;In) nalti t?

L'Shanah Tovah!

▪

nied suites for cello fit into Ju-
daism's religious perspective?
(Note: These are not rhetorical
questions. Traditional Judaism
does, in fact, have answers to
them. But the Judaism that is
most immediately available, ac-
cessible, appears not to care very
much about such questions, so
emphatic is its communal con-
cern.)
Perhaps, then, the focus on
spirituality comes to relieve not
only the sometimes austere for-
malism of Judaism's public ex-
pression but also as a way to
balance between the individual
and the community, to enable a
broader range of religious ex-
pression than our public liturgy
seems to invite.
So far, so good. The next will
be more troubling to some read-
ers. True, the concern with and
for spirituality has long and by
now entirely respectable an-
tecedents in the most rigorously
observant strands of our history,
and more than a few learned and
observant Jews these days follow
in and seek to expand that old-
er tradition.
For many of them, there's no
distinction between spirituality
and kedusha (sanctity, holiness).
But this generation's rush to
spirituality seems to me more of-
ten an effort to reclaim a religious
sensibility that is independent of
religious belief. Holiness with-
out a Holy One:
For some significant number
of Jews "out there," God is an im-
pediment, a barrier to their ac-
cess to Judaism. Either they do
not believe (whatever "believe"

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MEDITATION page 22

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means), or they are aware that
the God in whom they believe
bears virtually no resemblance
to Judaism's classic God, to the
God who speaks in our sacred
texts.
Yet they experience all those
things that believers experience
— awe, and humility, and even,
vaguely, a "higher power" —
even, indeed, a sense of the sa-
cred.
Some of them find great beau-
ty in Judaism's religious vocabu-
lary, even as they understand
that vocabulary metaphorically
rather than literally. So they try
to search out a way that is nei-
ther heresy nor orthodoxy, a way
that enables them to feel at home
within Judaism even as they re-
main distant from classic Ju-
daism's central premise.
The new popularity of that ef-
owes much, no doubt, to the
decline of formal secular options
within Jewish life. More and
more, we see ourselves and are

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