Introduction

What's this all about?

What is Living T(a)orah?

The Tao Te Ching is one of my favorite spiritual texts. Comprised of 81 short chapters, the Tao is traditionally credited to the ancient Chinese sage Laozi (sometimes spelled Lao Tzu), thought to have lived in the 6th century BCE. At heart, it expresses an understanding of reality that is unspeakable, empty, and constant—Tao is often translated as “The Way”—emphasizing the unreality and unnecessary contentiousness of all we perceive in the material world.

In my early twenties, I found a translation by Stephen Addis and Stanley Lombardo whose tight, rhythmic language is almost hypnotizing as it communicates the Tao’s simultaneously heady and calming mix of enigmatic and clear instruction. “Tao called Tao is not Tao,” reads the ancient first line of chapter 1. It hits me still the way it hit me the first time, a clear message that somehow makes it past the clawing, swirling, chaotic rigamarole of my thinking mind: relax buddy, it says pleasantly, nobody really knows anything.

At the time, I lived in New Orleans, and sitting in Flora’s, a cafe down the block from me with killer breakfast burritos, I zeroed in on Tao chapter 8 as a life-guiding framework. Here it is in full, from the Addis/Lombardo translation:

Best to be like water,
Which benefits the ten thousand things
And does not contend.
It pools where humans disdain to dwell,
Close to the Tao.

        Live in a good place. 
        Keep your mind deep. 
        Treat others well. 
        Stand by your word. 
        Keep good order. 
        Do the right thing. 
        Work when it's time. 

        Only do not contend,
And you will not go wrong. 

Clear as a bell gong, right? Well, maybe not. The questions inevitably struck me: how does one know where a “good” place to live is? how does one keep their mind deep? how does one best treat others and stand by your word and keep good order and know the right thing to do and when it’s time to work?

Over the years, I’ve found in the Tao, and so much Eastern thought, great wisdom for how to be. And, having decided a while back that I don’t want to be a self-negating monk, I also yearn for wisdom to help me figure out what to do with this whole business of being.

Looking for this balance of wisdom for both being and doing has led me to fall back in love with the tradition I grew up in: Jewish wisdom. In the last five or so years, I’ve discovered a new world of Jewish life heretofore unknown to me, one that identifies itself as a spark in the tradition that’s been there since the ancient beginning, a process and practice of consistent radical innovation and renewal, and it’s in this milieu that I feel I’ve found a spiritual home—we’re going to call this tradition of Judaism: Living Torah.

So there you have it: Living Torah + Tao = Living T(a)orah.

Who am I—extended edition

In my late teens and early twenties, like so many throughout history, I experienced what I can only describe as spiritual itchiness. I’d grown up in an observant, Conservative Jewish household deeply enmeshed in American Jewish life— Jewish private school, Jewish summer camp, Jewish youth group, weekly Shabbat services at the synagogue—and suddenly it hit me that I didn’t really know what any of it was for.

As I took my mandatory college courses on the histories of Western literature, philosophy, art, and music, I was introduced to the long lineage of philosophical inquiry into the nature of the “self.” It felt like the question of “self”ness was, in some way or another, at the heart of every work I read, even if it wasn’t always explicit. Plato and Aristotle, Maimonides, Michaelangelo and Da Vinci, Hume and Locke, Beethoven, Dostoevsky, Woolf. I thought: if only I can get to the bottom of this “self” business, I’ll find out who I’m supposed to be, what I’m supposed to do. Externally, I socialized and made friends and had crushes, but internally I lived in a near constant state of shuddering angst, overcome by uncertainty about the big questions of being alive—why am I here? what will I become? who will be my people?

In the decade after college, I lived the itinerant life of a twenty-something seeking answers without knowing the questions. Even so, I discovered insights of a kind wherever I went.

I moved to an organic vegetable farm in the low hills of northern Louisiana. The farm was spotted with big live oak trees drooped with Spanish moss and rolled long over the hills. I slept in a tent situated on an unplanted section of a big vegetable garden.I learned to tend soil and grow vegetables, to do basic carpentry and electrical work, to share space with an eclectic group of people from all over the world. There, I experienced an awe before nature I hadn’t known before. The galaxy lighting up the skies at night, the rains coming hard in the cold season, the heat and humidity making molasses of the air in the summer.

