Photo caption: Dovid Din at the author’s wedding, 1983
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“I have transferred all my hedonism to the spiritual level.”
–Dovid Din, NYC, April 10, 1986
“My whole purpose is to get everyone off the earth, not down to it.”
Dovid Din, NYC, September 25, 1986
Dovid Din wrote almost nothing. All we have are cassettes, now CDs, of his classes from 1982-1987. All citations are taken from those recordings, which I now own, thanks to the generosity of his wife Bracha. This is to commemorate his Yahrzeit, the 25th of Tammuz, 1987.
I
There is a story I heard when I was living in Meah Shearim studying in yeshiva, that in a small beit midrash tucked away in the haredi neighborhood of Geula there was a copy of Nahman of Bratslav’s Likkutei Moharan that was bound at both ends. Although I never laid eyes on the volume, I often reflect on the brilliance behind the idea. A book so sacred, it was forbidden to open. A book whose inner contents needed to be protected by a second binding that kept its words closed in upon themselves, a veritable talisman of concealed letters placed among books whose contents weren’t nearly as dangerous and thus, perhaps, not nearly as holy.
The book bound at both ends is an apt metaphor for the esoteric or the sacred as that which is not only infallible but indecipherable, not only divine but unreadable. When such holiness is revealed, as Shimon bar Yohai told his disciples in the Zohar, death ensues, as its disclosure brings destruction, or at least heresy to the world – and isn’t heresy itself a kind of death from the perspective of tradition – and such holiness is better left between two bindings. But this double bound book retains a place on the bookshelf nonetheless, and a place in the annals of Jewish history. Rabbi Shimon famously said, “Woe if I reveal, and woe if I don’t reveal.” Rabbi Shimon revealed the secrets, in a concealed manner. And then he died. So the Zohar teaches.
So too, in a different manner with my subject. This is a brief account of the short intense life of a largely unknown figure in postwar American kabbalism. His name was Dovid Din. He died mysteriously on the 25th of Tammuz, 5747/1987. He wrote almost nothing. He was a figure
who taught publicly for a relatively short period time from about 1981-1987, a man who died of mysterious causes in while visiting Notre Dame University in 1987 at the age of 46. He surrounded himself with a small group of disciples whom he led in the study of Lurianic
Kabbalah, Hasidism, and his own brand of meditation he developed from these teachings. From around 1980 through 1985 I was one of those disciples. He was my rebbe, and he showed me the map to enter Judaism. I keep it with me always, still trying to decipher it.
Dovid Din emerged on the Jewish scene in about 1965 when he met Zalman Schachter in Winnipeg, Canada, where Schachter was then the Hillel rabbi at The University of Winnipeg. Dovid would work as Zalman’s secretary for a few years before drifting to San Francisco to
manage the second iteration of Shlomo Carlebach’s “House of Love and Prayer.” By that time Dovid was already moving toward a strict, ascetic Jewish practice that would develop further when he moved to New York to attend Friedfeld’s Yeshiva in Far Rockaway, Queens, one of the most popular early yeshivot for Baalei Teshuva in America in the late 1960s. By then he was married to his wife, Bracha, whom he met at the “House of Love and Prayer.”
Dovid tried his hand at various businesses including owning a health food store — he had taken on a strict macrobiotic food diet years before and remained macrobiotic his entire life — all of which failed miserably. His regimen of daily ablutions in the mikveh, lengthy prayer that
lasted about two hours each morning and an hour each afternoon/evening was not conducive to the world of business. Living mostly on modest contributions from his teaching, welfare, food stamps, and the generosity of others, Dovid and his young family, along with one of his first true disciples, Simcha (Stanley) Miller, who was a successful Jewish musician and leader of the Simcha Miller Band, moved to the Hasidic enclave of Boro Park, Brooklyn where Dovid began to teach publicly. It was in Boro Park in 1980 where I first met him.
