So I understand where Elizabeth Gilbert is coming from in the “Pray” section of her wildly popular bestseller Eat, Pray, Love. In “Pray,” Gilbert—a nominal Protestant from New England—moves to an ashram in India where she becomes a devout student of a Hindu guru and has moments of pure bliss and communion with God.

Maureen Farrell at The New York Post and other critics have complained that the spiritual activity Gilbert recounts in “Pray” proves only that she’s self-absorbed, vapid, and irresponsible. Her record of her passage to India, they say, is the height of American self-help narcissism—a self-involvement distinctly at odds with ‘true’ religiosity.

This is a fast and dirty critique – and I don’t buy it. Buddhist practice, in my experience, doesn’t make us more self-involved, but less. If there’s any reason to be critical of Gilbert’s time in India, it’s not because she’s engaging with another faith —but because she doesn’t engage with the world around her. Which is why the Buddhist in me loved Eat, Pray,Love, but the Jew couldn’t get behind it.

I lost my religion at age 13. A bad cocktail of too much Holocaust literature, masculine God language in prayers, and lousy Hebrew school teachers made me, the Rabbi’s daughter, an apikores – an apostate. And so in college, when all of my high school friends were heading East to Israel for the year, I boarded an Air Lanka jet to Sri Lanka, where I would spend the next five months studying Buddhism. My last month in Sri Lanka – and the one I remember best – was spent in a mountain-top nunnery in the jungle with a group of Buddhist nuns who kept trying to convince me to renounce the world and shave my head.

My response never changed: “That sounds great, and I’m flattered that you’d ask, but I don’t think my parents would like it. Also, I’m a Jew. We don’t renounce. I’m just visiting.”

I thought a lot about what exactly I meant by “just visiting” as I read the “Pray” section of Eat, Pray, Love. I thought about how my forays into Buddhist practice and Vipassana meditation have taught me to swerve from self-regard to a concern for others’ happiness, how they have increased my compassion for others and myself. I thought about how Buddhism has shown me that an awareness of my own suffering must lead to compassion for others. But mostly, I thought about how those months “just visiting” made me a much, much better someday-Rabbi.

They also put me in tune with American religiosity. An “iPod” approach to spiritual life is par for the course in our current American cultural climate. We pick and choose the pieces we want from any religious tradition, and ignore the rest. There’s definitely something problematic about this approach to religion, but it’s not Gilbert’s problem alone.

Neither is it entirely inconsistent with the history of Judaism. Jews have a storied tradition of borrowing from religious trends in the surrounding cultures. In the 11th century, Jewish mystics began delving deeply into Sufi practices and philosophies to deepen their own experiences of God. Bahya Ibn Paquda, one of the greatest Jewish philosophical mystics of all time, was deeply shaped by Sufi ideas about God, Truth and Love. In the 13th century, Abraham Ben Maimon, the son of Maimonides, was a leader of the Sufi order in Cairo. And in the second half of the 12th century, the extreme ascetic practices of the Jewish group known as the Hasidei Ashkenaz were believed to have their provenance in Medieval Christian penitential literature.

In other words, drawing on other traditions’ spiritual successes to create a meaningful religious life is nothing new, and hardly outside the bounds of traditional Judaism. Which is why I think that it’s unfair, at least from a Jewish perspective, to dismiss Gilbert’s time in the ashram as a cop-out because she’s exploring what she wasn’t born into.

Nor is her ashram experience evidence of laziness. As anyone who’s ever spent time on a meditation cushion will tell you, there’s nothing easy about it. You try waking up at 3:30 every morning, sitting perfectly still for six hours, observing and quieting your mind, and then engaging in hard physical labor for a few more hours. Easy? Not quite. Fun? I don’t think so. Good for the world, and the Indian people living in hunger and poverty in the town where the ashram is located? Well, not necessarily, and from a Jewish perspective, that’s the question that ultimately matters.

The theistic and of-this-world Judaism I was raised with answers to a God and prophets who demand unremitting engagement with the world, insisting on the moral imperative to try to help fix everything broken, and help those who are in need. Every day. Whether you feel like it or not. In Judaism, you only get one day a week off from engaging fully with the world (Shabbat, for those of you who weren’t paying attention in Hebrew School), and even then, you’re still bound to provide Shabbat meals for the needy and visit the sick.

