| Winter is here, the salmon are returning, daylight and moonlight are waning, and Chanukah is on the way.
Please join me this coming Friday (12/20) evening for a Solstice Shabbat; 5:30pm – Candle Lighting; 6pm – music and meditation; 6:30pm – Potluck dinner (please bring something to share); 7pm – Shabbat service – Seeing Holiness on Chanukah, Talmud Study & Discussion.
Our Temple Beth El Chanukah celebration will be Sunday, December 29. Once again our friends at the United Congregational Christian Church generously have made their spacious social hall available to us. We’ll light our chanukiyot (menorahs), sing along with the Choir, and enjoy Dances of Universal Peace led by longtime Temple member Robin Wolff and musicians of the Garden of the Heart Sufi Community. (Be sure to bring your chanukiah & candles!)
I especially love Chanukah, which comes near the end of the lunar month of Kislev and close to the winter solstice, giving us the least daylight and moonlight, the darkest time of year. This is a magical time both for turning inward and gathering with family and friends. Sadly, this beautiful holiday is widely misunderstood. The festival is based on the tale of ancient war in which the tiny Kingdom of Judea led by a family called the Maccabees briefly succeeded in overthrowing an oppressive Greek-Syrian occupation in 167-160 BCE (Before the Common Era).
Pop Quiz: When do we read this tale aloud in synagogue? Where is the text found in Tanach, the Hebrew Bible?
Answer: We never read it. It’s nowhere to be found in Tanach.
The rabbis of the Talmud disliked this tale and left it on the cutting room floor when the Tanach was redacted around 100 CE (Common Era). They had good reasons: 1) the rabbis were themselves living under Roman occupation and didn’t want to elevate a tale of sedition, 2) Maccabees 1 has a distinctly secular tone, never directly mentioning God, 3) in Maccabees 2 Jewish communal suffering is interpreted as Divine punishment, a doctrine of less concern to the rabbis than to the prophets centuries before them, and 4) the story begins with one Jew killing another, a traditionalist vs an assimilationist. (So much for religious tolerance or God’s saving power!) Part of the power of the Talmud is that this encyclopedic work includes both majority and minority opinions. The rabbis understood that as times change, so should interpretation and law, and Jews shouldn’t kill each other over disagreements. Would you like to read the Books of Maccabees for yourself? Open one of the Christian Bibles that contain these texts.
Instead of the glorious battle story, the sages of the Talmud have a brief discussion of how Chanukah lamps should be lit and tell the tale of a small miracle: when the Temple was rededicated after the uprising, there was only enough special oil for the eternal light to last one night but miraculously it lasted for eight. So, at the dark time of the year we enjoy eight nights of celebration and oily food. And for the haftarah reading of Shabbat during Chanukah the rabbis chose these verses from Prophet Zecharyah: “Not by might, not by power, but through My Spirit!”
Our Chanukah party is usually high-spirited, but last year, in the shadow of October 7 and the unfolding war, I felt that we needed a different tone for our celebration. Our Chanukah gathering coincided with International Human Rights Day, so we included study of the International Declaration of Human Rights, followed by lovely Dances of Universal Peace. It was a beautiful event, uplifting and comforting. To our great dismay, the war rages on, the suffering multiplies, and I feel that once again we need a reflective, tender Chanukah event. I’m so glad that Robin and her musical friends are available to lead us in easy-to-follow circle dances where we can join hands and hearts, praying for peace with our movements, gestures and voices.
The Jewish-Sufi connection goes back a thousand years. Sufism is generally considered a mystical branch of Islam arising shortly after the life of the Prophet Mohammed (d. 632) and spreading throughout the Ottoman Empire over the centuries. Please join me now on a Jewish-Sufi journey through time.
My own experience with Sufi spirituality began nearly fifty years ago when I encountered the poetry of Rābiʻah al-ʻAdawīyah, Rabia of Basra, (713-801, Southern Iraq.) I had the good fortune to attend events at the Siddha Yoga Ashram in Oakland where we chanted, meditated and learned with Baba Muktananda Paramahansa. The Ashram walls were adorned with portraits of teachers through the ages of various faith traditions. Rabia was painted as one of her poems describes: “I carry a torch in one hand and a bucket of water in the other. With these things I’m going to set fire to Heaven and put out the flames of Hell, so voyagers can rip the veils and see the real goal!” (I just found this charming animated image of Rabia.)
