Yossi Klein Halevi: The Jewish Spiritual Quest

Finding God in the Twenty-First Century

David H.— Few thinkers have stirred the hearts of Jews as powerfully over the last decades as Yossi Klein Halevi, whose passion for Judaism, Israel, and the Jewish people remain unsurpassed in our time. In his essay for Jewish Priorities, he offered his thoughts on the deepest question of all: the Jewish search for God in the most ungodly of times.

Yossi Klein Halevi is a senior fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem. His most recent book is the New York Times bestseller Letters to My Palestinian Neighbor (Harper, 2019).

Jerusalem Event: Join the author for a live Jewish Priorities launch event on February 7, 2024 at the Menachem Begin Heritage Center in Jerusalem, featuring Yossi Klein Halevi, Einat Wilf, Hillel Neuer, Izabella Tabarovsky, and David Hazony. The event will also be webcast live. For information and registration click here.

The following is an exclusive reprint from the anthology Jewish Priorities: Sixty-Five Proposals for the Future of Our People, edited by David Hazony. Copyright © 2023 Wicked Son. Reprinted with permission.

The Jewish Spiritual Quest

Finding God in the Twenty-First Century

Yossi Klein Halevi

Judaism is a bridge between two aspects of the Divine: hamavdil, the Creator Who “divides,” distinguishing between the holy and the mundane, Israel and the nations, Shabbat and the six days of the week; and echad, the “One” who is beyond distinctions, resolving all contradictions within Its being.

Those two aspects are reflected in two paths of Jewish devotion. The conventional path of hamavdil seeks to sanctify our world of fragmentation, while the mystical path of echad longs to experience the Divine unity within the multiplicity of creation. The paradox of the Jewish mystic is to be grounded in the rituals and devotions of hamavdil, even as one actively seeks to experience echad.

Hamavdil is the world as it is; echad is the world as it one day will be. But until the messianic revelation of the unity of existence, Jews resist the pull of premature universalism, whether religious or secular. “Not yet,” the Jews insist, even as they maintain the vision of restored wholeness, tikkun olam b’malchut Shadai, the reparation of a broken world through God’s manifestation on earth. Meanwhile, Judaism maintains its complex dance, sanctifying distinctions, the slow accumulation of the good. Hamavdil is the means; echad is the goal.

But some cannot wait until messianic times to experience echad. Throughout Jewish history, individuals and groups of mystics have arisen who sought God’s all-pervading presence, the interconnectedness hidden in our world of separation. From the ancient prophets through the Kabbalists and early Hasidim, mystics have infused Judaism with a reminder of God’s tangible presence, and that the final stage of a religious life is transcending the consciousness of hamavdil. Not just monotheism as a principle of faith but as a lived experience.

The longing for a world of oneness while maintaining Jewish distinctiveness in an unredeemed world is an ongoing tension at the heart of Judaism. Abraham Isaac HaCohen Kook, the first Ashkenazi chief rabbi of the land of Israel and one of the great mystics of the modern era, lived on the fault line between hamavdil and echad. Rabbi Kook expressed his attempt to resolve that struggle in an essay, “A Fourfold Song,” which celebrates a human being’s four commitments or “songs,” from the Whitman-like song of oneself to devotion to one’s people, service to humanity, and finally, a cosmic embrace of the entirety of life, encompassing all songs. “And then there is one who rises with all these songs in one ensemble, and they all join their voices…. The song of the self, the song of the people, the song of humanity, the song of the world all merge in him at all times, in every hour. And this full comprehensiveness rises to become the song of holiness, the song of God, the song of Israel, in its full strength and beauty.”

Rabbi Kook’s intent is to honor the spiritual integrity of each of those songs, though he is obviously referring to himself as the “one who rises with all these songs in one ensemble.” In asserting that the “song of Israel” is identical to the all-encompassing song of existence, Rabbi Kook identifies the universal spirit as the essence of Jewish particularism, a Kookian dialectic that seeks to resolve his own conflicted soul.

Rabbi Kook tried and failed to create a spiritual movement in his image. He even envisioned his yeshiva in Jerusalem, Mercaz HaRav, as a center for the renewal of prophesy. Instead, his disciples, many of whom went on to found the Gush Emunim settlement movement, tended to emphasize his nationalist loyalties while neglecting his universal message. In the Kookian movement, hamavdil absorbed and effectively neutralized echad.

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The fate of Rabbi Kook’s spiritual universalism tells us much about the state of the God encounter within contemporary Judaism. We live in an era of extraordinary Jewish diversity. One can express Jewish commitment through Torah study, Zionism, feminism, social action, and community building. But the quest for an unmediated encounter with the Divine has been largely forgotten, confined to a few Hasidic groups that still recall their founders’ hunger for God.

