The world today is filled with suffering of the
most infinite and painful kind. Anyone who has fought in or been
exposed to war or who has witnessed a bus full of children
explode—a tragically familiar scene in my part of the
world—finds it difficult to embrace a theological
perspective, whether it's from the Eastern or Western
traditions, Meister Eckhart or the Kabbalah or J. Krishnamurti.
Because in the face of that kind of suffering, what do you do?
How do you meditate and embrace a ground of being that is divine
in a world of radical suffering? How do you live in a world
where supposedly, God is king, and yet real kingship or
stewardship seems to be lacking in the most profound way
possible? In a world of evil and suffering, how do you begin to
talk about love and healing and transformation? That is
the question.
Classical theology arose in order to answer that question.
And the core motivating force in the formation of the great
religions was love for one's neighbor—a love and
magnanimity that were transmitted at the greatest possible depth
to the largest number of people. This required the development
of religious systems whereby the great revelations of spirit
were translated into practice and conveyed to wider and
wider audiences. These systems included law, ceremony, and
ritual, and there were many versions of them. The development of
spiritual practices also grew out of the desire to transmit
these experiences and the religious values borne from them
to future generations, to guarantee an ongoing
religiosity in society at large.
But if that wholly positive intention was the entire story,
the old religions in their original forms might never have
fallen into their well-deserved contemporary disrepute. Over
time, religion transgressed its bounds and made two major
mistakes. First, it generated the popular understanding that
nonbelievers were damned to eternal perdition. St. Augustine
spoke to this in all religions in his classic formulation,
“There is no Redemption outside of the church.” Thus
religion often degenerated into chauvinism and triumphalism, in
which murder and untold cruelty were perpetrated in the name of
God. It is not insignificant that enlightenment philosopher
Voltaire's battle cry against religion was “remember the
cruelties.”
Second, amid the untold suffering experienced by those of
medieval Europe, classical religion could no longer provide true
meaning and succor to a plague-stricken population. And yet, in
spite of that, religion continued to make claims of knowledge,
authority, power, and dogma. It insisted on asserting its
relatively arbitrary authority over what was good or evil,
proper or improper in all fields of human endeavor, including
government, science, the healing arts, economics, and moral
thought, ultimately fettering each of these arenas and impeding
human progress.
For these reasons, a powerful and correct critique of the
classical forms of religion appeared in Western civilization in
modernity and then in postmodernity. As we can see, however, the
results of that critique have been both positive and negative in
their ramifications. One expression of that critique was the
shift of authority to individual autonomy and to the democratic
stage. These were classically understood as a move away from the
authority structures of religion. Scientific rationalism
replaced premodern dogma, freeing human inquiry, innovation, and
agency.
But I will focus here on what is, for many of us today, the
most significant aspect of the move away from classical
religion. The reaction against religious tradition that began
with modernity has emerged as a contemporary preference for a
loosely defined and more loosely practiced
spirituality—one that is to a considerable extent defining
the spiritual landscape of our time.
Our postmodern culture is characterized by an unprecedented
individualism, narcissism, and materialism—autonomy gone
awry. In this cultural climate, spirituality of the “New
Age” variety has emerged as being long on vision but short
on commitment, depth, and rigor. This kind of spirituality is
often primarily focused on spiritual experiences, few of which
make demands on the very essence of the human soul or the way
life is actually lived in the world. There is no sense of what
Hebrew wisdom would call mitzvah. Mitzvah, which
literally means commandment and is mistakenly translated as good
deed, speaks to the sense that something must be done.
But in much of contemporary spirituality, personal preference
replaces obligation. Indeed, this preference is but a reflection
of the underlying narcissism that lies at the heart of both the
modern and postmodern quests for meaning. Instead of autonomy
being an internal source of authority, freedom has come to mean
free from the core obligation to grow; free to ignore
the call of spirit to committed and consistent
action.
