The Jewish Renewal Movement with Rabbi Simcha Raphael (#399)

Summary

Religion on the Mind: The Jewish Renewal Movement with Rabbi Simcha Raphael (#399) Host: Dr. Dan Koch | Guest: Rabbi Dr. Simcha Raphael
Date: May 11, 2026

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Episode Overview

In this episode, Dr. Dan Koch sits down with Rabbi Dr. Simcha Raphael to explore the origins, character, and psychological impact of the Jewish Renewal movement. The conversation also delves into Rabbi Raphael’s own transformative spiritual journey, the intersection of psychology and religion, and the central role of spiritual experimentation and experiential practice in evolving faith traditions. Much of the discussion resonates with listeners exploring similar shifts from traditional forms of Christianity toward more contemplative, psychologically attuned expressions of spirituality.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Rabbi Raphael’s Upbringing and Early Religious Life

• Traditional Roots in Montreal:
  • Rabbi Raphael, originally Steven Paul, grew up in Montreal within a culturally Jewish yet non-fundamentalist family.
  • His early education was through one of North America’s best Hebrew day school systems, though family practice was less observant than the religious instruction he received.

    "A lot of Montreal Jews are sort of secular and cultural, so they'll send their kids to Hebrew school, but they won't necessarily do the same major practices at home." (06:23)

• Structure of Jewish Education:
  • The Montreal system grouped Jews under the English Protestant school board due to confessional lines in education; most synagogues were Orthodox, with very few liberal communities.
  • Comparison with American Jewish communities and their post-1848 movements.

2. Mapping Jewish Denominations to Christian Analogs (08:09 – 09:35)

• Dan’s Attempted Parallels:
  • Reform Judaism ≈ Mainline Protestantism (liberal, historical-critical).
  • Conservative Judaism ≈ Moderately serious faith traditions (perhaps Methodism, not quite Evangelicalism).
  • Orthodox Judaism ≈ Fundamentalist Christianity.

    "Conservative Judaism and evangelicalism on the same page doesn't quite resonate for me...they may be more Methodist." – Raphael (09:07)

3. The Intellectual Awakening: University and Comparative Religion

• Religious Studies in the 1970s:
  • Exposure to non-fundamentalist, comparative religious thought, largely influenced by teachers of various backgrounds (e.g., former Jesuit married into a Jewish family).
  • Early academic work explored polytheism and goddess culture in the Hebrew Bible, setting a precedent for broad religious inquiry.

    "What Dr. Willette opened me to was a kind of intellectualism of study... comparative study of religion." (11:55–12:49)

• The “Rear View Mirror” Mentality:
  • Noted contrast between teachers focusing on recovering a pre-Holocaust Jewish past and forward-looking, critical study.

4. The Era of Spiritual Experimentation (14:14 – 18:39)

• 1970s Zeitgeist:
  • The “spirit of the times” encouraged openness to eastern traditions and new humanistic/transpersonal psychologies. Montreal was fertile ground for these innovations.

    "Every guru who came to town got a podium to speak at our university." – Raphael (14:27)

• Academic Exploration:
  • Paid research into new religious movements: “I was paid to go interview people in yoga and meditation groups.” (15:41)
  • Personal involvement in meditation, including a week-long Transcendental Meditation retreat subsidized by research.

5. Psychological Reflections on Religious Pluralism (16:52 – 17:56)

• Internal Dynamics:

  • Raphael notes he didn’t have a “strong religious superego,” thanks to cultural Judaism, so spiritual exploration didn’t feel threatening.
  • Describes Montreal’s scene as alive with Hare Krishnas and a musical/spiritual revolution.

• Finding Meaning and Authenticity:

  • As he immersed himself in eastern spirituality, especially during travels in India, he questions its suitability for his own spiritual “authenticity.” (31:27–31:38)

    “I love that here I was, this Jewish kid from Montreal, totally immersed in this other culture and loving it. But I was still this Jewish kid from Montreal.” (26:55)

6. The Challenge of Identity and Authenticity (28:00 – 35:35)

• Core Moment in India:
  • Powerfully describes bowing to statues of Krishna and Radha in Vrindavan, feeling the tension between attraction to new spiritual forms and the internalized taboo against idol worship.

