Reprinted from Surprised by God: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Religion by Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg. Copyright © 2008 by Danya Ruttenberg. By permission of Beacon Press, www.beacon.org. Reprints not permitted without permission.

Click here to read about atheism, mystical experiences, and defining God.
Click here to read about Shabbat, desire, consumerism in America and looking for the party next door.

FIRST EXCERPT

This section was reprinted in World Jewish Digest, and can be found in its online incarnation here.

About six months after my mother died, strange things began to happen. I would walk around Providence at night - wide, clean streets, rows of crumbling Victorians in candy pastels, the sort of humming quiet that can be found at night in sleepy towns - and I would talk to the moon. It wasn’t really out loud, or even in words, but rather more like a sort of concentrated focus, a communion with this startling orb that seemed to be watching over me in a way that nobody else really was. I had never really looked at the moon, and now I was addicted. Some nights the sky was clear, and it would spread wide, clean light in all directions. On cloudy nights it would appear through a haze, swaddled in a muted rainbow.

I began to connect to something long buried that only had permission to stir as I traversed the winding streets, more than a little lost. I would listen to Tchaikovsky on my Walkman and weep at the moon. Not just the moon, though. I was equally moved by the shadows that were cast across the lawns by porch lights and the chunks of paint peeling off the old houses, or the weeds sprouting tenderly between sidewalk cracks. It was all too much for me to take. In the afternoons I’d walk home from class and suddenly everything seemed to take on a softness, an illumination of some sort. Colors seemed deeper, corners sharper. I would be walking down the street and, abruptly, the only thing that seemed to exist in the world was the stop sign at the corner - its bold red flatness, the tinny gray of the post, the holes in the post and the silhouette it created.

My mind would go still. It’d be absent of the clacking sound to which I was accustomed, with its endless running commentary about who I had seen and who I would see and what I had eaten that day and what I had to do and what had just happened in class and…suddenly the only thing in the world was this stop sign. And, somehow, that was enough. In a life primarily defined by a sense of deprivation and anxiety, it was striking, for a moment or two, to feel as though things were exactly as they ought to be.

I didn’t know what to call these experiences. I didn’t think to label them at all, really. They just sort of happened. They captivated me for a time and then I moved on.

The sense of losing myself certainly echoed how I had felt sometimes at [punk clubs I used to frequent in high school, like] Medusa’s or in the mosh pit, but these experiences against the Providence night sky were raw and unmediated; there was no music, no noise, no motion between me and this feeling of infinity.

I had had smaller moments like this in years past, but I don’t think it’s a coincidence that they began to come fast and furious after my mother’s death. My shell had been broken by grief, and perhaps for the first time in my life, I was unguarded enough to perceive a force that, for all of its power, is quite subtle in day-to-day existence.

I was empty, I was open. And I think it helped that I was also feeling alienated from the people and the routines from which I had expected solace as I mourned. It seemed that my friends were mainly interested in going to parties and riding the ups and downs of collegiate romance. My life had shifted radically while my friends’ lives had remained fairly constant; I was grieving, while they were not. Eventually I would once again become preoccupied with the location for the next adventure and the merry-go-round of who I would be kissing next. But that first semester back, I was a college senior drenched in grief and loss and hurt and heartache and the horror of everything that I had witnessed. And that created a gap between my friends and me.

Gaps are powerful, potent entities. Inside a fissure, things can grow. In lag time, we can hear quieter impulses too long drowned out by a comfortable noise. In the spaces between our lives as we have known them and our lives as they are, our peripheral vision tends to expand. As Annie Dillard wrote, “The gaps are the thing. The gaps are the spirit’s one home, the altitudes and latitudes so dazzlingly spare and clean that the spirit can discover itself for the first time…they are the fissures between mountains and cells the wind lances through, the icy narrowing fiords splitting the cliffs of mystery.”

Stripped from my usual context, from the comforts of normalcy, I entered, unwittingly, another dimension. It is inside the gaps that magic happens; an old defense is lowered, sensitivities are heightened, something calls in from the quiet. New questions flicker and, whether or not we’re aware of it at the time, a part of us follows after them. But it takes a long, long time to make sense of the clues we pick up along the way - usually years from the time we begin collecting them.

