Radical Now?
February 20, 2011 by Joel Stanley
Radical Judaism:
Rethinking God & tradition
By Arthur Green
Yale University Press, 2010
Everything is God:
The Radical Path of Nondual Judaism
By Jay Michaelson
Shambhala Publications, 2009
What does it mean to be radical? In the context of religion, the term can conjure up images of extremism, violence and fundamentalism (as in ‘Radical Islam’), often through strict adherence to orthodox norms. But to be radical is paradoxically both to depart and return—to depart from conventional or accepted forms, and to return to something essential, the ‘root’ of an ideology or philosophy.
What then would ‘Radical Judaism’ be? Perhaps the gun-toting hilltop nationalism of the Settlement movement? Or the ultra-Orthodoxies of Stamford Hill or Mea Sharim? Or could it be something altogether non-Orthodox, a return to a perceived essence prior to or beyond those outer forms and beliefs?
Two recent books that emphasise their radical credentials are Radical Judaism: Rethinking God & Tradition, by Arthur Green, and Everything is God: The Radical Path of Nondual Judaism, by Jay Michaelson—and they have far more in common than merely their titles. Michaelson, a scholar and activist who writes on spirituality, Judaism, sexuality and law, and Green, rector of the Rabbinical School at Hebrew College Boston and a major scholar of kabbalistic and Chassidic thought, both eschew conventional conceptions of a personal God who is outside of creation and intervenes in the world, in favour of a more mystical—yet immanent and accessible—Oneness.
