Jay Michaelson

Jay Michaelson is a columnist for the ForwardZeek: A Jewish Journal of Thought and Culture (which he co-founded in 2002), and Reality Sandwich magazines, and the executive director of Nehirim: GLBT Jewish Culture & Spirituality.  He recently returned (in February 2009) from five months of silent meditation retreat in Massachusetts and Nepal.  Jay is the author of God in Your Body: Kabbalah, Mindfulness, and Embodied Spiritual Practice (2007), Another Word for Sky: Poems (2008), and Everything is God: The Radical Path of Nondual Judaism (2009). A recent visiting professor at Boston University Law School, Jay has taught at Yale University, City College, Elat Chayyim, the Wexner Summer Institute, and many other institutions. Jay holds an M.A. in Religious Studies from Hebrew University, where he currently is pursuing his Ph.D., as well as a J.D. from Yale and B.A. from Columbia.

41 Articles Published | Follow:
Polytheism and Nonduality

It is a noteworthy paradox of religion that those traditions which most embrace nonduality also…

New Psychedelics Are Transforming the Future of Spirituality

In 1954, Aldous Huxley published "The Doors of Perception," a famous essay observing that the…

It’s the Deep Structure, Stupid

We are creatures of narrative. Our sacred myths, our everyday lives, and our political minds…

Free Will: The Last Gasp of the Unenlightened Mind

"Everything is foreseen; yet free will is given" – Pirkei Avot 3:15 Much of Western…

Why I Study Sabbateanism

The story I tell people is this: I went to Israel in 2005 to become…

The House of the Messiah … in Ruins

There is a house, or the ruins of one, at 920 Agora Girisi, in the…

Blogging the Cleanse #6: I’m ready for my swiss chard, Mr. Demille

And all good things must come to an end — sometimes, as with Godfather III…

Purifying My Colon—And My Soul

Depending on whom you ask, the Master Cleanse is either a highway to rejuvenation and…