    “I bow down in front of those statues and I say, dear God, please forgive me. Because we were taught as Jewish kids not to worship idols. And there I am worshiping an idol and asking God to forgive me for worshiping an idol.” (28:48)

• Return and Reintegration:
  • Experiences culture shock upon returning to Montreal—feeling “grotesque materialism” and searching for a Jewish equivalent to the transformative “spiritual vitamins” found abroad.
• Jungian Influence:
  • Inspired by Jung’s idea that “Westerners can’t come to full consciousness and individuation on the symbol system of the east, but they need to find their way through the symbol system of the West.” (33:48)

7. Exclusive Truth Claims and Pluralism (35:35 – 38:08)

• Christian Exclusivism vs. Jewish Experience:
  • Dan reflects on the challenges of reconciling exclusivist Christian truth claims with broader religious pluralism, influenced by reading Japanese Christian authors.
• Jewish Approach:
  • Rabbi Raphael describes not a “Jewish triumphalism” but a feeling of “loss” and hunger for spiritual sustenance and authenticity.

8. Encounter with Reb Zalman and Jewish Renewal (39:08 – 42:17)

• Meeting the Founder:

  • Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi, Jewish Renewal founder, combined deep Hasidic tradition with the spiritual and psychological experimentation of the 1960s/70s.
  • His background included time in Holocaust work camps, Hasidic education, and spiritual cross-pollination (LSD with Timothy Leary, meditation with Benedictines, study at Harvard).

• Key Teaching:

  • Crucial transformational moment:

    “We light the outer light to remind us to light the inner light.” – Reb Zalman (41:55)

  • First time he saw Jewish ritual directly linked to inner spirituality.

• Impact:

  • “I remember coming home Friday night and saying, I found my teacher. Because at that point, I was...looking around for [gurus]...And then I meet a Jewish teacher who speaks the language of spirituality.” (42:19)

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Notable Quotes and Memorable Moments

• On integrating East and West:

  “I started to feel like I need to find my Jewish equivalent to this spiritual vitamin.” – Raphael (33:20)

• Spiritual Exploration without Fundamentalist Guilt:

  “I didn't have as strong a religious superego as you would have had as raised evangelical...We were cultural Jews.” – Raphael (16:14)

• On the impact of Jewish Renewal:

  “It was the first time I heard a Jewish teacher connect ritual practice with inner spirituality.” – Raphael, re: Reb Zalman (42:17)

• Cultural and generational resonance:

  “You know, one of your interests is in religious change. So if I can follow it, please bring me back.” (18:09)

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• Opening & Introductions — 02:33–05:08
• Jewish Education in Montreal & Family Background — 05:08–07:38
• Mapping Denominational Differences (Judaism & Christianity) — 08:09–09:35
• University Years, Intellectual Awakening — 09:35–14:08
• The 1970s Spiritual/Countercultural Scene in Montreal — 14:08–18:09
• Participant-Observer Research & Early Meditation Practice — 18:09–24:52
• Immersion in Indian and Tibetan Culture, Spiritual Questioning — 24:52–33:20
• Reintegrating into Jewish Practice Post-India — 33:20–39:08
• Finding Reb Zalman & Intro to Jewish Renewal — 39:08–43:01

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Tone & Style

The conversation is thoughtful, personal, peppered with humor and stories, and marked by the sincerity of two seekers comparing journeys. Raphael is candid, historically informed, and psychologically astute; Dan is open, inquisitive, and eager to find parallels for his listeners coming from conservative Christianity.

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Summary

This episode offers a dynamic exploration of religious seeking and transformation, weaving together historical context, personal anecdote, psychological insight, and cross-religious dialogue. The story of the Jewish Renewal movement—emphasizing experiential, contemplative, and psychologically informed Judaism—serves as both a case study and a source of inspiration for listeners pursuing similar revitalizations in their own spiritual traditions.

For continued listening, the full episode is available for Patreon supporters.

Transcript

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[B]

Welcome back everybody to Religion on the Mind. I AM your host, Dr. Dan Koch, licensed therapist in the state of Washington. And today I am joined by Rabbi Dr. Simcha Raphael. How did I do? I mean I'm really bad at that.

[C]

You got that.

