My philosophy of Judaism is rooted in a nondual worldview rarely associated with conventional Jewish thought. Mainstream Judaism offers a dualistic understanding of reality that separates God and creation. Nondual Judaism holds that there is no real separation between God and creation. On the contrary, creation is a manifestation of God, the one true Source and Substance of all things. The goal of dualistic Judaism is to bridge the gap between God and humankind. The goal of nondual Judaism is to bring you to the realization that there is no gap.

My understanding of nondual Judaism comes from my study of Jewish mysticism, especially Hasidism. I pull from these sources to articulate a contemporary Jewish spiritual practice I call Minyan.

The word minyan refers to the ten Jews needed to form a complete prayer community. I chose the word as a mnemonic for recalling the ten practices I teach. I could have chosen more than ten practices, though I would have been hard-pressed to settle on fewer than ten. I decided on ten because the number ten represents a sense of completeness, and Minyan is a complete system of spiritual practice.

While each of the ten practices of Minyan is rooted in Judaism’s ancient past, some of them—meditation, repeating a sacred phrase, and dream interpretation, to name three—are not often associated with traditional Judaism. This is because the modern Jew’s notion of what is traditional Judaism is limited to the ritual aspects of rabbinic Judaism that came to dominate Jewish life in North America and Western Europe over the past century or so. The rich inner life and spiritual practice of Jewish mystics that for centuries informed Judaism receded into the province of Hasidic sects, leaving spiritually searching liberal Jews to turn to other religions for the insights and practices that once were a mainstay of their own tradition. It is part of my mission as a rabbi to reclaim some of these powerful and potentially transformative practices and to present them in a usable form to the contemporary Jewish seeker.

I chose the specific practices of Minyan for one very simple reason—they work. I have experimented with Jewish mystical practice for a long time, and these ten disciplines when practiced together do in fact offer a complete system for personal, interpersonal, and transpersonal growth. They hold out the promise for awakening to God and furthering the creation of a godly world.

I am not a Hasidic Jew. I am a liberal, postdenominational Jew who is drawn to the richness of Hasidic teaching without feeling compelled to follow Hasidic practice. I grew up in an Orthodox environment, but my chosen Jewish lifestyle, while informed by tradition, is not bound by tradition.

I am, however, a Jew in search of God—not as an abstract idea, but as a palpable reality. Many years ago, while still a rabbinic student at the Hebrew Union College–Jewish Institute of Religion in Cincinnati, Ohio, I delivered a sermon on the necessary unity of God, woman, man, and nature. Immediately after the service I was called into the office of the chairman of the philosophy department for a scholarly reprimand.

Referring to my position that God and creation are one, the chairman said: “You, sir, are a megalomaniac.”

“With all due respect, Rabbi,” I said, “you are wrong. If I understand the term correctly, a megalomaniac thinks he is God. I, on the other hand, know I am God.”

What I meant to convey, and doubt very much that I did, was my deep conviction that God is not something or someone living somewhere in or out of time and space. To me God is the One who manifests as all things in time and space. God is not something you pray to, but rather the greater reality to which you awake. For over twenty years, first as a student, then as a rabbi, this nondual understanding of God and creation, and how to awake to it, has defined my spiritual teaching.

I first encountered the nonduality of God at the age of sixteen. I was spending part of the summer of 1967 at a friend’s home on Cape Cod, Massachusetts. My friend worked in the local post office every morning, and this provided me with the privacy I needed to continue my meditation practice. I had been sitting zazen (Zen meditation) for several months and found a shady spot near a small lake for a perfect early-morning zendo (Zen meditation center).

I walked there each morning at sunrise, folded several beach towels to make a cushion, and sat cross-legged on the sand. I then attempted to count my breaths, one to ten and over again. Most mornings alternated between counting my breaths and daydreaming. Nothing special happened, but I kept at it nonetheless.

One morning everything changed. At some point my conscious mind stopped counting without replacing that activity with any other. For a moment I was no longer aware of myself sitting on the lakeshore. Everything—the shore, the lake, myself—was gone. There was nothing; not even an awareness of nothing. When the moment passed I was sweating heavily and laughing deeply. Something seemed extremely funny, but I could not tell what it was. Everything was bright; colors appeared more vivid; whatever I looked at seemed to pulsate with a life force I had not noticed before. Without any mental discourse on my part I simply knew that everything was a manifestation of One Thing, and that One Thing was no “thing” at all. The books I was reading at the time called it Reality, Tao, Nature, Universe. I called it God. I still do.

In a sense my whole adult life has been dedicated to renewing that insight for myself and sharing the means of experiencing it with others. This is the single point my rabbinate aims to teach: God is the Source and Substance of all reality, and God is experientially knowable. I do not believe in God as an abstract idea, I experience God as a palpable reality. I know this sounds strange coming from a rabbi. Yet it is not unique to me. Rabbi Yitzhak Epstein of Homel (1780–1857) wrote to a Jewish friend who questioned the authenticity of this nondual understanding of God:

Listen, please, my beloved friend! Do not say that what I am about to say is, God forbid, heresy or philosophy…. After doing all the goodly meditations while reciting the songs of praise and the Shema¹ … it is sensed that, as we say in Yiddish, Altz is Gott, All is God.²

I believe Reb Yitzhak is right. And I created Minyan to help you discover the truth of this teaching for yourself.