A Mystic’s Humanistic Judaism

July 8, 2009 · Filed Under Forums 

Editor’s Note: Peter is a participant in OurJewishCommunity.org and submitted this short essay.  We hope it will generate great conversation here!

A Mystic’s Humanistic Judaism
by Peter Schogol

As I’m sure is the case with many Jews who’ve abandoned theistic religion in general, synagogue Judaism in particular, I’ve sojourned with a number of different religious communities in search for, well.. whatever it is nontheistic Jews search for that they haven’t found in shul.  I’ve spent time with Baha’is, Quakers, Episcopalians, Vedantists, Pure Land Buddhists, Tibetan Buddhists, Humanistic Jews, Reform Jews, and Sect Shintoists.  I came to appreciate `Abdu’l-Bahá, Lucretia Mott, Frederick Denison Maurice, Vivekananda, Taitetsu Unno, Pema Chödrön, Yaakov Malkin, Leo Baeck, and Konko Daijin, but with regrets in hand I kept on moving.

I’ve reached the point where moving for its own sake has become enervating and counterproductive.  I wish to settle down.  I wish to settle down in a community which is a part of the wider world which raised and nurtured me.  I wish, for all the heartaches and heartburn, to be a contributing member of the Jewish people.

But I don’t want to bury myself in the part.

Each time I tried to find my place in Jewish life I’ve had to tuck some part of myself in.  Either I’ve been too ethnic, too left-wing, too gay; insufficiently theistic, insufficiently Zionistic, insufficiently Holocaust-obsessed.  I’ve been, in other words, what I am rather than what the neighbors should think I am.

I’ve been exceptionally fortunate in stumbling across an author, artist, liturgist, and hymnodist who was as curmudgeonly, as opinionated, as narcissistic and as brilliant as I in the person of the late Universalist minister Kenneth Leo Patton.  In his many books (all but one out of print), Patton described a “religion of realities” suitable to his spiritual personality as a “mystical humanist.”  In prose and poetry, lyrics and images, Patton chronicled a life immersed in the nitty-gritty of the human condition, singing as gloriously as Whitman, snorting as righteously as Clarence Darrow.

I believe in a mystical humanistic Judaism.

It’s not enough to be a rationalist.  It’s not enough to be an atheist.  It’s too late to be an objectivist.  It’s disempowering to expect vicarious righteousness from one’s rabbi.  It’s time to experience humanism as a project of the spirit charged with awe and mystery as well as justice and mercy.  It’s time to once again cast our liturgies in the first person, owning our searches and our fallings away.

Is there room in communal Judaism for such an aesthetic?  Should one have to turn to theistic religion for an appreciation of the mystical?  Can Humanistic Judaism contain both rationalists and poets?  I hope it can even as I realize that for the vocabulary of mystical humanism to be digestible to rationalists it will need careful unpacking.  I for one would be happy to be part of such an undertaking.  There is, truly, nothing otherworldly about a reverence for life.

Peter Schogol
Lexington, KY

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11 Responses to “A Mystic’s Humanistic Judaism”

  1. Melamed Says:
    July 9th, 2009 at 9:51 am

    Thank you for your essay, and for introducing me to Kenneth Leo Patton.

    If God is defined as the main character of the Bible, regarding that God I am an atheist. But I do believe that we humans are an expression and outflow of reality itself. “Life itself” is my understanding of God. I think there is a lot of good poetry in the mystical traditions of Judaism for thinking about our relationship to reality at large.

    This quote from Alan Watts has given me as lot to think about:

    “We do not ‘come into’ into this world; we come out of it, as leaves from a tree. As the ocean ‘waves,’ the universe ‘peoples.’ Every individual is an expression of the whole realm of nature, a unique action of the total universe.”

    What he describes is a kind of mysticism because it’s unitive – he takes the point of view that the observer and the universe are one. What he describes is not supernatural or theistic. It is the universe itself which is the object of his awe – not something external to it.

    Another favorite “mystical naturalist” quote:

    “My atheism, like that of Spinoza, is true piety towards the universe and denies only gods fashioned by men in their own image, to be servants of their human interests.” (George Santayana)

    Thanks again for getting this conversation going.

  2. mike liss Says:
    July 9th, 2009 at 1:16 pm

    Mysticism is inherent to humanism.
    It is the very rational realization that we know and understand very little, and that further mysteries will always confound our successors, that makes humanism the ideal platform for mysticism. We humanists realize that we know so little, but decline to explain away all that is not understood as “divine”-as we will continue to ponder, rationalize, try to understand, and realize that sometimes we will be left amazed at what we have yet to understand.

    Does that make a theist? Certainly not. It makes a thinker! And if nothing else, humanists are thinkers. Otherwise, we would all have just complacently accepted the mantras of our childhoods. You are welcomed and I wish you much learning along your journey. Just expect to be mystified at most turns in your life.

  3. Peter Schogol Says:
    July 9th, 2009 at 2:28 pm

    I have a blog at http://quakerstates.blogspot.com which goes further into mystical humanism. You’re welcome to read and comment on it.

    I see “mystical humanism” as containing two related points of view: naturalistic mysticism and religious humanism. The second term is familiar to non-theistic congregational Jews. The first may need some unpacking, particularly as it relates to Judaism in its broadest sense. If there is interest we could explore that angle.

  4. Joel Batalsky Says:
    July 10th, 2009 at 11:37 am

    The answer maybe the study of Mussar. This is a spiritual path to the goal that you are seeking to understand.

  5. Peter Schogol Says:
    July 10th, 2009 at 8:43 pm

    Joel, could you say more about Mussar and how you see it in relation to mystical Jewish humanism?

  6. Rabbi Baum Says:
    July 13th, 2009 at 5:05 pm

    I am also curious about Joel’s comment… I think of Mussar as much more in the world of the rational.

  7. Aron Says:
    July 29th, 2009 at 4:08 pm

    Interesting essay, Peter. Thanks for getting the conversation going!

    I certainly consider myself a mystic and I’m very sympathetic to humanism, naturalism and nontheism, but tend to label myself as an earth-based Jew, because interacting with the earth an it’s beings represent a significant value for me.

    I’m part of a Reconstructinist chavurah here in Columbus, Ohio but share your feelings about having to reign parts of myself in to participate.

    I add my interest in Mussar, there were some in my group working with it here.

  8. Peter Schogol Says:
    July 29th, 2009 at 6:51 pm

    Hi Aron,

    Could you say more about Mussar?

    Peter

  9. Aron Says:
    July 30th, 2009 at 3:01 pm

    Peter, unfortunately, I know very little about the Mussar movement beyond the basics of it being an ethical movement that began in the 19th century, started by Rabbi Yisrael Lipkin and there’s been a revival of interest recently.
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mussar_movement

  10. Aron Says:
    July 30th, 2009 at 3:20 pm

    Yisrael Lipkin Salatar, that is.

  11. Mari Says:
    March 19th, 2010 at 11:14 pm

    Having spent much of my adult life as a “Jewish Unitarian agnostic” I think perhaps I am a “mystical humanistic Jew” after all.

    Divinity to me is much like Emerson’s Oversoul… and Unitarian minister Wayne Shuttee’s concept that there is a moral imperative in the universe that we live ethically. There is, it seems, a Power that unites us, unites all living things… and can be experienced in a deeply spiritual non-rational way.

    I hope I’m not out of line in adding this personal experience of the divine!

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