[B]

Was that pretty good? I just say, I just say challah bread. I don't say challah. See, you know what? The M, the M is helpful. I think Simcha like the M sets me up better. But I could never roll my R's when I was learning Spanish as a kid, for instance, like in high school. Doesn't matter. Simcha. I'm gonna say Dr. Raphael just to make it simpler for myself. You are a scholar practitioner. You've spent more than 40 years exploring the intersection of Jewish traditional death awareness and psychological healing, including having a doctorate of psychology and being a licensed therapist. You're a central figure in what is called the Jewish renewal movement, which is something that neither myself nor my listeners probably know much about. So any explanation there would be helpful and really just kind of contemporary communities that are seeking a experiential, contemplative and sort of modern, psychologically attuned Judaism. And so listeners already probably know why you're here because in some ways that is what I and many listeners are seeking with Christianity, experiential for many of us, contemplative, certainly psychologically attuned. If they listen to this show, there's so much we can talk about. We will definitely get into stuff around death and kind of how you think about that, working with clients near death, kind of working with the concept of death super relevant to my work as a cognitive existential therapist or. But kind of where I really want to center the conversation is how you have undergone religious and spiritual change, like significant change throughout your life from what you were given growing up. And you've stayed within that fold. You found a way to integrate all this additional learning and experience into a very alive Jewish faith today. And that is such a wonderful analog for what so many listeners and what I myself am trying to do coming out of conservative Christianity. And so I think there's just going to be a lot to a lot that's helpful and interesting. Sort of a piece of glass going back and forth right between the two traditions. So could we start with your upbringing? Like what is the sort of faith background that you were raised with, from which the other things happened.

[C]

First of all, it's great. It's great to be here and I look forward to this conversation and thanks for trying to pronounce my name properly. My father called me Stevie to his dying day, but that's another whole piece. I was originally Steve Paul and later became Simcha Raphael, which is symbolic of religious transformation.

[B]

Hey, there we go. Yeah, New names. Okay.

[C]

I'm originally from Montreal, Canada. Montreal has one of the best Hebrew day school systems. Education took place there along confessional lines. There was a French Catholic school board, there was an English Catholic school board, and there was an English Protestant school board. And the Jews were in the English Protestant school board. That's changed. With a pro independence Quebec government. But growing up, that was the status of things. And as a consequence of that kind of religion or education along confessional lines, there was funding available for families that wanted to send their kids to Hebrew day school. Okay. And Montreal has one of the best Hebrew day schools systems in North America. So I had a relatively traditional, not so much orthodox, but a relatively traditional Hebrew education. I mean, I was speaking Hebrew, I was reading Hebrew texts with commentary. At 8 years old, at 10 years old. And that sort of set a foundation for learning, but was interesting. What we learned and what we practiced at home were not confluent. A lot of Montreal Jews are sort of secular and cultural, so they'll send their kids to Hebrew school, but they won't necessarily do the same major practices at home.

[B]

I think of that, like, maybe like Los Angeles, is that kind of maybe the US out, you know, similarity, like, because New York, you certainly have families like that, but then you've also got the Hasidic population and you've got like the. The much more serious. But Los Angeles, like, I mean, I'm thinking of, like, I'm probably getting this through curb your enthusiasm episodes, honestly. And not. Not from like any straightforward information. But is that. Is that where it is? Like, okay, we'll send you to school, but like, we're la. We're like LA folks. That's. That's our life in a sense.

[C]

There were two streams of Hebrew school. One was where the orthodox families sent their kids. The other was where the non Orthodox families sent their kids. There wasn't much of a liberal Judaism after the revolutions in Europe in 1848. That's when German Jews made their way more to America. And so the Reform movement, and then later the conservative movement established itself pretty well in America. It didn't happen that way. In Canada.

[B]

Okay. Interesting.

[C]

To this day, Montreal might have 50 synagogues and less than 10 are non Orthodox.

[B]

Okay. So. And this is never an exact, you know, one to one, but as I understand it, just to kind of help people place this. These different Jewish traditions. So Reform Judaism, that is the analog to like liberal mainline Protestant Christianity. It's like we're not. It's not miracles. You know, we're doing science. We're. It's that kind of a thing. It's like the historical, critical, biblical scholarship. It's all of that. Right. That's Reform.

