science seriously, and remember that there is no self either: consciousness is an illusion of the brain, after all. Believe the postmodernists, the Buddhists, the Darwinists, the cognitive materialists, and the Hasidim when they say that this sense of ego, while essential for our survival, causes us to mistake a pattern of phenomena for something that’s actually there. Really, there is no soul, just a buzz of neurons. So: no God, no self. And then . . . what?
What’s left, after the self is subtracted, is what nondualists mean by “God.” Other names are fine as well. Empty phenomena, rolling on; the Divine Play; Indra’s Net; the Dharma; causes and conditions; the substance of Nature, and its laws; the Shechinah and the Holy One; as you like it. YHVH, the primary Jewish name for God, basically means “Is.”
And now everything reappears. The self manifests as it does, with all its talents and neuroses. The breeze still blows, of course. And God, too, half-projected, half-imagined, but still nonetheless with an aroma of Presence, appears as well. But the “God” that reappears here is a God of more masks than before. In the Kabbalistic schema, the term “God” is only one of the ten sefirot, or emanations of the One to the many. Like our personalities, “God” is a mask, a way of speaking about the world: of naming it. As Daniel Matt says, “‘God’ is a name we give to the oneness of it all.”4 All of it—not just chocolate and summer days, but cancer and prisons too; “all is One” may sound like a bromide, but in fact it is a challenge.
In reluctantly choosing to use the word “God”—and given how much the word is misused, and for what reasons, my reluctance is considerable—I take a slightly different view from Professor Matt. For me, Ein Sof is the oneness of it all, but “God” is the name I use when “It” becomes “You,” when knowledge becomes love. God is the companion, the Presence ever-present, the half-projected face of the universe, the ghost within the machine. I recognize that this act of naming has attendant benefits and costs. It reflects my truthful experience, but it also raises the stakes; it shelves me together with fundamentalists, fideists, and fools; and it leads to any number of dangerous mistakes: mistaking the finger pointing at the moon for the moon itself, mistaking the means for the ends, and mistaking one’s own path for the only path.
If secularists object to the use of the word “God,” many religionists may object to my definition of it. For centuries, nondual Jewish theologians have been accused of pantheism (“where atheism and religion shake hands,” according to one popular notion), because this “God” is stripped of personality. This objection, though, misses two points. First, as we have just seen, nonduality does not erase Divine personalities but sees them as what they are: masks. Indeed, as we will see in chapter 3, the more masks, the better. Second, nonduality insists on transcendence, the view that “God is the world’s place, but the world is not God’s place.”5 (Of course, if God is “more than” the world, we might ask what this “more than” actually is. If it is anything we can define, then it is part of the universe. If not, it is, from our perspective, nothing.) That God is Is, but also the Naught surrounding it, is what is meant by the Ein Sof, the God beyond God: both the transcendent other, and the transparent immanence of the real.
Still, the traditionalists are right that the nondual return of “God” is different from the naive version. Now “God” is almost a way of speaking, and one mask among many. Indeed, we may experience this “God” in any number of ways: as bridegroom, or bride, or nature, or love. Because all these images are masks, all are available to us, though ultimately, as the psalmist says, only silence is praise.6
As before, there is no pretension here that this is what all Jews (or others) mean when they talk of God. But it is what is meant when I address this moment as You, rather than as It. This and nothing more. Only You; only This; only I; only Love.
NEITHER ONE NOR TWO
Nonduality is the oneness before the number one.
—RABBI DAVID AARON7
So nonduality means that all is one?
Yes, and no. Perhaps the most mysterious, misunderstood, yet also the most revolutionary aspect of nonduality is that it stands not just for “all is one” but, rather, that it stands for “all is one,” “all is two,” and, for good measure, “all is zero” as well.
Let us envision it this way. By the age of two, all functional human beings have figured out the difference between inside and outside, between self and world. It is the first essential stage in human development—and most of us spend the great majority of our lives there. Our lives are comprised of dualities, binaries, and boundaries.