* * *

Transformation, if it’s going to happen at all, is protracted, often imperceptible in the moment. Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi writes of his own experience, “I did not experience one seismic and pivotal movement with its special theophany. The process was gradual. There was a long series of these ephiphanies, often unrelated to one another, and the effect was cumulative.” Few, if any, of us go to Damascus and have one experience that changes absolutely everything (though in hindsight, we might be tempted to try to identify some turning point or other this way). More often, certain events make us ripe to regard things with a different kind of lens - though it’s never a foregone conclusion that we actually will. Maybe, regardless of a new experience, old ways of thinking will remain solidly in place. Maybe something within will shift slightly. And maybe, one day, we’ll find ourselves sliding into one of the great, gorgeous, terrifying gaps of stillness and uncertainty, somewhere in the disquieting space between comfort and crisis.

Certainly, my mother’s cancer didn’t prompt any profound personal development during my freshman year - I managed to get by, immersing myself in college life and going to enough parties to avoid thinking difficult thoughts. But as a grieving twenty-one-year-old, the same strategy wasn’t working. I found the same old conversations about dating and identity politics useless - they didn’t address my situation, my new, broken perspective, my needs.

When the usual routine doesn’t click, there can be a space, a receptivity, to encounter something else that might. And I think that that’s really why I was able to enter these curious nighttime experiences, and became even almost open to asking certain kinds of questions about them. For, when I wandered around Providence and slipped into the place where the air vibrated, where rocks and leaves seemed to pulse with opalescent light, I didn’t wonder why. I didn’t really think at all. The experiences certainly didn’t disturb me; they were gentle, sweet. Safe. What began to bother me, as time went on, was what to make of them.

One afternoon not long after these moonlit walks had begun, I had lunch with my friend Sabah at a café near campus. I don’t remember what she asked me, but my response caused her to look up at me over the soup and say, “You don’t consider yourself spiritual? I think of you as pretty much the most spiritual person I know.”

Sabah did and still does identify as a secular humanist, with no interest in religion of any sort. She did, and still does, count on my short list of people whose observations are almost never off target. The comment stayed with me, confounded me. What could she be talking about? What did she see in me to which this word could apply? I was confused and flattered at the same time, and then I wasn’t sure why I felt flattered. Was it a good thing to be “spiritual”? Wasn’t it just silliness? I was embarrassed by even the thought of applying the word to myself. It had always struck me as one of those ways people tried to make sense of their own insanity, of their blanket refusal to accept the world as it already was. These experiences of pure, rushing, vibrant presence didn’t inherently hamper my carefully constructed worldview. But a more objective attempt to give language to them, an attempt to explain why these deep connections with the night sky seemed to give me comfort when almost nothing else did…well, this direction of inquiry was philosophically devastating.

The implications made my head spin. I had always believed that religious people were deluded. What could it mean if the devout had all long been citizens of the remarkable, translucent world that I was just discovering?I had, at this point, spent several years studying religious phenomenology from the perspective of an academic trying to understand what people thought they were experiencing when they talked about God - even if, in reality, it was just a neurological reaction or something similar. And yet…I knew I couldn’t entertain the possibility that my midnight excursions might be connected to the word spiritual without extending the word to what I regarded as its logical extreme. And opening even the question of the concept of God made me a little bit nervous, a little bit jittery, and rather nauseous.

Like a lot of people, the only image I had of God, or even of “spirituality,” was this mythical, anthropomorphized God, the Guy in the Sky who sees you when you’re sleeping and knows when you’re awake. The Torah talks about a God who took the Jews out of Egypt with a strong hand and a mighty arm and whose nostrils flare when He (always He) gets angry. The artists of the Renaissance added a few Zeus-inspired touches: big beard, thunderbolt, menacing glare. The only archetypes that I encountered in my upbringing and in the wider culture were of God as fascist dictator or, maybe, God as the Big Buddy who makes everything okay. It was this latter God - the one who was going to somehow swoop down from the sky and save my mother from cancer - that I had so vociferously rejected the year before, and years before that. From my 21-year-old perspective, it seemed ludicrous that I would throw away years of rational inquiry and historical-critical analysis, that I would give up my intellect and my power and go mooning after these problematic images in the naïve belief that it would somehow help my life to do so.

