The Jewish Monastic Project, A Concept Paper

Home-leaving, Beyond Nazir, Queering Normativity, and the Jewish Monastery

“Home is not where you were born; home is where all your attempts to escape cease.” - Naguib Mahfouz, (Egypt,1911-2006)

This is essay is a place for me to put in writing some further thoughts I have been cultivating since my initial essay Nazir: Temple of One, and My Gaze on Yah, about heeding the call of the Jewish Monastic impulse.

Leaving Home

Leaving home is a term I learned and cherished in my Buddhist training. Home-leaving is the name for a disciple of the buddha who has joined his followers. Leaving the known, the safe, recognizing the fleeting, insubstantial promises of the mind, and stepping into a path that is complete an utter mystery. In my Jewish ancestral tradition, I think first of Avraham who was called to leave the home of this parents, to go unto a land that is not yet known. Adam and Eve’s expulsion from Eden is another myth of Home-Leaving, yet in their myth, they represent the fall, the consequence of shrouding their consciousness with the vail of the discerning mind. In a passage in the book of Zohar, Avraham, their descendent and home-leaver, arrives at the cave of Makhpelah, meets Adam and Eve, his ancestors, and redeems them. 

Home is the normative, habitual, unexamined way of life, a dream of forever-after, a planet whose ecosystem is not collapsing, or possibly too painful to experience. 

To many that I know, Leaving home means leaving judaism, leaving a world-view that is no longer relevant to them. Jewish people often dredd monastiscm because it brings echos of the Jewish cultural erasure that the inquisition and crusades, sanctioned by medival papal creeds and rolled out by religious orders. It also threatens the family unit which was established by the 1st century sect of Jews called ‘rabbis’ to be the seat of Jewish religious life, since the fall of the temple and the loss of the local-specific practices.

So many who leave Judaism, or disengage from that part of themselves, harking to a similar impulse - home-leaving, a step towards liberation. The double-bind of home-leaving is that it has baked in it the karma of the home. One must fully embody one’s body, one’s karma, and therefore, ones home, to be free in it. This is why home-leaving, and how I envision this monastic, being fully transparent to themselves and to others, where they come from, not apart. Leaving home is exactly why I went into rabbinic school to study the home of my ancestors. This monastic orientation is the dedication to the awareness that bears witness to it.

Beyond Nazir

How does the universal monastic impulse relate to Jewish ancestry and constructed identity? What is the difference between a Jewish Monk, and a Monastic Jew? Beyond semantic, in my case, it posits that the monastic impulse, to orientation towards the contemplative life and single-pointed attunement to the nondual, is prior to my Jewish ancestral identity. 

The first response I get when discussing, still (yes eye roll), is about celibacy. To reiterate, celibacy is a carry-over bias from christian and buddhist traditions and have no trace in the biblical and the talmudic instructions of the Nazir, the person who takes on them additional practices in line and beyond with the temple priests of the Israelite cult. 

But my exploration suggests that to collapse the Jewish Monastic on the Nazir, to conflate the two terms, limits the scope of the what this monastic impulse can be. Many sects of contemplative Judeans existed around and before the first Temple times, whose members lived disciplined, communal or solitary lives, without taking the Nazir vows. Contemplative does not equate Nazir. The Genizah of Cairo, an archive of documents preserved since the middle ages that gives an astonishing view into the Jewish life in Egypt, middle east and beyond of that era, shows documents of men and women taking on temporary or permanent Nazir vows to dedicate towards a particular outcome, not necessarily a contemplative orientation.

The Monastic that I envision, on the other hand, includes but is not confined by the Nazir framework. 

Orientation & Normativity

The second term that folks conflate with monasticism is restriction, often naming rules of monastic (Christian or Buddhist) orders. There is a sense that someone is making a choice, a tough choice, a sacrifice as part of a renunciant life. This posits a certain normativity-hegemony that assumes that everyone would choose something else, naturaly! The term monastic for me represent a natural orientation that manifests in non-normative choices. I am just like that. What to some is restriction, to me is the way. 

The present-day vocabulary and orientation of queerness invites one to fully embrace their complexity by passing through conformity of mainstream social norms. I am taking stock. At forty-five, I am not assuming child-rearing family-making, home-steading is imminent. I feel complelled to fully embrace the privilege I have been gifted. I am passing through/side-stepping social conventions. Yet, queerness doesn’t express my intention for me fully because that term is centered too much on my sexual, gender and familiar orientation and choices I make. I am orienting around a spiritual calling, that is the pivot, and that is what the monastic impulse, and the monastic identifier, represent to me. 

Thinking onward 

I am thinking of what this Jewish Monastic Project be? A place for gathering of those interested in exploring this impulse. For those who experience or are fascinated by it. I am thinking of the many monastics, monks and nuns in Hindu and Buddhist traditions that I know, who come from Jewish ancestry. Often there is a gap between these two identities of their. The complete dedication to their path may not give (or even allow) the place for their Jewishness to be seen - an important part of their karma to blossom and untangle. I imagine a fellowship of monastics practicing in other traditions, having an affinity-group-like space to simply acknowledging it. 

I have been thinking of convening a Jewish Monastery. I best nucternal dreams often involve my time and people I lived with at Zen Mountain Monastery during my Zen training there. Physical? Possibly online to start with? It feels powerful and true to claim and give a home to this orientation. So many have expressed to me a yearning for that. Just that name, Jewish Monastery, brings a sigh of relief to them. The Jewish Monastic Project and the Jewish Monastery are related. The project is vast, edgeless, open to creativity. It denotes unfolding. The monastery is a more karmicly loaded term, it connotes a framework, possibly a physical place if not a temporal one. It seems like the monastery is a derivative of the project.

No conclusion, the project continues.