Biography
Rabbi Lawrence Kushner is a writer, teacher, and Scholar in Residence at Congregation Emanu-El in San Francisco, California. He is also one of the most creative religious writers in America. His 13 books, lectures and articles have helped define spiritual renewal for an entire generation. [Biographical information is correct as of the broadcast date noted above.]

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          and 30 Good Minutes.

"The Mystical God" 
I’m sitting on a folding chair in the middle of the New Mexico desert. It’s about a half-hour before dawn and with me are a bunch of other people who have come to a place called the Bosque del Apache. It’s a bird sanctuary. We’re sitting there waiting in the cold. I’m not a big time naturalist, but my wife is an avid birder. And I say to her, her teeth chattering while sipping coffee from the thermos, “For this one, honey, I want extra points!” And we sit there and watch.

Gradually the horizon turns into a thin ribbon of orange and then bright orange. And then the whole sky explodes and dawn comes with such amazing beauty and power. It’s staggering. Together we all watch as within the next 15 minutes, 25,000 snow geese, herons, great blue herons, and God knows what else, awake from their sleeping on the waters of the bosque and fly off into the dawn’s early light. There are so many of them and they are flying all together and all at once with such intensity that I can literally feel the flapping wing flung wind on my face. The park rangers the night before had warned us. It’s called the “fly away” and they say you’re never the same after the fly away. And now I understand.

Simply being present for such an event changes your perception of what it means to be a creature. And here’s the thing that startles and amazes and chastens and humbles me: the birds do this all the time whether I’m there to watch them or not. They wake up to the dawn’s early light and fly off into the sunrise, a sky full of beaks and feathers and wings, flying off. Just like the great whales do it through the oceans. Just like the mitochondria do it through the protoplasm in our cells—great streaming currents of protoplasm flying, streaming, praying, swaying. Doing what they were meant to do. Doing the only thing they know how to do. While I’m obsessed with some writing assignment I’m working on and doing, I guess, what I’m meant to do. My God, as I think about it now, I can still feel the flapping wing flung wind on my face!

Let me try to explain this amazing experience by telling you a story about my learning how to play the clarinet. About seven years ago when I turned fifty-five, my wife, as a surprise, presented me with an R13 Buffet B-flat clarinet. This is the Cadillac of clarinets. Now, this would only normally be the story of another extravagant and beautiful birthday present were it not for one other surprising thing. Prior to that moment, seven years ago, I had never touched a clarinet in my life or read a note of music.

“How did you know?” I said to my wife.

She said, “Well, we’ve just been listening and it turns out that you’ve been mumbling about it for 20 years. I checked with the kids. They heard it, too.”

Well, so I’ve been taking lessons now, learning how to play the clarinet for the past several years. I’m still disappointed that I haven’t had any feelers yet from major symphony orchestras, but it’s becoming increasingly clear that reading music is going to take a lot longer. And not only is reading music difficult, but then there’s keeping time. To help you keep time, they divide the music up into little vertical bar lines. So I count: one, two, three, four. End of measure. One, two, three, four. End of measure. One, two, three, four.

My tutor turns to me and says, “How come you’re pausing at the end of every bar line?”

And I say, “Because there’s this little measure line here. This little bar line there.”

She said, “You’re not supposed to play that!”

And I say, “I’m not playing it!”

And she says, “Well, yes you are! You’re pausing at the end of every one.”

I said, “Well, how would anyone know it’s the end of a measure?”

She sets down her clarinet and turns to face me with exasperation and she says, “Let me put it this way, Larry: the bar lines are not there! I know it looks like they’re there, but the bar lines are not really there. We just add them to help you play the music better.”