Of course, I wasn’t experiencing an angry, or even necessarily a personal, deity. And that was just the thing. There was a disparity between the language I felt pulled to use to describe these experiences and my belief in what that language signified. The experiences weren’t wrong. The other possibility, then, was that these words - spirituality, or God, even - might refer to something much more powerful and primal, something much more fundamental than I had ever considered before.

The implications made my head spin. I had always believed that religious people were deluded, mistakenly transferring their need for a parent figure or for certainty in the world onto mythology. What could it mean if the devout had all long been citizens of the remarkable, translucent world that I was just discovering? And, sure enough, I would eventually discover that a great many people, from the authors of the book of Deuteronomy onward, understood what I, at this time, did not: that all the business of God’s flaring nostrils and mood swings was actually just metaphor, ways of describing the intangible force I began meeting more and more often.

Judaism’s ancient rabbinic texts make this point when they say that “the Torah speaks in the language of human beings,” and the medieval philosopher Maimonides is adamant that anyone who takes literally either the emotional or physical descriptions of God’s human attributes is committing idolatry. But at the time, I didn’t know this, any of it. I was like the people the twentieth-century Catholic theologian Thomas Merton described when he wrote “I know that many people are, or call themselves, ‘atheists’ simply because they are repelled and offended by statements about God made in imaginary and metaphorical terms which they are not able to interpret and comprehend. They refuse these concepts of God, not because they despise God, but perhaps because they demand a notion of Him more perfect than they generally find: and because ordinary, figurative concepts of God could not satisfy them, they turn away and think that there are no other.”

And here I was, suddenly, wondering if there were other concepts out there, if there were ways of understanding the world that I had never considered. Over the period of about a year, everything I had ever believed began to invert itself with a dizzying rapidity.

As I hesitantly experimented with using the word spirituality to describe these strange luminous rushes - the sense of being outside time, the sense of stepping into eternity, the sense that my self as I understood it seemed to melt away into the moment - the rushes got bigger. And later, as I began first tentatively, and then more assertively, to use the word “God” to describe the experiences, they got bigger and bigger still. It was as though, like Anne Lamott, I “had discovered that if I said, ‘Hello?’ to God, I could feel God say ‘Hello,’ back.”

* * * * * *

SECOND EXCERPT

Reprinted from Surprised By God: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Religion by Danya Ruttenberg.Copyright © 2008 by Danya Ruttenberg. By permission of Beacon Press, www.beacon.org.

This section was reprinted in ZEEK, at Jewcy, and can be found online here.

One Tuesday night [a few years back], I sat at a local cafe with a cappuccino and my just-purchased copy of Abraham Joshua Heschel’s The Sabbath; all of my reading for pleasure seemed to be about Judaism at this point. I had already begun to understand why, on the seventh day, Jews traditionally refrain from lighting fires or using telephones or cooking food or spending money or doing many other things understood to be either technically “work” or outside the spirit of rest that governs the day

It seemed clear that abstaining from this stuff would create long stretches of silence and a freedom from distraction that could help a person access the most silent, hidden parts of the self. Heschel, however, explained that there was even more to it than that. He wrote,

To set apart one day a week for freedom, a day on which we would not use the instruments which have been so easily turned into weapons of destruction, a day for being with ourselves, a day of detachment from the vulgar, of independence from external obligations, a day on which we stop worshipping the idols of technical civilization, a day on which we use no money, a day of armistice in the economic struggle with our fellow men and the forces of nature-is there any institution that holds out a greater hope for man’s progress than the Sabbath?[i]

The irony is that human progress depends on saying no to technology and economic engagement, at least for a while. Heschel framed Shabbat as a way of returning to too-oft-neglected ways of being human-a way to help us remember what we have in common with the woman who got up at 4 a.m. to clean the office.

I sipped my drink and I chewed on Heschel. The idea of being free from commercial transactions on Shabbat was attractive. I thought through the implications: If I didn’t spend money, I couldn’t get the eggplant sandwich I loved from the deli up the street. I wouldn’t be able to ride the bus, since I never had a monthly pass. I needed Friday-night money to tip bartenders, pay cover charges, pick up the tab on a date, get into a movie. The list seemed to be endless. No eggplant sandwich?

