Spiritual Masters of the World's Religions

Victoria Kennick, Arvind Sharma, Victoria Kennick, Arvind Sharma

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9781438444987, 9781438444970
• eBook ISBN: 9781438444994
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Comparative Religion

What is a spiritual master? Spiritual Masters of the World's Religions offers an important contribution to religious studies by addressing that question in the context of such themes as charismatic authority, role models, symbolism, and categories of religious perception. The book contains essays by scholar-practitioners on the topic of spiritual masters in Judaic, Christian, Islamic, Hindu, Sikh, Buddhist, Confucian, and Daoist traditions. It provides a full spectrum of exemplars, including founders, spiritual masters who highlight cultural themes, and problematic figures of modern times. To define spiritual master, the work of Max Weber, Mircea Eliade, Daniel Gold, and Bruce Lincoln is referenced to provide a balanced notion that includes both religionist and reductionist perspectives. This book takes readers from the past spiritual masters to the future of masters of any sort, posing food for thought about the future of master-disciple relationships in an emerging age of egalitarian sentiments.

1

Jewish Spiritual Masters

Harold Kasimow

And ye shall be unto Me a kingdom of priests, and a holy nation.

—Exodus 19:6

Ye shall be holy; for I the Lord Your God am holy.

—Leviticus 19:2

Introduction

When I recently told a rabbi that I was writing an essay on Jewish saints, he was somewhat puzzled. I am not surprised. When Jews think about saints, they usually think of Christianity. They think of the Catholic process of beatification and canonization by which the Church declares a person to be a saint. In Judaism there is no official religious body that can recognize someone as a saint. But there are saints in the Jewish tradition. When a person lives a holy, pious life, the Jewish community may come to recognize that human being as a saint. In the Jewish tradition a saint, or a spiritual master, may be called a talmid ḥakham (disciple of the wise), tzaddik (righteous person), or ḥasid (pious person). There are also other terms for the spiritually elite in the Jewish tradition, such as gaʾon (genius) and gadol ḥador (Torah leader of the generation).

But how does Judaism define a saint? I would define a saint as a person who views Imitatio Dei as the ultimate purpose of life,¹ and who is totally committed to the following two commandments from the Torah: “You must love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might” (Dt 6:4) and “Love your neighbor as yourself” (Lv 19:17).² The test of a holy life is the willingness to give up one's life for the sake of the commandments. Saints are always ready to die for God.

Because the Jewish tradition places such a strong emphasis on study, on the mind, the Jewish saint will most likely come from the ranks of the talmid ḥakhamim, a sage who has mastered the Torah in an astonishing way and attained great stature in the community.³ Classical Judaism sees such a person as the ideal because the Torah is believed to be the word of God and study of the Torah is seen as “holiness in words.” Study, it is said, not only leads to paradise; it itself is paradise. By studying the Torah we can discern the will of God and fulfill all the mitzvot (commandments).⁴ The person who submits to God's will and fulfills both the ritual mitzvot and the ethical mitzvot becomes holy.

The Jewish tradition sees Rabbi Elijah ben Solomon of Vilna (1720–1797), who is known as the Vilna Gaon and who studied Torah eighteen hours a day, as the ideal spiritual master in the Jewish tradition. He was known as ha-Gaʾon he-Ḥasid.⁵

However, some Jews who are not great scholars may also be considered saints. They may be recognized as saints because of their intense love of God or their humility or because they may be blessed with divine inspiration, which gives them special power to influence God. The greatest challenge to the classical conception of a Jewish saint was the Baal Shem Tov (1700–1760), the founder of the Ḥasidic movement, who did not come from the ranks of the talmid ḥakhamim and was not known for his extraordinary knowledge of the Torah. The Baal Shem Tov gave greater emphasis to the heart than to the mind. He himself was a teacher of small children and a laborer who spent a great deal of time meditating in the forest rather than in the study hall. For the Baal Shem Tov, prayer with concentration, with joy, with ecstasy was a better way to cleave to God than study of the Torah.

