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The can of worms is open. Opening up the question on my last blog of “How To Find a Spiritual Teacher,” or whether we need a teacher at all, tends to incite even the most dormant of creatures. We have strong reactions, powerful opinions and oftentimes righteous convictions regarding this topic, as was seen from the many and varied, but never lukewarm responses to my last post. In fact, when I toured an early version of my book in 2002, there were two uprisings in bookstores where I spoke — one in Manhattan and the other in Barcelona. In both cases, the movement was to incite the crowd to see that spiritual authority comes from within! I have absolutely no problem with this approach, nor with those who deeply feel the need for a teacher, or those who are confused, but why so much energy?

Is Guru a 4-Letter Word?

I have spent time with gurus who are living proof that “guru” can be a four-letter word. Nobody has asked me to drink cyanide-laced Kool-Aid, but I have been offered plenty of other substances. And most of the other crimes of power and passion one hears about in relation to purported gurus have been perpetrated upon me and people I know. After 17 years of experience on four continents and 10 years of research in the field, I am both personally and professionally all too familiar with the kinds of shocking abuses of power that have been committed in the name of spirituality. Yet I cannot denounce spiritual teachers in general, any more than I can denounce all men simply because I have had some less than desirable lovers.

I have learned that when one writes or speaks publicly on this topic, four potential positions can be expected: 1) The strong assertion that the guru and the source of all spiritual authority comes from within, and that people who seek from without are essentially deluded. This group speaks the loudest and the strongest, usually with a slight edge of disdain towards those who have or want teachers; 2) The people who have a particular guru and not only think that the Guru Road is the only destination in town, but more specifically that their guru’s home is the center of the universe. They want the world to join their guru’s mission because they sincerely believe that the world would be a better place if this was so; 3) One step down from this are those who believe that we need a teacher, but that it need not be their teacher. This group is less likely to proselytize their perspective; 4) Those who are either questioning whether they need a teacher, or are looking for a teacher but cannot locate one — this group is humble, open, curious. If we look at the responses to my previous blog, we see all of these perspectives represented with their predicted intensity.

Not Always So
If there is anything I have learned over 20 years of study, practice and research on the spiritual path, it is the truth of the teaching propagated by Zen master Shunru Suzuki of “not always so.” There is not one clear-cut road of beliefs and practices to suit all human beings. There are well-trodden paths and religions that have proven to be helpful to many people in indescribable and irreplaceable ways. Yet whether we practice in one of these traditions or find our unique path through the labyrinth of life, we each walk the path differently, in a way that only the inimitability of each of our beings can do — our “unique self.”

I now understand that there are as many unique paths to spiritual unfolding as there are human beings. I remember when Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee, my Sufi “uncle,” and Huff Po blogger, told me this. I was a die hard seeker in my twenties. Although in theory it made sense, inside I secretly believed, “But my path is the best path, or at least one of the very best, and there is a best way to follow my path.” Now, almost two decades later, it is clear to me that each human being follows a unique trajectory in relationship to spirit, truth or God.

The Need for Discernment on the Spiritual Path
Spiritual discernment, called viveka khy?tir in Sanskrit, is said to be the “crowning wisdom” on the spiritual path.

The Yoga S?tras of Patañjali say that the cultivation of discernment is so powerful that it has the capacity to destroy ignorance and address the very source of suffering. According to Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, to discern is “to recognize or identify as separate and distinct.” Discrimination, its synonym, “stresses the power to distinguish and select what is true or appropriate or excellent.” Those who possess spiritual discernment have learned this skill in relationship to spiritual matters, and they can consistently make intelligent, balanced and excellent choices in their lives and in relationship to their spiritual development. Their eyes are wide open and they see clearly.

Viveka khy?tir is believed to be such a powerful tool that it has the capacity to pierce all levels of the physical, psychological, energetic and subtle bodies of the human being. In “Light on the Yoga S?tras of Patanjali,” B. K. S. Iyengar explains that through this unbroken flow of discriminating awareness, the spiritual practitioner “conquers his body, controls his energy, retrains the movements of the mind, and develops sound judgment, from which he acts rightly and becomes luminous. From this luminosity he develops total awareness of the very core of his being, achieves supreme knowledge and surrenders his self to the Supreme Soul.”