Jewish philosopher-mystics met their Muslim counterparts in Medieval Spain, especially Al Andalus(later called Andalusia), where they shared Arabic as a common language. Sufism first appears in Al Andalus with the mystic Muhammad ibn ‘Abd Allah ibn Masarra of Cordoba (883-931) whose work would have been known to the great Jewish diplomat and sage, Chasdai ibn Shaprut (915-970), also of Cordoba. Scholars suggest that traces of Sufi thought are found in the works of Shomo iIbn Gabirol (1021-1058) to whom the hymn Adon Olam is attributed.
Then in the city of Zaragoza, in the north-eastern reach of Al Andalus, there lived Rabbi Bachyah ibn Pakuda (1050-1120), (note the Judeo-Arabic name). A mystic and dayan (legal authority), Bachya wrote Kitāb al-Hidāyat ilá Farāʾiḍ al-Qulūb, The Book of Guidance to the Duties of the Heart, written in Judeo-Arabic and known in Hebrew translation as Chovot HaLevavot – חובות הלבבות – (c. 1080). This Jewish classic draws heavily on Sufi sources. In his preamble Bachya fends off criticism by quoting the Talmudic saying, “He who pronounces a word of wisdom, even of the gentiles, is called a wise man. כׇּל הָאוֹמֵר דְּבַר חָכְמָה, אֲפִילּוּ בְּאוּמּוֹת הָעוֹלָם, נִקְרָא חָכָם” (BT Megillah, 16a) Following Bachya, philosopher-poet Yehudah HaLevy (1075-1141) used Sufi terminology in his Judeo-Arabic work, The Kuzari, although he rejected the Sufi asceticism of his time.
About ten years ago I began studying work by and about the philosopher-poet of Al Andalus, IbnʿArabi, sometimes called the Sheikh al-Akbar, The Great Sheikh (1165-1240). How I wish I could understand Arabic and Farsi ! Ibn ‘Arabi’s cosmology offers a map of many worlds, including one especially dear to me, the imaginal realm, the place of inspiration, an intermediate space between the physical and the intellectual, (similar to olam yetsirah in kabbalah.) On my 2019 Jewish study trip to Spain, I was eager to walk in the footsteps of the Jewish poets of Andalusia and the early kabbalists of Catalunya, but equally thrilled to travel paths followed by Ibn ‘Arabi, and I carried with me his little book Sufis of Andalusia. A brief verse from the Sheikh al-Akbar:
My heart has become able to take all forms:
It is a pasture for gazelles, for monks, an abbey,
It is a temple for idols and for whomever circles it, the Kaaba.
It is the tablets of the Torah, and also the leave of the Koran!
The history of religious thought is a great adventure to me. I love to glimpse how ideas and insights move around the globe and across the centuries. A few years ago I was surprised to learn that one of the first rabbis to openly embrace Sufi doctrine was Avraham Maimonides, son of the foremost Jewish philosopher of his era, the Rambam, Moses Maimonides (1138-1204). The Rambam’s son Avraham (1186-1237), also a distinguished community leader, went so far as to suggest that synagogues should be furnished with cushions in Muslim fashion and he contrasted the dignified worship in the mosque to the disorder of the synagogue of his day! He equated the discipline of the Sufi mystics with that of the Biblical prophets and lamented that the ancient holy practices had been lost to the Jews and transferred to another people. Avraham’s son, Obadaiah (1228-1265) goes even further. Written in Judeo-Arabic, his beautiful “Treatise of the Pool” (Al-Maqala al-Hawdiyya) freely incorporates Sufi doctrine and practice. The text appears to have been intended for a circle of initiates, emphasizing the need for spiritual preparation, humility and devotion. Obadaiah teaches that one must read Scripture not merely for intellectual fulfillment but as a lover and a seeker.
The generation after Obadaiah gives us the great Sufi Jalāl al-Dīn Muḥammad Rūmī (1207-1273). Rumi’s ecstatic Persian poetry has permeated Western culture in recent years through multiple translations and musical settings. I know that what we read in English is far removed from the original, but still there’s such a vital spark!
We must keep in mind that although the aforementioned Jewish and Sufi teachers found much common ground in their approach to the spiritual path, they all did so from within the structure and strictures of their own traditional religious observance. I can’t imagine what they would have thought of a rabbi like me meditating on their thoughts!
