Bob Schwartz

What is mysticism? One of many words that can mean many things. As Humpty Dumpty said, “When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.”

In The Encyclopedia of Jewish Myth, Magic and Mysticism, Rabbi Geoffrey Dennis tries to define it:

The term “mysticism” is one commonly applied, but imperfectly defined….

Scholars have struggled to give a precise definition to what constitutes mysticism within the Western religious traditions. Most regard it to be the impulse, ideology, and discipline to experience the unmediated presence of God or, more radically, union with divinity or a more broadly defined “Absolute.” Evelyn Underhill calls it, “… the expression of the innate tendency of the human spirit towards complete harmony with the transcendental order; whatever be the theological formula under which that order is understood.” Others see mysticism as a project of human transformation, the radical revision of human nature in relationship to the divine.

There is a substantial body of mysticism in Judaism, as there is in its younger siblings Christianity and Islam. The place of mysticism in these religions is complex and varied over time and circumstances. While mysticism might lead to fierce conflicts (“my enlightened vision is better than your enlightened vision”), the “radical revision of human nature” can also lead to followers experiencing other people and things in a more humane, open and divine way.

I don’t know of research measuring the study and adoption of mysticism among contemporary Jews. My anecdotal observation is that it might be small.

To a certain extent, materialism is the opposite of mysticism. Things are things but also transcendentally more than things. Land is land but transcendentally more than land. As religionists say, the phenomenal and the noumenal. We need and can’t avoid having and using the things, but that leads to attaching to the things, which inevitably leads to trouble, within ourselves and in the world. Mysticism, easily lost in the everyday of religions, including Judaism, and certainly lost in the turmoil, could be helpful right now.

© 2024 by Bob Schwartz