Are You Spiritual?
by Rabbi Dovid Goldman

One of the truly uplifting trends in today’s society is the renewed interest so many of us seem to be having in spiritual living. To me, it means we are starting to care about our lives in a more personal way. It means we are thinking less about values outside ourselves and more about who we are and what life is really about. I am a far bigger fan of the human being than of anything else on this planet - if we are finally starting to concentrate on ourselves more than on all those appealing distractions out there, I think we’re taking a giant step forward.

There’s one little problem. If asked, would you say you have a fairly good idea what the word “spiritual” means? More directly, would you say you have any idea what the word “spiritual” means? I have been following this in the media recently and it is becoming increasingly apparent that as much as we try to become more spiritual, we can’t get past the annoying little problem that we have no idea what it is.

Time Magazine (October 25, 2004) recently offered a quiz designed to answer the question, “Are You Spiritual?” The quiz is attributed to C. Robert Cloninger of the Sansone Family Center for Well-Being at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri - obviously an expert in spirituality. Thinking myself to be a highly spiritual person, I took the quiz with expectations of approaching the maximum score of 20. A few minutes later, having carefully graded my responses and recorded my score, I found myself looking at the number “2”, though without the zero next to it I was hoping for. According to C. Robert Cloninger, I come in as “highly skeptical, resistant to developing spiritual awareness” - several points below “a practical empiricist, lacking self-transcendence.”

As a student (and teacher) of Jewish spirituality, my first instinct was to study the questions again (humility, I think, ought to be at the beginning of any meaningful path). Contrary to what my score implies, I am not skeptical. Perhaps I’m missing something that I can learn from this quiz, I thought. I am a critical thinker, though, and quickly found myself wondering what could possibly have led this individual to his understanding of spirituality.

Am I a spiritual failure if I don’t “seem to other people like I am in another world” or “lose awareness of the passage of time” or “believe I have experienced extrasensory perception”? Must I “love the blooming of flowers in the spring as much as seeing an old friend again”? Do I really have to “often be called ‘absent-minded’” and “seem to have a ‘sixth sense’ that sometimes allows me to know what is going to happen?” To my mind, this quiz seems designed less to identify the spiritual than the flighty. Is this really what non-Jewish spirituality is about? Is this what thoughtful people should be striving for?

Though I’m not especially impressed with the spiritual values suggested by this quiz, I am not here to criticize it – just to draw attention to the challenge we face in knowing what we are looking for. We certainly don’t want to begin (or end) our exploration of the spiritual with a faulty picture of what it is.

The Jewish tradition, as it happens, has an especially clear approach to spirituality – one with a very different focus from C. Robert Cloninger’s. It’s an approach that opens up a compelling path before us to grow as a person on every level – intellectually, emotionally, personally and socially as well as spiritually. It teaches us how to connect with the world we live in rather than to disconnect from it and it offers a whole world of insight into the most awesome creation on this planet - you.

The Jewish approach is all about the relationship between your body and your soul and how they are meant to work together. Spirituality is not a yes-or-no proposition as suggested by the title of this quiz. It’s all about a choice.

In the Jewish tradition, I’ve learned, the human being consists of both spiritual and physical components, and what matters most is the relationship we create between them. Throughout our lives we choose: to follow the body or the soul? Sometimes we must follow the body, most of the time the soul. It is only through our soul that we can experience the infinite pleasure created for us. But left alone, our bodies take over and our soul slinks into the shadows or even gets lost. It is our choice and our challenge to engage this inner struggle and identify with our soul first and our body second – striking the right balance and enjoying the best of both worlds.

But how do you tell the difference? How do you know when you’re being led by your body and when by your soul? While we’ve all seen our bodies and we know what they want and need, none of us has ever seen a soul. How do we get to know our soul? How can we know when our ideas are being influenced by our physical needs or desires and not by our purest personal judgment? How can we distinguish between exciting experiences that, inspired by our bodies, will ultimately lose our interest and growth that is meaningful and destined to last?

Now these are spiritual questions we can work with. These are questions that call upon us to know our true selves, to face the animal drives that pull us down and to embrace the inner “I” that thirsts for meaning and presence. Far from losing yourself in another world, the way of the Torah is about finding yourself in this one. The more you learn to tell the difference between your body and your soul, the more spiritual you are certain to become as you find material pleasures paling in comparison to the spiritual pleasures you learn to enjoy.

Spirituality is worth searching for with every resource you have if you just make sure you’re looking for it in the right place.