A second stage is possible: unitive consciousness which returns to the predifferentiation of infancy. At first, it only occurs at certain peak moments—lovemaking, abject terror, encounters with the numinous. But gradually, it is possible to extend the light of the Ein Sof into everything, in the words of the Lubavitcher Rebbe, to be in unitary consciousness more and more of the time. As Rabbi David Cooper has written:
As nothing can be separated from it [Ein Sof], everything is interconnected in a Oneness, a unity, that cannot be divided. Things that in relative reality appear to be polar opposites—light and dark, hot and cold, male and female, determinism and free will, heaven and earth, good and evil, and so forth—are in absolute terms inevitably contained in the Oneness of Boundlessness.8
This sense of oneness is what many people call “enlightenment.” It is the state of no-mind, in which one knows oneself to be Nothing, and being Nothing, one with everything. Rarely do any of us inhabit its space for more than a fraction of our lives—and yet it is a reservoir of wisdom and compassion, comfort and joy. In my experience, it is worth the effort to reach it.
Yet even this is but an intermediate phase. That “all is one” is exactly half of the picture. After all, if everything is really one, does that not also include the experience of two? The third stage, then, is to “transcend and include” (Ken Wilber’s phrase) both the dual and the nondual, to return to the experience of duality while maintaining the consciousness of unity. This is what David Loy calls the “nonduality of duality and nonduality.”9 It is what the Zen masters mean when they say “in the beginning, mountains are mountains. During zazen, mountains are not mountains. Afterward, mountains are once again mountains.” That is to say: in the initial dualistic consciousness, mountains are experienced as mountains. In unitive consciousness, the mountains disappear as separate entities and are only motes on the sunbeam of consciousness. In nondual consciousness, the mountains are both: both everything and nothing, both existent and nonexistent.
Rabbi Aharon of Staroselye, a great but little-known nondual Jewish sage whose work we will explore in detail in this book, calls this seeing from “our point of view” and “God’s point of view.” Both points of view are of the same reality—they are just different points of view. Ours sees objects, people, and things. God’s sees only Godself. The object is to see both as two sides of the same coin. Neti-neti, the Vedantists say: not-this, not-that. Neither twoness nor oneness, neither yesh nor ayin, but both, and thus neither. It’s not quite paradox—it’s enlightenment.
The Kabbalistic math of this reality is that 2 = 1 = 0. Fortunately, I don’t have to be good at math anymore.
I’d like to return to a symbol I suggested in the introduction to my first book, that of the two triangles of the Jewish star. The downwardpointing triangle represents the “first stage,” the world of ordinary experience, in which there is self and other, figure and ground. This is the view of aretz, of earth, of all of us, with our histories and loves and heartbreaks and joy. The upward-pointing triangle represents the “second stage” of unitary consciousness, in which there is no self, no other, no figure, and only the one Ground of Being. This is the view of shamayim, of heaven, of ultimate reality, the way things actually are. The star together is the “third stage” of nonduality: of both-and and neither-nor. It is the Ein Sof that is both Many and One, hidden God and manifest Shechinah, and in being both, is Naught, or ayin.10 Here it is on one enormous chart (Hebrew terms are defined in the glossary):
2 | 1 | 2 = 1 = 0 |
dualistic | unitive | nondual |
immanent | transcendent | both |
aretz | shamayim | both |
yesh | ayin | both |
corporeal | incorporeal | both |
living in yesh | bittul ha-yesh | both |
self | no-self | Self |
relative | absolute | both |
form | emptiness | emptiness is form |
everything | nothing | both |
manifestation | essence | both |
expression | realization | both |
ordinary mind | no-mind | “ordinary mind” |
mochin d’katnut | mochin d’gadlut | ratzo v’shov11 |
tzimtzum | shefa v’atzilut | ratzo v’shov |
hitpashtut (expansion) | ratzo v’shov | |
yeridah (descent) | aliyah (ascent)12 | ratzo v’shov |
plurality | unity | union of unity and plurality |
memaleh (filling) | sovev (surrounding) | both |
materialization | annihilation | both |
our point of view | God’s point of view | both |
confusion | enlightenment | confusion is enlightenment |
samsara | nirvana | nirvana is samsara |
apparent | real | both |
many | one | both and neither; 0, 1, and 2 |
the “real” | the “ideal” | both |
good and bad | no good and bad | both |
good and evil | all is God/perfect | both |
self and other | all is one/no other | I/Thou (Buber, Levinas) |