Biblical and Rabbinic texts are shot through with the moral and ethical imperative to do more than navel-gazing (however transformative and healing said gazing may be for you personally). So are 19th century Hasidic parables and the 20th century thought of Martin Buber, Abraham Joshua Heschel and Emmanuel Levinas. To be a truly religious person, all these texts, stories and thinkers tell us, is to be a person engaged with others, and responsible for them. (Judaism does have intensely contemplative strains – both philosophical and mystical – but they have been less emphasized in my Rabbi school education, and in the Reform movement I was raised in.)

I have no doubt that Gilbert’s guru would advocate for this as well. And many—if not most—folks meditating in ashrams and Buddhist retreats believe that they are cultivating compassion for self and others. For them, meditation is engaged. But for Christians and Jews raised in less contemplative, activist traditions, that can be dissatisfying and incomplete, and is, I think, what lies behind the many of the critiques of "Pray."

Here’s a personal story, offered up as illustration: My best friend has spent the last three years in a silent Tibetan Buddhist retreat in the mountains of Northern California. When I say silent, I mean silent. Once every four or five months I get a nice long letter from her, but in the interim: nada. She started her retreat about the same time that I started Rabbinical School, and when she called to tell me what she was about to do, I was living in Jerusalem, in an apartment facing the Knesset. It was just after Arafat’s death and just before the withdrawal from Gaza. My roommates were student-soldiers. And one afternoon the phone rang and she told me she was going into silent retreat for three years and that I wasn’t allowed to call her or email anymore. She told me that when I wrote letters, I couldn’t write anything at all about current events.

And you know how I felt? Pissed off. Angry that she didn’t feel more responsible for the world. Then sad, of course, because I was about to lose my best friend for three years. But on the deepest level, jealous. I was jealous because I knew I could never do what she is doing, as much as I might want to. The Jewish values I was raised with tell me so, as does my chosen vocation. A few months of silent retreat? Maybe. A few weeks? Sure. But Judaism is not world-renouncing, even when I wish that it were otherwise, even when the world feels too much to bear. I can have my contemplative time, of course, and I do, every day, when I meditate on my own (and every Tuesday, when I meditate with Sharon Salzberg in downtown Manhattan), but it’s not the same.

And sometimes I still get angry, and jealous, and I wish it were otherwise, but it’s not. And this May, when she comes down the mountain from her retreat, she will live in my apartment in Brooklyn for a few days, and we will talk and eat and catch up and I will tell her what she has missed of the world in the three years she has been on the mountain-top. I will tell her what it has been like down here. I will tell her everything.

And maybe I will even decide that she’s been in a different kind of seminary for the past three years, and that’s OK – that’s as it should be. And maybe I won’t.

Because recently I’ve begun to realize that it’s a lot easier to take pot-shots at other people’s spiritual lives than to do your own inner work. It’s easier still if that person is Elizabeth Gilbert and she has a sweet book deal and the bravery or freedom to do things you won’t or can’t. As Episcopal Priest Barbara Brown Taylor once wrote: “To paraphrase a parable of Brother Kierkegaard’s, if you put a bunch of people in a lobby and give them two doors to choose between – one that says ‘transformation’ and another that says ‘lecture on transformation’, then most of them are going to line up for the lecture.”

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1. Do yoga (I’m a runner) 2. Eat more vegetables (I’m a carnivore) 3. Take a daily multi-vitamin (See #2) 4. Eat less cheese (I’m lactose intolerant) 5. Be nicer to my sister (I’m insufferable) 6. Stop taking myself so seriously (I’m going to be a rabbi.)

But when I got to rabbinical school, my list of resolutions started to seem a bit too superficial for Rosh Hashanah. Instead of pious spiritual aspirations, I was trying to frequent the produce section. I tried to make my Rosh Hashanah resolutions more metaphysical, but I missed my seasonal yoga classes and greens. I missed them a lot.

So I was thrilled when I discovered that Rav Kook, a hero of most contemporary rabbis, once wrote that the beginning of any attempt at Teshuva (repentance) is eating well. Kook claimed that human beings are born naturally good and only become corrupted over time. Repenting, he said, means getting back to who we really are, which starts on a physical level. So in the spirit of Rav Kook, here are a few ways to get your Teshuva on.