[C]

Right.

[B]

Conservative Judaism is, I take it to be more like a moderate kind of evangelicalism. Like, we take this very seriously. It's at the center of our life. We. And that Orthodox Judaism is closer to something like fundamentalist, like more of a literal reading of the text. Is that close?

[C]

It's close.

[B]

Okay.

[C]

It's close. I think Conservative Judaism and evangelicalism on the same page doesn't quite resonate for me. And I don't know my Protestant denomination as well as I need to. It may be more. They may be more Methodist.

[B]

Okay, okay, okay. So maybe not. Maybe not at. Yeah, like one foot in that real seriousness, but also one foot in the kind of workaday world kind of a thing.

[C]

Okay, okay. So at a certain point, I went to a public high school. And then what really was, I'd say one of the gifts of my life is in my second year at university, I began taking courses in religious studies. Now, it turns out in 1969, I date myself by saying that I was in one of the earliest Judaic studies university programs in North America. And my teacher was an interesting. My biblical studies teacher was really an interesting guy. He was a Jesuit who was interested in biblical archaeology. He ended up being invited by Nelson Gluck, who was a biblical scholar. And he was at Hebrew Union College. So he was invited. The man's name is Dr. Jean Willet. Jean Willette was invited to study biblical archaeology at Hebrew Union College. Eventually, he left the Jesuit order and he married a Moroccan Jewish woman. And he was working on. He was doing an archeological tell. A tell is a dig. He was in Israel when he met her. And so he ran. He started the Judaic studies program at the university, and he turned me on to a non fundamentalistic Judaism. What I got in those eight, nine years of Hebrew day school were teachers who were either Israelis who had left the country. And if you left Israel in the 1950s, early 60s, there was a certain kind of existential guilt about that. Or Holocaust survivors.

[B]

Yeah.

[C]

And so we got what. What my teacher, one of my teachers later called the rear view mirror. Like they were looking into the past to see how we can reinstate the past after the Holocaust.

[B]

Right.

[C]

What. What. What Dr. Willett opened me to was a kind of intellectualism of study where, I mean, I wrote my. My first college paper. I was. I was barely 18, on the polytheism of the patriarchs, on how there was Goddess culture in the Bible. And within about 18 months, I changed from a major in Judaic studies to an honors degree in history and philosophy of religion. Because I was also turned on to Hinduism and Buddhism and religious history of Western civilization and New Testament. I mean, I did an amazing melange of study that really opened me up to what has always been my first love, which is comparative study of religion.

[B]

Let me ask you kind of a psychological question about that time in your life, because I think that there's a contrast here with someone like myself who was raised evangelical in the United States. I was a.

[C]

And I'm not taking confession, by the way. What do you mean?

[B]

Don't worry, I'm not gonna. I won't let anything too big slip. No, but, like, for me, I was a philosophy major at a state college, so, like, you know, going into that. But. But even with a kind of a moderate evangelicalism, and many listeners had a much more kind of strict upbringing than I had even. I had some moderating factors, like my dad was a therapist, and so we let in science and things like this. But. But even for me, with that a bit more expansive worldview, I mean, it would be 10, 15 years from that point before I would actually feel internally comfortable really taking another religious tradition seriously on its own terms. There's a real barrier that was built into the religious, you know, environment I was raised in. Can you speak to any differences there?

[C]

Well, it was also the spirit of the times. Maharishi Mia Farrow and the Beatles were meditating with Maharishi.

[B]

Vatican II wasn't that long ago. Right? Yeah.

[C]

And every guru who came to town got a podium to speak at. At our university.

[B]

Okay.

[C]

So it was also the era of. Of sort of both Eastern spiritual tradition and Western humanistic, transpersonal, which we might need to define that word, but new psychologies were coming into town. And so I was really right in the middle of that. And Montreal was very fertile for that. I had whatever a Rolodex would have been. And no, see, I had addresses and phone numbers of all of the yoga and meditation groups and subsequently to just jump ahead. I did my master's degree and I had a fellowship at the same location. The university name changed, but a year later, after I got my bachelor's degree, I did a master's degree in history and philosophy of religion and I had a fellowship. And it was called, quote, a psychosocial study of new religious and para religious movements in the Greater Montreal area. I was paid to go interview people in yoga and meditation groups.

