Ramakrishna Paramahamsa
| Ramakrishna Parmahamsa is perhaps the best known saint of nineteenth century India. He was born in a poor Brahmin family in 1836, in a small town near Calcutta, West Bengal. As a young man, he was artistic and a popular storyteller and actor. His parents were religious, and prone to visions and spiritual dreams. Ramakrishna's father had a vision of the god Gadadhara (Vishnu) while on a religious pilgrimage. In the vision, the god told him that he would be born into the family as a son. Young Ramakrishna was prone to experiences of spiritual reverie and temporary loss of consciousness. His early spiritual experiences included going into a state of rapture while watching the flight of a cranes, and loosing consciousness of the outer world while playing the role of the god Shiva in a school play. Ramakrishna had little interest in school or practical things of the world. In 1866, he became a priest at a recently dedicated temple to the Goddess Kali located near Calcutta on the Ganges River. It was built by a pious widow, Rani Rasmani. Ramakrishna became a full-time devotee to the goddess spending increasing amounts of time giving offerings and meditating on her. He meditated in a sacred grove of five trees on the edge of the temple grounds seeking a vision of the goddess Kali. At one point he became frustrated, feeling he could not live any longer without seeing Kali. He demanded that the goddess appear to him. He threatened to take his own life with a ritual dagger (normally held in the hand of the Kali statue). At this point, he explained how the goddess appeared to him as an ocean of light: When I jumped up like a madman and seized [a sword], suddenly the blessed Mother revealed herself. The buildings with their different parts, the temple, and everything vanished from my sight, leaving no trace whatsoever, and in their stead I saw a limitless, infinite, effulgent Ocean of Consciousness. As far as the eye could see, the shining billows were madly rushing at me from all sides with a terrific noise, to swallow me up. I was caught in the rush and collapsed, unconscious … within me there was a steady flow of undiluted bliss, altogether new, and I felt the presence of the Divine Mother. Ramakrishna's behavior became more erratic as time passed and began to worry his family and employer. He would take on ritual and mythical roles identifying with figures from the Puranas (medieval Indian holy books describing the adventures of gods). His parents found him a wife hoping his mental instability was a result of his celibacy. About this time, an elderly holy woman named Bhairavi Brahmani appeared and determined that Ramakrishna's madness was "spiritual madness" rather than ordinary madness. He was literally mad for the vision of God. She convened a group of respected religious leaders who examined Ramakrishna's symptoms. They concluded that this was a case of divine madness similar in nature to that of other famous saints such as Caitanya (a fifteenth century Bengali saint). From this point on, people began to treat Ramakrishna with more respect though his unusual behavior in worship and meditation continued. The holy women stayed with Ramakrishna for some time teaching him yogic and tantric meditation techniques. A yogin named Totapuri then became Ramakrishna's mentor. Ramakrishna adopted the role of renunciant and learned a nondualist form of Vedanta philosophy from him. In this system, God is understood to be the formless unmanifest energy that supports the cosmos. Ramakrishna experienced a deep form of trance (nirvilkalpa samadhi) under the guidance of this teacher. This state can be described as complete absorption of the soul into the divine ocean of consciousness. Disciples began to appear at this point in Ramakrishna's life. He embarked on a long period of teaching where he gathered a group of disciples around him. This period of his life is well documented by two sets of books written by his disciples. These references are listed below. Ramakrishna explained on different occasions that god is both formed and formless and can appear to the devotee either way. He often asked visitors whether they conceived of god as having qualities or as being beyond qualities. He then proceeded to teach the devotee according to the way he or she viewed the divine. His acceptance of different approaches to the worship of God and the validity of different religious paths, such as Christianity and Islam, is in the best tradition of the universalist approach to religion common throughout India today. One extraordinary quality of Ramakrishna's message was its universal appeal to a broad cross section of Indian society. In the West, religions like Christianity and Judaism tend to be exclusive, and find the contradictions that arise from a religion that is too broad to be objectionable. If one