Stop Pretending Judaism Already Has Meditation

Observant Jews often like to argue to me that Judaism already has whatever spiritual practice I am studying in an Eastern tradition. And not just from relatively modern times, but from “thousands” of years ago.

I am really, really eager for someone to come PROVE that to me.

Thousands? I’d buy 7/800, coming from a cosmopolitan milieu in Moorish Spain with lots of esoteric cross-pollination, at a time when apocryphal origins were being made up for a lot of original works of Kabbalah, but those roots are much more traceable than any ancient Jewish ones.

Don’t cite R’ Aryeh Kaplan. He seems like he was a wonderful guy. But the idea that there are scraps of text containing the phrase “Sefer Yetzirah” in the 1st century does not exactly suffice as proof that the whole book that popped up in the 10th? 11th? 12th? century is authentic.

And look, I’m CERTAINLY not saying it’s not okay to write new spiritual books, or even to pretend they’re ancient for funsies! I’m saying that it’s disingenuous to say meditation is built into Judaism in such a way that we know how to incorporate it.

And when I say “incorporate,” the “corpus” I’m talking about is not a metaphorical “corpus” made of books, you know what I’m saying?

I’m talking about the corpse.

I should define “meditation, since it would be eminently reasonable to ask me to do something I am literally always asking other people to do:

Non-thinking-driven, embodied spiritual practices for working directly with the Divine energetic structure that houses us AND social containers for working through it. (Inextricable.)

Judaism does AS RECEIVED does not transmit meditation.

But it has way more than enough original spiritual practices to keep us going as a distinctive religious culture. Don’t be scared of learning more from other cultures who are better at particular things, because that’s what we literally ALWAYS DID.

My position on Lurianic (et al) word-permutation practices being kept secret is hesitantly supportive, but that’s for the same reason I don’t like teaching hell-yeah-rock-and-roll early Buddhist or Tantric meditation to people with no cultural container.

That container is not optional. It’s PART of a practice tradition. Learning Kabbalistic contemplative practices — OR hardcore sitting practices from other traditions — without a cultural substrate to absorb it is basically doing drugs without consideration for set and setting.

And that’s what I’m saying Judaism doesn’t have. It doesn’t have a culture that can ABSORB the kinds of experiences that arise in energetic practice. It doesn’t support the disintegration that DOES happen. And when that happens unsupported… it’s bad news bears.