[B]

Incredible.

[C]

Yeah, it was incredible.

[B]

Great job.

[C]

It's a great gig. If you wasn't.

[B]

I know.

[C]

And it was such a fertile era.

[B]

Yeah. So here's the psychological question for you then. I'm sorry to slow us down so much, but I am so interested. Like, what would you say in psychological terms today? What would you say it was doing for you then to have that wider canvas, to have these influences literally flying in from other continents? Right. Like kind of being at the center of that. Of that melange. Like, what. What was going on internally for you to be a part of that?

[C]

Well, it was clear I was on a spiritual journey, that the gurus who were coming to town. First of all, I didn't have as strong a religious superego as you would have had as raised evangelical. And my father wasn't wild that I was going off to study meditation. But we were not in any sense the word fundamentalist Jews. We were cultural Jews.

[B]

Right.

[C]

And it was right front and center. I mean, I was 17 during the summer of Love. So they were smoking weed and chanting Hare Krishna. Yeah, I mean, there were Hare Krishna. People were on the streets of Montreal day and night.

[B]

I mean, to this day. My favorite song that is actually about God. My favorite song is God Only Knows, which is not about God. It's a love song. My favorite song that is actually about God is My Sweet Lord, which has Hare Krishna all over it. You know, George Harris totally coming out of that. Like, literally, that album is 1971. 1970. All things must Pass. Exactly right. That time you're talking about, that was the era.

[C]

That was the era.

[B]

I'm so jealous.

[C]

Yeah.

[B]

Actually, if I'm just being honest, I'm just deeply, deeply jealous.

[C]

You'd appreciate this. On my website, I have a half hour clip called the Spiritual Supermarket east and west that I made in 1976.

[B]

Yeah.

[C]

We were going to do a whole series and I reconnected with the guy who was behind the camera when I did that 50 years ago, and he remastered it.

[B]

Oh, nice.

[C]

And so I was able to post some on. On my website, but. But that's what I was doing. I was. I was front and center in. In all that. And you're, you're, you know, one of your interests is in. In religious change. So if I can follow it, please bring me back. So I had great professors, and I only recently did I read a study of 50 years of. Of religious studies in Canada. And it turns out I was in the best religious studies program in Canada. I didn't know.

[B]

I didn.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

Nice.

[C]

And I. I felt that none of my professors had dealt with their own crisis of faith.

[B]

Oh, interesting.

[C]

I mean, I. There was one guy who. I've stayed in touch with some of my professors. Fifty years later, he's still alive. He taught me Hinduism and Buddhism. He had studied at the school of world religion, the Harvard Divinity School. Yeah, he assigned Harvard Divinity School. He had gone to India. I mean, he was, you know, he was a young guy and he was a great, great teacher. And yet he was, he confessed to be an atheist or to at least to be an agnostic.

[B]

Yeah.

[C]

It was almost as if we could talk about God in the religion department, but we couldn't talk to God.

[B]

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[A]

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[B]

That is the problem. Nothing in my life goes as smoothly. I'm waiting for the catch.

[A]

Maybe there's no catch.

[B]

That's exactly what a catch would want me to think.

[C]

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[A]

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[B]

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[A]

I think it's laminate.

[B]

Okay. Yeah, that's good. That's close enough.

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[B]

Just to map that onto, you know, American seminary and religious studies sort of scenarios. That is, that's really the kind of, that's the dividing line between the more conservative and the more liberal seminaries. At the conservative seminaries there is an adamant, there's literally a faith statement you must agree with to teach there and sometimes to be the student there. Liberals will eschew all of that and say, look, everybody is welcome. We're certainly talking about God. And then tend to get kind of squishy if we're going to talk really about like, you know, or like talking, talking about, talking about God is much safer for us than talking about God kind of a thing.

[C]

Or talking to God.

[B]

Talking to God. Right.

[C]

Talking to God. Right. And I in this sociopsychological study of new religious movements, my professor wanted to do statistical studies and I wanted to do participant observation research.

[B]

Yeah, yeah. I have the old quantitative, qualitative chasm there.

