Living with the “Arational”
AMITAI ADLER
SHMA.COM
Each month over the
course of this year, a
guest columnist reflects
on the midrash of
Avraham smashing the
idols in his father’s shop.
We’ve asked our writers
to think about the idols
they must still smash to
get to “Canaan.”
Father’s Idols
A YEAR-LONG
CONVERSATION
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Amitai Adler is a fifth-year
rabbinical student at the Ziegler
School of Rabbinic Studies at
the American Jewish University.
My name is Amitai Adler, and right here, right now, I am coming out of the mysti- cal closet. I don’t have a tie-dyed tallis. I
don’t identify as “Renewal.” I don’t even really like
drum circles. I am actually a rather studious rabbinical student — with a bent for halakhah — at a
Conservative movement seminary. But I believe in
energy. I believe in magic. I believe in angels and in
demons. I believe in a universe of both the seen and
the unseen. I believe in the ability of human beings
to see the unseen. And I believe I have caught
glimpses of it. There. Now you know my secret.
How did I get here, and what stood in my
way? In some ways, my upbringing could not
have prepared me better for what I aim to do —
be a rabbi and teacher. But the question we ask
ourselves in the context of this discussion is: In
what ways were we shaped that ultimately
proved to be impediments to becoming who we
needed to be?
With me, it was rationalism — by which I
mean not the Rationalism of classical philosophy but a rationality reflecting an absence of
the mystical. Both my parents are, intellectually, children of the 1950s. I appreciate their optimistic streaks, and how they taught me about
civil rights early and often. But less helpful was
their reasoned approach to Judaism. Though
spiritual, they are not comfortable with the
mystical. My mother is a deeply pragmatic
Reform-oriented thinker and my father was
trained by Rav Eliezer Berkovits, z”l, a master
of reasoned traditional thought.
I, on the other hand, instinctively relate to
God and to the universe first and foremost in
terms of energy and essence. While I view this
world as key (that being a primary tenet of all
Jewish understandings of life), I see it as one
world among many, and I view it — as I mentioned — as a mix of the seen and unseen, as
a living network of energy. Thus I was fascinated early on with magic, mythology, and
tales of the Hassidic wonder-workers, though I
shunned the “crunchy granola” that so often
seemed to accompany such interests in
American society. Additionally, by disappearing into books, into silent contemplation, into
creative artistic experiments, I began to develop a reputation with my family and teachers
as a “daydreamer” with his “head in the
clouds.” It must have seemed to my parents
that I made less and less sense the older I got.
For me, my life began to make sense after
I taught myself to meditate. I probably made a
hash of it, seeing as I was only eleven, but I
kept at it, both the practice and the inexhaustible reading and research; by the time I
entered college, I was seriously meditating on
an almost-daily basis. That practice helped me
reconcile that although I had instinctively seen
the universe I had never accessed the language
to understand how it worked. I always instinctively felt as though I were walking in many
worlds at once. Deeply empathic, I had always
felt what others felt; perceived to some small
extent things that were intangible, sensed the
invisible; by college, I even began to catch
glimpses of the patterns of force and energy
that make up the world around us. Naturally,
since modern Western society doesn’t even acknowledge the phenomena of the mystical, I
had always felt constrained to keep my perceptions and feelings to myself since, as a
child, there was apparently no place for them
in the world around me. Meditation — with its
discipline to calmness, to channeling and controlling feelings and perceptions, to balancing
one’s energies toward inner peace — not only
gave me tools to control my sensory input, it
gave me a sense of harmony with who I was,
thus freeing me to explore the larger universe
that beckoned me.
Meditation also influenced my desire to
major in theater arts, as acting is a craft well-suited to working by feeling and not reason, and
one that is entirely dependent upon the ability
to freely embrace the truth and the totality of
one’s being. That decision bewildered and
slightly horrified my uncomprehending parents,
who understood the desire to teach and write,
but really didn’t think a person could make a
living as an actor, and never understood the
more spiritual and psychological elements of my
attraction to acting. Finally, meditation kept me
grounded, and, completely unconsciously, it
worked its way into my practice of tefillah,
which probably ultimately saved me as a Jew.
When I was a teenager I took a rumspringa,
as the Amish phrase puts it: I stopped going to
shul, kept zealously treyf, and so forth. Then, a
few years later, on Rosh Hashanah I went home
to go to shul — ostensibly to please my family
