The Story of How I Became Religious
Before I began studying the Torah ten years ago I considered all religions the spiritual imaginations of ancient world mythology. However, after an intense ten year journey into the heart of the Torah and its secrets, the Torah has become the center of my existence. I would like to share briefly some of the awesome realizations that led to this transformation. The path of the Torah and its faith in God is not something of the ancient past, but a powerful reality that thousands of Jewish people are awakening to today.
I grew up in a family that was completely separated from its Jewish roots. Although both my parents are Jewish, I did not go to Hebrew school, attend a synagogue or celebrate any Jewish holiday. We were the first in our reform Jewish neighborhood to have a Christmas tree.
When I was a child I asked my father what Judaism was. I asked him, "Do we believe in God? He said no. "Do we believe in a soul or the afterlife?" He said that we didn't. So I asked then, "What is Judaism about?" He said that it was a tradition of customs. I had no interest in traditions or customs for their own sake, and so this conversation was the first and last time I spoke about religion in my family. Having been raised in the era after the holocaust, it was understandable that my father and mother had no interest in practicing Judaism.
My grandfather was the son of an immigrant from Russia, a communist who was exiled by the Czar before the revolution of 1917, and so he was raised as an atheist. Until the age of 31 I had never met a Jew who believed in the Jewish religion. Consequently, I had not the slightest thought in my mind that there was a God. When I was a child my entire life centered around music, movies and television. My grandfather Bob Shad was one of the most famous men in the music business; he recorded the Platters, Janis Joplin, Ted Nugent, and all the legendary figures in Jazz, such as, Coleman Hawkins, Ben Webster, Count Basie, Charlie Parker, and Sarah Vaughn. My brother Judd is well known today as one of the premiere comedy writer/directors in Hollywood. Entertainment and money was our family religion.
My grandfather and I were very close. He did not have any sons, and when I was born I was named after him and given a middle name after his father. My grandfather treated me like his son, but with the special bond that only a grandfather and grandson can share. He was an amazing man, full of the love of life. When I was a small boy of only five, he used to take me flying in his twin engine Cessna airplane. The flights in his airplane were like spiritual experiences for me. I remember so vividly the roar of the engine as we sped down the runway, soared into the air and flew above the clouds.
When I was nineteen, the phone rang early in the morning on the day of my birthday, March 13, 1985. It was my aunt who told me that my grandfather died of a heart attack at the young age of sixty-five. I cried so intensely and out of the depths of my tears and pain I shouted and screamed out at God for taking my grandfather away from me. For over an hour I continued to shout out loud at God in my anger.
I never thought about it until many years later how strange it was that I was shouting at God. I had no belief in God, not even a thought about Him. And yet in this moment, I spoke to God face to face -- God who was present and real, the Creator and Director of all events. Hidden in my soul was the complete faith in God and this tragic shock brought it out of me. But after this initial shock, this strange, intuitive knowledge of God disappeared.
The death of my grandfather led me on a spiritual quest. I had just begun studying Greek philosophy in college and learning about the idea of the immortal soul. I had not considered these ideas seriously, but after my grandfather's passing I concluded that the beauty and love I saw in him could not just vanish. This was the most real thing I had experienced in my life. Plato's teaching of the immortalty of the soul and the Eternal Ideas of Truth, Beauy, and Wisdom became my religion, but I did not think about God.
I went on to devote my life to the philosophy of Plato. Plato presents a spiritual teaching that is the foundation of all Western thought and new age philosophy. I went on to study with a contemporary master named Pierre Grimes, who had revived Plato's philosophy and developed a whole path of life around this ancient wisdom. Pierre taught me his new paradigm for psychology based on Plato and his teacher Socrates, and the art of dream interpretation. We also practiced the discipline of Zen meditation and I studied with Maezumi Roshi, the founder of the Zen Center of Los Angeles.
The ultimate questions of philosophy are what am I? And what is reality? These deep questions are asked also in Zen as puzzles that become the focus of mediation practice. In Japanese they are called koans. In Zen, a student focuses all his meditation and energy on such a question until he exhausts every possible thought and answer. This leaves the student in a complete state of wonder and openness that awakens the mind to direct experience of existence. In life, we are usually thinking about pains and pleasures, different thoughts, fantasies and fears. All these thoughts become the object of our experience. It takes a lot of effort to purify the mind in order to just experience the world simply and really as it is without our mental interference.
After many years of intense meditation, I had my first "enlightenment experience." In the middle of the meditation hall I burst out in laughter at the joy of the moment. Later that day one of the other students asked me why I laughed and I answered him saying, "I saw the smile of God." This was the pure description of my experience. My answer to the Zen Koan, but oddly enough, I still had no interest or belief in God.
Despite this experience, I continued on in Buddhist practice and came close to becoming a Buddhist and a teacher of this religion. The ultimate quest of the Buddhist is to discover “your original face before your mother and father were born.” This “original face” is the realization of “nothingness” and the illusion of the soul and all individuality. The irony is that my intense journey in Zen and quest for enlightenment led me to the opposite – I discovered behind all the experience of the world and beyond “emptiness” was the “smile of God.” It was this realization that helped me to continue on my journey and discover that my original face is a Jewish one (big nose and all).
About four or five years later when I was thirty-one I began to be curious about Kabbalah. I was then a professor of philosophy and I had studied nearly every spiritual tradition of the world, but I was completely ignorant about the Jewish tradition. Many people were at that time beginning to speak about Kabbalah. It was just becoming a trend, and I was a little embarrassed that I knew nothing about it. I visited a synagogue in my town and began a class in Jewish philosophy.
