A Tale of Two Sinais

Last week marked my three-year anniversary working at the Institute for Jewish Spirituality. It has been an amazing time—not only because I started as a global pandemic was breaking, or because the work we do means so much to so many. No, one of the things that has made it literally amazing is that I’ve kind of amazed myself that I’m here.?

As I discussed on a recent podcast interview , when I shared the news of my new position with my friends three years ago, a lot of them did a double-take: “Feigelson? Leading an organization that teaches Jewish mindfulness practices? Huh. Unexpected.” I had only begun developing a meditation practice a few months earlier, and I think I was known to many of my friends and colleagues as more of an academic, intellectual type than someone who would sit on a cushion or a yoga mat and lead people in sacred chant.

But my professional move came at the right time for me, and it is, and has been, true to who I am at this stage of my life. Yes, I still have a PhD (it’s not like I gave it back) and I still do a lot of thinking and analyzing and writing and teaching. But another part of me has opened up and developed these last few years—not only because of my work at IJS (though that has certainly helped), but also because of the path I sense I’m on in general.

Curiously—maybe significantly?—as I marked this anniversary, I found myself ruminating on an observation. For much of my adult life, I have been blessed to be a student of Rabbi Yitz Greenberg, one of the great teachers in American Jewish life since the 1960s, and still one of our great teachers today. Yitz’s theology, his approach to understanding the presence of the Divine in a post-Holocaust world, his philosophy of halakha, his pluralism and involvement in interfaith work, his personal and professional example of creativity and institution-building, and our own personal relationship, all have had an enormous influence on me.?

Ten years ago I wrote my doctoral dissertation on Yitz’s teaching, looking for what it was that made him one of the most influential teachers in American Jewish life. I concluded that part of his attraction for so many people, including me, was his understanding that, despite all the reasons we might think God is absent from the world, in fact, God is more present than ever—but we have to look for God’s presence differently than we might have thought before. Yitz referred to this as “Holy Secularity:” God isn’t only present in the synagogue or in ritual moments, but in the advances of modern medicine, in our vastly increased capacity to reduce suffering, in our expansion of rights and human dignity to so many more people than have ever known it before in human history. All of these, according to Yitz, are evidence of God’s presence in the present. I found something tremendously empowering and uplifting in this theological orientation.

At a certain point, however, I found that there was something else I needed too: a language for my own personal experience of the Divine presence—not in the grand sweep of history, but in the much more granular moments of my own life from day to day, hour to hour, moment to moment. I came to realize that, at this point in my life, I thirsted for a Torah (in the broadest sense—not only the Five Books of Moses, but a total approach to Jewish life) that could help me become and remain attuned to the presence of the Holy One in every breath and every heartbeat. That search led me to IJS and, more broadly, to the world of neo-Hasidic Torah. I even wound up writing a book in that tradition.??

And here’s where the observation comes: It occurred to me that I was complementing Yitz’s Torah with a Torah that was, significantly but hardly exclusively, developed and championed by Reb Zalman Schachter-Shalomi. While I didn’t have the good fortune to meet Reb Zalman during his lifetime, today I count him among my own major influences—and his students among my colleagues. What Yitz has been for Jewish history, Zalman was for joyful, embodied, emotionally-attuned Jewish living. He inspired thousands of people with his own example of a rich and meaningful Judaism—centered not so much on the grand narratives of Jewish history as on the more visceral narratives of the lives of Jews, yours and mine.

And then a second observation: I was hardly alone in this movement. As I started to think about it, I realized there are many of us out there who share some version of this story, moving from a Torah centered more on God’s presence in history to a Torah centered more on God’s presence in our hearts. And then a third, final kicker of an observation: If you’ve read Rodger Kamenetz’s classic The Jew in the Lotus, you may have already recognized that two of the main characters in that chronicle of a group of Jews visiting the Dalai Lama in 1990 are… Yitz Greenberg and Zalman Schachter-Shalomi. Huh. Unexpected (or maybe not).

Parashat Yitro is, in so many ways, the apex of the Torah. It is the moment of Divine Revelation at Sinai. For me, and perhaps for you too, the narrative reads with a grand historical sweep: This is a moment that the world changes, as the Holy One breaks through, as it were, and speaks in thunder and lightning to 600,000 people collectively. For so many of us, this is a dramatic moment that changes Jewish and human history.?

As a younger person, that narrative carried me and inspired me, propelled and compelled me. As I’ve gotten older, though, I find myself equally if not more drawn to a more inward understanding of Sinai, one that finds its roots in Jewish mysticism as developed especially through the Hasidic tradition: Sinai was a moment of profound attunement of a collection of Jewish heart-minds to the still, fine, and still powerful voice of the universe’s animating life force. And: It was not only a moment that happened once in history never to be repeated, but is a moment available to us regularly, if we are able to tune into it. For me, right now, that approach is profoundly resonant and true.

I don’t want to be misunderstood: I’m not arguing for the value of one of these approaches over the other, or even trying to construct a binary between them. (God forbid the head of IJS should espouse binaries!) I’m simply trying to reflect on my own spiritual-religious journey with reference to two of my most important teachers. Each of them, I believe, can help contribute to our understanding of the human-Divine relationship. As the very process of our continual growth and development shows, at different moments in our lives we hear the Divine voice at different frequencies. May our study and practice of Torah help us continually grow in our attunement to the voice that spoke at Sinai and continues to speak to us now.

Shabbat Shalom.