Reimagining Dualisms for a Nondual World
A typical week in Covid times often feels like an endless Monday. One day streams into the next with a sameness that is mainly distinguished by different faces on the screen. Thank God that Shabbat comes to provide a welcome release from the restrictions of the pandemic and invites us to dwell for a day in what Heschel so lovingly describes as a palace in time. We can step away from the work week and savor this day of rest that often moves at a deliciously slow pace. Yet, the challenges of setting this as a day apart are complicated by the reality of still connecting to community for prayer or study or social interactions through a computer screen.
We live in a paradoxical reality of strict boundaries and boundlessness. We are severely limited in who we can see in person, what spaces we can enter, and how many of us can gather in one place. And, at the same time, our homes have become offices, gyms, sanctuaries, conference centers, cultural venues, libraries, spaces for political activism, social and spiritual gatherings, ritual practice, and meditation. Sitting in one place, we can travel the world looking at a screen, and at the same time, so much we hold dear is inaccessible and so very far away.
Living within this paradox of expansiveness and constriction is lonely, exhausting, confusing, and unsettling. It is also exhilarating, generative, inspiring, and sometimes even joyful. So much is accessible to us through screens that it can be overwhelming. It is our lifeline to friends and loved ones, community, and culture. We’ve become accustomed to it, and at the same time, we push against the tedium and limitations.
The impact on Jewish life is profound. Collective belonging is mediated through a screen. We zoom up the street and around the world for Shabbat dinners, weddings, funerals, baby naming ceremonies, and other life cycle events. We watch services and listen to sacred music mixes across time zones. We can meditate and study Mussar with global communities. We attend lectures and workshops all over the world. We can customize our practices to fit our own schedules, participating in events in real time or watching them later on FaceBook or YouTube. Zoom is our individualized portable miskhan, and it raises the question of whether it will continue to be a portal into Jewish life well beyond the time that the virus is contained.
As technology expands the boundaries of community, it pushes the question beyond what we do as Jews in the midst of the pandemic. It gets to the very essence of belonging: What does it mean to be part of the Jewish people today? This question is hardly new. Long before Covid, we were confronting core questions of Jewish life – how we gather, learn, pray, celebrate, and mourn together. Covid has just accelerated the disruption already underway.
One of the core texts that has shaped my understanding of Jewish belonging is Chaim Nachman Bialik’s essay “On Jewish Dualism” written in the early 1920s. In exploring the relationship between universalism and particularism, Bialik observes that these opposing forces create a formative tension that sustains both Judaism and the Jewish people. He writes: “No nation strives to be swallowed up in other groups as much as the Jews and, at the same time, to remain an entity - an entity whose least particle is still recognizably Jewish.”[1] Bialik claims that Jewish life is challenged and ultimately strengthened by the constant tension between the pull to assimilate and universalize and the push to retain and preserve our particular identity and forms of expression. Indeed, consider the manifold dualities within Jewish experience - universalism and particularism, religion and peoplehood, the individual and community, the sacred and profane, Israel and the diaspora, tradition and change. Navigating these tensions is an integral part of what it means to be a Jew.
Well before Covid times, these formative tensions were in flux. For several decades, we have observed that Jewish engagement is driven much more by what people find personally meaningful than by a commitment to a normative tradition or a particular community. The magnetic pull between these dualities has weakened as one tendency tends to overwhelm the other. This is particularly noticeable in the impulse to universalize to be more welcoming of all who choose to connect Jewishly in some way. This long-standing trend has intensified in Covid times, given the seemingly endless array of mostly no-cost resources available through the click of a button. Over this time, we have also seen personal and communal identities grow more and more porous and fluid. Identities of all kinds are breaking out of binary classifications of either/or to become both/and in terms of gender, race, ethnicity, sexual identity, and religion. Many Jewish communities are grappling with how to be genuinely more inclusive of individuals and families who maintain these multiplicities of backgrounds and cultures as essential to who they are alongside being Jewish.
