Spiritual Regret and Holy Envy

As a Jewish reader I was honored at the invitation to participate in this symposium of the twenty-fifth anniversary of the distinguished series of Classics of Western Spirituality (CWS), but also intimidated. I am a scholar trained in French literature, not an expert in religious studies. But my fascination with religious texts is both personal and pedagogical. My interest in mysticism has been indelible, motivating work parallel to my field of literary studies. At Brandeis University, I teach courses such as "Mysticism and the Moral Life" and "Life Stories Spiritual and Profane." As an interpreter of spiritual lives and thought, I have followed most closely Thomas Merton, Howard Thurman, and especially, in my own tradition, Abraham Joshua Heschel.

Howard Thurman speaks of a "hunger in the heart" for God that is itself an intimation of the Divine Presence. My initial attraction to mystical texts was provoked by a naÏve rationalistic ideology typical of Reform Judaism in the 1950s. My childhood rabbi taught a dogmatic form of "religious naturalism," an approach that considers "God" to be either a human construct serving lofty humanistic ideals or a "process" intrinsic to the observable universe. This rabbi exercised a simplistic censorship of traditional religious language, and so God had no "fingers" nor did "He" shelter the bereaved under "under the shadow of His wings." Religious thinking had no metaphors!

So a thirst for metaphors, for poetic thinking, brought me to what we now respect as "spirituality." But it wasn't until I encountered the works and the person of Abraham Joshua Heschel that I found a Jewish writer for whom poetry was a pathway to spiritual insight. Heschel was and remains the Jewish writer who most convincingly conveys to me a sense of God's presence.

Poetry in literature, mysticism in religious studies, reflect my personal drive for intimacy with Ultimate Reality. And yet my faith remains fragile. Nevertheless, my conviction that most human beings possess a sensitivity that unifies the dimensions of the religious, the poetic, and the ethical remains consistent. I am especially attracted to religious writers who harness the power of language to evoke holiness, leading to ethical courage and action in the world. The CWS convey that synergy of the good and the transcendent.

Writing for Spiritus, a confession would seem to be in order. The remarkable CWS, overwhelmingly but not exclusively Christian, appeal to me especially, I think, because I am not a Christian. I am an enthusiastic Jew, committed to working out my perplexities, in large part but not exclusively, through Jewish texts, Jewish worship, and identification with the Jewish historical experience.

As a scholar of French literature, I am comfortable with Christian terminology. Fascinated with the ambiguities of Catholic spirituality, I became a Baudelaire specialist. Charles Baudelaire rejected the idealizations of his Romantic predecessors; bravely he faced human sin, ugliness, and banality with compassion as well as with anger, a disguised compassion to be sure. A contemporary interpreter of Baudelaire, the poet and thinker Yves Bonnefoy taught me how Baudelaire affirmed the preciousness of finite human beings, social outcasts, criminals, but also mothers, artists, and lovers. The poet endowed simple or corrupted individuals with absolute value, fallible images of the Divine.

The CWS provide the fullest access to this spiritual tradition. I was first attracted to the Christian writings, since many of them are autobiographical. Jewish personal testimonies are rare, and they usually demand extensive knowledge of original sources in Bible, Talmud, and Kabbalistic texts. The Islamic writings in the Series attracted me somewhat later, though well before the September 11^th wake-up call. My research on Abraham Heschel brought me to the luminous writings of Henry Corbin and Sayyed Hossein Nasr, both of whom are sensitive to the confluence of Sufi mysticism and Jewish spirituality, in both the historical and personal dimensions. What potential these collections possess for understanding between the Abrahamic faiths!

The Jewish contributions to the Classics series restore to their appropriately dignified place spiritual treasures usually considered to be marginal, or simply ignored, by conventional Jewish scholars. Non specialists like myself find an entrance to this complex heritage...