Some Notes and a Summary of Rabbi James Jacobson-Maisels “Non-dual Judaism CONCULSION PART TWO

This brings us to the final question raised by Jacobson-Maisels article.  Just how possible is non-duality, as a mental or spiritual state, for people?  We have seen that non-duality as conceived today was a minority trend within Judaism (really, a minority within a minority, the retreat of mystics who had achieved a very advanced level in their understanding of God).

It appears that the non-dual view is also only for a tiny minority of people.  As human beings, we seem to "see" duality in the world.  We even see more than that; we perceive a booming multiplicity all around us.  We live in a dualist world.  Yet we are told that non-duality is our true state.  We are one with everything, and it only appears that we are separate from everything.

This is the hard part.  How do we accept that the world is all there is, that God is part of the world (but not actually the world) and at the same time realize that the same world hinders our ability to see the non-duality of things?  One way we are supposed to cultivate this understanding is through meditation.  Meditation is designed to break down and or loosen the bonds of the self and create a wider sense of reality.  I have experienced this sense both through meditation that has been guided by another person, and through self-mediation.  I can attest that it feels very real.  Done well, and long enough, there is no feeling at all.  There is nothing.


Is this what we are supposed to find?  Is the nothing experienced in meditation the nothing of ayin, of God, of the ALL.  I am told that it is.  But as a mediocre mediator, I am still trying to figure that out.  What is the difference between self-induced illusion and genuine ayin?  For me, the question still stands.


Articles like those of Rabbi Jacbson-Maisels gives us interesting ideas and answers, and many questions.

There is no God in Judaism

There is the impression, in watching Rabbi David Aaron talk about his conception of God,that he is playing with us a bit. When he says that God is not mentioned in the bible, he is fooling with the tradition.


There is a perfectly functional word for God in Hebrew, elohim, and it is used to distraction all over the place. But it is not considered the paramount name for the divinity. What Rabbi Aaron is talking about are some interpretations about the name God reveals to Moses, HaShem, the name that can't be pronounced. This is the divinity that is about non duality. There is not Him and Us; there is only a kind of oneness that transcends the human conception of oneness.


What Aaron is getting at here is that when you say the name God, all sorts of images come to mind (usually of an old man somewhere, or a being someplace that is not here). So he invites us to toss out the word, because it has too much baggage. There is a place in the Jewish tradition for a broader view of the divine: as the unfolding nature of reality, of the past, the present, the future, all at one time and in every place.


This kind of "God" gets to skip away from all kinds of troubling aspects of traditional monotheism. If this "God" concept picks up a few of its own theological conundrums, some hard nuts to crack, then it says more about the way we think, than about a non dual God.