To be sure, there are far too many in our world who reject this new reality and strive to hold on to a more rigid dualistic frame that preserves hierarchies, perpetuates an us vs. them orientation, and perceives these trends as a threat to an idealized status quo. These attitudes and actions present us with a profound dualism that seems at times to be impossible to navigate. Covid certainly heightened our awareness that we are interconnected, and that individual’s actions have consequences far beyond their own person. At the same time, Covid intensified the divisions between us, bringing greater clarity into the cracks and fissures of our world, challenging the binaries that enable and perpetuate systemic racism, fear and even demonization of the other, income inequality, ableism, gender bias, transphobia, political extremism, and more.
How fitting that Purim marks the one year point for the Covid upending in my part of the world. That was the last day we gathered as a community on the New York campus of HUC-JIR. The association of this holiday that revels in reversals and enjoins us to wrestle with a world turned upside down is too strong to ignore. Last Purim, we had no idea what would happen to us and how long our world would be turned upside down. As we mark Purim this year, we are still far from an end to the pandemic, but we are perhaps seeing the possibility of an end. This existential state again evokes the paradox of boundaries and boundlessness and invites me to revisit my embrace of Bialik’s notions on dualism from a new perspective.
I still believe in the essentiality of negotiating the opposing forces that are inherent in what it means to be a Jew. And I also find myself increasingly seeking to harmonize and unite these dualities to better understand what it means to be human. This shift is not intended as a rejection of the complex task of navigating these tensions. Nor is it meant as a way to homogenize the distinctions. I still hold strongly to the ideas and ideals of Jewish belief and practice framed around dynamic engagement with the sacred and the profane, with Israel and the diaspora, with the universal and the particular. However, by adding a theological lens to this more sociological understanding of the Jewish and human enterprise we can transform these oppositional dualisms into an intricate network of an interconnected and interdependent whole, that allows us to imagine new possibilities in our broken world. And in order to do the essential work of repair, we must imagine new possibilities. It would be a terrible thing indeed, if we went back to “normal” and did not attend to the need for deep structural change that this period of confinement, containment, and constraint has brought into such clear focus.
This reframing has strong roots in Jewish thought and experience. It is grounded in the kabbalistic notion that no place is devoid of God, and that everything is a partial manifestation of the divine.[2] This belief posits that all reality derives from a single source: there is nothing but God. Not only is God one, but nothing can be separate from God - all is One. Likkutim Yekarim, a classical Hasidic text, puts it simply:
The meaning of “echad” in proclaiming the Shema is that in all the worlds, only the blessed Holy One exists. The whole earth is filled with God’s glory (Isaiah 6:3). The main intent is that you consider yourself as nothing, zero. The important thing about you is only the soul, and that is “part of God above.” Therefore, there is nothing in the whole world except the One God.[3]
This is not to say that we are God. Nor is it meant to erase the uniqueness of each aspect of creation. Rather, the belief that there is nothing but God invites us to see things that appear to be in opposition – light and dark, exile and redemption, heaven and earth, good and evil, sacred and profane, as all contained in the One. It helps to understand the deep symbiosis between the natural and human-made world, and it forces us to reckon with the evil within us. To be sure, it might be easier for me to have a moment of divine connection with the tree outside my window, than it is to acknowledge that something of the white supremacist out there is also a part of me. But that is the point. My humanity can only be fully realized if I see myself as part of the divine whole.
The Meor Eynayim offers a sweet illustration of how essential this interconnection is in our work to create a more perfect world. While his numbers may be fanciful, the essence of his message is that we are all connected, and we are all essential. He writes:
There are 600,000 letters in the Torah, against which there are also 600,000 root souls, even though today there may be more or less that number of Jews. Nevertheless, essentially there are 600,000 root souls and the multiplicity of people results from the division of those divine sparks. Therefore, each Jew is connected to one letter in the Torah. The Torah and the blessed Holy One are a complete unity, and each letter represents the divine element in each person. It is actually the very letter which is the root of his soul….
