The lecture hall was packed. We had come to learn about three of the world’s great religions. We were hungry for something new, some spark of insight that would rekindle souls cool with doubt.

The first to speak was a Catholic priest. He sat on a large, straight-backed oak chair with thick rectangular arms and a red velvet seat. He spoke about theology and faith.

The rabbi was next. He sat on a metal folding chair that creaked as he squirmed around on it. He spoke of Jewish history, the Holocaust, Halacha (Jewish law), and human rights.

The Buddhist monk was last. He sat on brown cushions placed carefully on a carpet on the floor. He instructed us in meditation: sit up straight, close your eyes, count your breaths one to ten over and again. He invited us to try it, closed his eyes, and said nothing for fifteen minutes. He clapped his hands twice to call us back to attention. “This is Buddhism,” he said. “Any questions?”

It has been over twenty-five years since I attended that lecture, and I’ve never forgotten it. The priest was remote and seemed very sure of himself. He provided us with answers but was not interested in our questions. The rabbi was passionate but abstract. He offered peoplehood to individuals still unsure of selfhood. Only the monk took our seeking seriously. Only he showed us what to do. And it was what to do that I wanted to learn.

Certainly Judaism is filled with doing; but the doings to which I was exposed as a child were rituals performed without real purpose or understanding. My family observed the holy days and Shabbat (Sabbath) because we were commanded to do so. Fulfilling our obligations to God and tradition seemed to be the whole of Judaism. One was a good Jew if one conformed to the ways of the old Jews. I wanted something more.

Not long after my experience with the Buddhist monk, I attended a lecture by a rabbi who had just published a fiery call for reinvigorating Judaism with kabbalistic insights and practices. He spoke for an hour, outlining the key concepts of Jewish mysticism, and then invited the audience to form a huge circle.

He lighted the braided candle of Havdalah, the ceremony separating the Sabbath from the workweek, and asked us to focus on the flame. His voice softened, deepened; he led us into a light trance state. After a few relaxation exercises he guided us through a fantasy world of our own making, helping us find the divine flame within each one of us.

The experience moved me deeply. I was elated to have finally met a teacher of Jewish spirituality. After the talk I managed to get close enough to ask the rabbi: “When can I visit your synagogue and experience more fully what you teach?”

Without missing a beat, he laughed and said: “My synagogue? We don’t do this in my synagogue. To tell you the truth, I don’t know of any synagogue where you can practice Judaism this way.”

I was crushed, saddened, and not a little angry. I felt like challenging the rabbi to preach what he had just practiced, but the crowd had pressed in on him and I was pushed to the back.

I wanted a Jewish spiritual practice that would infuse my days with light, with joy, with peace, with a transcendent sense of meaning and purpose. I suspected that such a Judaism existed, but I had no idea where to find it. So hungry was I for this spiritual Judaism that I vowed that if I had to, I would create it myself. The chutzpah of a nineteen-year-old.

I was fairly new to spirituality, having started my study of world religions two years earlier while still in high school. I had the good fortune to learn from two history teachers, Michael Gelinas and Peter Santos, who had just returned from a summer study program in India. Their enthusiasm was catching. I read every book on Eastern philosophy I could find. I enrolled in a one-day introduction to Zen Buddhism taught by Roshi Philip Kapleau and learned to sit zazen, the meditation practice of the Zen Buddhists. I dreamt hungrily about enlightenment.

My parents worried. Their average Jewish teenager was turning into a “Zen,” as they and their friends called it. They feared for my Jewish soul.

In college I majored in philosophy and religion. I continued to meditate daily. I felt myself being drawn deeper and deeper into Zen teaching and practice. I also felt a great deal of guilt about abandoning my Judaism. I had done nothing overt in this regard, but my heart wasn’t in the ritual. I knew my parents were concerned, and I wanted to calm their fears. I offered to study in Israel for a year. I went to Israel in search of Zen Judaism and discovered it in the teachings of the Hasidic sages who shaped Jewish life and thought in eighteenth-century Eastern Europe.

Hasidism, from the word hasid, or “pious one,” was a revolutionary movement among Jews hungry for something more powerful than the dry erudition of the Talmudic scholars that dominated Jewish life in Eastern Europe. The founder of Hasidism, Rabbi Israel ben Eliezer (1700–1760), was called the Baal Shem Tov, a name denoting great skill as a spiritual leader. A baal shem, or master of the Name (of God), was an itinerant healer and sage. The Baal Shem Tov (the Good Master of the Name) was the preeminent baal shem.