God or no God | God-beyond-God | both |
I’m here, God’s there | all is God | both |
prayer, myth, ritual | contemplation | both |
sacred and profane | all holy | both |
ethics | no ethics | nondual ethics |
problems | perfection | both |
tikkun olam | all is perfect | all is perfect, but |
pursuit of justice | acceptance | both |
yang; action | yin; nonaction | both |
farq (separation) | jam’ al-jam’ (union) | al-farqath-thani |
passion | dispassion | compassion |
movement | stillness | both |
seeking | nonseeking | seeking without seeking |
path | no path | path |
hope | without hope | hoping without clinging |
particular | universal | both |
conditioned | unconditioned | both |
damaged | undamaged | integrated |
human | being | human being |
eros | thanatos | both |
diversity | union | both |
mountains | no mountains | mountains |
existence | consciousness | both |
in the world | apart from world | return to world |
kadosh baruch hu | shechinah | union |
sefirot | ayin | Ein Sof |
presence | absence | absence in presence |
thesis | antithesis | synthesis |
earth | heaven | heaven on earth (Hasidism) |
polytheism/monotheism | monism | all three |
The list could go on, but the point, I hope, is clear. Nonduality is not only oneness. It is oneness-in-twoness, the extraordinary in the ordinary. Is it a mere coincidence that so many of the symbols of the world’s religions are based upon this coincidence of opposites? The cross of heaven and earth, the six-pointed star, the yin and the yang. To what does their joining gesture? This is why so many nondual sages say that the only thing keeping you from enlightenment is searching for it. If only you’d stop trying to see yourself through your own eyes! You, with your neuroses and shadows and wounds—tat tvam asi, “you are that.” This moment of your experience is God masquerading as you.
As a lived phenomenon, the experience of the chart is one of ratzo v’shov, running and returning. This experience is not one of an Aristotelian golden mean, or some vacuous sense of “balance,” but rather of transcending binarisms to include both sides of them. Sometimes we experience life as the ego tells us we must: as a separate self, with boundaries to be defended and needs to be met. Other times, we see this ego as being like a computer program, running according to causes and conditions, just like the trillion miraculous programs executing all around us at every moment. Or consider nonduality from the perspective of earthbased spirituality: sometimes, we feel at one with all, part of the great cosmic dance, the cycle of birth and death—and other times, we revel in our own uniqueness, our individuality, our humanity and sex and joys. Along such a path, we do not seek a midway point, somewhat godly and somewhat human, but rather a vibrant oscillation between the poles of everything and nothing, separation and union.
Of course, most of us spend the overwhelming majority of our lives at “stage one,” experiencing ourselves as selves sandwiched between our ears—and we suffer as a result. So, for most of us, just getting to “stage two,” in which the ego melts away for a blessed moment or two, remains the primary work. Besides, stage two is wonderful: spend time in the presence of enlightened masters, and see for yourself the palpable stillness of no-mind, the great compassion that emerges naturally from wisdom. Know that you can become such a person yourself. Please, do not rush to integrate too quickly.
Gradually, though, the mind states of spirituality, even the most lofty, will become less and less urgent, as God becomes more and more transparent. Slowly, not only may you see infinity in a flower, you may not even need to. The flower, having become infinite, may now be but a bloom—and wholly Divine in being so. Both-and, neither-nor, all of it, the emptiness and the form, yielding and wrestling. Duality and nonduality are the ultimate nonduality. As the nondual sage Nisargadatta said, “Love says ‘I am everything.’ Wisdom says ‘I am nothing.’ Between the two, my life flows.”13
THREE ASPECTS
As we have already mentioned, the kind of “knowing” that constitutes the liberation of nonduality is, of necessity, richer than solely intellectual cognition. For that reason, this book is divided into two major parts, the first devoted primarily to theory, the latter to practice. Part 1 begins with ten ways of understanding the concept of nonduality and then explores a variety of sources that are used in Jewish and other traditions to express it. Later, part 1 approaches nonduality from the three aspects of mind, heart, and body, here mapped (somewhat idiosyncratically) onto the traditional Jewish doctrines of God (creation: theology and mysticism), Torah (revelation: Jewish myth and practice), and Israel (redemption: history, peoplehood, messianism).