religious approach is right, the others must be wrong. But the Indian mind tends to more readily accept someone like Ramakrishna who preaches universality of religion and accepts and even promotes individuality in the seeker's approach to God. For instance, Ramakrishna appealed to the upper classes who are likely to follow a Vedantist or philosophical approach to religion by sometimes describing God as a nondual formless essence. His description of Kali as an ocean of light had much in common with the ocean of Brahman that the Brahmins (the traditional priestly caste) seek to encounter when they are initiated into the Gayatri mantra, or the mantra of the sun. One divine ocean of consciousness may be difficult to distinguish from another. Ramakrishna also appealed to those with an interest in yoga and esoteric practices by practicing a nondual form of meditation prescribed by Totapuri which seeks samadhi. The most popular religious practice by far in India is bhakti, or devotion to a deity. Ramakrishna's message was welcomed by both the rural and urban religious people who did puja to the divine mother Kali as a protective and benevolent deity (Kali also has a fierce and destructive side which she generally does not show to those who worship her). These devotees saw him as a great teacher and bhakta who sang the names of God and talked incessantly about God. They too did puja and sang Kali's name in hopes of having healthy children, getting good jobs or marriages, or producing a plentiful harvest. The sincere devotee could even hope for a vision or dream of the divine mother. Those who followed the Vedic prescription of religious universalism summed up in the phrase "There is but one Truth, but sages call it by different names" noted that Ramakrishna practiced the rituals of many religions, and found that they all brought him to the same divine reality in the end. For those who worshiped many different saints and deities throughout India, this universal approach echoed their own multi-faceted religious practices. Finally, for those with a strong sense of Hindu nationalism, Ramakrishna's chief disciple, Swami Vivekananda, entered onto the world stage by doing a keynote address at the World Parliament of Religions meeting in Chicago in 1893, and he electrified his audience. Hindus for generations could point to their indigenous traditions with pride after his exemplary speech. Vivekananda also promoted a more activist form of Hinduism, which focused on education, feeding the poor, and developing libraries and other institutions. His works were a way of showing Hindus that it was not only the Christian missionaries that could benefit society, but that Hindu religion was also valuable with respect to improving society and combating social ills. Ramakrishna died of cancer of the throat in 1886, leaving his wife Sarada Devi who was considered a saint in her own right to take charge of his disciples and carry on his message. An unusual development in modern attempts to understand Ramakrishna’s life has been the recent application of psychoanalytic theory to his experience. While a large majority of psychologists consider psychoanalytic theory to be discredited, historians of religion have resuscitated this moribund methodology in an attempt to explain the existence of Ramakrishna’s mystical experience. Specifically, it is claimed that Ramakrishna's mystical states (and through generalization all mystical states) are a pathological response to alleged childhood sexual trauma. There are, however, some serious problems with the attempt to apply this form of psychological reductionism to Ramakrishna. First, the most recent proponent and popularizer of this theory is not a psychologist and has no formal training in psychoanalytic (or any clinical) theory. Second, he is doing his analysis based on a set of biographical texts rather than direct contact with an individual patient in a clinical environment. Psychoanalysis is a highly interactive process, and analysis of textual data cannot begin to approximate the complex and detailed information provided by the one-on-one relationship that develops between patient and analyst. Applying the psychoanalytic method to one or more texts about a person is therefore likely to result in a failure to understand the patient. Third, the author is working in a thoroughly non-western culture where is it highly questionable whether Western psychoanalytic theory even applies. Fourth, the author has been shown to have difficulty understanding the nuances of the Bengali culture in general as well as the Bengali language in which Ramakrishna's biographical texts are written. He spent a mere eight months in West Bengal most of it apparently in libraries and on this basis makes grandiose claims about understanding both the mind and cultural environment of the renowned saint. This