[C]

Yeah, right. It was the experiential versus the statistical. I wrote a paper, I did a five day meditation retreat in transcendental meditation because very early on I was initiated into transcendental meditation in the summer of 1972 for 25 bucks. That was the student price.

[B]

I think it's gone up a little bit since then. By the way, you don't know this about me, Dr. Raphael, but the Beach Boys are my favorite band of all time with nobody even close. So my TM experience is exclusively through Mike Love, one of the, possibly one of the worst pop culture people in the world. So I'm all I need other people like Jim James of My Morning Jacket and other people I respect more to kind of like yourself, to kind of give me a softer view of that because it's hard for me to get the Mike Love stink off of it.

[C]

All right, well, the research project paid for me to go on a five day meditation retreat. And I wrote it up as a participant observation paper.

[B]

Nice.

[C]

So that I don't know if the word has tempered my Judaism, but it certainly distanced me from my Judaism. Two things happened in subsequent years. There's an organization called the Shastri Indo Canadian Institute. It funded Indian studies in Canada and Canadians studying in India. It was established through the Canadian equivalent of the State Department. And in those years, that wasn't the India of high tech culture. That was the India that was just getting some industrial development. Yeah.

[B]

Behind China even. I mean just. Yeah, right, right, right, right.

[C]

And so there was a balance of rupees payment between Canada and India. And instead of having to turn it into dollars to pay Canada, they paid for Canadians to study in India. So in 1973, this is when I'm still doing this research project. Also there was an all India study program at McMaster University where they took five students from 10 different universities. And we were taught Indian religion and Indian art, Indian anthropology, some people did language. And we had all these different cultural events. And I was totally immersed in Indian culture. Then I came back to school after this. It was a two month summer program. And then I was doing this gurus and swamis research project. The next year I went to India. They took 18 of the 50 of us and we had an all expense paid trip to India, which is, which was a gift of a lifetime. I met Mrs. Indira Gandhi. I mean we were, you know, we didn't travel first class, we traveled university guest house class.

[B]

Yeah.

[C]

And we. There was a dance concert in the home of the president of India at the time. Wow. And I actually spent a week on a houseboat in Kashmir which was, you know, you can't get into Kashmir these days. It was quite incredible. And where I was on a houseboat, you could see a 14th century Shankaracharya temple. Shankaracharya is the lineage of sort of raja yoga that made its way into Yoga culture here. Go back to the 14th century and

[B]

a TV tower in the same kind of frame.

[C]

Well, yeah, right. There were two peaks and one. Yeah. And it really left me contemplating east versus West. I love that here I was this Jewish kid from Montreal, totally immersed in this other culture and loving it. But I was still this Jewish kid from Montreal. Here's a sidebar. I love to tell this story. If I get lost, you got to bring me back to the mountain, to the two towers.

[B]

There's a nice little screenplay moment there. I can Bring us back to that visual if I need to.

[C]

It's still there. You can look up the Shankaracharya temple.

[B]

Okay.

[C]

On this trip they took us to Vrindavan. Brindavan is the birthplace of Krishna and say it was a fifty hundred foot walk from the entrance to the temple into the temple and it's lined with widows and beggars and handicapped people. Like I'd never seen such a hodgepodge of humanity. And they're all chanting Hare Krishna. And they've been chanting Hare Krishna at that temple site for hundreds of years, day and night. So the morphogenetic field was unbelievable. And I walk in and there's these statues of Krishna and Radha. And I bow down in front of those statues and I say, dear God, please forgive me. Because we were taught as Jewish kids not to worship idols. And there I am worshiping an idol and asking God to forgive me for worshiping an idol.

[B]

Basically, in the same breath you're experiencing these contrasting impulses, right?

[C]

It's like that inner voice of superego. Because we were taught at 8 years old that Abraham went into his father's idol studio and broke the idols.

