Shabbat Gathering: I'm of two minds about nonduality.

Brian D. Johnson

10 Jan 2025 • 8 min read

Gud Shabbos Khaveyrim, as is our custom, we will gather tonight at 5.45p ct to welcome Shabbat. These are the coordinates:

Zoom
Meeting ID: 883 8469 4181
Password: 822665
Phone: +1 312 626 6799

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Here we go.

My study group is helping me out with a religious dilemma that has vexed me for years. Simply put, I'm trying to figure out if there is good and evil or if everything is good. Do I believe in duality or nonduality?

Way back when.

When I was in middle school, I began associating with a group of grown-ups who practiced vague forms of Hinduism. (In Arkansas?) Hinduism is a very big tent that shelters many varieties of beliefs, but nonduality is well accepted as a core tenet across them all. A nondual philosophy / theology followed me into college where I read Be Here Now by Ram Dass and had my nondual beliefs supercharged. In college I also had some, um ... experiences that led me to deeply feel / know / understand that All is One, to borrow an expression from Dr. Bronner's soap bottle. I lived in a nondual universe. Everything was part of everything else and it was all created by G!d and it was all good.

As I got older, I never really outgrew that point of view. I never looked back and told myself I was being naive. Well, not right away anyway. But then, after having my epiphany that I was a Jew and after embarking on the formal conversion process, I had a change of heart. I felt I needed to better understand the Shoah, something so central to being a 20thC Jew, so I read Night by Eli Weisel. It changed everything for me.

Before I read Night, I never thought there was an uncrossable chasm between "good" people and "bad" people. There were differences of perspective. There were differences in philosophy. And there were differences between how people were nurtured. After I read Night, I realized on a visceral level that there are truly Evil people in the world, people who don't deserve our mercy. And I was frightened. I had never lived in a world where some people were actually out to get me. I had grown up in a world of safety and privilege.

That world of mine where we all held hands and sang Kumbaya exploded. I was a Jew and had a responsibility to my people. I needed to prepare for the worst. I briefly thought about getting a gun but didn’t. That’s how crazy I became. And then I lived with this fear for many years. My beit din and mikva were in an Oakland synagogue, and the night before, someone set the playground on fire. The smell of smoke the next day was overpowering. Yet, there we were. One of the rabbis on the beit din bluntly asked me if I knew what I was getting into and I said … yes.

And I was in a new world. There was Evil and there was Good. And it was never certain that Good would prevail over Evil, certainly not based on what happened to Jews in the 20thC, or pick any prior century for that matter. There is always going to be the next pogrom. It’s just a matter of time.

Recently, I've almost come full circle. As I've written here before, I've been studying Jewish meditation and it's very much grounded in nondual Judaism. Nondual Judaism isn’t some New Age gobbleygook glommed onto “traditional” Judaism. It is actually core to our faith according to what I’ve been studying.
I've been revisiting my roots. I re-read Be Here Now and discovered it still speaks to me, albeit in Hindi. And then, I just finished reading Judaism Is About Love and the author, R. Shai Held, emphasized how everybody is kin because we all came from Eve and Adam. There's a whole lot more to nonduality than what R. Held puts forward, but it’s a beginning.

Smoke in the air.

But it isn't as if I've transitioned all the way back to nonduality. I live with the acrid smell of the Cossaks burning the shetl down the road. Fundamentally, all this has created a Very Big Conflict for me.

For the past year, I've been talking about this conflict with my friends, both Jewish and gentile. Two of my very dear friends at Shaarei Shamayim suggested I read Everything is God by R. Jay Michaelson so I bought it. And when the study group I belong to finished R. Held's book and we were discussing what to read next, I suggested Everything Is God and, after reviewing our other options, decided Michaelson's book would be the one we'll begin studying this month.

F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote, "The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time." I think I have a lot of things going for me, but a first-rate intelligence isn't one of them. If I could just hold duality and nonduality in my head at the same time, I wouldn’t have this conflict. But that’s not the case.

Maybe I’m making too much of all this. Maybe this falls into the bucket labeled, “Hashem is infinite so how can a mere finite person understand the Divine?” Or maybe in a world where dishes must be washed, the bills have to get paid, the chickens have to be fed, … maybe it really doesn’t matter. Maybe we just focus on performing the mitzvot and everything else will sort itself out. Maybe. But maybe sorting this out is what it will finally lead me to enlightenment. That certainly would make the effort worthwhile.

And may it be for all of us a blessing.

See you tonight!
Gud Shabbes!

All my love,
brian.

Extra Special Note

Dorith Hodavah Steinberg will be ordained by Aleph tomorrow. You can send her a special blessing here.

Note: People's March, January 18, 2025

At last Shabbat Gathering, people expressed an interest in learning more about the People's March. Here's all the information there is on it at the time of writing.