This, I realized later, connected to all that stuff about desire I found in countless books on spirituality. Carol Lee Flinders wrote, “as long as I believe in sex as a source of lasting happiness-or power or food or even long weekends in the mountain or anything finite-then no matter how much I want the mysterious something else that mystics speak of, I can’t walk toward it because my consciousness is divided.”[ii]

In Buddhism, desire–uncritical servitude to our finite cravings–is considered the root of all suffering. The Ten Commandments tell us not to covet, not to desire greedily. Attempting to rein in my impulses, however, sounded terrible. The mere prospect of not being able to do what I wanted, exactly how and when I wanted to do so, was causing me no small amount of my own suffering. There seemed to be no winning.

Up until now, dabbling in Judaism hadn’t demanded very much of me. I had time in my schedule for both Friday night services and clubbing, I could spare an hour’s sleep every week or two for morning prayer and Torah class. Avoiding nonkosher food wasn’t so hard-I hadn’t eaten meat in years, and I wasn’t really a fan of seafood anyway. But as I contemplated Shabbat, and what it might entail to deepen my practice, I began to realize that this spiritual discipline stuff was . . .well, more work than shooting energy out of the palms of my hands. If I wanted to move past the “random cool experiences” phase and into something more like Divine DSL, I had to actually do things to make that happen. I just wasn’t sure that I was ready.

I wasn’t alone in my hesitation to take this next step. A lot of people hit their limit of spiritual experimentation, I think, when it comes to facing down desires. The happy glow, the rushing ecstasies, and the feelings of being understood are all amazing. A class here or a retreat there is sweet, inspiring. Doing more than that is harder for a lot of us.

It’s not like we have a lot of help and encouragement from the culture in which we live, either. As Caroline Knapp notes, “some twelve billion display ads, three million radio commercials, and 200,000 TV commercials flood the nation on a daily basis-most of us see and hear about 3,000 of them a day, all of them lapping at appetite, promising satisfaction, pulling and tugging and yipping at desire like a terrier at a woman’s hemline.”[iii]

American culture today is the most consumer oriented in Western history, and the system depends upon our cravings. Buddhist environmentalist Stephanie Kaza suggests that “consumerism rests on the assumption that human desires are infinitely expandable; if there are an infinite number of ways to be dissatisfied, there are boundless opportunities to create products to meet those desires . . . How can [consumers] know what product will satisfy them when there are so many to try?”[iv]

With a little practice not running after our cravings, we begin to realize that they, and the feeling of urgency to satiate them, might not be as endless as we had thought. If, one day a week, all of our needs can be met with prayer, slow walks in the park, reading, Torah study, sitting in silence, and long communal meals that allow conversation to unfold, what might that tell us about the things that seemed so urgent on the other six? What might that tell us about our culture’s stories regarding what we can and can’t live without?

It’s not that there isn’t a place for work, music, travel, and, yes, spending money-the world needs us to be creators and doers just as it needs us to take breaks from all that relentless creating and doing. As Heschel framed it, “in regard to external gifts, to outward possessions, there is only one proper attitude-to have them and to be able to do without them.”[v]

This was what Frederica Mathewes-Green meant when she said that we should enter one religious system fully and allow it to change us. Judaism was beginning to ask things of me, to intimate that it might be in my own best interests to take on practices that were neither convenient nor comfortable. Me? I wasn’t so certain. It wasn’t that I didn’t want a deeper relationship to God and my religious practice, but that-like many of us who grapple with desire-I was terrified of the implications.

I had created a tenuous balance, one hand grasped tight around my Judaism, another around my social life. It felt like any sudden movements in one direction or the other would cause everything to fall. I was terrified to think I might become so religious that I’d lose much of what I had in common with the artists, activists, and slackers cum Unix administrators who made up my world. If I said no to what I wanted, would I get things that I needed, instead? That piece of me that was always itching for more-more God, more connection, deeper encounters that lasted longer-would it be satisfied? How much of my life, my friendships, would I lose by seeking this out? Would oh-so-holy Friday nights without spending money be boring? Lonely? Feel like some sort of a punishment? If everyone went out without me . . . then where would I be?