The tale of his life was always shrouded in mystery and that story, a life bound on both ends for many years, remains in the nexus between truth and myth. More important is how he envisioned the devotional life refracted though the Jewish mystical tradition. Before moving to
Dovid’s views on Judaism, Kabbalah, the mystical, and the monastic, however, it is worth briefly rehearsing the context in which he was able to pull off what I am calling his great inversion. Prima facia, the symmetry between Haight Ashbury and Boro Park in the late 1960s and early 1970s couldn’t be more disparate. The “Summer of Love” never made it to 13th Avenue, but numerous veterans of “the Haight” did. And while San Francisco was a world where openness and transparency was a value, in Boro Park insularity was dogma. Boro Park was happy to be a book bound on both ends to the rest of the world. What the Haight and Boro Park shared, however, was a period when each was inundated with outsiders, traversing its borders and making its presence known.
The cloistered nature of Boro Park could not deter these seekers. In fact, it is what attracted them. I know, I was one of them. The community reluctantly granted us entry as long as the newcomers played by their rules. And those who arrived were coming precisely to play by their rules. The rules were fairly simple: you were a Jew and you lived an ultraorthodox life. The Hasidic enclave’s insularity did not sufficiently arm itself by formulating any criteria to verify anything other than how people chose to act. The Hasidic community in Boro Park was much too fragmented and dysfunctional in that regard. In addition, it had its own kabbalistic and theological ethos supporting this influx, founded on the principle of the “gathering of the sparks.” that in the end-time, so the story goes, the lost souls would find their way back to the
truth (“shuvu banim shovevim“).
Chabad made this into a doxa, but Crown Heights was a much more cohesive enclave with a central authority and thus, while infiltration occurred, Chabad was better prepared to integrate and absorb them into their world. In general, though, this sentiment of returnees, long
awaited, extended to much of haredi Judaism in postwar America and Israel. The Baal Teshuva influx, of which Dovid was an early participant, so overwhelmed this world still reeling from the trauma of the Holocaust that it unwittingly made its opaque walls permeable to the returnees the way Jewish communities did in the post-expulsion years in the early 16th century, though, granted, more attention was paid at that time to conversos who were living as Christians than was to the wayward Jews in the 1960s living simply as secular Americans. I say this because in those heady years when the countercultural return to Judaism was entering its operative stage, the insularity produced a permeability inspired by the combination of simple incompetence and the optimism that in some way the Holocaust, in all its horror, enabled barriers to break and the redemptive process to accelerate. No one asked any questions. If you wanted to be inside, it was a sign that you were meant to be inside. Dovid Din entered that world in that transitional stage.
Much of the postwar American Jewish kabbalistic activity was engaged in two overlapping themes. First, the attempt to answer the question, What is the nature of Kabbalah?, assuming a kind of essentialism. And second, In what ways can Kabbalah cater to an audience
outside the insular orbit of a hermetic circle? In some way, this mirrors earlier iterations of Kabbalah, certainly some forms of Hasidism and later first wave neo-Hasidism in early 20th century Germany, but postwar America provides a distinctive template for such considerations. In the history of American religion in general, with its openness to innovation contra conformity and its democratic spirit that subtly challenges the hierarchy of religious institutions and authority from within, Dovid followed in a long line of figures engaged in this enterprise of moving Judaism outward. I will argue, however, that he offers a somewhat idiosyncratic rendering for both ideational and personal reasons.
II
I briefly contextualize Dovid this way because as opposed to many others in that cadre, he came from that counter-cultural social context but withdrew from the excesses it represented and the expansive nature of religious liberalism, even antinomianism. He slowly began to
construct a neo-esotericism that was antinomian in its hypernomianism. That is, he challenged what he often referred to as “Western religion” not with the loosening of formal structures, as Martin Buber did, but, rather, with an attempt to re-capture the monastic roots of Kabbalah refracted through the poetics of New Age lyricism. In his opening remarks in the March, 1985, edition of a short-lived journal he founded called Merkava: A Journal of Spirituality, Dovid wrote that Kabbalah was “a relatively strong kind of antibiotic for the infectious disease of secularism.”