limited exposure makes him subject to serious errors in translation and to misinterpretation of both cultural and textual data. These would be serious problems even if psychoanalysis were among the newest and most accepted psychological theories. Combining them with the fact that psychoanalytic theory is disrespected and ignored by most of today’s psychologists seems to call the whole reductionist enterprise into question. The fact that many historians of religion have eagerly embraced this antiquated Freudian methodology in an attempt to understand Ramakrishna and mystical phenomena in general is an indication that the field may be in trouble. Historians of religion and those in the field of religious studies who grant awards to books based on cultural and psychoanalytic illiteracy seem to be at a loss to find a better methodology by which to understand saints and their religious experience. |
Books on Ramakrishna:
The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna by Mahendranath Gupta
Ramakrishna the Great Master by Swami Saradanananda
The Great Swan: Meeting with Ramakrishna by Lex Hixon
Life of Ramakrishna by Romain Rolland
Ramakrishna and His Disciples by Christopher Isherwood
Available from:
Swami Vivekananda and Sri Ramakrishna
A popular view is that without Vivekananda Sri Ramakrishna would have remained the Sri Ramakrishna of Bengal; to the wider world he would at most have been a mere name. One may quite reasonably dispute the point, for no spiritual force of Sri Ramakrishna’s dimensions could lose its dynamism and remain confined within the narrow limits of one little province. But it goes without saying that Vivekananda would not have been his mighty self without his child-like, simple, but towering spiritual Master.
The reciprocal appreciation of the greatness of the disciple and the Master found an exceedingly interesting expression in their lives. The former was firmly convinced that millions of Vivekanandas could come into existence at the fiat of his Master, while the latter declared that his Naren was the incarnation of Narayan himself to uplift humanity.
Without Arjuna would the victory of Kurukshetra have been possible? Sri Krishna had to preach the whole Gita to train his disciple, over and above infusing into him his divine force.
Sri Ramakrishna and Vivekananda appeared in an age more advanced. Hence the Master could much more easily make of Naren what he intended him to be.
In the life of Narendranath we notice two instances in which Matter submitted to Spirit. The young Narendranath, steeped in agnosticism, accepting matter and doubting the existence of the supreme Spirit, would question people who seemed to be advanced in spirituality as to whether they had direct vision of God. Maharshi Devendranath, father of Tagore, attempted thrice in vain to answer the query of the bold young man, and at last said, “You possess the eyes of a Yogi.”
This very Narendranath fell at the hallowed feet of Sri Ramakrishna, who was a veritable embodiment of Spirit, and who saw Spirit permeating Matter.
As a contrast, the supremely materialistic America practically bowed down before Vivekananda, who stood there as the spiritual representative of the East.
His was a life of numerous miracles. At the age of eight he entered into trance for the first time! He was only thirty years old when America -nay, the West - found the spiritual giant in him! In his childhood and boyhood he condemned women terribly. But in his later years he fought like a giant for the progress of Indian womanhood! We may, however, hold that in his earlier days Vivekananda was afraid not of woman but of temptation. It took six long years for him to make his proud head bow to the Mother Kali. And when his surrender was complete he opened his devoted lips: “All my patriotism is gone. Everything is gone. Now it’s only Mother, Mother!”
I am sure my purpose will be best served if I just reproduce his own words about Kali. “How I used to hate Kali!” Vivekananda said, “and all Her ways. That was the ground of my six years- fight that I would not accept Her. But I had to accept Her at last. Ramakrishna Paramahansa dedicated me to Her, and now I believe that She guides me in every little thing I do, and does with me what She wills.”
Vivekananda ruthlessly looked down upon the so-called miracles that create a commotion in the minds of people. “I look upon miracles as the greatest stumbling block in the way of truth. When the disciples of Buddha told him of a man who had performed a so-called miracle and showed him the bowl, he took it and crushed it under his feet and told them never to build their faith on miracles, but to look for truth in everlasting principles.” He showed them the inner light - the Light of the Spirit, which is the only safe light to go by. Miracles are only stumbling blocks. Let us brush them aside.
