Rabbi Nahum Ward-Lev is the leader of Beit Midrash, an intensive Jewish learning community at Temple Beth Shalom in Santa Fe. He is the founding director of The Meeting Ground at Ghost Ranch, a spirit-based, multi-cultural training center for peacemakers. He trains physicians in Spirituality and Medicine at the Northern New Mexico Family Practice Residency Program. He is a trained Spiritual Director. Nahum is a co-founder of the Jewish and Christian Dialogue in Santa Fe and the former Rabbi of Temple Beth Shalom in Santa Fe. (Bliss 5 Archive, 2006)
Lindsay Ahl: I like what you said about Moses coming down from the mountain with his face shining but veiled so the people couldn’t see it.
Nahum: In Hebrew the word for world, Olam, comes from the Hebrew root which means hidden or veiled. The world, that is, the physicality of the world, is God, but a veiled form of God that allows us to come in contact with the Divine, or else we would be overwhelmed. The light shining through creation is God’s presence. When Moses came down from Mount Sinai, he was so imbued with that light that he himself became brilliant beyond the ability of others to be near him.
Lindsay: When you fall in love and feel that drug of love coursing through your veins, is that kind of like being filled with the spirit?
Nahum: That’s a wonderful question. Well, there has been a lot of work done recently about the role of the erotic in Judaism. The erotic not in the sense of the sexual specifically, but in terms of Eros, in terms of just aliveness, the joy, the juiciness, the light and the pleasure and sensuousness of life. God is life, and life is sensuous and beautiful and alive and erotic. So, in that sense, the full spectrum of one’s experience of love from devotion to excitement, to the light, the joy, ecstasy, would be an experience of God, yeah.
Lindsay: What’s the role of the self in relation to loving God, and the role of the self in relation to loving other people? How do you get away from your own ego and into a more pure spiritual plane?
Nahum: There’s a commentary in the Talmud, where the question is raised, how do we love God? God says to the people, “Love my creatures, and love my creation.” So I think the extent to which I’m feeling the aliveness of God’s presence, I’m experiencing myself as being a lover in the world, and therefore the distance between myself as a contained ego and the other begins to dissolve and it’s just an experience of God’s love.
Lindsay: Is there discussion or argument about how one can prove or disprove that the Torah is the word of God?
Nahum: The word argument connotes something problematic. There’s some kind of violence to the word argument, which is different than conversation. So there is certainly also argument, but there is also a healthy conversation in Judaism about in what ways the Torah is divine. And I both recognize the historical arguments that identify different literary genre in the Torah which indicate that the Torah is the combined work of several schools that have been brought together at some later point in time. And also there are verses in the Torah that are very troubling, and difficult and why would that be the word of God? And yet in a lifetime of studying Torah, when I’m in conversation with the text, I always feel like I’m in a conversation with something beyond. In traditional Jewish circles, the Torah isn’t meant to be studied individually, between me and the book, but here’s the book in the center of the conversation so that we’re all taking part of the conversation. And I always find that the Torah can be totally transformative in bringing people to that place of asking the deepest questions and being challenged in the deepest ways and being pushed to their limits. So I would say that, the Torah, like so much of this territory, is a mystery to me. It looks like it’s human, and it looks like it’s divine, and I don’t know really how to reconcile that mystery.
Lindsay: Would you say that you’re not getting your faith from the word of God but from the world, almost?
Nahum: My faith comes from the gift of teachers who I’ve learned from, the Torah, and most of all, from working on my relationship with God for many years. I think that faith is less belief than relationship.
Lindsay: How do you know that that relationship is something that’s really happening in the world and not in your mind?
Nahum: I don’t. I mean, when you say, how do I know? I don’t know. But how do I rest in comfort? That’s a different question. Confidence in my teachers and in holy people. Not only Jewish holy people but holy people of all religions and all walks of life, great people we would all look up to and feel that there is something we experience in them that is real. A second thing, a really important step in my own spiritual development, is I came to the place where I felt if I couldn’t trust my deepest sense then I was nowhere. In some ways, we’re not brought up to trust ourselves, we might be deluded, we might be deceived, and we really can’t trust our experience, and people really go off when they trust their gut and that sort of thing…. and I was in a place in my life, at that moment, that if I can’t trust that place inside myself, then I know nothing. So, it’s sort of like an axiom … axiomatically … I trust that place of knowing within myself. And in that way, in that place of knowing, for me, I know of God’s presence in my life.