The Baal Shem Tov was viewed by his followers as the ideal saint, the ideal master, the great tzaddik. His followers began to emphasize the doctrine of the tzaddik, whom they saw as an intermediary between themselves and God. According to the doctrine of the tzaddik, if we want to become attached to God we must attach ourselves to the tzaddik, whose thoughts are entirely God-centered. According to Louis Jacobs, the Ḥasidic master Elimelech of Lizensk (1717–1787) claimed that the tzaddik “brings man near to God and he brings down God's grace from heaven to earth.”⁶ We should not be surprised, therefore, that the Gaon of Vilna banned the Ḥasidic movement.

Moses Maimonides (1135–1204), the great Jewish philosopher, of whom it is said, “From Moses to Moses there was none like Moses,” distinguishes between two types of ideal people: the ḥakham, that is, the sage, and the ḥasid, that is, the saint. Rabbi Jonathan Sacks claims that Maimonides favors the sage over the saint because “the sage is concerned with the perfection of society. The saint is concerned with the perfection of self.”⁷ This is a useful distinction, but it does not always work so neatly in reality. The greatest Jewish sage, the Vilna Gaon, is also seen as a great saint. The sage from Vilna devoted so much time to the study of the Torah that it left him very little time to become involved in the affairs of his community. He never accepted a rabbinic position.

The Gaon's way of life, as portrayed by his sons and his students, was characterized by the maximum channeling of the powers of body and soul to one exclusive goal: the study of the Torah. In practice, the Gaon understood absolute devotion to Torah study as one side of the coin; the other side was the value of asceticism and withdrawal from society as a guiding principle and way of life…. The Gaon saw the main significance of asceticism in its channeling of the majority of an individual's physical and spiritual resources toward the purpose of Torah study. He therefore particularly stressed the value of separation from the society of other people, as social contact brings in its wake the loss of time from Torah study, while isolation from society assists in constancy of study.⁸

In his last book, A Passion for Truth, Abraham Joshua Heschel points out the affinity that the major Ḥasidic leader Rabbi Mendel of Kotzk, known as the Kotzker, had for the Gaon of Vilna by citing the following passage about the Gaon:

The Gaon would not receive people in order to save all his time for his studies. When his sister came to see him after an absence of twelve years, he said to his attendant, “Tell her we'll see each other in the next world. I have no time for such meetings here.”⁹

Heschel claims that the Kotzker had a somewhat similar view: “Both lived in solitude, cut off from the world.”¹⁰ In his excellent article “Ascetical Aspects of Ancient Judaism,” Steven D. Fraade, professor at Yale University, states: “If the central religious obligation is that of the study of Torah (and attachment to God through it), then worldly preoccupations such as family are bound to be distracting for reasons of time, energy, and purity.”¹¹ Here we can see the strong ascetic strain in the Jewish tradition, which we will find in Moses Hayyim Luzzatto's path to holiness.

In contrast, the Baal Shem Tov, who revealed himself as a spiritual master when he was thirty-six years old, did not believe that to live a spiritual life it is necessary to divorce oneself from this world. He stressed a passage from the prophet Isaiah that “the whole world is full of His presence” (Is 6:1). Even more central to his teaching is his interpretation of the phrase from Proverbs, “In all your ways know God” (Prv 3:6). For the Baal Shem Tov, people have different paths to God. Study may not be the path for everyone; each person needs to find the right path for himself. The Baal Shem Tov felt that the highest peak of spiritual living is attained through immersion in everyday life. Heschel's statement on the Baal Shem Tov helps us see the contrast between the Baal Shem Tov and the Gaon of Vilna:

Before the Baal Shem's time, pious Jews felt that to be close to God, the body must be chastised, one must fast and scourge oneself. Bodily enjoyment was considered despicable; sexual pleasures filled them with revulsion. But the Baal Shem and his followers held that all delights come from Eden. “A longing for things material is an instrument by which one may approach the love of God; even through coarse desires one may come to love the Creator.” Lust, desire, evil inclination, all should be elevated, not uprooted.¹²