To show surprise at anything amounts to a tacit expression of ignorance, and hence of weakness. Never show surprise, - such was the command of Viswanath Dutta to his son Naren when he was in his teens. The son acted according to his father’s instructions from that very day until the end of his life. He spent years at the foot of the silence-hushed and snow-capped Himalayas during his itinerancy. He met people drawn from all sections of society - from the lowest to the highest. He came in close contact with the poorest and the richest of the world. In spite of striking differences in the world, surprise could never take shelter in his all-conceiving eyes.
Perfection is the only choice for a man treading the path of spirituality. Perfection and infinite bliss run abreast. True happiness lies nowhere else except in perfection. But how to achieve this perfection? Vivekananda shows us a unique way to achieve the impossible. He writes: “If we can distinguish well between quality and substance, we may become perfect men.”
Sweetness and happiness are rarely found in carrying out earthly duties. No human being must be judged by the nature of his duties, but by the manner and the spirit in which he discharges them. What is our duty and what is not our duty has been the most puzzling, the most intricate problem to solve since the dawn of civilisation. But the bold statement made by Vivekananda solves it in a very easy manner: “any action that makes us go Godward is a good action, and that is our duty; any action that makes us go downward is evil, and that is not our duty.” And we may further add to it that in order to advance in life, it is our duty to have faith in ourselves first and then in the Divine. Everybody must remember the undeniable truth that without having faith in oneself one can never have faith in God.
Why Ramakrishna Matters
For these reasons alone, Ramakrishna matters to those Jews who are interested in the roots of their spiritual traditions. "All is one" may seem like an obvious, or even trite, religious view, but it has a history, and in large part, that history begins, in the modern period, with Ramakrishna. However, Ramakrishna matters much more than that. In my research of his work (conducted as part of the writing of my next book, Nondual Judaism), I have come to believe that he is a religious figure who ought to be far better known than he is, particularly in the Jewish community, because he explains religious practice in a way that is valuable for all of us semi-believers, non-believers, and closeted believers.
God as All, or God as Beloved?
Ramakrishna (1836 - 1886) To those who know it, Vedanta is known for its radical understanding of the scriptural teachings of unity: that You are That, that there is no essential difference between subject and object, self and other. These teachings are encapsulated in the "Mahavakyas" (great sayings) of the Upanishads: Prajñānam brahma ("Consciousness is Brahman,"),[1] Ayamātmā brahmā ("Atman is Brahman"),[2] Tat Tvam Asi ("You are that")[3] and Aham brahmāsmi ("I am Brahman").[4] On the face of it, these teachings are rigorously pantheistic, monistic, and nondualistic. However, as is well known, and as I have written about in these pages before, Hinduism has many branches, some of which emphasize the fact that all is one, others the many deities of the Hindu pantheon.Advaita, in general, is of the former type, and its pronouncements, though radical, are compatible with atheism, or the pantheism of Spinoza. One may believe that "all is one" or even that "all is God" without having any notion of a historical God, a personal God, or the other forms of God that are familiar to Western and Eastern religious traditions.
For many spiritual Jews today, this presents a problem. On the one hand, we are taught and, on retreats, have experiences of the great All that encompasses everything. On the other hand, we also have experiences -- and a tradition -- of a personal God that hears us, comforts us, even speaks to us. These are basically incompatible. On the one hand, the Ein Sof is everything:
The essence of God is in every thing, and nothing exists outside of God. Because God causes everything to be, it is impossible that any created thing exists except through Him. God is the existence, the life, and the reality of every existing thing. The central point is that you should never make a division within God... If you say to yourself "The Ein Sof expands until a certain point, and from there on is outside of It," God forbid, you are making a division. Rather you must say that God is in found in every existing thing. One cannot say "this is a rock and not God," God forbid. Rather, all existence is God, and the rock is a thing filled with God... God is found in everything, and there is nothing besides God.[5]
On the other hand, there's some vague notion that this Everything has a voice, or a personality, or something.
