[HANASHIR:3171] Spirituality and H.N.

[Ethan Leigh Bueno de Mesquita <mesquita...>]

Hi all,

Each year after Hava Nashira this list is filled with beautiful accounts  
of the depth of spiritual experience and the heights of spiritual ecstasy
achieved during the workshop. I have attended Hava Nashira in the  past,
and I'll even admit to having felt many of the same sentiments being
expressed now. Nonetheless it always troubles me. So, I thought I would
take this opportunity to try to put into words what it is about the
conception of spirituality being expressed here that disturbs me.  I would
love to hear the reactions of others. This message is really long and not
specifically about music, so be warned.

What is spirituality? Heschel argues that the Jewish spiritual quest
involves "addressing oneself directly to God with the aim of getting
close to Him; it involves a desire for experience rather than a search for
information." (God in search of Man, 28) (excuse the gendered God
language, it is Heschel's not mine.) This, it seems to me, is the
vision of spirituality most supportive of experiences such as Hava
Nashira. I don't think that it is by any means the definitive view of
Jewish spirituality.  But I will go with it for now.

It is precisely the experience of the Divine that people describe as
having experienced at Hava Nashira. "I felt the presence of Adonai," "the
Shechinah was dwelling among us," are the types of things that have been
written in the past week and in years past. The intensity of feeling, the
wonder of the music, a community of people who choose to express their
spirituality in a way similar to your own is a miraculous thing. And,
because H.N. is first and foremost about music, in some ways I think it is
this last that really is the backbone of the community and the spiritual
experience at H.N. A group of people who love to worship and express their
spirituality in exactly the same way I do is amazing.

This, I believe, is what made those who love to dance so frustrated with
H.N. last year. They were in a community of people who chose to express
their spirituality primarily through music. And this shared musical
expression was the glue of the community. So a person who wanted to
express spirit through dance not only felt the absence of dance itself,
but also felt a separation from the community rooted in expressing
spirituality through music. The point of all of this is that in the Jewish
context, spirituality (that is the experience of God) is itself communal.

The greatest moment in the Jewish spiritual quest was at Mt. Sinai. It was
a communal experience. The people are commanded by God to form a circle
around the Mountain and not to break out of the circle on pain of death to
"many of them," not just the one who broke through.  Moses warns the
people of this and then proceeds up the mountain where God instructs Moses
to once again go down and warn the people not to break the circle.  So
important was the community to revelation that Moses went up and down the
mountain twice to repeat the same warning; that no one was to single
themselves out from the community.  And if someone did, disaster for them
all. (Lev. 19.9-19.25)

So here is what is troubling me.  The Israelites had been slaves
together, faced death at the sea and starvation in the desert together,
had experienced countless miracles together. Only after all of this were
they given communal responsibility for each other's spirituality.  It is
within a deeply intertwined and interdependent community
that shares experience, history, love, death, miracles and deep communal
responsibility that, I think, the Jewish tradition teaches us that we
truly experience God.

Hava Nashira (and other short events like it) is not such a community.  It
is a group of wonderful people with some deeply shared interests. Judaism,
teaching, music. But it is not a community of true and lasting mutual
responsibility. Nor is any group that gets together for but a week once a
year.  How could it be? We see how tenuous the communal bonds are when we
see that some people do not experience the spiritual wonder because of the
lack of dance. Dance is just an expression, surely the lack of dance
cannot impede the spiritual experience. As I said above, I don't think it
was the lack of dance, per se.  The lack of dance made those people feel
somewhat outside the community because the community was based on music. A
deeper Jewish community can only be formed among people who live in
community and share their lives together. And it is in this context that
one can reach the highest levels of spiritual experience according to
Tradition (in my view).

So what am I trying to say?  I  am not trying to denigrate Hava Nashira.
It is wonderful.  But I would like to question what a profound spiritual
experience is. If we are climbing no higher in spirit than what is
experienced in H.N., in a community that will exist only for a few days
and will not bear responsibility for the true communal needs of our lives
(simchas, daily friendship, mourning, raising children together, etc.),
then I think that we are not achieving the sort of spirit our Tradition
advises. We feel a spark at Hava Nashira. But it is a spark that is found
without the fuel of a deeply experienced community. I wonder, are we
mistaking the spark for the fire? I think the fire can burn only in a
community with which one shares one's life. 

So, why does the "spark" at H.N. seem so much brighter than the "fire" in
our communities? Is the experience of H.N. really as high as we can go? Is
the intensity of feeling at H.N. a genuine spiritual experience? And if so
(and I thin it is) is it the pinnacle of spiritual experience? Why does
life in our "real" communities rarely seem to have the same "brightness?"
Is this because we are not achieving heights of spirituality in our own
communities or is it because we are mislabeling what a profound spiritual
experience really is? I don't know, but I'd love to hear what people
think.  Sorry for the length.

L'shalom,

Ethan
mesquita (at) fas(dot)harvard(dot)edu



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