Such a monastic and anti-secular inclination brought him to support groups like the anti-Zionist Neturei Karta, believing that Zionism sullied Judaism’s spiritual roots by miring it in the realm of the political. In an interview with Howard Jay Rubin, published in The Sun in 1984, Dovid states, “Zionism is wrong because it is a rather clever attempt to trade on the thousands of years of aspirations of the Jewish people. It asks Jews baptized in a sea of blood and yearning and suffering to jump into a small pool of cheap third-world nationalism”. In another register Dovid felt that Zionism emerged from the abandonment of the inner meaning of Torah as no longer having the answers to what he calls the “necessary illusion” of the world. In his view, it is only when one abandons the notion that Torah supplies the requisite vehicle to see the world beyond the world, that Zionism emerges as a solution. For Dovid, Zionism is a symptom of a larger problem, not a solution to that problem; the problem is the abandonment of Jewish mystical wisdom that deconstructs the boundaries of inside and outside. In an unrelated remark in a talk on August 26, 1986, speaking about the nature of evil and the demonic, he said, “The
cacophony of the over-bearing nature of physicality brings about the inability of the material plane to bear the [weight of the] spiritual – thus the Temple was destroyed.”
It is the focus on physicality in Zionism, both political and material, that for him marginalized the spiritual component of Torah’s inner-meaning, not by circumstance but by definition. While Dovid didn’t know it, Aaron Shmuel Tamares said something very similar in 1921.
While he would certainly agree that Neturei Karta is itself mired in the political, he would maintain they retain a sense of that transcendent core even if it remains in their collective unconscious. Or, as the Zionist Gershom Scholem, once said in his interview with Muki Zur, those opposed to Zionism (that is, ending the Exile) better understood the precariousness of Zionism than the Zionists themselves.
The hypernomianism Dovid suggests is that the law is not the telos of Jewish piety, nor is it the complete path to the inner consciousness of Torah, but merely its beginning, albeit a necessary beginning. And the world, understood outside the higher consciousness that Torah can
provide if enacted toward that end, enabled Jews to interpret reality as an end that required a political response, as opposed to the world as an illusion that needed to be transformed from within. The yoga of the law, as Dovid likes to call it, requires a much more rigorous and focused discipline than simply engaging in practices that bind a community together or even answer a divine demand. In a talk about the Passover seder on April 10, 1986, he said, “Enlightenment cannot be achieved with the ritual law…yet ritual and the body are indispensable; detachment from either is death.” The law is efficacious as a spiritual discipline only as it serves as a portal to the higher states of consciousness which does not necessarily translate into experience, a distinction he repeatedly made.
Meaning or experience as the path toward achieving fulfillment was a dangerous trap for Dovid, what he considered the failing of “Occidental” culture (Sun interview). I would add to that trap what Dovid would call the “false consciousness” of New Age spirituality which claimed to re-capture the authenticity of the “Orient”, but was simply a romanticized iteration of western Occidentalism. The trajectory of Torah reflected through the lens of the Zohar-Luria-Shneur Zalman of Liady-Nahman of Bratslav provided for him a more unadulterated, and un-Occidentalized vision of the New Age. Here Dovid unwittingly shows influence from the early Buber, an influence he would certainly deny or at least equivocate since, for Buber, it is the true “orientalism” (in a positive sense) of Hasidism that frees the Jew from the law. For Dovid, it binds the Jew to the law, as a first step to transcend obligation while retaining practice.