Lindsay: It’s true that our culture, especially in America, is oriented so that you can’t trust yourself, you have to trust the news, you have to trust science, you have to trust the authorities, but you can’t trust yourself.
Nahum: It’s a dangerous place too. The corrective is community. If I had some thought, and everyone who I really respect said, “You know what, that’s nuts, that’s not God,” then I would know I need to go back in and look again. And I need to test my sense of God’s presence not only in the light of the teaching of my most immediate community, but according to the teachings of faith traditions around the world. I think there’s a lot of consistency. One of my teachers said one of the ways that you look at faith as to its reality and legitimacy is its fruits. Fruits like love, kindness, generosity and service. Last night, I was reading the great Jewish mystic, Rav Kook. He was the chief Rabbi of Israel in the 1930’s in a time when the vibe in Israel was this radical, secular, Marxist kibbutz energy, and Rav Kook was able to see God’s work in them and God’s presence in them. The other Rabbis were saying, “No, they’re really off.” Even atheism, Rav Kook said, is a part of God because atheism challenges us, pokes holes where we need to have holes poked. He was in that place of really being able to look at all creatures. I am challenged by his thinking. Can I look at figures in the government and politics I think are really wrong, and can I see that in my mind they seem misguided, but in some way, at some level, some aspect of what motivates them is God at work. That’s really a challenge.
Lindsay: I ran across this idea Makom, or Hamakom. The author described it as God being in an unlimited, ever-present place of now. Can you talk about that word?
Nahum: So the word, Makom, or Hamakom, literally means, the place. But within Rabbinic literature, God is referred to often as Hamakom, The Place. God is the place in which you and I are right now. The root of Makom, is Kum, which means, “stand.” We get our standing in God or we wouldn’t be here. We’re within God, this is the place, or we wouldn’t be here. There would be no place for us to be. It’s similar to, in the Torah, Moses asks God what his name is, and God says ahyeh asher ahyeh, which literally means, I will be what I will be. And later, What’s your name? Ahyeh, means “be.” And the name of God in the Torah is the Hebrew letters that represent pure being, and we don’t know the vowels, so we can’t pronounce it, which is a way of saying, the ultimate reality of God is a mystery. But it is the word for Being, in the future and past tense combined. So that, somehow, God is. All is-ing, is God. Even when people are doing terrible things, not that that is what God would want, not that they’re doing God’s will, but they are also moving within God, the energy with which they move, is also God. A great mystery.
Lindsay: That reminds me of something I read in the New York Times long ago when we were first bombing Iraq. There was a man, who had lost his wife, son, and parents, with a bomb, and he was quoted as saying, “This is God’s will.” I thought that was intense, because he was so able to accept the world. I’d never be able to do that, to accept that. Is that what you’re talking about? This is the world and you move through it, and you’re always there, with God?
Nahum: Yeah, though I’d be a little bit careful, in that, I wouldn’t say it was God’s will that his family died, but given that his family did die, that this is God’s will now. And in that way it is God’s will. It’s a strange thing to say but you see there is a difference. In Hebrew thought there’s a difference in the same event before and after. So, before, God working his will would not be toward destruction, but after, this is the world that God has given us and God is now present in this reality. God is present now in this world where the man has lost his family. In Jewish tradition when we hear that someone dies, we say, Baruch Atah Adonai Dayan Ha-amet, Blessed be you, God, Judge of Truth. Which is: this is what is.
Lindsay: When you were talking about “the place” and before and after events, you’re talking about time. How does the Torah address time?
Nahum: Oh gee, what a question. In Torah interpretation, there are four different levels for the four different worlds. The world of the body, the world of the heart, the world of the mind, the world of the soul. And so in the world of the body, there is a sense that the Torah is a story. In that story, there is a beginning, a middle and an end. And stories move within time. So that’s at one level. But at other levels of Torah interpretation, there is no time. Both are true. In the physical world, we are living within time, you walked in, we’re here, and you’re going to walk out. Other worlds are not limited in the same way. And so with our minds we have a hard time grasping something like right now is forever. And anything that ever happened is still happening. And anyone that ever touched us is still touching.
Lindsay: Wow. That’s so intense.