Unlike most of the great spiritual leaders of Judaism, the Baal Shem Tov at first did not stand out as a Bible scholar or Talmudist. He was not known for his legal acumen or religious asceticism. On the contrary, the stories about the Baal Shem’s youth portray him as a simple soul of low social status, who worked as an assistant in a Jewish elementary school. Once married, he dug clay and lime for his wife to sell in the villages of the Carpathian Mountains. Eventually he and his wife ran an inn for wayfarers.

Yet it isn’t the outer life of Rabbi Israel that interests Hasidim, but his inner life. For years the Baal Shem Tov would spend hours each day in isolation deep in the forest. There, in communion with God, he evolved his message and teaching style. In 1736 he revealed himself as a healer and a new voice of Judaism.

In 1740 he and his wife moved to Meziboz, a town along the Polish and Ukrainian border. Students came to listen to the lessons of this new teacher and found a unique message and a teaching style to match. Where the rabbis spoke of law, the Baal Shem spoke of joy. Where the rabbis honed the fine points of Talmud, the Baal Shem told stories about real people in real-life situations struggling to maintain a personal relationship with God.

“God desires the heart,” the Baal Shem would remind listeners again and again, quoting from the Talmud;¹ God desires the purity of spirit that all can bring and not the learned mastery with which only some are gifted.

For the Baal Shem Tov “the whole world is full of God’s glory,”² there is no place and no thing devoid of godliness. Therefore it is unnecessary for Jews to isolate themselves from the pleasures of the world in pursuit of an ascetic and disembodied ideal. On the contrary, true worship is a joyful embracing of the world. When you see something of great beauty, the Baal Shem Tov taught, reflect on the One who fashioned it and in that way allow all life to return you to its Source, the one God.

The Baal Shem Tov died in 1760, entrusting his fledgling movement to Rabbi Dov Baer of Mezerich, who proved to be a great innovator, teacher, and organizer. Hasidism grew and rivaled conventional Judaism for the soul of the European Jew.

In time, however, the movement stagnated. Its emphasis shifted from the spiritual lives of simple Jews to the mystical feats of the tzaddikim, the grand masters of competing Hasidic courts. With the rise of Haskalah, Jewish rationalism, in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Hasidism began to merge with Orthodox Judaism to form a united front against secularism. Hasidic schools adopted a more mainstream Talmudic focus, and Orthodox rabbis decided their differences with Hasidism to be less important than the threat from reason and science. Today Hasidism is seen not as the revolutionary movement it once was, but rather as the extreme right wing of Orthodox Judaism. Few who catch a glimpse of these pious Jews still wearing the clothing of their Eastern European homelands recall the spiritual creativity that was once the heart and soul of their movement.

With the merger of Hasidism into the larger world of Orthodoxy, and the eventual victory of rational thought over mystical revelry, Judaism experienced a steady decline in mystical fervor. The God-filled world celebrated by the Hasidim faded from the general Jewish consciousness, and with it the practices that made that world an everyday reality. What I have done in this book is to reclaim that worldview and recast some of those practices for contemporary liberal Jews.

In 1981 I completed my rabbinic training at the Hebrew Union College–Jewish Institute of Religion and founded Congregation Beth Or in Miami, Florida. My goal was to create a center for a nondenominational, post-Halachic Judaism that used tradition and Hasidic teaching as vehicles for deepening spiritual awareness. The core of Beth Or would be an evolving spiritual philosophy that drew from what I felt was the best of Jewish mystical teaching understood through the lens of contemporary inter-religious dialogue, transpersonal psychology, and my own passion for a nondual understanding of woman, man, and nature as expressions of God.

During my first ten years as rabbi of Beth Or, I developed my philosophy, wrote new liturgies, and experimented with Jewish mystical practice. I shared everything with my congregation. We studied together, davened (prayed) together, and struggled to uncover a practical Jewish spirituality that would work for a congregation of middle-class Jewish householders. It took another eight years for this work to come to fruition, emerging as the program I call Minyan.

Minyan is a path of daily spiritual living based on ten hanhagot, spiritual disciplines, which have been practiced by Jews for centuries. Minyan is not a substitute for Jewish tradition. You practice Minyan in addition to everything else you do as a Jew. Minyan enriches your Judaism by reclaiming the mystical element that used to be the foundation of tradition.

Minyan has one aim: to awaken you to God as the Source and Substance of Reality. I have practiced Minyan for many years. I have shared these teachings with hundreds of people, both Jew and Gentile, and have found that for those willing to follow them, these ten practices can be powerful vehicles for spiritual living. I hope you will find this true for yourself as well.