In a talk given on August 26, 1986 about tefillin, Dovid defines mohin: literally, “brains,” but kabbalistically understood as consciousness, as “the awareness of self that is beyond the self, that is truly the awareness of God.” The sin of Adam, he remarked in a talk on April 10, 1986, is brought about by the anxiety produced when Adam is introduced to the notion of prohibition, that is understood as the idea that the self cannot contain all things. In an editorial to the Spring, 1986, edition of his journal Merkava, Dovid writes, “We seem to be very adept, and very insistent also, at projecting a kind of expansive sense of self onto objective arenas and calling it ‘reality’. The limitations of any such endeavor are equally insistently apparent.” The challenge of Adam in the garden, and of human existence more generally, is to resist the inclination to project the self beyond its limited existence. According to Dovid, this resistance creates space for the divine in the self and in the world. This suggests a kind of human zimzum (contraction) that creates space for God, mirroring the divine zimzum that creates space for creation. Too much God destroys the world; too much of the human eclipses God.
Experience, understood through feeling, is for Dovid the attempt to capture the absolute in the self and is thus akin to Adam’s sin. In a talk on September 25, 1986, Dovid said, “the desire for feeling is the concealment of the divine image.” What one desires to feel is the self, which, by definition, excludes God. Elsewhere he remarked, “When I exclude any truth that will not fit into my expanded sense of self, that is sin.”
It was the Hasidic Jews of Boro Park, Williamsburg, and Jerusalem, Dovid contended, who really held the key to the “Doors of Perception,” except that they forgot what door the key was supposed to open. This is what the New Age, refracted through Dovid’s neo-monastic lens, can bring the Jews: a door that fits the key. In his 1984 interview with Howard Jay Rubin in The Sun, he states,
My path is clearly aligned with a very traditional position. This is because I feel the Torah is oracular in nature. The path I have chosen and teach my students seeks to restore the traditional pattern of belief and practices to the levels of their full and pristine integrity. This infers [sic.], clearly, then, the problem with traditional orthopractic structures; they have maintained the forms but have fallen short of being able to sustain the deeper spiritual content.
More personally, for him, the haredi world offered him a safe house, a place between two bindings, as it were, to make a revolutionary case for his neo-monastic Judaism; the piety that comes from insular behavior and expanded consciousness, from the bustling streets of the everyday in Boro Park, women in wigs and hats rolling their baby strollers, to the seclusion of a contemplative life inside the imagination of his own mind. The irony here is that Dovid took insularity as an occasion for a universalism that his neighbors could not imagine. In fact, for him, the very Kabbalah that is utilized as the template for hyper-particularism is, at its core, that realm of Judaism that undoes the particular to reveal Judaism’s universal and inclusive message when refracted through the New Age consciousness separated from its propensity for human excess. On this he states (interview in The Sun):
People and cultures differ. So tell everyone to put away their differences is not realistic and not true. It must be that the equation works the opposite way; when a person is truly grounded in the best that his tradition has to offer, he will from that point be assessable to others because he has passed the first gate of being true to himself.
The Free Love of the other in the New Age becomes the free love of God, which then yields the true love of humanity that transcends the physicality of Eros, which is true love’s lowest instantiation that is necessary but transitory (talk on Sept 25, 1986). Dovid was advocating a
kind of Jewish Caritas.
III.
At this time Kabbalah was a growing cottage industry in this part of the Jewish world, embodied in a variety of figures, some well known, some obscure. Zalman Schachter-Shalomi (Dovid’s first teacher) had already moved beyond haredism; Shlomo Carlebach’s popularity
was intact; Aryeh Kaplan’s writings began to have an impact; Gershon Winkler’s book on the Golem of Prague was being read (Winkler later mysteriously disappeared from Boro Park and later emerged as a Jewish shaman in Northern New Mexico); Gedalia Fleer, a Breslover and
popular speaker and writer, had a circle of followers that mysteriously collapsed. (He now lives in Jerusalem.) And more traditional figures, such as the Breslov mentor Eliezer Schick, whose shul in Boro Park we frequented, began attracting some outsiders. Schick, a prolific writer and mentor, eventually moved to Israel to establish a Breslov community in Yavniel and passed away some years ago. These figures and others were part of our world. We frequented their homes on Shabbat and attended their shiurim. They were our mentors and guides, even if we knew they did not quite understand us.