Nahum: I was in a men’s group, up on Whidbey Island, and when my wife and I were leaving, one of the men said to me, “Well, have we been together here on the Island?” And I said, “Yeah, we’ve been together.” And he said, “So we’ll never be apart.” And I thought about that and the truth of that slowly, slowly, slowly has moved more deeply into me. In psychology these days, there is a lot of interesting object relations. How do we learn our relationship to things? We know that a young child needs to learn object constancy. Peek-a-boo games. What objects will do over time. Even when we don’t see them, they’re still there. I think there is a spiritual way in which we’re challenged to develop object constancy. Which is once we’ve met, that meeting goes on, we’re all connected, we’re in relationships in ways we can’t see, so that things that look like they separate us, like space and time, are real on one level and on another level, they’re not.
Lindsay: In Buddhism they talk about detachment which is a word I’m not crazy about, but I’m wondering how would you talk about how to love someone, to really give yourself to the world passionately, be in the moment passionately, while not losing yourself and while not needing a return. Does that sound like a weird question?
Nahum: No. It’s a challenging question. Loving is an act of listening deeply into what the right relationship is with a given subject or person … that’s where the real work of spiritually is, developing the right relationships to those around you. One way of looking at your question goes back to our conversation about time. When we experience something precious, if we have a sense that we need to hold on to it because it’s so sweet and so precious, then we … it sounds trite but when I thought of it, it felt real … we lose our sense of faith that the next moment is going to bring us what the next moment is really going to bring us. And so to be able to give myself fully to this conversation, and to feel the joy … to let this moment be what this moment is, and then the next moment is what the next moment is … I don’t know if that’s very helpful, but I think that for me it’s about faith that God comes in the next moment however God comes in the next moment.
Lindsay: That’s beautiful. When you are closest to God, are you closest to yourself, or furthest from yourself?
Nahum: I might look at it a different way. When I’m most wrapped up in my small self, I feel furthest from God. I feel most disconnected when I’m afraid, defensive. When I’m most connected to my deepest sense of self, I feel closest to God.
When Judaism came on the scene 4,000 years ago, it was essentially, in part, to bring forward the sense of a transcendent God who could command a moral order. One gift Judaism came to give is a sense of morality founded on a stable system based on one God who rules that this is good and that is bad. That’s really an important achievement. But we don’t want to stop there. That was 4,000 years ago and today our challenge is to stay in a relationship with that transcendent God but also to find God eminent. Many people have said, and I agree, that our environmental crisis is really a spiritual crisis. Many people look at the earth and see Other. They don’t see that it is their own body, the rivers our own blood – it’s all one creation. This spiritual alienation comes from the idea that God is up there in heaven, so we can cut down things here on earth. This is all God’s eminent creation. We’re all connected.
In the past, the environmental movement portrayed the destruction and devastation and danger that have been taking place. That can become a diversion. Many people came to the conclusion that when you communicate it that way, you are missing the relation and basis on which deep ecological action needs to take place. It’s really love and connection and interconnection and relationship that need to be the motivating force, rather than fear and pictures of devastation.
Lindsay: How do you get rid of fear? Do you replace it with love?
Nahum: (laughter) I don’t get rid of fear. I work on it. I do think that fear needs to be worked with, and that fear does distance us from God, and that being afraid is a call to go inward and find that connection to God.
Lindsay: I love how Judaism holds the paradoxical truths together … walks right up next to the mysteries rather than trying to deny them … we sense this fluidity of time, this way it’s not linear, but we have no way to posit that …
Nahum: Yes, in Judaism, paradoxes are central to our reality. We want to live with them, and to explore them, but not to grasp or collapse them. For example, it’s not that light is a wave or a particle, and it’s not like it solves it to say light is a wave and a particle, you have to keep the tension present. Just the other night, we were studying the most difficult story about Abraham taking Isaac to the mountain, and in reading the text carefully, you see that Abraham is both held up as a model and held up as not a model. It’s both true that Abraham is hearing this transcendent voice that’s really important, and at the same time, how can there be a spirituality that is outside the ethics of taking a life? And both are really true, so how to live with that … I think there’s so much in our modern culture that tries to collapse everything, to make it simple.
Lindsay: If God knows you, and God loves you, and God is there with you, do you really need anything else?
Nahum: No. And that’s the part of me that is not afraid to die. Then there’s the part of me that has a ten year old daughter, a wife, and family, who I have passion for in the world, all these things. I think we all live simultaneously on lots of different planes. So on one plane, I’m with God, but I’m also in this body, and I feel pain … it’s all true. I am also interested in the other side of the question, “Are you afraid to die?” which is, “Are you afraid to live?”