Everyday Mysticism: A Contemplative Community at Work in the Desert by Ariel Glucklich (review)

This is a beautiful, compelling and original book that opens up new horizons in our understanding of what it means to pursue spiritual meaning and depth within community. It also offers us something new and important in terms of how to do scholarship in spirituality that is critical, but also open and responsive to the fluid and often-unpredictable character of lived spiritual experience. There is nothing to which I can easily compare it. In this it resembles its subject, Neot Smadar, an intentional contemplative community in the southern Negev Desert, approximately 70 km north of Eilat. Neot Smadar, founded under the guidance of Yossef Safra (1931–2003), a former theater director, playwright and film director, is not a kibbutz (although in its outward form it resembles one). Nor can it be described using any of the terms commonly applied to intentional spiritual communities. What is it then? The preferred name of the community itself is a "school of Self-Inquiry."

This helps a little. But in many ways Neot Smadar does not conform to the idea of a "spiritual school" that one encounters in ashrams, Vedic schools, Mus lim madrasas, Buddhist and Christian monasteries, Jewish Yeshivas and many other comparable models. In part this is because of its lack of dependence on any particular spiritual tradition. Most of the members are nominally Jewish and there is regular celebration of Shabbat, but there is little talk of God and even less of Torah (More of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky). In this sense it is a striking expression of the increasingly common phenomenon of post-religious spiritual seeking. But the difficulty of defining the purpose of the school also has to do with its unusual, open-ended conversational method. Everything of significance that happens in Neot Smadar happens within the flow of the unfolding life of community, through openness to dialogue and discovery, in the work of living.

If this feels evasive or unsatisfying, it would be hard to disagree. Often as I read this book, I felt baffled by the vague and indeterminate accounts of experi ence in community, as well as by the ideas behind that experience. Sometimes, the language used to frame questions about spiritual thought and experience feels so open-ended or opaque that it is difficult to gain a purchase on its meaning. Then, suddenly, things turn and the question or insight pierces with unnerving clarity. This seems to be part of the searching character of Self-Inquiry. Nor is it only the teachings of the community that at times leave one baffled; it is the often-unpredictable and dynamic structure of community life itself.

The conversations about spiritual meaning and purpose that are so central to the life of the Neot Smadar community take place more or less continuously: in conversation circles, yes, but also in the midst of automobile repair work, wine and cheesemaking, pouring cement, herding goats, rituals of initiation, and so on. The title of the book, Everyday Mysticism, sometimes feels like a sly joke. But it isn't. Much of the power of Neot Smadar and the spiritual work to which its members commit themselves lay precisely in this unpredictable, unfolding, never-to-be pinned down character of the work of Self-Inquiry that emerges everywhere, all the time. As any serious spiritual teaching does, the dynamic spiritual work at Neot Smadar subverts and calls into question the often-rigid categories we frequently use to interpret spiritual experience. In its place, something else begins to emerge: a simple, honest and free way of apprehending spiritual experience amidst everyday existence and in one's own life.

This will, perhaps, sound too good to be true. And it is. But what I am describing here is the aspirational horizon against which members of this community live. And as with any flesh and blood community, there are many ambiguities, contradictions, set-backs, and outright failures that shape the day-to...