Spiritual Orphans

The last two posts on this blog focused on insights into spirituality from some primary Mussar teachers of the last two centuries. The Alter of Slabodka said that “the entire foundation of the world is wisdom, and that is spiritual.” And Rav Yerucham offered the perspective that “the natural and the supernatural are one.” We are souls living in a spiritual reality and nowhere does that show up more clearly than in our inner life, where nothing is material and everything spiritual, in the broad way the Mussar teachers understood the spiritual.

There is much more to explore on these profound subjects, but I think we may have covered enough to make the point I was seeking.

I wanted to offer some profound and compelling Jewish thoughts on spirituality in order to be able to ask the question: How many of us were exposed to this kind of thought and guidance growing up?

On the basis of many conversations, I feel pretty safe saying that if you were raised anywhere in the post-World War II Jewish world of North America (and quite possibly elsewhere as well), it is a safe bet that the answer is “No, I never heard any of this in my formative years.”

Of course, there will be a handful of people who were so very fortunate as to be able to answer “Yes,” but they are the rare exceptions. The majority of Jews who came of age in North America in the late 20^th / early 21^st centuries did not receive any sort of transmission of spiritual teachings from the older generation that preceded them.

This was certainly true of my own upbringing and in my years of sharing what I have learned of Mussar, I’ve heard from many people who have confirmed that the same was true for them. Because I was raised completely cut off from what I have much more latterly come to see as my spiritual lineage, it became clear to me at a certain point that it was entirely accurate to see myself as a “spiritual orphan.” And that’s true for so many of us in our generation of Jews, who grew up with a broken line of transmission to our own authentic spiritual inheritance.

Once I had that realization that I was a spiritual orphan, many things about my own life made sense. There were blank spaces in my inner being that I sought to fill – though I never considered seeking in Jewish sources because I had no idea that there might be Jewish answers to my spiritual questions. I have good reason to suspect the same is true for many of us.

I’ll offer two vignettes that well illustrate my experience.

Even though both my parents were born in Europe and were thoroughly Jewish from a cultural perspective, and our home was Jewish to the bones, nothing of Jewish spiritual teachings was passed down to me. I came of age in the 1960s when the wider culture started to wake up to the spiritual dimension of our lives and I also took that interest to heart. But having absolutely no inkling that there might be Jewish teachings and practices related to vibrant inner living, I rode the wave of seekers who found their way into eastern traditions of Buddhist meditation and Hindu yoga. In that, I was far from alone. One of my primary teachers was Baba Ram Dass, birth name: Richard Alpert. And among the Buddhist meditation teachers I learned from were Joseph Goldstein, Sharon Saltzberg, Sylvia Boorstein, Jack Kornfield, and Norman Fischer, all Jews, all of whom searched elsewhere, it seems to me, because Jewish spiritual teachings were nowhere to be seen during those decades.

I recently heard a podcast with Jack Kornfield and his wife, Trudy Goodman, talking about, of all things, Chanukah. I found it painful to listen to them because they know so much about Buddhism and so little about Judaism. The Chanukah they referred to was stuck at a second grade level, all dreidels and candles and latkes. As you can imagine, our Mussar teachers of the last 200 years have a lot to say about the spiritual foundation and meaning of Chanukah, but we spiritual orphans knew none of that.

In my own case, I studied yoga with B.K.S. Iyengar in Poona, Tibetan meditation with Geshe Dargey, one of the teachers of the Dalai Lama, in Dharmsala, and became such a serious student of eastern traditions that I wrote my doctoral dissertation at Oxford University on the topic of Hindu pilgrimage. Cumulatively, I spent 3 years in India, most of it in spiritual pursuits. I don’t regret any of it because I learned so much and those experiences formed who I became, but in hindsight, all of it happened because I was a spiritual orphan who felt he had to go far away from home to find spiritual teaching since none was in evidence where I lived.

Fast forward to 2020. Avi Fertig and I were leading our second Mussar Institute pilgrimage to Israel. I was already well along in the process of reconnecting to our spiritual heritage, and I was aware that people who had played a significant role in the Mussar world of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries lay buried in the Har Hazeitsim / Mount of Olives cemetery in Jerusalem, so we decided to visit.

We went from graveside to graveside of the Mussar greats and stopped at each one to acknowledge them and to share some snippets from their legacy of teachings. Among the first was Rabbi Yitzchok Blazer, known asItzele Peterburger, one of the three primary disciples of Rabbi Yisrael Salanter, founder of the Mussar movement in eastern Europe. Reb Itzele was born in 1837, made aliyah to Palestine in 1904, and died there in 1907.

Next, we went to visit the grave of Rabbi Elya Lopian (1876-1970), followed by Rabbi Nosson Tzvi Finkel, the Alter of Slabodka (1849-1927), and then his disciple, Rabbi Yechezkel Sarna (1890-1969).

In my earlier years, I was completely unfamiliar with any of these people, but when I stood by their gravesides, having learned from their written works for many years, I was overwhelmed by the feeling that I had come home. These were not ancient, mythic figures but people who had lived and died during or near my own lifetime. Here is my spiritual lineage, and although I was only visiting their graves, not seeing them as living beings, I was filled with the profound and moving sense that I was an orphan no longer.

It is my impression that very few people who grew up in the contemporary Jewish world were exposed to Jewish spiritual thought or practice. What about you? Did Jewish spiritual thought or practice show up in your upbringing? I’d love to know.

Next time we meet here, I’ll fill in the picture of how this situation came to be. There is a very good chance that you are also a spiritual orphan, and understanding the factors that led to our orphaning can help make sense of some very significant aspects of choices we have made and the lives we have lived.