I am traveling in Israel this week leading a group of American Jews committed to making the world a better place – a place of greater dignity for all people, a world in which Jews feel more deeply connected to each other, and a world in which they and others can find faith/religion/spirituality/meaning on their own terms. And it is meeting this last challenge that interests me this Friday as Jews around the world prepare to Parashat Lekh Lekha beginning with Genesis 12.
What do we really mean when we say we want connection and meaning on our own terms? Is that simply new age narcissistic drivel – the whim of spiritually lazy people who are not willing to dig in and find what their faiths want them to find? Or could it be a powerful and healthy path to spiritual insight and renewal? I guess in depends.
According to Genesis, God tells Abram “Go to yourself, from your native land, from your tribal home and from your father’s house”. And in those words lie the key to finding a middle ground between using spiritual growth as cover for the most ego-driven self-serving silliness, and invoking religion as the excuse for stripping people of all individual discovery and experimentation in the construction of a meaningful spiritual life.
Using this one brief sentence from Genesis, we can see that the journey outward, upward, or anywhere else for that matter, begins with the journey inward. However much we use other texts or communal precedents, there is no escaping that barring utter coercion, each of our spiritual paths are first and foremost a reflection of who we are and what we want. And were they only that, I too would be concerned. But the verse continues.
Having begun the journey by going inward, by checking in with himself, Abram must then begin the journey outward – a journey which takes him beyond that which is known to him, and comfortable for him. What keeps the journey inward healthy is that it must be balanced by a journey outward, toward others and toward the larger world in which both Abram and we live.
Each deserves to find the spirituality, meaning, and purpose we need to, on our own terms. And each of us must find terms which demand that whatever we find serve not only our individual selves, but the larger world as well. When that happens, like Abram, we will know lives of blessing and success.