From the farm, I moved to New Orleans, where I found a job in a secondhand bookshop in the French Quarter. I fell in love with the history and soul of the city, its relationship to water and disaster, its joyful style, its zeal for celebration, its defiant spirit. An illuminative story: founded by the French in 1718, the Spanish took possession of the city in the 1740s, but the Orleanians refused to no longer be French, so they tied the newly arrived Spanish governor to the mast of the ship he came in on and sent it back to sea. I also became enmeshed in the city’s culture of activism and justice work—as much as the city wore the pride of its live-like-there’s-no-tomorrow-joy on its sleeve, so too were visible everywhere the effects of the historical racial injustices of the American South and the present racial and economic injustices embedded deep in our society. I marched in protests, brought books to prisoners, got a part time job as a mole for an organization that tracked fair housing practices (I was the single, white “control” tester, wearing a hidden tape recorder as I went to look at apartments and houses for rent and sale; later, people who were historically discriminated against because of their race, age, and family situations would see if they could look at the same apartments and houses and get the same spiel that I’d gotten).

I also dove into spiritual writing that came from outside what I’d learned as the “Western Canon.” I had a lot of time to read in that bookshop. This is when I first read Ancient Chinese works like the Tao and Chuang Tzu and the Confucian Analects; the Hindu Bhagavad Gita; medieval Muslim poets like Rumi and Hafiz; stories of Jewish Hasidism written in the 20th century by Elie Wiesel and Martin Buber; contemporary wisdom like Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Pirsig; theological and ethical treatises by Abraham Joshua Heschel, Edmund Jabes, Reinhold Niebhur, among others.

Eventually, I quit my job to travel the country and ended up moving to another farm, this one in Mendocino County, California. I learned to raise sheep and chickens, sharpened my carpentry skills, and lived in community with all its challenges and joys. After a few years there, I went back to school for creative writing in Spokane, Washington. And then in 2020, I moved to New York City, where I live now, married to a beautiful, brilliant, and hilarious fellow writer, with whom I share a cat named Brian and have a baby on the way.

So what will this newsletter be?

On the fourth page of the first tractate of the Talmud, an unnamed teacher tells us, “Teach the tongue to say ‘I don’t know’ lest you become entangled in deceit.” So, let me honestly say about this project: I really don’t know yet what it is or what it will become.

What I sense is that the synthesis I’ve arrived at for now in my religious/spiritual life and practice—one which feels radical and ancient all at once—fits inside what feels like a nascent movement of rabbis, thinkers, artists, and practitioners who are already out there, writing and speaking and teaching, doing what I described above as Living Torah. A non-exhaustive list of such people and some of the places to find them includes rabbis and thinkers like James Jacobson Maisels, spiritual director of Or HaLev, a Jewish mindfulness organization based out of Israel; Amichai Lau-Lavie, spiritual leader of Lab/Shul in Manhattan; Benay Lappe, founder and head of SVARA, the Chicago-based queer yeshiva; Jill Hammer, director of spiritual education at the Academy for Jewish Religion; Jericho Vincent, spiritual leader of Temple of the Stranger in north Brooklyn; Dan Libenson, founder of Judaism Unbound and president of Lippman Kanfer Foundation for Living Torah (where—full disclosure—I also work); Gashmius Magazine, a neo-hasidic online magazine with art, fiction, poetry, and essays; and so many more.

The content of this newsletter will surely be connected to the works of these other thinkers and teachers, many of whom I’m blessed to know and count among my teachers and friends. I intend to cite them often, and I’m hopeful that some will pop on here from time to time with a guest post. I know well that the demand on our attentions are splintered a hundred which ways every day, so I’ll try to keep these posts to no longer than about a 10-15 minute read.

Whenever possible, I’ll add links to where to find more of the ideas and wisdom of those I cite, and I hope you’ll read and listen to what they have to say—if all that this newsletter becomes good for is as a portal to the wisdom of the people I learn from, then dayenu, it will be a success.

At the end of every post, I'll also include a list of cited works and people, in addition to links within the essay. (I also know well that tragic, tantalizing habit of right-clicking links to open them in new tabs, only to let them pile up until you eventually relegate them to a OneTab list (“I WILL still read them one day!”). But we all know that, years later, when we inevitably need to uninstall and reinstall our browsers or get a new computer, we just end up deleting or losing them anyway. I don’t want to deprive you of that journey if it’s your preference, but I also want to offer this other option: read through the essay and return to the list later to explore links when you're ready.)

What’s with the jellyfish?

Finally, you may be wondering why there are jellyfish in the background of the Living T(a)orah title banner. In response to that, I invite you to close your eyes and imagine an ocean of gently jetting jellyfish, their tentacles pulling in, expanding, contracting in the water, the soft waves making pleasant splashing sounds. Relax your shoulders, feel your butt in your chair, your feet on the ground, and in your thoughts, let the synchronized, slow movements of this bloom of jellyfish in water envelop you.

Whenever I do that, I tend to pleasantly forget whatever question I was asking.

Cited or referenced:

1. The Tao Te Ching translated by Stephen Addis and Stanley Lombardo

2. Talmud Berakhot 4a