Saint Teresa of Avila writes of her own experience,

It is one of the most painful lives, I think, that one can imagine; for neither did I enjoy God nor did I find happiness in the world. When I was experiencing the enjoyments of the world, I felt sorrow when I recalled what I owed to God. When I was with God, my attachments to the world disturbed me. This is a war so troublesome that I don’t know how I was able to suffer it even a month, much less for so many years.[vi]

I needed my friends. They had nourished and sustained me, helped bring me back to life after my mother’s death, given me a sense of community the likes of which I had never experienced. I loved them-Jack and Lida and Michael and Ariel and Rebecca and Cass and everybody else. If saying yes to God meant endangering these ties . . . well, I wasn’t able to do that. And yet, it was clear that my relationship to God had become fundamental to the point of non-negotiability. Any attempts to run from it would just be denial doomed to failure. God was calling me, but I wasn’t sure to where. God beckoned, but I couldn’t face the price that I might have to pay to follow.

The Catholic priest Henri Nouwen wrote,

You have an idea of what the new country looks like. Still, you are very much at home, although not truly at peace, in the old country. You know the ways of the old country, its joys and pains, its happy and sad moments. You have spent most of your days there. Even though you know that you have not found there what your heart most desires, you remain quite attached to it . . . you know that what helped you and guided you in the old country no longer works, but what else do you have to go by? . . . Trust is so hard, because you have nothing to fall back on.[vii]

The feeling that I was living a double life began to wear. I still wasn’t ready to throw away the full, flourishing existence that I had painstakingly built from scratch in a brand-new city, but inside the so-called flourishing life, I was increasingly lonely. That I felt like I couldn’t talk about my desire for the sacred to become the organizing principle of my life meant that I had less and less to say.

My social life, like my freelance career, seemed to be far too much about the quest for the fresh, the exciting, the new, the next big thing. I, on the other hand, was yearning for the well tested, the eternal, the timeless. I was getting too much candy and not enough protein. Even costuming-which had become one of my favorite activities-began to lose its sparkle.

Though it had been delightful to reinvent myself over and over again, now I wanted to figure out who I was underneath all the artifice, underneath the makeup and the glitter and the thousand shifting guises. I still cherished the creativity demanded by the enterprise of getting dressed, but it began to be harder and harder to feel like I was “on” all the time. I started going out a little bit less, refusing invitations here and there. More often, though, I’d go out and simply not enjoy it.

All too frequently, it felt like there was something important missing from the conversation, something beyond romantic escapades, making rent, and the vicissitudes of pop culture. There just seemed to be a dearth of people with whom I could talk about this “something else,” about not only my burgeoning religious life but all of the things that it might mean. My close friends’ own spiritual lives allowed for some translation, but not enough. I needed people who were going through the same thing that I was, people who had also thought about keeping Shabbat or who were also afraid of their desire to become religious, and who might have some new ways for me to think about my private dilemmas. I needed those people, but I didn’t see them anywhere in the life that I was already living.

Alex and I would later refer to this sense of longing as the search for the “party next door,” for community and a life that felt cohesive, in which all of the social and religious aspects integrated seamlessly. At this point, however, I didn’t know that there was a party happening elsewhere, or what kind of fun that could possibly be.

I wouldn’t give up one life or the other. I’d refuse to tip the balance. And, in fact, I didn’t stop spending money on Shabbat at this point; I just couldn’t bring myself to take that step and face its possible implications. I’d just live with the discord, I told myself, keep letting the feeling in my solar plexus get trampled by the loud music at the bar. I’d notice keenly every time the check came at a restaurant, feel guilty and far from God as I reached into my purse for my share of the bill. This wouldn’t be a long-term solution, and I knew it. The problem was, I didn’t know what else there might be.

[i]Abraham Joshua Heschel, The Sabbath (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1979), 28.

[ii] Carol Lee Flinders, At the Root of This Longing: Reconciling a Spiritual Hunger and a Feminist Thirst (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1998), 71.

[iii] Knapp, Appetites, 15.

[iv] Stephanie Kaza, “Overcoming the Grip of Consumerism,” Buddhist-Christian Studies 20 (2000): 23-42.

[v] Heschel, Sabbath, 28.

[vi] Flinders, Enduring Grace, 167.

[vii] Henri Nouwen, The Inner Voice of Love (New York: Bantam, 1999), 21.