This reminded me of something I learned from my friend and colleague, Professor Daniel Matt, who is now translating the Zohar, the great mystical text of Judaism. Danny Matt taught me that we have words for all the parts of a tree. We have words for leaf, twig, branch, but we must not get so carried away into thinking that because we have words for all the parts of a tree that a tree really has all those parts. A leaf doesn’t know when it stops becoming a leaf and has become a twig. A twig doesn’t know when it’s no longer a twig and has become a branch. A branch doesn’t know it’s stopped being a branch and is now the trunk. The trunk doesn’t know it became the roots. The roots don’t know that it became the soil. The soil doesn’t know it’s become the moisture, the sunshine. All of our words are arbitrarily superimposed on what is otherwise seamless reality. In other words, we have to take reality and divide it up into component parts to manipulate it so that we can imagine that we know what’s going on, but in truth, we don’t.

The Kabbalists, the great Jewish mystics of old, explained it this way: They said that there are two worlds. There is a world of separation where everything is divided, where everything has a beginning and an end and a definition and boundaries and coordinates and, if it’s a human being, has it’s own agenda. And then there is the world of unity where there are no parts, where there are no beginnings, where there are no ends. Indeed, the Kabbalists said the way we can explain this, the only way we can explain such an all embracing unity is to call it “nothing” or “nothingness” or, in the words of the Kabbalists, the Ayn Sof. And so what they said was that there is a world of separation that we all live in now with all it’s discreet parts and elements. But that world of separation resides within the bosom of the world of unity where there are no parts. And in moments of heightened spiritual awareness, in moments like I experienced when I saw the fly away in the New Mexico desert, for a few moments I slipped into the world of unity where there were no parts, where I was one with the birds and with all the creatures, and with all of being. And I understood the meaning of the unity.

Perhaps the simplest and best available metaphor for this holy nothingness or this world of unity we are talking about would be to say, in the words of the theologian Richard Rubenstein, “that God is the ocean and we are the waves.” Many people think that because they are present within the ocean that they understand who they are. But the truth of the matter is that it can be divided up in several different ways. The ocean itself represents all of God. And when people think that they are something, then they think they are in control of their lives and they have all the pieces and all the separate parts. But what they really need to understand is that when they slip into the ocean, when they become one with the nothing then, indeed, they are really something. You might say that they are like a drop of water that you and I are like drops of water fallen into the great ocean where it’s no longer possible to know where the beginning or the end is. We are one with God and one with the ocean.

Interview with Lawrence Kushner

Daniel Pawlus: Larry, that was a very inspiring message. I wonder if we might start with this idea of a world of separation versus a world of unity. It feels like we are in the world of separation more often than not.

Lawrence Kushner: I think we’re all, all of the time, in the world of separation except for those glistening moments of heightened awareness when we slip into something where we realize we are all a part of the same great unity.

Delle Chatman: I’m almost afraid to think that we actually might have been created with the intention of us abiding in the world of unity.

Lawrence Kushner: Yes.

Delle Chatman: So we’re missing it by a mile, don’t you think?

Lawrence Kushner: The great problem of mysticism is if God is one and we’re all present within the world of unity and the ocean of God, then why did God bother making the world? No mystical tradition has come up with a conclusive or definitive answer.

Delle Chatman: Well, I’ve got an idea. If I’m God I’d kind of like to share it with somebody. Isn’t it possible that it really is one big share? You know, the universe, our lifetimes.

Lawrence Kushner: The Nobel laureate, Elie Wiesel, says the reason God made the world was that he was lonely and wanted some more stories.

Delle Chatman: And stories are the ways in which we define being human, the ways in which we try to have intercourse with the rest of the world and each other. That works for me!

Lawrence Kushner: Abraham Heschel says that a story is where the heart surprises the head.

Delle Chatman: Nice.

Daniel Pawlus: I loved what you said, too, about this greater connectedness of all of us and being in that place of nothingness. It’s challenging in a way for many of us to make time and space for that and set things away so we can do that.

Lawrence Kushner: Experiencing the nothingness. It sounds funny because it’s counter intuitive. It doesn’t mean “nothing.” It really means the everything! Experiencing the all and the great unity is something that is available to any one of us and all the time. As you might have discovered in your own lives—or in our viewers lives—that it’s something that actually can happen without warning. Not necessarily in a synagogue or church. Not necessarily on a Sunday afternoon. Sometimes in rush hour traffic. Sometimes when you’re up late at night with the baby. You’ll get a glimmer. You’ll get a sense: Oh my God, it’s all connected!