Ramakrishna faced a similar problem. On the one hand, he affirmed the monism of Vedanta. On the other hand, he was himself a bhakta, or devotee. Ramakrishna was both an ascetic and an erotic-mystic, often experiencing the Divine in powerful, devotional, and sensual ways. He was powerfully and mystico-erotically devoted to Shakti, the Divine Mother, in all her forms. But he was also mystico-erotically devoted to Vishnu in His many forms, and in order to achieve mystical union with Him (whether as Krishna, Christ, or even Allah), would take on feminine attributes in order to unite with his male Beloved.
(Here it may seem that Ramakrishna and the Baal Shem Tov permanently part ways. However, as I have argued elsewhere, Jewish mystics took on similar "feminine attributes" to unite with the Kadosh Baruch Hu, the male aspect of the Divinity. And there are many Hasidic teachings with nearly the erotic force of Ramakrishna's.)
As reflected in the collection of his oral teachings known as the Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, Ramakrishna wanted it both ways. His mind soared to the abstract heights of Advaita Vedanta and his heart loved the Divine personalities. Both perspectives are essential:
When I think of the Supreme Being as inactive -- neither creating nor preserving nor destroying -- I call him Brahman or Purusha, the Impersonal God. When I think of Him as active -- creating, preserving, and destroying -- I call Him Shakti or Maya or Prakriti, the Personal God. But the distinction between them does not mean a difference. The Personal and the Impersonal are the same thing, like milk and its whiteness, the diamond and its lustre, the snake and its wriggling motion... The Divine Mother and Brahman are one.[6]
In other words, "God" and "the world" are two ways of speaking about the same thing, depending on how we think of them. God-as-Being is the Ein Sof; God-as-Active is YHVH. But Ramakrishna goes a step further.
God with form is as real as God without form. Do you know what describing God as being formless only is like? It is like a man's playing only a monotone on his flute, though it has seven holes. But on the same instrument another man plays different melodies. Likewise, in how many ways the believers in a Personal God enjoy Him! They enjoy Him through many different attitudes: the serene attitude, the attitude of a servant, a friend, a mother, a husband, or a lover.[7]
That is to say, to imagine God only without form -- only the One, only the philosophical God, or only the Ein Sof -- is to miss the richness of life itself. Because God/dess takes on many forms, many appearances, and we can delight in them. Sometimes God is master, sometimes mother, sometimes husband, sometimes lover. As Lou Reed sang in a different context, "The possibilities are endless/And for me to miss one, would seem to be groundless."
Moreover, as with images of God, so with the reality of the world:
Brahman is neither 'this' nor 'that'; It is neither the universe nor its living beings... What Brahman is cannot be described... This is the opinion of the jnanis, the followers of Vedanta philosophy. But the bhaktas [devotees] accept all the states of consciousness. They take the waking state to be real also. They don't think the world to be illusory, like a dream. They say that the universe is a manifestation of God's power and glory. God has created all these -- sky, stars, moon, sun, mountains, ocean, men animals. They constitute His glory. He is within us, in our hearts. ... The devotee of God wants to eat sugar, not to become sugar.[8]
What a liberation! Now nonduality embraces not just polytheism, monism, and monotheism, but paganism as well. To eat the sugar of life -- that is the ethos of carpe diem, of sucking the marrow out of life, of poetry and sex and dance. To be sure, Ramakrishna himself was an ascetic, not a pagan. But as I read him, he re-affirms the world (where monism slides to acosmism), and invites us to taste the sugar.