Dovid was ubiquitous among these men (he would often pray in Schick’s small shul), serving as a kind of monastic refuge for those who viewed haredism as an expression of the alterity they sought. He named his first community “Bnei Hekhola” (Children of the Palace), from the Aramaic table song ostensibly authored by the hermetic mystic Isaac Luria, who was Dovid’s primary behavioral and spiritual model. (Dovid named his eldest son Shalom Ari, who now goes by the name Shulem Deen). People at the time noted that “Children of the Palace” was a somewhat pretentious name for a group of newly religious initiates. But Dovid, like Luria, was quite adept at spiritual audacity.
In truth, Dovid’s neo-monastic project was likely an extension of the first iteration of Zalman Schachter-Shalomi’s attempt to establish a neo-monastic Jewish community called Bnei ‘Or (“Children of Light”), which he envisioned in Winnipeg and then established in Philadelphia. Schachter-Shalomi’s influences included Christian monastic orders with whom he was familiar in Canada; the Trappist monk Thomas Merton, whom he visited numerous times in the Gethsemane monastery in Bardstown, Kentucky; the discovery of the Qumran community in the Dead Sea scrolls; and Hillel Zeitlin’s “Yavneh” intentional community project in Warsaw, about which Dovid learned in 1959 on a visit to Israel, where he met Natan Hofshi, a colleague of Zeitlin. (See Arthur Green, “Renewal and Havurah: American Movements, European Roots,” in Jewish Renaissance and Revival in America [2007], 151, and a chapter on Hofshi in Hayyim Rothman’s No Masters but God: Portraits of Anarcho-Judaism [2023].)
In any event, by the early 1980s, Dovid had long left Schachter-Shalomi’s direct influence behind and was admired in the Boro Park Haredi community mostly for his intense piety. Nevertheless, his secrecy began to peak curiosity, and Aryeh Kaplan, for example, never trusted
him and thought he was hiding something.
One thing the pastiche of kabbalistic iterations in postwar America shared was a particular narrow trajectory of the Kabbalah as a historical phenomenon. The trajectory begins with the Zohar as the kabbalistic ur-text. Its apex is reached in 16th century Safed with Isaac Luria, whom Dovid calls, “luminous, pregnant with the electricity of the divine.” Luria’s system is then filtered in these postwar kabbalistic iterations through the Baal Shem Tov, Shneur Zalman of Liady, and Nahman of Bratslav. Figures such as Shlomo Carlebach brought in Polish Hasidism, and Aryeh Kaplan introduced the Bahir and Abraham Abulafia, but each iteration remained somewhat derivative in the American Kabbalistic imagination. This lineage of course, was constructed earlier by Hasidism and the post-Lurianic tradition in southern Europe. By the time it reaches postwar America it becomes a doxa.
For most postwar American Jews who engaged in Kabbalah, Luria served essentially as a mythic figure. The obscurantism of his intricate metaphysical system and the ascetic nature of his behavioral prescriptions were largely out of bounds. In its place were a more palatable and more joyful Hasidism serving as a diluted application of Lurianic teaching. The more popular works of the 18th century Paduan kabbalist Moshe Hayyim Luzatto, such as Mesilat Yesharim and Dat Tevunot, were common fare in Brooklyn yeshivot.
For Dovid, however, Luria was the electrified model of piety and devotion and the foundation for his neo-monastic mystical asceticism. His choosing to name his community Bnei Hekhola was no accident; he envisioned reconstructing a Lurianic circle in the way that Luria
ostensibly tried to reconstruct the circle around Shimon bar Yohai in the Zohar. Having said that, Dovid was no hermit. Aside from having a family he also frequented New Age spiritual ecumenical retreats, posing as a kind of Jewish monk, the exemplar of the “real thing” and
engaging in the universal language of spirituality through a kabbalistic lens. In the mid-1980s, Dovid began attending seminars with Christian theologian Ewert Cousins at Fordham University, a fact that I will come back to below. He and Cousins both attended a series of lectures Moshe Idel gave at JTS that eventually became the book Kabbalah: New Perspectives (1988), In response to a question, Cousins suggested, “Why don’t we ask a real kabbalist, because we have one sitting right here,” and gestured to Dovid sitting next to him. (Moshe Idel personally verified this encounter to me.) More generally, though, the hermetic pose accompanied by ascetic disciplines, little food, and long
hours of prayer and meditation, created its own kind of personalized hermeticism, an intended performance of obscurity and hiddenness that was made possible by being concealed in a haredi world that for its own reasons, asked few questions.