I believe that more potent than any of our current spiritual convictions — which if we observe closely and honestly within ourselves over many years, we discover, do in fact change no matter how certain we were of what we believed — is the capacity for discernment. The degree to which our discernment is refined is the extent to which we can move through the complexities of the spiritual marketplace and the deepening of spiritual life with effectiveness and wisdom. We make radiant choices that serve others in smaller and larger ways, and become part of the evolutionary and healing force in life, instead of what George Bernard Shaw calls, “a feverish, selfish little clod of ailments and grievances complaining that the world will not devote itself to making me happy.”

Read more: Yoga, Religion, Gurus, Psychology, Spirituality, Happiness, Leadership, Spiritual, Spiritual Power, Living News

In the weeks leading up to the Jewish High Holidays, pulpit rabbis across North America will spend countless hours preparing for their most listened-to sermons of the year. For 2010, “intermarriage” may be a popular topic thanks to the recent nuptials of Marc Mezvinsky and Chelsea Clinton. Compared to years past, I believe significantly more of those sermons will be about welcoming intermarried couples into the Jewish community, rather than discouraging young people from following such a path. And that’s a positive development.

Still, even among the most welcoming and inclusive sermons, there will likely be strings attached. Most rabbis will add caveats, perhaps using similar language as Rabbi Steven Wernick, leader of the United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism, when he wrote about the Clinton-Mezvinsky intermarriage: “Judaism teaches that in-marriage is a mitzvah, a sacred act that we are commanded to fulfill. As such, it’s always the preferred choice for Jews to make, contributing to the continuity of our peoplehood [emphasis added].”

Almost nowhere among Jewish leadership — even in the liberal movements — has there been a full shedding of the preference for in-marriage. And that preference for one type of family over another inevitably must lead to a lesser welcoming for intermarried families.

You simply cannot say, “We welcome everybody equally, but we prefer one kind over another.” Maybe the difference in the way people are treated doesn’t always manifest on the surface level, but it bubbles up. This is not to say that we can’t discuss the challenges of raising Jewish children when one parent is not Jewish; what I’m talking about is the open preference for one type of couple over another, even when both may choose to raise Jewish children.

As an advocate for accepting intermarried families into the Jewish community, I have a rebuttal for every argument against a full welcoming, except one: “Because God said so.”

When observant Jews take an exclusionary approach to intermarriage, I understand. If you’re among the 15% or so of American Jewry who tries to keep all the mitzvot (commandments) all the time, and you believe intermarriage is a “sin,” I won’t argue with you. My challenge is to those among the other 85% of Jews, who pick and choose which mitzvot you find relevant and want to adhere to, but then use the “mitzvah” of in-marriage to criticize me for choosing a different sub-set of mitzvot to observe.

All of non-Orthodox Judaism would be greatly served if our leaders would finally admit — and put into practice — the reality of today’s Judaism, which is (to paraphrase Rabbi Mordecai Kaplan) that Jewish law gets a “vote not a veto” in the lives of the overwhelming majority of American Jews. Mitzvot that seemed essential in the past, including in-marriage, are no longer considered ethical or moral litmus tests.

In the 1970s, when radical modern-Orthodox thinker Rabbi Irving “Yitz” Greenberg grappled with the full implications of the Holocaust, he concluded that God’s withdrawal from earthly affairs and failure to protect His chosen people meant, quite dramatically, that “the covenant was broken.” However, Rabbi Greenberg suggested that “the Jewish people was so in love with the dream of redemption that it volunteered to carry on with its mission.” And in fact those who took up the “voluntary covenant,” as he called it, were even greater than those who acted “only out of command.”

The notion of “voluntary covenant” is a powerful one, and yet it seems to imply that the covenant itself is still an unbroken entirety. If you’re going to take it on — whether by command or voluntarily — you take it all on. But that’s not what I believe is happening among the majority of Jews.

