Reclaiming Jewish Solitude, Disrupting Jewish Community

Note: the essay below was written as part of a conversation in a Jewish circle. While some of the language relates to Jewish experience, I write this in hope that the universal themes of solitude, fellowship & spiritual practice may be relevant to those of other cultural or spiritual tradition.

“The cure for loneliness is solitude.” — Marianne Moore

“Loneliness expresses the pain of being alone. Solitude expresses the glory of being alone”- Paul Tillich

“Karov Yah lekol Korav, lekol asher Yikreuhu bemet / Mystery is close to all those who seek, who seek Yah earnestly.” - Psalm 145

“Drop off your own skin, and the sense-dusts will be fully purified, the eye readily discerning the brightness. Accept your function and be wholly satisfied. In the entire place you are not restricted;…solitary boat carries the moon; at night it lodges amid the reed flowers, gently swaying in total brilliance.” - Hongzhi (translation by Leighton, Taigen Dan; Wu, Yi. Cultivating the Empty Field)

BACKGROUND 

My conditioned default experience as a human self, which I learned either during my upbringing, or inherited epigenetically from my ancestors, is one of isolation and lovelessness. The sense of not belonging to any of my identity-communities, Israel my country of birth or in the USA; among Jews, or Buddhists; the efforts to fit in and belong, or to lead such a community, has most often imploded into a sense of disappointment, disillusionment, or even injustice. Examining this response with therapists through the years, the answer came from a different place. I learned that I needed to train: to host it, love it, generate vaster and vaster temple in me to care for it. In order to do so, I needed to learn to lean and rely on something else, deeper, that is ever present and resourcing. It is acutely personal. It is empowering, bewildering, a source of total surrender and agency at the same time. It challenges everything I think I know about anything, even my own needs - even as it listens to them. It challenges my need not in a confrontational way, but lovingly shows, adds, relies on a certain not knowing, a mystery that transforms my experience. At times, I am intoxicated, absorbed by this mystery.

THE FEAR OF SEPARATION, LONELINESS, AND THE PRESENT SHADOW OF TRAUMA

The question this essay responds to is part of a conversation about Jewish communal spaces, what’s referred to as ‘dwelling’ form of religiosity and ‘seeking’ form of religiosity (Robert Wuthnow, After Heaven). This term ‘Jewish communal space’ itself posit an assumption I don’t subscribe to - that community and solitude are somehow a balance one must hold as a part of their spiritual life. I challenge the place of community in a spiritual orientation, and wish to disrupt, dethrone and decentralize community from the spiritual experience, especially in the Jewish one. I am not negating community, but i am challenging its centrality as an organizing principle. It’s not that the dwelling factor is not important, I just found that it has been privileged over and overridden the radical interiority impulse in common Jewish experience, exhausting its leaders with offering a perpetual “Jewish coddle,” to appease deeply entrenched responses to generational trauma. Somehow, in the US, I feel very remote from this trauma, as if it is buried deep. I observe other jews being remote from it, though I do not doubt it is present. (one rabbi in Aleph actually asked me, what Jewish trauma?) Jews are quick to ally in support of other trauma-subjected identity-led groups (race, gender, class to name a few.) - all important justice work! But the shadow remains. I feel this shadow comes to great light and detail when I visit Europe, walk the streets of Krakow, look out to see form the port of Akko in Israel - locations in which my ancestors walked and suffered in. Persevered and found awe. My body inherited thousand of years of exile, genocide, pogroms, discrimination, internalized self-hate, fear of mysticism. That shadow, is in the room. Right now.

ESCAPING FEAR THROUGH COMMUNITY AND/OR PEAK EXPERIENCES 

Being alone is frightful. Many feel alone even when with others. I do not mistake a sense of belonging, camaraderie, community, efficiency of shared logistics and shared space, as closeness to God. Such closeness may be experienced with others, but it is not IN others as the catalysts. It relies on my state of openness, surrender, rigidity and constraint.

I have experienced peak experiences or heightened closeness in contemplative absorption. These were both in solitude and in community, both self-induced in meditation and externally induced by substances or collective pressure-cooking. From all of those, I have learned that these, too, pass, impermanent. My passion is to find the contemplative insight - the thread that is eternal - before, during and after all experience, mundane and extreme. Not in provoking an ecstatic peak experience in individuals or collectively, I am interested in sustained practice.

DISRUPTING TRIUMPHALISM 

There is nothing specifically Jewish about human awareness or seeking union with the divine. Groups and communities, invested I’m comfort of belonging and identity tend to self affirm themselves and their ways, resulting in triumphalism, which is collective narcissism. To counter triumphalism, I constantly repeat to students and when addressing groups - this is not special. this practice is not special. It is simply both in accord with a porous reality that I perceive, and in line with a hereditary emanation with certain forms, practices, language and customs.