Make Rosh Hashanah dinner a part of your day-to-day life by eating more tzimmes and cholent. Cooked carrots are 34% higher in antioxidants than raw carrots and the antioxidants continue to increase if the carrots are kept at high temperature for a long time—up to a week. (Published in The Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry by Luke Howard PhD, Professor of Food Science at the University of Arkansas). Check out this tzimmes recipe, or try Pickled’s less-sweet version. For an extra health boost, vegetarian cholent packs a hearty punch. And thank your grandma—she knew what was good for you.

Spend more time at Congregation Beth Elohim and live three years longer In studies published by The Journal of the American Board of Family Medicine, researchers found that the social interaction and community provided by regular attendance at shul (or church) may add an extra two to three years to your life. Don’t belong to a synagogue? The Reform, Conservative, and Reconstructionist movements all have search engines that allow you to research local options. Just attending on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur doesn’t count, though; it’s hard to find community in a group of people you only see twice a year. Instead, start by regularly attending an adult ed class or doing volunteer work. Then, when you come back for Shabbat, you’ll find enough friendly faces to feel instantly at home.

Who needs Lipitor when you can just accept your sister’s apology? Forgive yourself. Forgive your parents. Forgive Joey Hershberger for not inviting you to his Bar Mitzvah in 7th grade. In the spirit of the season, and as your rabbi has been telling you for years, get over it. Frederick Luskin, a psychologist who works at Stanford University’s Forgiveness Project —the largest research project in the country exploring the physical effects of forgiveness—has proven that persistent unresolved anger can lead to higher blood pressure, cholesterol and stress levels, so letting go is good for your health. It’s also mitzvah, of course, and it only takes nine easy steps.

Ward off Alzheimer’s with the Aleph-Bet Dementia occurs later in bilingual folks: a study in the Journal of Neuropsychologia found that Alzheimer’s and other dementias set in four years later in patients who spoke more than one language. No other factor—culture, gender, immigration, education, employment—made nearly as much of a difference, so get your Hebrew on by enrolling in an ulpan or taking adult education classes. (The National Center for the Hebrew Language has a marketplace selling all the tools you need to keep your brain sharp.)

Swap white rice for brown rice in your stir-fry. Brown rice is lower in carbs and higher in fiber than white rice. It also has more vitamin E, thiamin, riboflavin, niacin and over a dozen other nutrients. And it’s better for the environment—brown rice is less processed than white rice, so it takes less energy to produce. So go ahead. Buy a rice cooker (you can find a variety here.) Dump in two cups of rice, water, and a pinch of salt. Press the button. Wait 45 minutes. Eat. Feel self-righteous. You’ve now done a mitzvah for your body. And if you’re Sephardic, you’ve just doubled what you can eat on Passover.

