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What is spirituality anyway? Isn't spirituality about emotion?
And isn't work about the rational mind?
"Too often, we divorce our 'work life’ from our 'real life,’ from our innermost beliefs and convictions. But ‘work’ can be as much a part of our life—and as much a vehicle for spiritual growth and personal understanding—as going to synagogue or church on Saturday or Sunday or taking a walk in the woods or reading quietly to our kids at bedtime. In fact work may be among the most potent vehicles for fulfilling our spiritual life because, for many of us, it presents the best opportunities to meld community and social and economic productivity with personal belief and individual talent."
—from the Introduction by Norman Lear
Being God’s Partner will help people of every faith reconcile the cares of their work and the strivings of their souls—and restore the hidden link between them.
By exploding our assumptions that work and spirituality are irreconcilable, Salkin explores how spirituality can enhance our 9-to-5 lives. "It is time to be as rich internally as we are externally," he writes, offering soul-stirring ways to “smuggle religion” into our workplace.
Thought-provoking, practical and exhilarating, Being God’s Partner goes beyond just talking about the subject to give you specific actions to take and connections to make—right now—to help infuse our lives with greater meaning, purpose and satisfaction—and invigorate all that we do.
Since Rabbi Jeffrey Salkin wrote Putting God on the Guest List: How To Reclaim the Spiritual Meaning of Your Child's Bar or Bat Mitzvah in 1980, doing mitzvot has become fashionable, while Israel, the topic of his latest book, has become decidedly "passe."
“Al Gore’s inconvenient truth is global warming. Our problem is a little bit of freezing. We are cooling off in terms of our relationship to Israel. It’s almost as if we have internalized the attitudes in the surrounding world, especially on college campuses,” said Salkin in a recent telephone interview from Boston.
His book, A Dream of Zion: American Jews Reflect on Why Israel Matters to Them, published by Jewish Lights in 2007, is a project he undertook as a corrective to that “cooling” trend, he said. “I edited Dream of Zion to strengthen the connection of American Jews to Israel and to give them role models for how to support Israel. There’s no orthodoxy in this book — no one approved method. There are right-wing Zionists and people critical of Israeli policy. But every person in the book wants Israel to be democratic, Jewish, and secure,” he said.
A Reform rabbi, Salkin acknowledged the trend is particularly acute among Reform Jews. “Reform Jews are statistically the least connected to Israel, they go to Israel the least, their children go to Israel the least, and they tend to be more critical of Israel,” he said.
If the connection is less visceral among this group, he also acknowledged that it is due to demographic trends, including the high numbers of non-Jews being brought into the denomination through intermarriage. “It does seem to be a smoking pistol,” he said. “It is fair to say that demographic trends in the Reform movement have put a strain upon our commitment to the larger Jewish community and people,” he said.
Salkin also pointed to the rise in “Jewish spirituality” as another culprit in the lessening of interest in Israel. “To the extent that Jewish spirituality has grown in the movement, there has been a concomitant shrinkage of Jewish peoplehood. Ethnic ties have grown strained. As we become more removed from the immigrant generation and more American, our commitment to the larger Jewish people is becoming strained.”
Salkin himself has written and edited books that focus on bringing spirituality into one’s life, including Being God’s Partner: How to Find the Hidden Link between Spirituality and Your Work.
Salkin is the founder, rabbi, and director of Kol Echad: Making Judaism Matter, a transdenominational kollel, or Jewish learning center, in Atlanta. Kol Echad was established in 2007. If this generation is less engaged with Israel, they are more focused on tzedaka.
“There’s a new hipness to altruism,” said Salkin. “I find many families increasingly interested in engaging in good works, and tzedaka. In some cases, they’re even becoming competitive with each other. The same effort that used to go into the celebration now goes into doing good works.”
And while he said he wishes the motivation were pure, he’ll take the deeds. “Even if people do good, ethical things for narcissistic reasons, they are still doing good things,” he said. He’s also thrilled that the impetus for the mitzvot often comes from the family itself, rather than as one more hoop for a young person to jump through before his or her big day.
So does Salkin think there’s still room for improvement? Yes. “I wish families were doing more things that are specifically Jewish,” he said. “Many people give to the disease of the week or to save the whales. We need to redress the imbalance between the universal and the particular. We need to remind ourselves that if we as Jews do not give to Jewish causes, who will?”