[B]

Right, Breaking the idols. Well, and you're, I mean to tie back to what you said earlier, you know, talking about the formation of monotheism within the early Israelites, right? Like monolatry is the. Or what's, what's the. There's a term for. There's a term for like they weren't quite monotheists, but they were on their way and sort of coming out of polytheism. And I forget what the exact term is, but. But yeah, like the stories of Jacob, you know, and his. I guess I don't remember where this is exactly in the Bible. Cause I'm pulling from the Frederick Buechner historical novel Son of Laughter, which is about the character of Jacob, written from his perspective. There's a scene in that novel where he goes in the basement of his father in law's house, like in the. It's kind of like the workshop downstairs. And he's like feeling drawn to these clay figures that he knows are like local deity idols. And he's like pulled. He's pulled in two directions right to that and then to Yahweh. And that's kind of the vibe I'm getting. And by the way, when you say super ego just for listener's sake, that's the Freudian term for like, that's the bigger, the sort of bigger moral system in which you live that sort of tells you how to moderate your raw ID and, and tells you what your balanced ego view should be of, like taking those raw materials but having them in a moral and ethical container. The superego is sort of that, the top down structure. So for me, the superego would have been like. Yeah, evangelical subculture, stuff like that.

[C]

Right, right.

[B]

Yeah.

[C]

Well, it's, it's like the socialized inner voice of, of your group, of your culture.

[B]

Of your culture.

[C]

Yeah, yeah, right. So anyway, so I have this experience in India at that point, but while I'm on a houseboat in Kashmir, it's beginning to gnaw at me that I don't know if this is really my authenticity.

[B]

Which part that you're not sure is authentic?

[C]

The Indian piece. Oh.

[B]

Like I'm overcome by something here. This is obviously powerful, but is this me, actually?

[C]

And when I got home, I had. So I was in India for 10. For, for 10 weeks.

[B]

Okay.

[C]

The tour was six weeks with an optional week on a houseboat in Kashmir, which about half of us stayed. Had a lot of good Kashmiri substances. And then, then I had three weeks in a Tibetan village in Dharmsala because my brother had been living there for a year.

[B]

Come on.

[C]

I get back to Montreal and I'm in total culture shock because I see this almost grotesque materialism. People experience that when they go to a really different culture. Of course, now China is very super.

[B]

I've spent a lot of time in China. It's just like they're, you know, they're just like in the cities anyway. You know, I haven't, I haven't lived in a, on a farm there or anything in rice patties. But, but in the cities in China, they are just like less rich cities. You know, they're, they're packed and they, they have their differences. But yeah, I would imagine back then there would be a lot more differences of abundance and scarcity and building up and all that stuff.

[C]

Yeah, right, right, right, right, right. And by June of that year, I had done a workshop called from west to east and Back Again because I started to feel like I need to find my Jewish equivalent to this spiritual vitamin. Ice. Vitamins.

[B]

And to be, just to be clear, did you feel you needed to find sort of the, the Jewish equivalent because of that feeling of discrepancy with the, with the sort of homegrown Eastern religion of the east that didn't feel like it. It was not a garment that fit? Is that kind of what you're saying?

[C]

Well, it's interesting. I'm sort of trying to Retrace it, you know, and at some point I'm going to try to read all my journals from those years. But I remember the year I got back from India, I took a course called CG Jung and the Parapsychology of Religion. John Rosser was a pretty far out professor too. He had dealt with his crisis of faith because he was an Anglican minister. And Jung writes that Westerners can't come to full consciousness and individuation on the symbol system of the east, but they need to find their way through the symbol system of the West. It's because he had seen a guy by the name of Richard Wilhelm who translated the I Ching, which is a Chinese oracular book. And when he went to China, he had trouble reintegrating back into the culture, at least as I remember that. So I wrote a whole thing about how we can learn and imbibe the traditions of the east. But ultimately Westerners, I was going along with Jung and saying Westerners have to find their own way and that will lead to the planetarization of consciousness. That was sort of what I was, that was what I was writing about. I have to go back and read that paper. I think I might have had some goodies left over from Kashmir when I wrote that paper.

[B]

Can I, can I just drop something in that you might be interested in around that question of like, you know, needing, needing Western language? Where that concept has been most important for me, as I've thought through this stuff over the years is, you know, in Christianity, especially conservative Christianity, there's a, almost a maniacal emphasis on exclusivity of truth claims and exclusivity of salvation channels and all that stuff. Right. So that's. Right, that, that gets kind of preloaded on my software, right as I'm raised.

[C]

Right.

