• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 450 0

a little treatise called Fundaments of Hasidism by Hillel Zeitlin, one of the two key neo-Hasidic thinkers of interwar Europe (along with Martin Buber), and famous martyr of the Warsaw ghetto.3 When I read those pages — Zeitlin's discussions entitled “Being and Nothingness,” “The Self-Contraction of God,” and “Uplifting Sparks”—I remember somehow knowing that I had found my own religious language, one that spoke deeply to my soul, while challenging rather than offending my mind. It has served me well across the decades, and I hope that I have come to serve it faithfully as well. One of my goals here is to share some of that language — and my enthusiasm for it — with you.

The most important religious questions, I understood from the beginning, are universal: the quest for meaning, the purpose of human existence, the true nature of both world and self. I think about these overwhelmingly universal matters from within the context of a very particular religious language. I am not only a Jewish theologian, working within a religious language and historical context familiar to no more than the tiniest fraction of humanity. As one who draws deeply upon the language and symbolism of the Jewish mystical tradition, I represent a minority within this minority. I am a neo-Hasidic Jew, one influenced by the lives and teachings of the early Hasidic masters, but choosing not to live within the strict parameters of religious praxis that characterize Hasidism, and not sharing the later Hasidic disdain for secular education or for the modern world as a whole. It has long been clear to me that the insights into reality to be found in the texts, lives, and stories of the Jewish mystical and Hasidic tradition need to be shared more broadly, something I have tried to do over a lifetime of writing and teaching. I also have a sense that this spiritual legacy should not belong to Jews alone. Its insights into the great universal questions, though expressed in uniquely Jewish language, have importance for Jews and non-Jews alike, for all who take religious questions seriously and who understand the critical hour in which we live.

I also think of myself as a religious humanist. Humanism means an understanding that our fate, along with that of the entire planet, depends on human action. There is no one to hold back our hand, to keep us from destroying this garden in which we have been placed. We are totally responsible. Religious humanism means that we will fulfill that awesome role only by realizing that we are part of a reality infinitely more ancient, more profound, and more unified than any of us can express or know. Much of this book is an unpacking of the ways in which I see mysticism and humanism, two seemingly very distinct approaches to life, complementing one another.

The book is clearly and unabashedly Jewish in its language. Its examples are brought mainly from the tradition I know best and from my own life of religious experience. But its address is to a new and broad religious community, one that transcends conventional borders in order to deal with questions too big to be confined. My job is to translate the specifics in a way that carries them beyond the particular Jewish context and renders them accessible to everyone. If I have succeeded, the book will be “heard” as a clarion call, coming from an ancient tradition, for a transformation of human consciousness uniquely befitting this critical hour in human history, a new and universal religious awareness that will serve as an enabling vehicle for other changes that will soon be required of us.

I have lived much of my life at the juncture of historical scholarship and religious creativity. Trained as a historian of premodern Jewish thought, I am still committed to scholarly understanding, as some sections of this book will attest. But I have become more concerned with what Jews might believe in the uncertain future and what we as an ancient civilization might have to say to humanity at the present moment. This takes on a special urgency in the times in which we live. The most essential