DISRUPTING COMMUNITY  

I’d like to suggest to haul-overs the assumption behind ‘Jewish communal spaces -’  operative word being communal, as an a priori attribute of Jewish experience. Doing that, I’d like to challenges the explicit/implicit relationship between leader-clergy, congregation, place and God. The unapologetic bullseye here is self-realization - one person’s, direct relationship with their mind as God and the full embodiment. This is not exclusive to the plethora of jewish wisdom - it harnesses it towards that purpose, to develop Dveykus / single-pointedness / adhering to awareness, a private, solitary experience. That, in turn, then sources one’s engagement with one’s community, and the world.

PRACTITIONERS, NOT CONGREGANTS 

Most congregations cater to the need of belonging to a community, a real human need that rests in the middle of Maslow Pyramid of Needs; Most often, their leaders provide spiritual ‘goods’ to spiritual ‘consumers’, hitting obligatory ‘notes’ on the annual and lifecycle calendars, concentrating on making people feel ‘Jewish’ and delivering a ‘Jewish experience’’, (regardless of being trendy, soulful, mindful/embodied, earth-based or justice-oriented etc.) I envision a social agreement in which people are not congregants but PRACTITIONERS. Each person is expected to practice, to be responsible for their dveykus/self-realization/practice of mind. The community is secondary in importance. This orientation is self-selecting. Those who hear the call, respond. 

I refer to any space I create, whether for study, meditation or worship - as practice and training. Kabbalat Shabbat practice. Shakharit Practice.

FELLOWSHIP, NOT CONGREGATION  

A fellowship will cater to sharing resources and insights, while sharing the common intention to practice one’s awareness and experience of solitude - nurturing each-other’s solitude even while being social. I think of the christian model of the Laura, a compound of hermitages. A monastery, a collective form of living which maintains inner solitude, is another form of lived fellowship.

THE ELEPHANT IN THE ROOM 

To me, connection with God is not Jewish. There is nothing ‘Jewish’ about it. to train a seeker, to challenge the solidity of all aspects of their self, or selves, one needs to challenge being a Jew. Jews are so attached to being a Jew! To be seen! Heard! I do not challenge the body experience. Not dismiss the accumulative wisdom and grief in it. But I yearn to go beyond calling it something and then calling it a day. My words can be perceived as an insult to the Elephant in the room, the Jewish Self. Therefore - training.

TRAINING THE ELEPHANT 

Elephant is not only Jewish. It is the rigidity of any self-identification. Jewish religious space is not often thought of as a training ground. On Hoshana Rabba, I visited a certain congregation to which I was a stranger. The rabbi, who was later referred to by a friend as ‘halakhaicly strict,’ asked me to hold the torah. In the midst of the service, he approached me and ask that I change the shoulder on which I rested the torah scroll. I doubt he saw it as an opportunity to train my elephant. I definitely did not come to an agreement and consent on this with him. I’d like change the shared agreement on such spaces from being a collective locomotive that plows through the prayer book and corrects what others do wrong - to an agreement of training. Kind training. Tough training. I was often ‘corrected’ while performing liturgical roles in the Zen monastery I trained in. The orientation was vastly different. The Zohar and the Tanya talk about the Yekhida - Hebrew for singular / unit / togetherness. The Elephant doesn’t know that it in fact yearns for this Yekhida. That’s who truly wants the coddle. How to keep my gaze at this Yekhida, while training the Elephant? While loving the Shadow? Can I hold the solitude and the fellowship in such deep not-knowing, that the path emerges, unprescribed, fresh, creative, authentic?

HEALING

Lots of it. Solitary practice has been shunned and shamed within our own people’s tradition, elevating normative lifestyles around monogamy, child-rearing & livelihood-based routine. blazing a different trail, or revealing the one that mystics of old have blazed which is now wild with overgrowth, I must learn to face shame, guilt, this sense of isolation itself. I think that is the greatest shadow, the fear to face mystery, alone. Each identity that holds on to my awareness has its own expression: Jewish, cis-man, Ashkenazi, secular, Israeli. These need a lot of attention. What spaces, conversations, rituals can I create to specifically tend to these ruptures? Who hears this call? I believe that healing this wound, through suffering, is where the fellowship, the other is met. If I ever move towards creating a sense of community, healing will be central to it. No Kombaya without the Ah-Yah! 

Careful, even the sense of shared suffering, being really seen by a community, another person, or a coveted leader! all may still be part of the Great Coddle. My gaze is set on the Yekhida, its awakening.

STEPPING FORWARD FROM THE TOP OF A HUNDRED FOOT POLL

That’s a Zen Koan. How would I do that? Here is taking some inner inventory. I already orient towards working with individuals. I am careful not to cater to my and students needs for community. They can find it in other places- public jewish spaces are abundant with dwellings orientations, including justice-oriented ones. I am not interest in offering another. I strongly believe this is a very important tikkun / repair for the Jewish collective soul. To reclaim, protect and deepen the solitude. 

I pay attention. I hear what my students and colleagues yearn for. I don’t look for prescribed solutions, and I don’t look at sustainability - the imagination of creating a lasting change to the order of things.

Nothing to hold on to.

That is the greatest existential fear.

Practice is penetrating this fear, again and again

Karov Yah lekol Korav, lekol asher Yikreuhu bemet - Psalm 145

(Yah is close to all those who seek, who seek Yah earnestly.)