Spiritual?

Part II

My last post ended with a cliffhanger: what’s the difference between a spiritual experience and a spiritual life? I pointed to experiences I expect we all have had to highlight what our teachers have told us, that the spiritual shows up within what we think of as natural, that heaven and earth are one. But there is a big difference between a spiritual experience and a spiritual life that I want to highlight, and it is an important distinction, because knowing what we are after is the only way to find the path that leads to it.

A spiritual experience teaches us that the universe is pervaded by spirit. We feel it in the moment when something we encounter pierces our ordinary consciousness and reveals a deeper truth about what’s really going on. But like all experiences, that moment of transcendent insight comes to an end, and then we go back to fighting traffic or reading the newspaper.

The experience is a lesson, but it hasn’t really been learned until we make an effort to understand and internalize it so it takes a place in our worldview, our “nature,” if you will. Those experiences are incredibly valuable because they reveal a deep truth about our existence, but they only go beyond being a “Wow!” when we recognize that how we conduct ourselves in our everyday, mundane reality has a direct impact on our access to that spiritual dimension.

Rav Yerucham Levovitz says this directly: “After a person safeguards and establishes nature in all its details, one merits to enter to the level that is supernatural.” How we behave in this ordinary world we see ourselves inhabiting determines the extent to which we connect to the spiritual level that is present within it.

It is for that reason that Rabbi Shlomo Wolbe, who was a recent Mussar teacher and a direct student of Rav Yerucham, defined spirituality as “building your interior world.”

Yes, the experiences are valuable because they can teach us, but running off after peak experiences is not the path the Mussar teachers guide us to walk. The glimpses we get that penetrate the seeming solidity of reality speak directly to our hearts and have the potential make us wiser, but it is up to us to apply that wisdom to guide ourselves in navigating the world in which we find ourselves living. That’s where the “spiritual life” comes in because it is by working on ourselves in our everyday lives that we can merit to live connected to this higher level of reality.

That’s what Rabbi Yisrael Salanter had in mind when he said that another person’s material needs are an obligation of my spiritual life. All the choices we make and all the values we implement as we make them, “build” our interior world and shape our ability to see the deeper truth of our existence.

Rav Yisrael also said: “A pious Jew is not one who worries about his friend’s soul and his own stomach; a pious Jew worries about his friend’s stomach and his own soul.” He is teaching us that how we behave in the world has an impact on the soul that is the primary and most fundamental level of our own being. The soul is our spiritual self and we shape it (“build it,” in Rav Wolbe’s terms) by how we act in the world.

I said when I launched this blog that what I want to explore is ways of responding to real-world events: the war in Gaza, the rise of anti-scientific thinking, the reviling of refugees, the war in Ukraine, you name something difficult going on in our world. And I have now laid out two of the foundations for my thinking about how we respond:

• we must be aware of the divine that exists simultaneously within the mundane, and

• how we behave in the world conditions our awareness of (or obliviousness to) the spiritual dimension of all.

I cited four teachers in this post. They are part of a spiritual lineage: Rabbi Yisrael Salanter (b. 1809), was the teacher of the Rabbi Simcha Zissel Ziv (the Alter of Kelm), who taught Rabbi Nosson Tzvi Finkel (the Alter of Slabodka), who was the teacher of Rav Yerucham Levovitz, who was the teacher of Rav Wolbe, who died in 2005. This spiritual lineage spans almost two hundred years, right up to the present.

If you grew up as I did, with no awareness of any of these people nor their teachings, then you will appreciate what I mean when I say that many of us who grew up in the post-World War II era are “spiritual orphans,” cut off from deep and wise teachings that are accessible within our own Jewish tradition. How I wish I had met my spiritual ancestors earlier in my life! That might have spared me from living in India for three years, though, in truth, I learned a lot in the east and have no regret about doing that. But what I was learning was not from my own root-stock, it didn’t sing to me the way the teachings I am sharing with you have done.

So many of us grew up as spiritual orphans and didn’t even know it. I’ll go deeper into that subject in my next post.

And until then, I welcome your comments about instances when you have felt the transcendent burst through into your mundane consciousness. Am I so far off in the clouds that I have lost you, or can you point to experiences of your own that have taught you that the natural and the supernatural are, indeed, one?