A Happily Bifurcated Yoga Jew: Why I Keep My Asanas and My 'Adonais' Separate

[MormonHero]

After my presentation at a smallish Midwestern synagogue last spring, I was schmoozing over the dessert table when the rabbi came up to me and asked if my yoga practice had anything to do with my Jewish observance (thus letting me know that he had read my blog, where yoga is one of the few personal details in my profile.)

This was a cool, young rabbi, the kind of rabbi who runs serious wilderness hiking trips with congregants and prays with them under the stars. I assumed that he wanted to me say yes, but I told him the truth.

“No,” I said. “Yoga is for emptying my head. The Jewish stuff is about filling it up. I try to keep them separate.”

He grinned at me and said, “Me too.”

Several years ago, I tried a “Jewish Yoga” class in which the instructor used Hebrew metaphors to get us into poses or asanas.

“Think of your body as an aleph,” she said.
…
For most Americans, yoga is a spiritual practice, but not a religious one. Of course, Judaism is both a religious and a spiritual practice. And while I experience the spirituality of Jewish life in song, ritual, holidays, and communal study, it is on the mat where I manage to lay down my ego for more than 10 consecutive seconds at a time.

People I trust and respect have told me about terrific teachers who masterfully blend yoga and Judaism. But I also know that finding the right yoga teacher – like finding the right rabbi or hairdresser, is a matter of chemistry and kismet and timing. So maybe someday I’ll give the Jewish yoga thing another try.

But the truth is, I am not interested in a reconciling my yoga practice and my Jewish practice. I feel no tension or contradiction in this double life.

Judaism demands debate, and justice, tzedakah (charity) and committee meetings. Judaism requires engagement rather than detachment. It’s a complicated package that defines, delights, and challenges me.

Yoga is where I go quiet and stop striving – even when I’m sweating. This is a counter-intuitive effort for someone like me: opinionated, impatient, perfectionist.

I am happily bifurcated; a Jew who studies yoga, a word that means “union.”

Go figure.

 

[former_Catholic]

God is God.

Man is limited in both his perspective and in his understanding of God. All religions reflect those limitations in one way or another.

but God is God.

Christ said that it was the pure of heart who would see God.

If there is such a thing as one “true church” it is comprised solely of those who are sufficiently pure of heart to see God directly and transcending all. Everyone else sees only what they themselves see and understand of somebody else’s idea of God.

Why should a Jew not study Yoga?.. or physics?
Why should a Yogi not study Judaism?.. or anthropology… or biochemistry?
Where in heaven or earth could one ever look and not eventually find the hand and the face of God transcending all of it?

 

[RebeccaJ]

Best post title ever.