For this reason, we say each morning before we pray, “I hereby take on myself the positive commandment of ‘Love your neighbor as yourself” (Lev. 19:18). All Creation is a complete unity, like the Torah which can only be called a Torah when all of its letters are presented and united.[4]
This reframing requires seeing these manifold dualisms in our world not as opposing forces to be negotiated, but rather as necessary components of a great whole. Just as each letter of the Torah has its own shape and sound, so too each aspect of creation has its own dimensionality and distinction. We need to honor and value that in all of its complexity. As Jay Michaelson writes: “the goal is not to attain some sense of balance but rather to transcend the binaries and engage in a vibrant oscillation between the poles of everything and nothing, separation and union.”[5]
Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook calls this approach the union of opposites. He posits that only by connecting these seemingly contradictory parts can we find shalom, wholeness and peace, in opposing truths. He writes:
There are those who mistakenly think that world peace can only come when there is a unity of opinions and character traits. Therefore, when scholars and students of Torah disagree, and develop multiple approaches and methods, they are causing strife and opposing shalom. In truth, it is not so, because true shalom is impossible without appreciating the value of pluralism intrinsic in shalom. The various pieces of peace come from a variety of approaches and methods which make it clear how much each one has a place and a value that complements one another.[6]
Rosenak and Leshem Zinger offer a practical application of Rav Kook’s ideal in doing the work of conflict resolution. They offer the “unity of opposites” for dialogue groups as an alternative to the more familiar narrativist approach which asserts “that there is no single ‘truth’ and no way to uncover an all-inclusive truth.”[7] Following Kook, they suggest that we need these oppositions in order to ultimately arrive at the truth. Rosenak and Leshem Zinger acknowledge that this “approach does not lessen the conflict that exists in the world, but it does place it in a new perspective. One who has internalized this approach does not find contradiction frightening, because she understands that everything has its source in the One.”[8] They continue by explaining that taking this approach in situations where there is disagreement and discord focuses on identifying a single integrated truth, going beyond individual stories and seeking deeper understanding of ideas. As they write: “Unity of opposites discourse will thus go beyond the narratives to hear the bat kol, the heavenly voice, which, for those who wish to uncover it, will be heard in the present open space.”[9]
In the Jewish mystical tradition, acknowledging the unity of all is the beginning of wisdom, not the end. It is the means towards deeper understanding of the self in the universe, which is certainly the inner work that this pandemic invites us to do. It is also perhaps a way of accepting the essentiality of dualisms even as we strive towards nonduality. This belief leads to the embrace of the weighty complexities inherent in being human in general and a Jew in particular.
Covid times compel us to confront these complexities and find deeper truths that might lead to restructure and repair of our world. It would be a tragedy if we go back to what life was in the before times. We need new approaches to work through these long-standing problems in our world as a whole and within our Jewish communities as well. If we listen more carefully for the bat kol, the voice of God, perhaps we might begin to see new possibilities in harmonizing without homogenizing the dualisms that provide needed structure and meaning to our lives.
This is no easy task, but it is an essential one, and a holy one. It requires the ongoing work of bringing the divine presence into our words and our actions that foster our relationships with all of God’s creations. Just as with any relationship worth preserving, sustaining this relationship takes work. This work is a form of tikkun – working towards repairing and improving an imperfect world. It can also be understood as a partnership, a brit l’olam, a covenant for all time. May that be a lesson we carry forward with us beyond Covid times into a reimagined future that unites us in all our glorious differences and distinctions in the pursuit of peace.
[1] Chaim Nachman Bialik, Revealment and Concealment: Five Essays, Ibis, 2000, p. 28.
[2] Tikkunei Zohar, Tikkun 70, pg. 122b
[3] Likkutim Yekarim, Yeshivat Toldot Aharon, Jerusalem, 1974, pg. 53b.
[4] Me’or Eynayim, second drasha (zot hatorah adam ki yamut ba'ohel), Moznayim Press, Jerusalem, 2012, pg. 269.
[5] Jay Michaelson, Everything is God: The Radical Path of Nondual Judaism, Trumpeter: Boulder (2009), p. 11.
[6] Abraham Isaac Kook, Olat Ha’reiah, Mossad HaRav Kook: Jerusalem (1963).
[7] Avinoam Rosenak and Sharon Leshem Zinger, “Narrativism and the Unity of Opposites: Theory, Practice, and Exegesis: A Study of Three Stories from the Talmud,” Religions 2019, 10, 367, p. 3
[8] Ibid, p. 4.
[9] Ibid, p. 5