From 1985 through 1987, much of Dovid’s teaching left the page of any text he might be reading and shifted to long and often circuitous meditations on the holidays or the Torah portion. For example, in a talk on September 25, 1986, about Rosh Ha-Shana, he began by talking about the idea of the divine Logos and the gnostic and hermetic theories of divine thought in what he called “the Judeo-Christian heritage,” a term that for him was about esoteric ecumenicism and not a shared cultural ethos. In an aside, he remarked:
Kabbalah is essentially a projection of the image of the divine emanation outside of God…and the central concern of Kabbalah is how one remains divine [that is, having absorbing that divine projection] and acts human simultaneously.
The fabric of creation in this projection lies in a concealed state. Kabbalah attempts to disclose this fabric of creation and in doing so, to effect the work of revelation. But this concealed divine projection in the world and within every human being, that which makes the human being possible, leads inevitably to the human substitute for God that is concealed within yet felt. That, Dovid argues, is idolatry: “I need something to project what is within me and that projection is idolatry when it is me that is being projected and not that which is concealed in me that is projected.” For Dovid, divine concealment is the loss of a sense of where the self ends and God within the self begins. This, he claims, is what Kabbalah seeks to resolve psychologically. Its product is happiness and the resolution of the anxiety initially produced by the Adamic condition. Metaphysically, for Dovid, the telos of Kabbalah is to enable God to reflect on God’s own reflection, to expose the concealed projection for divine pleasure. Its product is cosmic alignment.
What is significant here for me is that for Dovid, Kabbalah was the very place of the inversion of the holy and its opposite. It is the concealed state of the divine projection in the human, the hiddenness of God’s image even from God – precisely from God – and the anxiety that is produced in the tension between the self and non-self that is also embedded in a concealed state in the self. The Adamic state for Dovid is the anxiety produced when Adam had to confront existence beyond the self, couched in prohibition (“THAT is not you!”). When that tension
between self and other is maintained without anxiety, he says in a talk on Purim in July of 1986, the result is love. God’s absent presence in the Book of Esther (the only book in TANAKH where God’s name is not mentioned) functions positively because Purim is precisely the day
when the tension of absence and presence is allowed to exist, so much so that we can say “Blessed be Haman.” But the existence of the tension without anxiety, expressed in love, requires surrender, and thus Purim is the second Sinai where Israel accepts the Torah willingly as
an act of surrender (known as “kimu ve-kiblu,” Babylonian Talmud, Shabbat 88a).
The secret of Purim for Dovid is the Hebrew term “va-na’afokhu” (based on Esther 9:1) that he renders as “everything is its opposite because it embraces the ability to draw itself from what appears to be its opposite.” The surrender to the paradox is “revelation” and thus Purim is the completion of Sinai. As Dovid defines it, “from the opposite will come forth truth.” The realization Kabbalah offers, as he says in a talk on Pesah on April 8, 1987, is not a resolution of opposites, per se, but the disclosure that there are no opposites, that everything is a continuum with no sequence. He states, “Redemption is not a sequential continuum but rather a surrounding.” In a talk on Sukkot and Shmenei Azeret on October 26, 1986, he remarks, “revelation is the indwelling of God in us whereby the outside becomes the inside.” Revelation in a Purim register, and he will say this about Sukkot too, inverts the very boundaries introduced by the Sinaitic revelation.