Instead, we’ve adopted a “selective covenant.” Vast swaths of mitzvot are completely irrelevant to our lives. And unlike what I’ve heard bemoaned from some observant quarters, it’s not that if we were just more Jewishly-educated, we’d understand the beauty and relevance of the mitzvot enough to follow them. I know which mitzvot I’m rejecting, and I know why I’m rejecting them. Whether God withdrew as Greenberg and others have suggested, or died at Auschwitz along with so many of our relatives, or simply never was, to me the tradition is only relevant if it improves my life and the lives of those around me. I am never going to believe that separating milk from meat will make this world a better place.

With a “selective covenant,” rejecting the dietary laws of keeping kosher (for example) does not mean rejecting Judaism. We can and do pick-and-choose which mitzvot are relevant to our lives, and I believe the majority of Jews among the 85% not-fully-observant would still say they’re guided by the principles and morals they learned through the Jewish tradition — even if it means reinventing some of those rituals as we go.

When it becomes important to modernize while maintaining a halakhic (Jewish legal) facade, like on gay and lesbian acceptance — or women rabbis, or driving on Shabbat — the Conservative movement demonstrates remarkable ability for Circ De Soleil-like theological contortions. Even the Reform movement’s decision to accept patrilineal descent was based on a responsum. So if the liberal movements disagree that there’s now a selective covenant, and instead believe we must still try to maintain all the mitzvot (or at least rationalize what we do based on the mitzvot), then I recommend they contort their way into equal acceptance of in- and intermarried.

Because for a majority of young Jews today, the mitzvah of “Not to intermarry with gentiles” is about as relevant as the mitzvah “To keep the Canaanite slave forever.” And the harder our leadership tacitly or explicitly “prefers” one type of Jew over the other, the less ethical our community seems. This extends not just to the explicit preference of in-married over intermarried, but tacitly to rich over poor, married over single, white over other races, hetero over homosexual, and so on. I’m not saying that no boundaries should exist in Jewish ritual practice, just that the choice of a non-Jewish spouse, in and of itself, is no longer a decision that should be considered communally punishable.

Once you acknowledge a selective covenant, then objections to welcoming the intermarried are not based on what God wants but on what you want. And as another great theologian once said, you can’t always get what you want. All those other fears about an equal preference for intermarried couples are just fears, and refutable. They raise Jewish kids less frequently? It went from 18% to 33% nationally in the ten years between 1990 and 2000, and it’s at 60% in Boston; no reason to think we can’t encourage those percentages higher. They care less about Israel? That’s not a causal relationship; you don’t change your feelings about Israel because you got married. They dilute Jewish ethnicity? We were never just one ethnicity. And so on.

Over the last quarter-century, nearly as many American Jews have married non-Jews as fellow Jews. Today, there are more intermarried than in-married households in the U.S., perhaps by as large a ratio as 60%-40%. The high rate of intermarriage can be seen as the defining opportunity to transform the Jewish community from an insular, tribal entity to a diverse and expanding peoplehood based on key common causes and beliefs. But first we have to make sure our common causes and beliefs are the right ones to be shouting from the mountaintops (hint: “don’t intermarry” isn’t one of them), and then we have to let go of the fear and begin genuinely welcoming as equal all who would select Judaism for themselves or their children.

Read more: Marriage, Intermarriage, Chelsea Clinton, Inclusion, Judaism, Jewish, Interfaith, Rabbis, Interfaith Relationships, Jewish High Holidays, Religion News

As the Park51 community center and mosque project near Ground Zero is painted as an issue of the rights and future of the American Muslim community, Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf has been challenged to demonstrate that he is a moderate voice for Islam. By portraying the mosque issue as one of American Muslim rights the community is forced to align itself with an Imam who may not represent our true center.

I first met Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf in 2002 at his NYC apartment where a group of young Muslim professionals had gathered for a study circle. After the events of 9/11 many Muslims in NYC were struggling to find their place within American society. Imam Feisal and his wife Daisy Khan filled the void and continue to create venues for Muslims to meet and discuss their faith without prejudice. This work is exemplified by the projects undertaken through their American Society of Muslim Advancement (formerly the American Sufi Muslim Association), the Muslim Leaders of Tomorrow Project (MLT), the Cordoba Initiative, the Listening to Islam documentary, and the Women’s Islamic Initiative in Spirituality and Equality, amongst others. I, along with many other Muslims, have been privileged to be part of some of these programs.