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“So,” he says in a low, soft voice, leaning across the table. “Tell me, what does Judaism say about sex?” “Be fruitful and multiply,” I say flatly, and start laughing. “What does that mean?” he asks. “It means that the Torah and the rabbis thought sex was a good thing. None of that abstinence and celibacy for them—that’s Christian. No ascetism, no celibacy. Judaism’s not really into celibacy. It thinks sex is natural, and beautiful, and sacred. Or that it should be anyway. There’s no guilt attached to it, really.” “No guilt?” This makes him happy. “Yeah.” I say, “Which is great. But then there’s that clause. The one that says that once you sleep with someone, you’re supposed to keep them.” “For how long?” he asks. He’s a law student. He knows about clauses. “Life.” I say, raising my eyebrows and shrugging. “What do you think?” he asks. I grin. “Remains to be seen,” I say, and return to my sushi. Over the last three years, I have had this conversation on at least five different dates with five different men—all of them Jewish. Before rabbinical school, and before divinity school, my dates didn’t ask me about sex. But ever since I became “Jordie-the-almost-rabbi,” the men I’ve dated have been intensely curious about my sexuality and what Judaism does (or doesn’t) bring to bear on it. I’ve become—without my desire—a one-woman sexual ethics committee. Dating never starts this way. It starts at a party, or a lecture, or a meeting. I meet someone new, I turn on my Jew-dar, we make small talk, he asks me what I study. I say religion. He says, “Oh really? What religion?” I say, “Christianity and Islam,” hoping to prolong the inevitable, and then I feel guilty and say more softly, “and Judaism.” If he’s obnoxious or pretentious, or if he has a sense of humor, I’ll add, “Circumcision and smiting, too.” “What do you want to do with your degree in religion?” he asks. “Become a rabbi,” I say. If I like him, or think that I might, I’ll do whatever it takes not to tell him that. “Oh,” he says, and goes quiet. He’s now picturing the rabbi at his home synagogue, comparing me to the bald guy with a gut who dresses up as a baseball player every Purim. “That’s intense,” he says. The R-bomb, it’s fail proof. It always shuts them up. If he thinks I’m cute enough, if he’s not getting bible-beater vibes, he’ll continue, and then he’ll ask me out. Nothing like going out with the guys for a beer and telling them you’re dating a rabbi. A cute one, he’ll add. In tight jeans.
The eroticization of this profession is stunning. He’ll call me up from work and whisper, “Hey, Rabbi Gerson.” Flinching, I’ll look around for my father, Rabbi Gerson the first. The mystique of this profession turns him on. He thinks it’ll be like being in bed with God. He wonders if I’ll speak to him in Hebrew. But far worse—and more common—are the men who fall for me but won’t touch me. For many Jewish men in their 20s, you can’t just date a rabbi. You have to be serious about her. This Madonna-whore complex has wreaked utter havoc on my dating life, and produced more conversations with the word ‘marriage’ in it than I want to recall. (“Marriage?!” I want to say, “Are you crazy? I just want to date you, for God’s sake. Just relax!”). But too many Jewish men think that they have to be serious—on-the-road-to-marriage serious—to even casually date me.

Even now, I’m still trying to figure out what serious means to these men, but I think it’s mixed up with the possibilities of what could happen when something as messy and complex as sex and sexuality becomes mixed up with God and what we hold most sacred. Sometimes I feel like the enormous ambivalence evoked by the meeting of divinity and sexuality is an ambivalence I provoke in the men that I date, and the repercussions of this have complicated or ended relationships that in any other universe would have been just great. There’s nothing as frustrating as dating a great guy who adores you but is afraid to touch you because he’s worried that he’ll incur the wrath of God. (Or be smote. Be careful when and with whom you joke about smiting.)

The bottom line is this: too many of the men I date make significant assumptions about me without getting to know me first. They assume I’m Shomer Negiah (I'm not), they assume I'm strictly Shomer Shabbat (I’m not), and they assume that my commitment to a lifetime of Jewish leadership makes me—or should make me—a Puritan. If I’m comfortable with my sexuality, they’re shocked. If I wear a low-cut shirt, they’re scandalized.

I’ve had my share of flings since graduating from college. Almost all of them—before rabbinical school—were with non-Jewish men. My relationships? With Jewish men exclusively. Believe me when I tell you I didn’t plan it this way, nor did I intend, for better or worse, for this to be the case. We don’t fall in love with people, even if our mothers would like it, because of the religion they were born into.

But the non-Jews, they knew better. They knew that in my world they were not welcome, at least not for long. Well, by me, maybe, they’d be welcome. But not by the places I was going, and in the communities I would someday lead. Non-Jewish men assumed our relationship couldn’t become serious—and after the Jewish men who put me in the serious category automatically, this was an enormous relief. Ask first, I say. Because you don’t know.

Dating as a rabbinical student has made courtship—an ordinarily fraught, and occasionally painful endeavor—that much harder. It’s hard to ask men to see me as a woman first and clergy second. It’s hard to explain that I want to leave the baggage and blessings of my work at home (or at synagogue) when I’m on a date. And sometimes, as anyone who’s ever dated in New York City knows, it’s just hard. By being enough of a feminist to train for the rabbinate, I’ve unintentionally saddled myself with age-old gender stereotypes, issues that the majority of women my age don’t have to address anymore. Questions about how to talk about my career—or whether to talk about it all—and issues surrounding how I dress, whom I date, and what I do on those dates crop up in ways that “Free To Be You and Me” never warned me about. The problem is this: I’m not willing to give any of this up. Not my sexuality, not my spirituality, not my Judaism, and not my career. I want it all. And as a third-wave feminist, I want to believe that I can have it. I expect it. So mah la’asot? What to do? For the moment, I’m working on kicking the “rabbi” word out of the room on dates. My title doesn’t belong on a date. It doesn’t belong between me and my lover. So these days, I’m looking for a man who can ignore it, or at least realize that this word is not me, that I am more than the sum of its parts. Then, I hope, he can get to know me as me and not as the role I will someday have.