Judaism Is Devotion
For Ramakrishna, and for Kabbalah, the unspeakable is only one half of the faces of God. In Kabbalistic language, it is the ein sof in itself: nothingness, unknowable. But recall that the boundless nondual is-ness and nothing-ness of Being is the starting point, not the endpoint. The Ein Sof births the Sefirot, the God of attributes and characteristics. Like Ramakrishna, the Kabbalah insists that "God with form is just as true as God without form."[9] That All is One is only the beginning. In Chabad language, pure ayin is only one half of the path of unification. Its complement is the return to the "lower" from the perspective of the "higher," the samsara that is one with nirvana, the multiplicity that is one with unity, the manifestation that is a manifestation of essence. Here's Rabbi Arthur Green, in his primary book of theology, Seek My Face:
Because we feel the relationship with God as one of great intimacy, we cannot help but depict it in images of the sorts of human intimacy that we know best: God as our spouse, God as our parent, God as our loving friend. The process of seeking and of growing in faith requires and opening an making vulnerable of the self that usually happen to us only in the intimacy of human relations.[10]
In just this way, devotional nondual Judaism complements the Ein Sof of ayin with the God of yesh, dances in manifestation, and complements contemplation and meditation with prayer, ritual, study, and more. It provides a communal and ethical frame for how the "individual" relates to the community. It is a language of people, spirit, righteousness, and engagement.
This is Judaism as a devotional practice, understood not as some tortured theological wrangling but as a perspective of the heart. For some of us, the heart speaks the language of God, and of Judaism. And for us, the brain trying to make sense out of it is really secondary. For me, reciting the Ashrei is my way of buying a bouquet of roses for the universe. After all the tragedies of the world, I can't say what God hears and doesn't. I just know I want to express love. Of course, for others, a non-theistic devotional practice, through art or yoga or meditation or some other form, can better express that love. But for me, relating to God feels more fuller, from an emotional perspective, than to Being alone.
Skillful religionists know that at different times in our lives, we need different faces of God. On a meditation retreat, it is often good to discard all images of the Divine, even the notion of "Divine" itself, and approach the ineffability of nonduality. In a hospital, this can be extremely unhelpful; there we may need God as healer, as listener, as rock of strength. And in times of emotional pain, we may need some of each. I love that my religious consciousness allows my heart to pine for the God of my ancestors, and connect with Him (and Her) through ritual and the body.
This devotional understanding of Jewish practice avoids the pitfalls of endless and tiring Jewish godwrestling on the one hand, and reductive atheism on the other. As I've written before in these pages, contemporary engaged Judaism seems obsessed with "wrestling," trying somehow to square the circle of religious belief. This is better than fundamentalism, which layers dogma atop unexpressed desire, but it is still an exercise in false consciousness to the extent we are trying to rationalize what is fundamentally irrational.
Yet if religionists layer belief atop unexpressed desire, atheists often ignore the desire entirely. What is the meaning of the yearning of the heart? Is it really as ridiculous as it is made out to be? Is not the question, perhaps unlike the answer, as beautiful as the appreciation of painting, dance, or music? Some atheists treat religion the way a bad junior high school teacher treats a poem: as being about the facts it seeks to convey. Whereas a connoisseur of art or of religion knows that the informational content of the myth is far less important than the way the myth functions in a self-examined life.
I don't care about whether Abraham left Ur and came to Canaan; I care what his journey means to me, to my family, and to my people -- "means" as myth, not as history. I care about what it must have been like for Isaac to submit to the violence of his father, and about his soul, so strong, so willing, so bound. I care about these sacred texts not as pseudo-science or pseudo-history, but as myth. From a nondual perspective, these myths retain their attraction to the relative self. They tell us nothing about the ultimate -- but then, nothing can tell us anything about the ultimate. What they do tell us about is how "I" struggle, prevail, surrender, and fail in "my" relationship with it.