The essential imperative to clear and decisive action in this
moment often goes unheard in the din of postmodernity. It is
blocked by the deafening deadness of a society whose true God is
comfort and not pleasure. In fact, the definition of modern
spiritual decadence is the linguistic assumption that the
opposite of pain is pleasure. But the opposite of pain is not
pleasure, but comfort, which is to avoid pain at all
costs. If my goal is truly pleasure—the pleasure
of spirit, which is growth—then I will be willing to
engage the pain of committed service.
Hence modern spiritual seekers anesthetized by the comfort of
their pallid “spiritual search” remain at their
depths comfortably numb. And in a world gone awry and in
desperate need of our help, postmodern spirituality has become a
sophisticated form of leisure activity and escape, another
variety of the many therapies we apply in the worship at the
altar of ourselves.
As we can see, neither New Age spirituality nor the old
religious orthodoxies have within them the power to heal our
souls and our planet. And presently, they can both function to
keep us from experiencing ourselves as partners in the healing
of the world—a globalized, superconnected world where we
can no longer claim emotional ignorance. A world where evil and
suffering demarcate our reality.
So I want to put forth a different vision of how to manifest
love and healing and transformation in this world—a new
spiritual vision that emerges from the depths of Hebrew
mysticism. One of the core revelations of the great empirical
researchers of human development over the past hundred years has
been the validation of perhaps the most important single
teaching of classic Renaissance Kabbalah—the understanding
that Spirit is not static but rather that it develops; it
evolves stage by stage. And each stage adopts the great truths
of the prior stage while discarding its dross, as it reaches for
the next and higher level of Spirit's unfolding.
The Zohar* says that we are God's name—we're God's
verbs, we're God's adjectives, we're even God's dangling
modifiers. We're the language of the divine in the world, and in
that way, we become the voice of the meshiach—the
messiah. Anything less than the realization of that is called,
in the inner mystical tradition, heresy. The core liberation
teaching of Kabbalah is that to be a heretic is to believe that
God does not need me, that I am not required to
participate in the evolution of God. But enlightenment
means we participate in divinity; we don't just submit
to it by responding to the evil and suffering in the world with
a traditional theology or a theodicy. The ultimate response to
the suffering of the world is, like that of the Hebrew mystic,
to cry in protest and to let that protest translate into
action. I call this nondual humanism,
which means that I participate in God's evolving
self, now.
As the great nineteenth-century Hasidic master Nachman of
Bratzlav implied, the most important thing in the world is to be
willing to give up who you are for who you might become. He
calls this process the giving up of pnimi, which
literally means “what is within.” For Nachman, that
means the old, familiar thing that comforts even when it no
longer serves—and that can include our spirituality and
religion, and even the very core way we understand our
relationship to the divine ground of being.
In fact, we are now consciously responsible for the very
evolution of divinity so that it becomes relevant for
our time. Thus we are called on to reach for
makkif—that which is beyond us, that which we can
only reach if we are willing to take a leap into the abyss. This
is what Abraham was called to do—to give up all his
yesterdays and todays for an unknown tomorrow.
What we are talking about is much more than the evolution of
man. The great privilege of being human is that we can
participate in the evolution and healing of God. We participate
in the yearning force of being, experiencing the
interconnectivity of the all and the all—the fullness of
presence and interiority. And that means to take up one's role
as an evolved agent co-creating with God in the transformation
of the planet. The evolution of the human spirit is what
catalyzes the evolution of God, of divine consciousness. We are
God's healers. In the words of Nikos Kazantzakis, We are the
saviors of God. And when God and man meet in an
evolutionary embrace, redemption is achieved.
* Widely considered the most important work of Kabbalah, or
Jewish mysticism.
Rabbi Marc Gafni is the leader of Bayit Chadash, an
international movement for Integral Judaism, and also holds the
Chair of Judaism and Kabbalah at the Integral Institute. He is
the author of Soul Prints and The Mystery of
Love.