[B]

And so I had to kind of think my way through that because, you know, the idea of God, especially like a Calvinist God, deciding who goes to everlasting torture before they're born is like just so insane abhorrent. So you have to kind of think through this stuff. And that's where a similar kind of line of thinking has landed for me is like, if I were to try and say Christianity is sort of like exclusively true in a way that other religious traditions are necessarily then false. I run into a limit there when I think, you know what, I don't even know how I would adjudicate that, especially for Eastern traditions, because I'm aware enough of the differences of a broadly speaking Western and Eastern mindset which goes, which begins at birth. And you're raised in a totally, you know, at least not totally different, but, you know, different in certain ways, different categories, these different, you know, sort of what's good and bad or have different meanings and. And like that. I just. I would need to be raised in one of those traditions to be able to compare it to what I was raised in. Because if they tell me Christianity is bullshit, I'll say, well, you don't understand Christianity. Let me tell you what it's like to be raised in it. But I would have to extend the same charity to them. So that. That's where that thinking has been helpful for me, in sort of like intellectual and theological humility around. Like, I can't just go around pontificating about religious traditions that I don't have experience with, because how deep that grain of east versus west goes. And just really briefly, I'll say for me, that was probably mostly through reading Shusaku Endo and Silence and the Samurai and other books of his where he's a Japanese Catholic, trying to explain how differently Japanese people see these things than his Western Catholic peers.

[C]

Well, I don't think there was a Jewish triumphalism that was motivated.

[B]

No, I'm sure there wouldn't have been.

[C]

Yeah, it was more a sense of, like, something was stirring in a way of loss. Like, I remember during those years, there were a few of us, we would get together and we would study. We were trying to find spiritual sustenance. And in studying Jewish texts. Yes, you read. You read certain. There's five scrolls, there's Esthers, there's Lamentations, there's Megillat Esther, Megillat Ruth. There's Ruth. Lamentations, I said on Purim.

[B]

And

[C]

there's five different schools. So we would get together in holidays and we. And we would study that. We'd sign up for three, four, five hours. The change that then happened was meeting a guy by the name of Rabbi Zalman Schachter Shalomi Reb Zalman, as he was known, was the founder of the Jewish renewal movement. Reb Zalman was in a detainment camp during the Holocaust. I mean, he was born in Vienna in 1924. And he discovered his father, like, his background. I think 1. His father was a kind of enlightened. His father had both the fundamentalist and the scientific background.

[B]

So he's like 13, 14. When Austria joins the Reich under Hitler and the Jews get the most. Austrians are pumped. The Austrian Jews are not pumped.

[C]

Right, right. He was in a work camp. Yeah, he was in a work camp, and there he meets the Lubavitchers. The Lubavitch is sort of a more modernized Hasidic movement to do a lot of missionary work. And he starts his deeper spiritual learning. And eventually he gets to this country. He was a Lubavitch rabbi for a while in the 19, late 50s or early 60s. He goes to do LSD with Timothy Leary, because he was living in Massachusetts, near where Leary was.

[B]

Certainly was also the time for such an activity was the era.

[C]

Somewhere along the way, he corresponded with Thomas Merton.

[B]

Oh, stop it. Yeah.

[C]

And when he was in Winnipeg, he would go at night and do meditation and prayer with the Benedictines. So here was a guy and he did a degree in psychology of religion at Harvard. There was a black preacher who was head of the chapel there. So here was a guy who had. He basically was educated in traditional Hasidic Judaism, and he flavored it with the psychology of the 60s. And so the first words out of his mouth, a tradition. Jews light the candles on Shabbat. And he says, we light the outer light to remind us to light the inner light. And that was the bolt of lightning that changed my life story, because it was the first time I heard a Jewish teacher connect ritual practice with inner spirituality.

[B]

Yeah.

[C]

And I spent a weekend with him. He was leading a shabbaton program at McGill Hillel. And I remember coming home Friday night and saying, I found my teacher. Because at that point, I was. You know, I'd been looking around for Swami Satchin Ananda and. And Pierre Vilayat Khan and Chogyab Trunk. I mean, I had met all of these gurus. And then I meet a Jewish teacher who speaks the language of spirituality. You can listen to the rest of

[B]

this episode by joining the [e-mail] and Coke.