Joy at God's presence: One doorway to the divine.

•
The
mystery of
our lives
pulls us
toward the
elusive
place
where God
encounters
man and
man
encounters
himself.

26

Rabbi Heschel said, "I felt my legs were
praying."
No one form of spirituality dominates
in Judaism because no one type of person
dominates in Judaism. The religion has
had the wisdom to recognize that Jews
are as patterned as the world in which
they live. Some prefer the inner world,
some the outer. Some favor the life of the
intellect, some the life of the emotions.
But virtually all forms of Jewish spiritu-
ality encourage Jews to strike a balance
between themselves and family and
community. Without this, spirituality
can become a self-indulgence —religious
thumb-sucking that elevates the self
above all else.
"People confuse privatism with an ex-
pression of spirituality," said Baltimore's
Joel Zaiman, rabbi of Chizuk Amuno
Congregation and president of the Syna-
gogue Council of America. "Without bal-
ancing the inside and the outside, this can

FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 28, 1990

all become very self-absorbed."
Likewise, all distinguish between hav-
ing a spiritual experience and a spiritual
life. The experience itself is momentary:
A fleeting brush with the other side. But
a spiritual life is a commitment to what
Rabbi Green called living "in the pres-
ence of God." Without this commitment,
the experience becomes "nothing more
than yesterday's sunset," observed Rab-
bi Jonathan Omer-Man, the Los Angeles
Hillel Council's director of religious out-
reach.
For Orthodox Jews, spirituality ema-
nates from prayer, observance, tradition
and, especially, from orienting one's life
toward Judaism's 613 mitzvot. To them,
the physical and spiritual planes are inex-
tricably linked. Every physical act rever-
berates in the soul. Since each mitz-
vah corresponds to parts of the body and
the soul, performing them advances one's
relation with God and one's status in the

afterlife, the olam habah.
To Baltimore Rabbi Menachem
Goldberger of Orthodox Tiferes Yisroel
Congregation, spirituality cannot be de-
fined in this physical world, although it
can be alluded to as "realms beyond nor-
mal consciousness that we know exist
through the revelations at Sinai and the
writing of the prophets."
Rabbi Goldberger distinguished au-
thentic spirituality from a blissful emo-
tion divorced from intellectual content or
observance of the Torah. Joy and ecsta-
sy, he said, do not necessarily signal that
one is having a spiritual experience, al-
though they are often associated with
one.
"A person may be doing something
wrong," said the rabbi, "and feel good at
the same time. How you get these feel-
ings then becomes arbitrary."
According to Rabbi Goldberger, the
content and study that balances joy come

