PATHS TO THE DIVINE
I was listening to the radio the other day and George Harrison’s song My Sweet Lord came on. I was reminded that I had once taught that song as a perfect contemporary example of bhakti yoga. What’s that you ask and what does it have to do with earth based Judaism?
The word yoga comes from the same root as the English word “yoke.” A yoke is something that holds together the oxen when you work them in teams, so the meaning of the word is something like binding. The idea of yoga then is to facilitate the practitioner to be bound to the divine. If you’ve ever read the Bhagavid Gita, it delineates three kinds of yoga. Bhakti yoga is the yoga of devotion to one of the manifestations of the divine; in Harrison’s case to Krishna. Jnana yoga is the path of knowledge or wisdom, what we might call theology. Karma yoga is the path of action. These aren’t necessarily mutually exclusive, but, as presented in the Gita, they are three very distinct paths.
Judaism is mostly a path of Karma yoga. Halacha, Jewish law, is a path to align with the divine by obeying all the commandments, the dos and don’ts. Tikkun Olam, the repair of the world, is much more popular than the path of Halacha amongst non traditional Jews, and it too is a path of action, a path of alignment through the divine by taking action to bring about a more just world.
We praise the divine in all of our prayers, but I can’t think of any kind of Jewish movement which says all you have to do is pray with a full heart. Certainly there were Hasidic masters who taught that what the divine wants is your offering of a broken heart—but that didn’t stop them from also saying you should walk the path of halacha. Ask yourself who do you associate with the idea of a “robust devotional life” in Jewish history, figures who were known exclusively for their devotion to the divine.
Jnana yoga is a possible path in Jewish history. Martin Buber is an example of this path, a man who drew close to the divine through his thinking and writing without following halacha and without a robust devotional life. Yet, the tenor of most Jewish thought is suspicious of theology in favor of action.
For earth based Jews, karma yoga is accessible through a driving commitment to serving the more than human world. Climate action in a Jewish context, as done by Hazon and Dayenu, for instance, is a kind of karma yoga. So is repairing a particular part of the earth through any kind of regenerative agriculture again, informed by a Jewish context. Bhakti yoga might be available to us through a devotion to the more than human world in a Jewish context, praying for the grace to serve the more than human world through our unique gifts. Jnana yoga might be available to us through some kind of study of humans and the more than human world. I wonder if someone like David Abram could be following a Jewish version of this path. I suspect that the teaching I am doing is a kind of jnana yoga, though, like Abram, I am much more grounded in the world than is traditional jnana yoga.
Whatever path we might take, I believe that yoking ourselves to the more than human world is the core task of earth based Judaism. What path appeals to you and how do you practice it?