These three aspects recur in part 2, only now from the perspective of practice (how nonduality may be lived and experienced) rather than theory (what nonduality is). Here, I draw on the schema of Rabbi Aharon of Staroselye, the leading disciple of the founder of Chabad Hasidism and perhaps the most systematic expositor of nondual Judaism. R. Aharon’s two major books are, like the two parts of this book, divided into theory (Shaarei HaYichud v’HaEmunah, “The Gate of Unity and Faith”) and practice (Shaarei HaAvodah, “The Gate of Practice”), the second of which articulates three core practices corresponding to mind, heart, and body: contemplative meditation, ecstatic prayer, and performance of the mitzvot. (They also correspond more or less to Hinduism’s jnana, bhakti, and karma yogas, which perfect wisdom, devotion, and action.) For R. Aharon, these three aspects of practice had both personal-mystical and cosmological value. For the individual mystic, they comprise three aspects of knowledge. Contemplation reveals the truth of things; ecstasy provides the emotional, unitive experience of that truth; and ritual and ethical action cause that truth to manifest in all aspects of life. On a theological or cosmological level, these three faces of nondual practice unite the mind with God, enable God to unite with Godself, and extend the light of the Ein Sof into all of existence, leaving nothing out.
Here, I expand R. Aharon’s categories somewhat, addressing both traditional Jewish contemplative meditation and other forms of nondual meditative practice, asking not just how prayer works but also how the more general Jewish heart-practice of tshuvah (discussed in chapter 7) and consciousness of our imperfection works with a perspective that all is perfect, and exploring several Jewish practices from an embodied, nondual perspective. In addition, I devote a separate chapter to the question of ethics and the problem of evil, which, as we will see, can be particularly tricky for nondualists. A concluding chapter restates the major themes of the book in the context of knowing, not knowing, and knowing anew—the great ratzo v’shov of the nondual path.
Doubtless, some of these aspects of nonduality will be of more appeal to some readers than others. By temperament, some may prefer the emotional, experiential, and practical to the intellectual, rational, and theoretical, while others will prefer the reverse. I have tried to accommodate both of these and more. I assume no belief or faith whatsoever. I take nothing for granted, and question everything. I am especially sobered to remember that, in geological time, we humans are but an instant away from tree-dwelling monkeys; it’s best to hold all ideas lightly, not to presume too much of our capacities. Yet I do take seriously the possibility of authentic religious consciousness, and I do not seek to reduce it wholly to something else. And I do not dumb it down. In our day, there are many who seek to relegate religion to the reactionaries—and many reactionaries who are glad to comply. But if we aspire to the heights of a Baal Shem Tov, a Ramakrishna, a Buber, or an Abraham Joshua Heschel—and there is no reason why we should not do so—then we must reject such efforts to divorce heart from head, spirit from matter. Obviously, such separations fly in the face of the absolute. Yet even in the sphere of the relative, they demean our humanity, and by extension the unfolding intimacy of the One who has chosen to dance within us. Having yearned for such a courtship, and its eventual consummation, She has donned the garb of multiplicity. Let us find the joy He, and We, deserve.
At first, most of us imagine that we are essentially selves, and some of us believe that there is a God as well. Nonduality invites us to suppose nothing, believe nothing: that there is no God, but also that there is no self. When there is merely no God, we remain as we were. But when there is also no self, then what is left is the Ein Sof, the God beyond “God.” Simply what is; simply this; and not-this as well, “surrounding” as well as “filling” all that can be predicated.
And from that fullness, which is also utter emptiness, God reappears, and the self reappears as well—only now as masks, perspectives, ways of seeing, modes of speech. Some masks are more real than others; some are merely imaginary. But that becomes a subject for a different conversation. In silence, all disappears. From silence, all is born.