The inclusive spirit however has its shortcomings as well. At the first MLT gathering in 2004,we contemplated Islam’s stance on homosexuality, the status of women in the legal code, and what it meant to be a progressive or modern American Muslim. While important, and soul-searching, questions were raised there was little offered to guide the perplexed and Imam Feisal does not necessarily bear the “Islamic” credentials to successfully engage those within the faith: he is not an Islamic scholar.

This point was exemplified in 2005. As the War on Terror in full-swing, Imam Feisal became more an international figure. His book What’s Right with Islam: A New Vision for Muslims and the West was published, and his interfaith work began to be supported the US State Department. In the televised Doha Debates, it was Imam Feisal arguing that the War on Terror was not a War on Islam, while Mustafa Ceric, the grand Mufti of Bosnia, argued the opposite. The apparent discrepancy in stature might have been lost for the non-Muslim audience, but not for its Muslim one. On one side an Imam from a small mosque in New York City, and on the other a grand Mufti who represented an entire nation.

The Doha debate demonstrates a critical failing in championing Imam Feisal as a voice to speak to the Muslim world. The Imam, unlike his father, and his opponent at the Doha Debates, is not a formally trained Islamic cleric, nor is he a university-trained Islamic studies expert. Thus, both within the Muslim world and in the American Muslim context, one struggles to properly assess Imam Feisal’s place.

In 2007, the RAND Corporation issued a report entitled “Building Moderate Muslim Networks“. The policy paper urges the United States government to ally itself with moderate Muslims. RAND argued that capable partners would found within “Sufis.” Since Imam Feisal’s trips to the Middle East are at times sponsored by the State Department, as noted by a recent NY Times article, it seems that RAND was heard. However, Imam Feisal may be on the fringe of the American Muslim fold in several important ways. Firstly, most American Muslims do not consider themselves Sufis, and if they do the belong to those Sufi orders which are backed by Islamic seminaries across the globe and tied closely to the Sunni Islamic schools of law. These orders such as the Naqshabandi, Chisti, Shadhili, Ba-Alawi, and Muhammadiyya are organizational giants with histories dating back hundreds of years. Imam Feisal’s Nur Ashki Jerrahi Sufi order is less than a few decades old and does not allay itself with an Islamic legal tradition. If the idea is to have the Imam spur change his limited traction within the Muslim tradition posed an obstacle.

Imam Feisal’s greatest strength is his ability to engage people from other religious traditions and foster interfaith collaboration. One of the aims of his work is to foster Abrahamic ethics with Christian and Jewish groups. While the Imam’s accomplishments in this arena are many, it is curious to note that he is not on the roster of mainstream Muslim interfaith programs. The Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), arguably the largest civic organization representing American Muslims, is heavily involved in interfaith dialogue. Yet, Imam Feisal is rarely seen at their events and is not part of the initiatives through ISNA’s Office for Interfaith and Community Alliances. Similarly, Imam Feisal is not part of many university-based interfaith initiatives either. Nazareth College recently inaugurated the Center for Interfaith Study and Dialogue and tabbed Muhammad Shafiq, a former Imam and author of Interfaith Dialogue: A Guide for Muslims, as its director. Imam Feisal is conspicuously absent from this group as well. Imam Feisal’s absence is in part due to the perception that he is not representative of the Muslim middle. As organizations attempt to foster dialogue between the center groups within each religious group he may be perceived as a little removed.

As the Park51 project near Ground Zero has become painted as an issue of religious freedom, American Muslims are confronted with championing the cause of a man who may not accurately represent them. While Imam Feisal is in the middle of the debate, he may not necessarily be at the center of the Muslim tradition.

Dr. Padela is a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Clinical Scholar and Islamic bioethics researcher at the University of Michigan, a fellow at the Institute for Social Policy & Understanding, and a Visiting Fellow at the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies in the UK. His opinions here are his own and do not reflect those of his sponsoring organizations.

Read more: Islam, Ground Zero Mosque, park51, Feisal Abdul Rauf, Cordoba House, park51 Ground Zero, Muslims, Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, Muslim, Religion News