Spirit and Story Archive

Welcome to Spirit and Story, where you will find the latest thoughts and reflections by CLAL faculty and associates on the contours of our contemporary spiritual journeys. Every other week you will find something new and (hopefully) engaging here!

To access the CLAL Spirit and Story Archive, click here.

To join the conversation at Spirit and Story Talk, click here.

Spirituality and Intellectual (dis)Engagement

By David Kraemer

In contemporary discussion, spirituality is most commonly associated with intellectual disengagement. A "spiritual experience" is achieved through the elimination of critical thinking and its replacement by a more diffuse, even dreamlike state of mind. Spiritual experiences are realized-if at all-through song, chanting, meditation, and (with a lot of practice, but still very rarely) prayer. The "spiritual" is to be found in the woods or meadow or mountains, not in the office or classroom.

But recently a student asked me a question that forced me to examine my own assumptions about spirituality, and I realized that my personal spirituality is very different from the one described above. To be precise, the student asked whether I find Talmud study "a spiritual experience." This is an interesting and even crucial question for two reasons: first, because Talmud study demands intellectual engagement and critical thinking, and second, because Talmud study has been central to the religious life of some Jews for many centuries. Can this particular Jewish religious practice-one that has been privileged in yeshiva society, at least-be spiritual? (If not, what would this say about rabbinic Judaism?)

When the student asked me this question, I hesitated at first. I had to think about the answer, which wasn't obvious to me. But as I sat and tried to recover my experience as I study Talmud, I realized that the answer was a definitive "yes." Talmud study is spiritual (when it works-just like other forms of spiritual exercise), in ways that are unparalleled.

Talmudic spirituality happens something like this: Talmud study incorporates many voices. There is, of course, the voice of God in the Torah, which is quoted to support and test the variety of rabbinic opinions. Then there is the voice of the rabbis who examine the written Torah and promulgate their own Oral Torah-all in pursuit of God's will. As the Talmud's discussions progress, it becomes difficult to distinguish the express Divine voice from the incorporated (=rabbinic) Divine voice. Both merge into a tentative Torah harmony. But, as anyone who has ever studied Talmud knows, the Talmud is incomplete without your own voice (the voice of the learner) to provide the connective tissue. And Talmud makes no sense without your own interpretive voice to test and re-test possible interpretations. So, in the first-and-last step, your own voice joins the Divine and rabbinic voices to create a cacophony of oral Torahs. Crucially, this is not an external cacophony; it happens inside you. So you feel, welling up inside you, the voice of God and the voices of God's creatures, in rich and ever more complex exchange. If all goes well, you will lose yourself in this exchange-as you lose yourself in any spiritual experience. The difference is, in this spiritual exercise, God's voice becomes one of many voices inside you-voices which merge to become indistinguishable. This is, I think, what is meant by devekut-cleaving to God. But it is a peculiarly rabbinic way of accomplishing it.

In the course of this spiritual exercise, you never give up your critical faculty. One question is always followed by another. The spirit never demands that you abandon the intellect. So you can be Talmudic and spiritual at the same time. To modern sensibilities, this may seem counterintuitive. But by opening up alternative spiritual models, Talmud study potentially enriches the religious soul in uniquely Jewish ways.

To join the conversation at Spirit and Story Talk, click here.

To access the Spirit and Story Archive, click here.