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"The rabbi owes to his people not only his industry but his judgment, and he betrays instead of serves them if he sacrifices it to their opinion; a rabbi who asks only whether a thing is popular or unpopular instead of seeking to know whether it is right or wrong, is a coward to begin with and a menace always." –Rabbi Leo Jung

A student hated one of the sermons I gave this year. Let me repeat that.

He HATED my sermon. I mean, he found it so offensive that he wrote an email to folks at the Union for Reform Judaism and to my bosses at NYU suggesting that they should "take action" because of what I'd done. Which means fire me. What had I done?

I said that the people who had disproportionately suffered in the wake of Hurricane Katrina were poor and black. I said that the government had failed New Orleans. I quoted New York Times articles. I quoted New Orleans residents. I quoted my sister, a New Orleans refugee. I said that the federal and local governments had failed. And I fact-checked everything with a lawyer friend of mine who has done substantial work in the area. "I don't want to point the finger at the wrong people," I wrote him an email a few weeks ago "Can I say that the Army Corps of Engineers failed?" I asked. Yes, he wrote back. Unquestionably, given all the evidence, yes.

I presented the facts on the ground, and in the newspapers, and I talked about what I'd seen when I spent a long weekend visiting New Orleans last year, six months after the fact. What did I see? What looked like a war zone. (And this from someone who's spent time in the West Bank and unsavory parts of Sri Lanka.)

I talked about accountability, and renewal, two of the most important themes of Rosh HaShanah.

The student called me divisive. He said I had politicized his Rosh HaShanah services. He talked about how he left angry and offended. He said that I had blamed the government (You're damn right. Even George W. Bush blamed the government). And then he wrote something that I'll never forget: "Religion and politics shouldn't be mixed." He doesn't want to hear about society when he goes to Rosh HaShanah services. (Presumably, he wants to hear about himself). And he wants to leave feeling good about himself. (Um, I'm not sure that's what Rosh HaShanah and Yom Kippur are about.)

Anyone who tells you religion in America is not also politics in America is lying, or not paying attention. Anyone who reads the papers and watches TV, and doesn't understand the power of the Christian Right and the appropriation of Christianity and "Christian values" by the Right is missing the boat. And this student, who wrote in his email that the Reform Movement was apolitical, couldn't have been further from the truth.

We were the first movement to ordain women and to ordain out gays and lesbians. Apolitical?

In a post-facto staff meeting with my boss, I explained that one of the major reasons that I came back to Judaism after a rogue 8 years as a wannabe Buddhist (which, to be fair, I still am. More a JUBU these days…) was that Judaism is so overtly political, so unapologetically engaged with the world. It's because of people like Rabbi David Saperstein, the Director of the Religious Action Center in Washington D.C. It's because of my Rabbi father, who used to head up the Illinois Coalition for Abortion Rights, and his board members, who were nuns and Rabbis and priests. It's because my Judaism informs my politics, and has, largely, shaped who I vote for, and why. It's because Abraham Joshua Heschel marched with Martin Luther King, Jr. It's because the first abolitionists in America were preachers. It's because of Rabbi Melissa Weintraub, who spends half her time leading Rabbis for Human Rights, and the other half bringing American Jewish leaders to the West Bank to speak to Palestinian peace activists. It's because, as Rabbi Jung once wrote: "The purpose of the Rabbi is to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable."

It's because prophecy has never been non-partisan. It's because religion matters in American politics, more than it ever has before.

It's because, if I had to give that sermon again, I'd say the exact same thing.

(To read a copy of my inflammatory Rosh HaShanah sermon, email me here).

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