THE JEWISH THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY REQUIRED RABBINICAL students to spend one year in Israel, and we decided to go the following fall. One day, shortly before we left, Norman Fischer (Abbot of the San Francisco Zen Center) was in New York for a visit and decided to come to minyan at the seminary with me. He had often told me about the intensely Jewish life he had led as a boy. He had been his rabbi’s favorite and had prayed and studied with him every day. When he was eleven years old he had vowed to himself that he would always remain faithful to Judaism, and, as far as he was concerned, he had never broken that vow. He never missed High Holiday services, and it was only because of him that I had begun to celebrate Passover seders again. He bad never felt alienated from Judaism, and he did not see his involvement with Buddhism as posing a conflict to his Jewish identity. In fact, in a way that was often difficult for me to understand, he saw his Buddhist practice as the fulfillment of his Jewishness.

In the fifteen years that Norman and I had been close friends, I had never been in a synagogue with him, and I was shocked when he walked into the minyan and threw on a set of tefillin as if he’d never missed a day in his life. He picked up a siddur and began to daven with great fluency and passion, shukkling mightily backward and forward. After the service was over, there was a radiance on his face I had never seen before, not even after a session in Tassajara. “Now that I’ve done Zen meditation,” he said, “I could do this for the rest of my life and it would be enough. I wouldn’t have to do anything more. But if I’d never done Zen meditation, I wouldn’t even know what this is,” he said. I knew exactly what he was talking about. I had felt exactly this way so often in my own prayer life, as if Zen meditation had opened me to the great richness of ordinary Jewish prayer, a richness that was no longer apparent to most Jews.

I have thought of Norman’s remark many times in recent years. I watch Jews come to our morning minyan searching for spirituality–a spirituality which I know very well is there-which I feel very powerfully every morning of my life. A very few manage to find what they are looking for, but the vast majority do not. The power of the service seems lost on them. Or in my friend’s words, they don’t even seem to know what this (the service) is.

Part of the problem is education. People don’t understand Hebrew, and they don’t understand the structure or the function of the service, and this keeps them outside of it–and therefore, untouched by its deep current of feeling.

But that is only part of the problem, and, I believe, not the most important part by far. It’s important to understand the language and the structure of the Jewish prayer service, but I think the real spirituality of the service lies elsewhere–in the rhythm of the service, in the flow of gesture and sound, and in the silences between and behind the language. Spirituality is non-verbal and a-rational. Understanding can certainly enhance it, but it can never contain it, nor even convey it very well. That’s what my friend the Zen master meant. His meditation practice had sensitized him to the non-verbal spirituality of the service. Without that sensitivity, he didn’t even know what the service was, even though as a boy he had davened it every morning of his life.

Perhaps there was a time when Jewish life imparted this kind of awareness automatically–a time when whole communities of Jews were so sensitized to the sacred in the world by rigorous, traditional observance that the spiritual potential of the daily service was perfectly obvious to them.

Meditation has many benefits, and as Aryeh Kaplan, Jonathan OmerMan, and many others have pointed out, it has along and distinguished Jewish history as well. But at this moment in our history, I think it has a particularly important role to play. Somehow we have lost touch with our sense of the spiritual. Meditation, in a Jewish context, can help us get back in touch with it.

Norman had been rising in the ranks at Zen Center. He had gone to Japan to receive transmission. He was now a Zen master, and soon I would be a rabbi. We were each other’s path not taken. The apartment we rented in Jerusalem was built out of chalky pink Jerusalem stone that gave off an odor of old bones in the heat of the day. It was in Talpiot Mizrach, a magical neighborhood of new apartment buildings winding up and down a mountainside where the old U.N. headquarters used to be before 1967. From our living room we could see the hills of Moab and the volcano-shaped Mount Herodian. Spread out beneath our building were beautiful Arab villages. Their cobalt blue windows warded off the evil eye. Loudspeakers on the top of a minaret broadcast the Moslem call to prayer. It woke us up before dawn every day, when it was still cool.

We soon learned to shop at Rail’s, a corner grocery store with a four-sided counter where people of every description crowded around on all sides. We bought our milk there in plastic bags, while Rail ran back and forth dispensing items and making change in Hebrew, Arabic, French, English, Russian, and Yiddish. We had a community center in our neighborhood where Hannah took ballet lessons. There was a Calder sculpture of a red heifer in front. Across from it was a supermarket where all the food was kosher. Sometimes, we would see Bedouins on camels or donkeys in the courtyard. In the bomb shelter–every neighborhood in Israel has a bomb shelter–there was a Conservative synagogue. Religious politics being what they are in Israel, it was hard for a Conservative congregation to have a regular synagogue. That is where we went to pray on Shabbat. There were a lot of Conservative Jews in this neighborhood, many of them Conservative rabbis. But they didn’t have a daily minyan. For that, I went to a little Orthodox shul in a geodesic dome across the street.