Ramakrishna saw clearly that devotion-practice and wisdom-practice were two different ways to the same end. In wisdom practice, one contemplates and meditates and inquires, and arrives at the place where the self and the world melt away into vapor. In devotion practice, one prays and dances and unites, and arrives at the place where the self and the world are radiant manifestations of God. Sort of the same destination, but seen in very different ways, and approached from different angles. "Under what conditions does on see God?" Ramakrishna once asked rhetorically. "Cry to the Lord with an intensely yearning heart and you will certainly see Him."[11]
To Know and to Love
When Reb Zalman was just Rabbi Zalman Schachter, working as a Hillel rabbi and teacher at Camp Ramah while pursuing his Ph.D. in religion, he came across Vedanta philosophy in the library at Yale. He told me in an interview, "I was very excited to find out how they were dealing with spirituality and the questions that Ramakrishna raised about how to deal with monism and dualism, and everything that he had to say really made a lot of sense to me. From there I went to the upanishads."
This was, Reb Zalman told me, the beginning of his own deep ecumenism and a turning point in how he understood Judaism in the context of other religious traditions. It makes a lot of sense. Here was someone steeped in Chabad nondual philosophy, yet who also loved his devotional path to God. The nondual and the dual; the impersonal and the personal. In the Jewish tradition, these were sometimes seen as either/or: either the acosmism of Chabad or the devotionalism of Polish Hasidism, either the all-is-one of Mezrich or the crying to God of Bratzlav. In Ramakrishna, both are affirmed, but, in a way, both are also put in their place. Don't try to rationalize theism; that's not what it's for. But also don't remain solely in rationalism or mysticism; don't forget that we are living human beings on a living Earth with a living God. From one perspective.
From the "perspective" of the Absolute, all of us is God because God is all there is. But from the perspective of the relative, said Ramakrishna, "I look on myself as a devotee of Krishna, not as Krishna Himself."[12] So, yes, you are God -- but you are not God. Got it? It depends how you look. As Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi says, the mind is like tofu - it takes the flavor of what it marinates in. Or as Ramakrishna put it, "The mind will take the colour you dye it with. It is like white clothes just returned from the laundry."[13] If you dye your mind with God/dess, you can become intoxicated with Him and Her. If you dye your mind with pantheism, you can become One with the One.
And of course, if you dye your mind with Bloomberg machines, celebrity gossip, and angry political diatribes, well, you know the rest. We are suggestible creatures, and ultimately, you are what you eat: the kind of media you consume conditions the kinds of thoughts you have. Garbage in, garbage out. Anger in, anger out. Sorry, but there's no way around it.
Judaism needs Ramakrishna, and in its own way, it is reinventing him. Conservative Movement theologian Elliot Dorff's new book For the Love of God and People essentially makes the same point: that Jewish law is an expression of love, not reason. All these pseudo-arguments one often hears, about covenant and chosenness and whatever, are increasingly falling on deaf ears. What works, in terms of Jewish continuity and Jewish authenticity, is an affirmation of the emotive core of Jewish life. There's an energy there, underneath all the claptrap about ideology, myth, and the rest. Let's give each part of ourselves its due. The mind has science, reflection, philosophy, ethics, history. The heart has art, religion, relationship, earth. What a miracle that we are born, it seems, both to know and to love.
[1] Aitareya Upanishad 3.3, Rig Veda.
[2] Mandukya Upanishad 1.2, Atharva Veda.
[3] Chandogya Upanishad 6.8.7, Sama Veda.
[4] Brhadaranyaka Upanishad 1.4.10, Yahur Veda.
[5] Moshe Cordovero, Helek Shiur Komah, Modena ms, p.206b, in Bracha Zack, "Moshe Cordovero's Doctrine of Tzimtzum," Tarbiz 58 (1989), p. 213-14. Translation mine.
[6] The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, p. 32.
[7] Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, p. 217
[8] Id. at p. 133.
[9] The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, p. 80.
[10] Green, Seek My Face, p. 25.
[11] The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, p. 32.
[12] The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, p. 842.
[13] The Gospel of Sri Ramakrishna, p. 138.