The Jew in the Lotus

if Judaism is going to survive in this country, it will be because it will have succeeded in retrieving this sense of itself as a practice—not as an ethnicity, not as an occasional church—but as a set of intentional and disciplined gestures that have the effect of transforming us, of deepening our relationship to the sacred.

Many Eastern religions speak of “mindfulness”—being in the present moment, aware and devoted to “the now.” In the Jewish tradition, what God asks is moral mindfulness—to be always aware of the moral dimensions of our actions. Nothing exists in a vacuum; one is always in relation to others, always in the moral moment.

In this single development Jews performed one of their most stunning leaps of the imagination. At a stroke they freed Jewish spirituality from its dependence on a land, a country, a state, a holy city and a Temple with its sacrificial rites.

Jewish existence is not only the adherence to particular doctrines and observances but primarily the living in the spiritual order of the Jewish people, the living in the Jews of the past and with the Jews of the present. It is not only a certain quality in the souls of the individuals; it is primarily involvement and participation in the covenant

Within the limits of human intelligence, we can climb at least part of the way to heaven, but the purpose of the climb is the return to earth, knowing that here is where God wants us to be and where he has given us work to do. Judaism contains mysteries, but its ultimate purpose is not mysterious at all. It is to honour the image of God in other pe