Delle Chatman: And you touched upon something early on when you first gave us the definition of mysticism. This connectedness includes sorrow, travail, challenges, as well as the beatific visions of birds taking flight. In other words, I gathered from what you said that it’s a seamless weave.

Lawrence Kushner: Yes. The man who taught me how to sail a boat in New England, in his accent, said, “Any damn fool can sail a boat in a hurricane, but it takes a real sailor to make one go in no wind!” So I think what that means is that we start times of experiencing the wonder of creation at easy times, but people who are serious about it and devoted seekers after a while try to expand it to increasingly less likely places and occasions.

Daniel Pawlus: Do you think we can try to create more opportunity for that world of unity by being just more open in general? You mentioned your wife pulled you along on that trip that you probably had no intention on going on and joked that she owed you for that.

Lawrence Kushner: It can happen anywhere and it can happen all the time. And my advice to my students always is to start with what works and then try to make it bigger and bigger and bigger. Don’t start with visiting a friend who’s dying in the hospital, but when you get good at it you can begin to find the sacred nothingness and your connection to it in increasingly less likely places.

Delle Chatman: Another thing I like about your perspective is that you’re seeing the mystical experience as something that is available to everyone, not just people who are practiced theologians or clergy or holy people or saints, but something that is there for each of us.

Lawrence Kushner: I’m convinced that everyone has mystical experiences. They are not where the roof flies off the building and you all of a sudden hear the Mormon Tabernacle singing Handel’s “Hallelujah Chorus.” They are more like quickie moments. For just a split second, where you get a glistening sense of your presence in the great unity and once you have that then you go on about your daily life again.

Daniel Pawlus: Is this something you’ve come to in your time as a rabbi? I mean this is non-traditional to a certain extent.

Lawrence Kushner: It’s my attempt to make sense out of religious experience. And what I discover as I talk to people and try to monitor my own life is that I begin to realize that nothing is beneath being a footstool for the sacred.

Delle Chatman: That is a beautiful way of putting it. I wonder if there is some...well, I liked what you say to your students about begin with what works. For someone who is not working at all at this, for whom the word mysticism itself is kind of spooky and like what can that possibly have to do with my everyday life? What kind of a handrail can you give them to step into this experience?

Lawrence Kushner: Such a person, I would respectfully submit, that even for such a person there are moments when he or she has a sense that there is something bigger and something more. And it is always beyond language and it is always nameless, but it is always sacred. And I think it’s the most important moments in life.

Delle Chatman: I wonder if people who don’t believe in God at all or at least don’t think they believe in God at all would agree with that statement that you just made.

Lawrence Kushner: I would say as a mystic, it doesn’t matter what you call it.

Delle Chatman: Ok. Again, like you said, words in a way can separate us from a real insight into our connectedness and maybe even the word “God” for some people is a hot button.

Lawrence Kushner: Well, I could be mischievous and say sometimes people who are convinced they believe in God don’t and sometimes people who are convinced they don’t, do.

Delle Chatman: Well, that’s mischievous, but probably accurate!

Daniel Pawlus: That’s a wonderful paradox at the heart of this, as you said, that we need to be open to this and yet it’s about not doing anything necessarily and listening.

Lawrence Kushner: Yes. I think I would even add that often people are afflicted by what is almost a compelling need to have to believe in God. And I would say, don’t worry about belief, just ask yourself: were there times when you were close to God? And what were you doing when you felt close? I don’t know if I believe, but sure I was close to God. Well, what were you doing and what could you do to increase the likelihood of those times of divine proximity in your life?

Delle Chatman: That’s beautiful. I’m totally stoked! How about you? I’m really encouraged by your presentation and our conversation with you to really pursue this mystical union myself and to encourage people I know to do the same. Thank you so very, very much.

Lawrence Kushner: Thank you.