Now we fast-forward about 650 years. In 1910, Hazarat Inayat Khan (1882-1947), an Indian professor of musicology, poet and philosopher toured the US, sharing his teaching which became the foundation of Western or Universal Sufism. With his open-to-all form of Sufism, Hazarat Inayat Khan emphasized the oneness of the Divine and an appreciation for the prophets of diverse religions. Though his spiritual terminology is definitely drawn from the vocabulary of Islamic mysticism and he reveres the Sufi saints, the movement he inspired does not seek to convert anyone to Islam, just as contemporary teachers (like me) share insights from Jewish mystical tradition without any intention to convert anyone to Judaism. Curiously it happens that Hazarat Inayat Khan’s first Western student was Ada Martin (1871-1947), a Jewish woman born in San Francisco who took the Sufi name Rabia, after the great poetess.
Hazarat Inayat Khan’s legacy was continued by various successors, including another Jewish-born disciple, Murshid Samuel Lewis(1896 –1971) whose mother came from the Rothschild banking family and whose father was vice president of Levi Strauss Company. “Sufi Sam” turned down a career in business and traveled the world as a spiritual seeker. His final years were spent here in California where he developed and taught the lovely Dances of Universal Peace, continued by our own local Garden of the Heart Sufi Community.
And now the story gets personal for me. My master teacher Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi was born in Poland in 1924 and lived his early childhood in Vienna until his family fled from the Nazis in 1938. Reb Zalman’s father was a Belzer hasid, but also had progressive views. Zalman was educated in both a traditional yeshiva and also a leftist Zionist high school, learning Latin and modern Hebrew. During the family’s flight through Belgium, young Zalman was deeply moved by an encounter with Chabad hasidim, and when he finally arrived in New York, he enrolled in the Chabad yeshiva and in 1947 was ordained as a rabbi in that tradition. In his mid-twenties Zalman, along with his friend Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach, served as emissaries for Chabad, doing outreach on college campuses, lively gatherings with music and storytelling. Over the next twenty years he studied religious traditions of the world and took part in multi-faith gatherings. In 1968 he earned a Doctor of Hebrew Letters degree from Hebrew Union College, seminary of the Reform movement. He was drawn to the study of Sufism and met Vilayat Inayat Khan (1916-2004), eldest son of Hazarat Inayat Khan’s eldest son and successor of Vilayat Inayat Khan who first brought Sufism to the west. Reb Zalman was so enamored of the Sufi teaching and practices that at age 51 In 1975 he sought initiation as a murid, a disciple. But the story goes that to his surprise, when Vilyat Inayat Khan conferred ordination it was not as a disciple, but as a sheikh, a master, in recognition of Reb Zalman’s spiritual achievements. Twenty years went by and then in 2004 Reb Zalman inaugurated a new order of Western Sufism, the Inayati-Maimuni, with the stated purpose to “renew the spirit of the original Egyptian Sufi-Hasidism practiced by Rabbi Avraham Mimuni (Maimonides).”
Another ten years later, in 2014, Rabbi David Zaslow organized a beautiful shabbaton at Havurah Shir Hadash in Ashland with Reb Zalman and Dr Ibrahim Abdurrahman Farajaje, known as Ibrahim Baba, Provost and Professor of Cultural and Islamic Studies at Starr King School for the Ministry in Berkeley. On Sunday morning they led a powerful Jewish-Sufi zikr, a ritual of chanting and movement. I just found a video of the gathering; you may recognize my sister and husband among the dancers! A Zikr with Pir Zalman Schachter-Shalomi and Pir Ibrahim Farajajé (May 4, 2014) I was somewhere in the back of the group, having a profound experience, weeping. It was to be the last time I saw Reb Zalman in this world, and Ibrahim Baba also left us shortly thereafter.
And now we jump forward one last decade: 2024, and I’m looking forward to gathering with you for the gentle and inspiring Sufi-inspired dances and sharing my original Chanukah songs reflecting on nature, family, community and our longing for peace.
I hope you’ve enjoyed this little journey through time. The history of Jewish-Sufi friendship reminds us that, despite the tragedy of current enmity, there have been times when Jews and Muslims, the Children of Israel and the Children of Ishmael, shared deep spiritual pursuits with fruitful cross fertilization. The pursuit of religious purity is a dangerous, divisive undertaking–often ending up at the undertakers. We can be thankful to live in a time and place where we still have the freedom to explore spiritual traditions of the world and thereby better understand and enrich our own.
We read in Talmud that we’re not to use the lights of the Chanukah lamps for mundane purposes, but simply gaze at them, to recall wondrous things the Divine has done for us. Those little flames of Chanukah are more delightful than any light display on our screens. I hope all of you will put down your electronic devices and enjoy the simple, heimish (homey) ritual. At this very painful time in history, as we gaze at the lights on Chanukah, may we each find humility, love and peacefulness in our own hearts.
L’shalom,
Rabbi Naomi |