“For the Baal Shem Tov,” says Heschel, “saintliness and worldliness are not mutually exclusive.”¹³

For the Mithnagdim, the traditional Jews who opposed the Ḥasidim, Ḥasidic beliefs seem to blur the distinction between the sacred and profane. Especially troubling to them and their leader, the Gaon of Vilna, was the Ḥasidic sanctification of food and drink. The Gaon of Vilna discouraged excessive eating even on the Sabbath. One of his students recounts the following conversation:

When I spoke of this matter before my teacher, the Gaon, of blessed memory, he told me that he had a general principle that even though it is a mitzvah to eat and drink on the Sabbath, it is also a mitzvah to study Torah on the Sabbath. It is then much better to increase one's study than to increase one's eating and drinking. For increasing study will help develop study habits, and study is a mitzvah at all other times as well. On the other hand, eating on the Sabbath will lead to a greater appetite on weekdays as well.¹⁴

It may seem that the Mithnagdic and the Ḥasidic conceptions of the saint cannot be reconciled. But as I will demonstrate in the final section, there is a modern-day saint who combines the virtues of both models of the saint.

The Path to Holiness in Jewish Thought

We have some sense of what a Jewish saint is. But how does one become a saint? The best description of a path to holiness in the classical Jewish tradition comes from the great Jewish mystic and ethical writer from Italy, Moses Hayyim Luzzatto (1707–1746), and his Mesillat Yesharim (The Path of the Upright). Perhaps the most influential Jewish book on ethics, Mesillat Yesharim presents a systematic, step-by-step path on how to attain holiness: “Holiness is of a twofold nature; it begins as a quality of the service rendered to God, but it ends as a reward for such service. It is at first a type of spiritual effort, and then a kind of spiritual gift. A man must first strive to be holy, and then he is endowed with holiness.”¹⁵

Luzzatto's work is actually an investigation into a single teaching from the second century rabbi Phinehas ben Yair, who stated: “The knowledge of Torah leads to watchfulness, watchfulness to zeal, zeal to cleanness, cleanness to abstinence, abstinence to purity, purity to saintliness, saintliness to humility, humility to fear of sin, and fear of sin to holiness.”¹⁶ Luzzatto transformed his hierarchy of qualities into a detailed guide to how man could perfect himself.

Luzzatto based his arguments on the belief that human beings, because they are imbued with a divine soul, cannot be satisfied with anything that can be found in this world. Rather, human beings were created to enjoy the world to come. Luzzatto writes: “Likewise, if thou were to offer the soul all the pleasures of the world, she would remain indifferent to them, because she belongs to a higher order of existence” (Koheleth R. to 6.7).¹⁷ Therefore, this world should be viewed only as a path to fulfillment in the world to come.

Luzzatto says, “All of man's strivings should be directed toward the Creator, blessed be He. A man should have no other purpose in whatever he does, be it great or small, than to draw nigh to God and to break down all separating walls, that is, all things of a material nature, between himself and his Master, so that he may be drawn to God as iron to a magnet.”¹⁸

Watchfulness

Following Rabbi Phinehas ben Yair's model, the first step to holiness begins with watchfulness. By watchfulness, Luzzatto means great care to avoid the evil inclination inside oneself. Only by studying the Torah and taking time to consider its ethical lessons can one avoid the evil inclination: “In fine, a man should at all times consider carefully what course to pursue so as to conform with the laws of the Torah. He should also set aside stated periods when he may contemplate in solitude.”¹⁹ But watchfulness is endangered by three factors: “The first is preoccupation with worldly affairs; the second is frivolity and levity; the third is...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Preface
• Introduction: Defining Spiritual Master
• 1. Jewish Spiritual Masters
• 2. Christian Spiritual Masters
• 3. Muslim Spiritual Masters
• 4. Hindu Spiritual Masters
• 5. Sikh Spiritual Masters
• 6. Buddhist Spiritual Masters
• 7. Confucian Spiritual Masters
• 8. Daoist Spiritual Masters
• Concluding Remarks
• List of Contributors