Spiritual Orphans

Part II

Sylvia Boorstein is a very well-known teacher of Buddhist meditation who makes no secret of her Jewish roots. In fact, she published a book called, “That’s Funny, You Don’t Look Buddhist” which has the subtitle “On Being a Faithful Jew and a Passionate Buddhist.” I know Sylvia a little, but I became very close to her late husband, Dr. Seymour Boorstein. He and I spent several years as learning partners working our way through a section of “Netivot Shalom,” the writings of the Slonimer Rebbe, that focuses on Mussar practice.

Seymour was a psychiatrist who wrote two of the pioneering books in transpersonal psychology. Like his wife, he immersed himself in Buddhist study, publishing at least one small book on the intersection of psychotherapy and Buddhism that I have in my library. His growing up years, however, were spent in a very Jewish part of the Bronx in New York. As a young child, he was not sent to public school but to a yeshiva named “Yeshivas Yisroel Salanter” (which still exists, only now merged with two other schools). One time, he shared with me a photo of an advertisement for the school from a Yiddish newspaper that featured a young, bright-faced student – who was Seymour!

Yet it was only in the course of our studies together, by which time Seymour was already in his 70s, that he heard for the first time about the man after whom his yeshiva was named _- Rabbi Yisroel Salanter – who is revered as the founder of the Mussar movement in Lithuania in the 19^th century. Seymour, too, was a spiritual orphan, and despite a long detour into Buddhism, as we learned together, he expressed great satisfaction at having come home to the spirituality of his own tradition.

When Seymour heard about Rabbi Salanter, and at many other points in our learning, he exclaimed, “Why was I not told this?” It became something of a refrain and one that can, in fact, be answered, because there are solid historical explanations for what caused the break in the line of transmission that resulted in many of us becoming disconnected from our own spiritual roots.

The Holocaust certainly played a big role in putting us in this situation. The transmission of our spiritual tradition was disrupted because so many of our teachers were murdered. Before the war, the Novarodok branch of Mussar alone had centres in 70 cities in eastern Europe, and after the war survivors established one in France and none remained in eastern Europe. Nothing remained in Europe of the other branches of the tradition.

Those who did survive or were spared the Holocaust were faced with the enormous task of rebuilding a functioning Jewish world. When I asked my Mussar teacher, Rebbetzin Perr, why even in the Orthodox world, Mussar was so hard to find in the post-World War II era, she said that the highest priority of the time was to establish the necessary institutions of a Jewish community: kosher food, schools, social service agencies, etc. There was so much rebuilding to do on a practical level that took precedence over any concern for the inner life.

This was true not only at the communal level but at the individual level as well. People had jobs to go to, families to attend to, homes to build, practical needs to meet. As is well known, the spiritual is always a lower priority when basic practical needs are as yet unmet.

There may be a deeper factor at work as well. The impact of the genocidal intent of the Holocaust was deeply traumatic not only for those who were directly affected but also for the Jewish people as a whole. In the decades following 1945, the pain was still so raw and the reality so uncontainable that it was simply too painful for many individuals to engage sensitively and constructively with any sort of inner explorations. This factor is cited to explain why so many survivors simply remained silent about their own experiences during the war.

The impact of the Holocaust alone can account for the rupture in the transmission of Jewish spiritual tradition, but as it happens, the post-Holocaust Jewish community tended to embrace priorities that were entirely focused on the material world. The highest aspirations of Jews in the 1950s and onward have been material success, affluence, assimilation, and secular education and career.

The oft-cited Pew Report from 2020 reveals the results of that focus.

“With an average of 13.4 years of schooling, Jews are the most highly educated of the world’s major religious groups. Nearly all Jewish adults ages 25 and older around the world (99%) have at least some primary education, and a majority (61%) has post-secondary degrees.” Average number of years of schooling is even higher in the US: 14.7. Three-quarters of North American Jews have post-secondary degrees.

While acknowledging that there is poverty in the Jewish community, Pew reports that “As a whole, U.S. Jews are a relatively high-income group, with roughly half saying their annual household income is at least $100,000 – much higher than the percentage of all U.S. households at that level.”

Jews in this period were free to get involved in politics and they did, and rose to high office. Currently, 7% of the members of the US Congress are Jewish, and 10% of the Senate, very disproportionate to the percentage of Jews in the country: Congress is three times more Jewish than the general population.

Jews of the 1950s, 60s and after were motivated to go gangbusters after their economic and social advancement, and I find that very understandable, since politics, social advancement and positions in the general population had been denied to their parents and grandparents, whether in Europe or elsewhere.

The upshot, however, was that the inner life virtually disappeared from the Jewish agenda, and we who were raised in that era became spiritual orphans. We had a lineage of spiritual teachers, but we were cut off from them to such an extent that our current generation of Jews who have been educated in a secular, irreligious, unspiritual environment are considered in Jewish law to fall into the category of what is called a tinok shenishbah, a term the Talmud uses to describe a child raised among gentiles who therefore has no understanding of Judaism. Jewish law compassionately says that such a person is not to be held accountable for lacking in belief and observance, and it seems to me that we need to be equally compassionate with ourselves and others for having been raised to be the spiritual orphans we are.

More on this theme next time.

I’ll close by asking how this analysis resonates with you, what insights you might have, and what arises for you when I suggest that you be compassionate with yourself about being raised with a ruptured connection to our spiritual lineage?