There is good reason for the waning of the God quest within the Jewish people. A life of striving for an intimate encounter with the Divine requires deep faith in God’s existence and accessibility. The last two centuries haven’t been kind to Jewish belief. The rise of secular ideologies, mass emigration and assimilation, the Holocaust, and the forcible erasure of Jewish memory in the Soviet Union, have all undermined the vitality of faith.

Since the 1960s, many thousands of Jewish seekers have turned to the East, unable to find a spiritually stimulating home within Judaism. In a perhaps apocryphal but revealing story, a guru told a rabbi: Your people is very spiritual; my ashram is full of Jews! Though rabbis and community leaders have long bemoaned the mass exit of many of our most spiritually talented seekers (some of whom have gone on to become world leaders in the spiritual quest), little serious thought has been applied to creating alternatives able to offer Jewish versions of the one-pointed quest for the Divine presence found in the best of the Indian ashrams. It is not enough to tinker with existing Jewish forms, like making Friday night services more “spiritual.” A moral life and the observance of mitzvot are prerequisites for a Jewish spiritual life; but the search for the living God requires more.

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What is required is a new form of Jewish institution, a kind of Jewish ashram, where ritual practice and religious study have only one purpose: furthering the quest for God. Given the cataclysmic upheavals in Jewish life over the last two centuries, Judaism is long overdue for new expressions of the mystical quest. Those upheavals, it turns out, foreshadowed the fate of humanity as a whole. As the world of the twenty-first century becomes ever more terrifying and dangerous, increasing numbers of people, including, of course, many Jews, are turning for meaning and guidance to spiritual paths. We desperately need institutions that can address the need of serious seekers, drawing on the Jewish contemplative tradition while sensitive to contemporary sensibilities.   

For the last forty years, I have been part of a small circle in Jerusalem devoted to renewing the practice of Jewish contemplative meditation. Unlike some currently popular forms of meditation like mindfulness, contemplative meditation is explicitly God-centered. As in other mystical traditions, the Jewish path of contemplative meditation focuses on religious imagery and active longing for an encounter with God, placing the Divine encounter at the center of the meditation work.

The practice I share with my friends is rooted in traditional Jewish concepts and techniques, culled especially from Kabbalah and Hasidism. At the same time, we gratefully draw inspiration from other mystical traditions that bring the seeker closer to God. We are blessed to live in a time when the interfaith encounter has opened up the hidden spiritual resources of multiple traditions, allowing us to learn from the mystical experiences of other faiths. To experience oneness requires simultaneous rootedness and expansiveness, the rigor of adhering to a specific tradition, and the flexibility to absorb the wisdom of humanity.

In the last few years, our Jerusalem circle has begun bringing this work outward. Daat Elyon: The Center for Spiritual Training is a Jerusalem-based group headed by Rabbi Yoel Glick and devoted to Jewish meditation and mystical study. During the Covid-19 years, the use of technology has widened the reach of Daat Elyon, drawing seekers from around the Jewish world. Daat Elyon is building a strong online presence, offering courses in mystical study and meditation.

Daat Elyon’s goal is to foster inner growth and transformation. All spiritual work begins with relentless self-examination, a confrontation with the personality flaws and negative habits and thought patterns that obstruct the God encounter. At the same time, students are introduced to the wisdom literature of Jewish and general mysticism. Prayer is extended from formal times to a constant practice throughout the day—what mystics call nurturing the habit of God’s Presence.

The heart of the work is meditation. It is through silence and sustained concentration that the individual mind forms a link into the mind of God. Jewish meditation is no mere adaptation of popular meditation practices but a venerable tradition in its own right extending back into ancient times. In his groundbreaking work, Meditation and the Bible, the late Rabbi Aryeh Kaplan, who helped re-introduce classical Jewish meditation to contemporary Jews, makes a compelling case based on textual reading that the prophets were trained in meditation techniques. His other classic work, Meditation and Kabbalah, introduces the English-language reader to a wide variety of Jewish esoteric contemplative approaches.

The next step in the development of Daat Elyon is the creation of a full-time center in Israel that would sponsor retreats and offer options for a prolonged stay, training seekers and forming small groups of meditators. These future spiritual leaders will be role models for Jewish communities around the world.

For Jewish mystics, the purpose of the Divine encounter isn’t only personal experience but the ability to become a vessel for the spiritual invigoration of Judaism and the Jewish people. The fruits of intensive spiritual work are an expansion of heart and mind: increased capacity for service to others, enhanced intuition, and a growing sense of God’s tangible presence in one’s daily life and struggles.

Every religion requires adherents willing to transform their lives into a spiritual laboratory, testing the possibility of the God encounter. The work, inward and painstaking, goes largely unseen. But judging by historical precedent, when a spiritually committed group ripens, the potential of that work to help renew Judaism and the Jewish people can be transformational.