This point is made more explicit in his 1984 interview with Howard Jay Rubin. Answering a question about how to live our lives that contain holy sparks, Dovid replies, “We release the sparks of holiness. Meaning that holiness is inevitably hidden, in the kabbalistic frame of things, under the appearance of non-holiness.” This Zoharic and Lurianic idea that serves as a touchstone for later Sabbateanism will help us move back to the garment of Dovid’s personal story and its concealed truth, which is both holy and unholy, true and false, but the deeper truth, the revelation of Dovid Din which is the inversion of inside and outside is in the realization that such a dichotomy may be meaningful but is irrelevant.
In his talk just referenced on Sukkot October 26, 1986, Dovid makes a novel rendering of the sukkah as a place where the holy, rendered in Kabbalah as the makifin, the surrounding expression of the divine, extends to the place of the unholy. Sukkah is thus not a holy place, but
the holiness of place that reaches out to where no holiness is. This, he suggests, tells us something about the operative nature of holiness itself; its appropriate action is not insular nor is its role to maintain separation, but always to extend beyond itself to where it does not (yet) exist. The surrounding nature, or makifim, of the sukkah for Dovid is the holy exercising its role to penetrate the dark place of the demonic, or hizonim, which become nullified in Shemeni Azeret. According to kabbalistic custom, one sits in the Sukkah on Shemini Azeret, even though the Festival of Sukkot is completed. That is, one continues to dwell in the sukkah even after the sukkah has exhausted its mystical telos, has already nullified the demonic by erasing the boundaries between the demonic and the holy. Or, put otherwise, after the hizonim have been defanged, one remains in the sukkah. Thus, tradition mandates that on Shemeni Azeret we bring only one sacrifice that includes all. Sitting in the sukkah on Shemeni Azeret is thus basking in the completion of the exercise of sacrality.
The person who sits in that place, in that sukkah, especially on Shemeni Azeret, “becomes Torah” according to Dovid. The sukkah, especially at that time, is the incarnational space of the indwelling of the unholy and its opposite, or the corporeal and the purely incorporeal. This does not erase all boundaries per se but rather fulfils the function of unification whereby not only does each component contain its opposite, but its opposite becomes an operative part of itself. “Becoming Torah,” is here not being bound by limits of Jew and Gentile; it is different than “becoming Jewish.”
On this reading, conversion is something that exists in a fallen state of separation which activates a move from one to the other. “Becoming Torah” in Dovid’s analysis – a term he used with some frequency – is the absorption of the completed state of sacrality where difference
remains but exists outside the expression of difference. It serves as a provocative transnational rendering of the Talmudic teaching, “One who repudiates idolatry is called a Jew” (Babylonian Talmud, Megillah 13a).
In this brief rendering of Dovid’s views on the role of Kabbalah, we can see his expression of kabbalistic ideas extant in the Zohar and Luria that are translated to express the internal nature of difference while maintain its external façade. History, including exoteric Judaism, becomes an externalization of the psychic reality of the mystical imagination. Strict observance remains the necessary means to an end that inverts the structural nature of ritual life.
IV
Some of the great mystics of the world have mysterious biographies. Luria’s beginnings are sketchy. Born in Jerusalem and raised in his wealthy uncle’s house in Egypt, there are stories of studying alone, or with an angelic guide, on a small island in the Nile, before traveling to
Safed and arriving as a relatively unknown figure. Eighteen months later, he was gone, taken by a plague. The Baal Shem Tov’s youth and pedigree are still a matter of conjecture even after Moshe Rosman’s 1996 biography, Founder of Hasidism: A Quest for the Historical Ba’al Shem Tov. He emerges as an unknown and in the course of two decades, changed the Jewish world forever. One of the great and often frustrating aspects of the American postwar counterculture, and certainly among the Baalei Teshuva when I was there, is that anonymity was ubiquitous. People arrived from unknown places, often made up stories of their travels, like Bob Dylan’s story of running away with the circus as a child, which he told people when he arrived in Greenwich Village in the early 1960s. In some way, when one enters a parallel universe that is Boro Park, Brooklyn in the 1970s, it really didn’t matter where you came from, and who you were. What mattered is who you wanted to be. What mattered is that you are there, and that you are living the life, that you are “on the derekh.”
This was the case with Dovid. He arrived at Freifeld’s Yeshiva in Far Rockaway via Haight Ashbury and Winnipeg where he was Zalman Schachter’s secretary. He was one of many pilgrims on the “Aldous Huxley Highway,” looking for the “Doors of Perception” in the narrows
of a community that didn’t, couldn’t, understand us. And in some way, we didn’t want them to. But we represented for them something redemptive. And so they accepted us without asking too many questions. Which was good for them, and good for us.
But unlike many on that path, Dovid had something else in mind. He looked beyond those barriers, beyond the differences, beyond the necessity of true biography. Torah for him was a key to unlock, release and liberate, all from within the strictest forms of piety imaginable. One can reach a point where biography is effaced by intensity of worship and the beauty of the spirit. “Who are you?” becomes “Where are you going?” We all felt that in those heady days, biography was a rear-view mirror we used sparingly. Dovid just ripped his off the windshield. In Judaism, pedigree matters. But in the Judaism that transcends the mundane nature of difference, not to erase it, but to absorb it, pedigree is a meaningless point of departure.
I would like to suggest that on a more unconscious or perhaps subconscious level, Dovid’s kabbalistic views sketched above were a projected justification of his inverted status. In them we see a notion of the Kabbalah, a universal wisdom embedded in a particular tradition, that sought to diffuse, albeit not fully erase, difference through oppositional inversion, in which revelation is a form of enlightenment whereby the holy extends beyond itself to concealed corners of reality. All of this portends an existence of tension and anxiety that is released through focused acts of devotion. Dovid’s focus on anxiety as the Adamic condition relieved through the realization of a transcendence of self – “something outside me exists” – and that one can live from that realization, was the core of his justificatory posture. I think that for Dovid, “becoming Torah” was not a nationalized or ethnic concept but a purely spiritual one and that the very act of becoming Torah overcame the externalities of the garments of nation which may have informed his anti-Zionism as well. This was not an achievement that erased difference; Dovid remained externally, and internally, an intensely particularized ultra-Orthodox Jew, but the maturation of the holy through
devotion extended outward to determine and enlighten the garments of the unholy and thereby make external difference significant to maintain, perhaps, but spiritually irrelevant. His subversiveness moved from the inside, out.
In time, however, the enclosure of the double binding housed its own anxiety that could not be relieved by devotion and secrecy alone. And the need to extend beyond the self, instantiated in the externalized body, proved too difficult to bear. Here I think seeking out Ewert Cousins and openly engaging in the study of Christian Gnosticism is telling. For Dovid it relieved some of the pressure, it provided oxygen for a suffocated self that needed to extend beyond the enclosure of his contradictory inner world. He needed relief from the double binding he created.
It freed him yet also sucked the life out of him. What drove him onward – one might say, outward – intellectually, spiritually, and performatively, was the tension of “becoming Torah” that he embodied even as it produced an almost unbearable state of being. Dovid was living in his own Adamic nightmare. When liberated from it, he fell, exhausted, into a state of despair. He could not bear the tension of living in the world, his world, our world, and ultimately, any world.
A friend found him in a motel room, lifeless, on a Saturday night in South Bend, Indiana. Cause of death: natural causes. No one quite knew why he was there. It didn’t matter. His visitation on this plane ended as mysteriously as it began. Like a book bound on both sides. But for those he touched, and I am certainly one of them, he never really left because, in some way, he was never really here.
Shaul Magid teaches Modern Judaism at Harvard Divinity School where he is also a senior research fellow at the Center for the Study of World Religions, and is the rabbi of the Fire Island Synagogue. His latest book is The Necessity of Exile: Essays from a Distance (Ayin Press, 2023).
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