All I can say is that something within me that was sleeping woke up. For thirty-one years I had no interest in anything related to God or Judaism, but suddenly from out of nowhere my soul longed for the Torah, faith, and God. I remember picking up the Torah for the first time in my life to study it. I did not know or understand what I was reading, but my soul was exulting in ecstasy. It was one of the strangest experiences in my life.
You may think that this is a natural thing because I was finally waking up to my Jewish identity, but I can tell you the experience was not so simple. You have to understand that I was perfectly content in my life and with my spiritual path. I had no feeling that anything was missing. When this passion awakened within me, I still did not have any idea what the Torah really was. In fact, everything that had I learned previously about it seemed rather simplistic and silly. I did not believe in those ancient stories, and I considered religious people to be ignorant of science, wisdom and spirituality. I had no desire whatsoever to be identified with this camp of people. In fact, my very connection to this group was deeply disturbing to me as well as my friends and family. My interest in Judaism became so disturbing to me that eventually I concluded that the religion was like a cult and that I had to separate myself from it before it took me over and destroyed my life.
I left the synagogue for many months, but during that time I felt a terrible sadness in my soul. I had a good friend at synagogue and one day I decided to go back and visit with him. As soon as I entered the door, all the deep feelings of love for God and the Torah reawakened within me. My soul was flooded with happiness. I couldn't deny it. I then said to myself, "I don't really care if the religion is true or not, I obviously am a Jew and need to be connected to my religion and people."
For five years I walked around thinking I was going crazy. I was following a religion that I did not believe intellectually. How is it that I could take seriously the stories of the Bible? God, Adam and Eve, Noah and his ark, all these miracles..., and yet my soul was on fire with passion for its teaching and its prayer and practices.
The Torah may seem very simplistic to those of us who are not educated in it. This is because the Torah is written in a language of simple stories. God did this for a very special reason. He wants the Torah to relate to everyone, child or adult, wise or simpleton. Every person can read the Torah and understand it on some level. However, the depths of the Torah's wisdom are infinite. Throughout history the greatest minds of the Jewish people, minds greater than Einstein, Freud, or Marx, have devoted every moment of their lives to the detailed study of the Torah because of its profound depths.
Even though I had begun to study and practice Judaism I had no conception of these depths. I was inspired by the feelings of love and faith that I was experiencing for the first time in my life. No matter how strange the religion seemed to me, there were several teachings that did ultimately convince me of its truth.
Many people turn to Eastern philosophy because they are looking for a path to enlightenment. These paths are beautiful and many do reach the wisdom and enlightenment that they are looking for. Enlightenment is the realization that there is a greater reality than the perception of life we ordinarily experience as an individual soul observing the world. The experience of enlightenment is an experience of life in a state of freedom from all sense of self. When a person “lets go” of the sense of self he or she is able to experience the “oneness” of life where there is no sense of separation between the perceiver and what he or she is perceiving, (that is between you and the world you are experiencing). The deeper levels of enlightenment lead to experiences that are free of any mental category or description and so are called in Buddhism the experience of “emptiness.” This “emptiness” is also paradoxically called “completeness,” because when we are free of the self we are free from all desire.
There is a path of spirituality that leads to the experience of enlightenment and the transcending of self or ego – that is, the experience of “emptiness,” as it is called. But there is a problem with this enlightenment (and all practitioners of Buddhism are keenly aware of this). After a person reaches "enlightenment" he still has to live in this world of pain and suffering. The Eastern religions teach that pain and suffering are part of the illusion of existence. Maybe many people can accept this, but one who is honest and sincere cannot be satisfied with such an answer. Pain and suffering raise the biggest questions of existence. The fact that one can reach a perception of existence that penetrates to a deeper level where there is no pain, is not an answer. It is an escape. This experience reveals that pain and suffering are not the ultimate end of life, but it does not explain why there is such enormous suffering in the world or if it will ever end.
The Torah deals with the suffering of life in way that is honest and with integrity. First and foremost the Torah accepts the reality of suffering. Life is not an illusion. It is the handiwork of the Creator. “In the beginning God created the Heavens and the Earth...” This is the foundation of reality. The world and its pain is a part of the creation. The reason for suffering is a deep mystery, but also deeply meaningful (as we shall discuss later on).It is part of the process for the birth of a world that will be ultimately free of pain and suffering. The Torah teaches that the world that we all long for in our hearts, a world of love and peace, is the purpose of God's plan, and the pain we experience is part of the process to achieving this end. I remember sitting in synagogue alone reading about this and crying tears of joy and relief when I realized that there is truly a purpose to history and an ultimate meaning of human life in this world.
Another fundamental teaching of the East is that we must free ourselves of the ego. One rabbi explained to me that this is not possible through meditation. In the practice of meditation one can experience life free from the limitations of the ego, but these experiences are always temporary and the meditator returns to his regular consciousness. Indeed, this is what my Zen teachers taught me as well. There is no permanent "enlightenment." This is an illusion and false advertising in the Eastern religions. In fact, it is well known that many of the world's leading teachers in the Eastern traditions suffer from various addictions and sexual problems because they are unable to deal with the conflicts between their spiritual life and their ordinary life.
This rabbi explained to me that whenever someone is seeking enlightenment no matter what they think, they are ultimately doing it for themselves. He said that the only true way to get beyond the ego is if we do something for a higher reason.
"This is one of the reasons why God gave the Jewish people commandments. It is out of love, because when one performs a commandment he can do something for God, and not for the ego. This the only way to break the power of the ego."
I had spent over ten years of intensive experience in Zen I saw very clearly the truth of what the rabbi said. Although Zen practice brings one to experiences and feelings of "egolessness," the only freedom from the negative aspect of the ego comes when we recognize God and dedicate our life to serving Him. This is what brings true healing and wholeness to one's life. The Eastern philosophies cannot achieve this because they do not acknowledge the reality of the individual soul. They train people to feel egoless and to feel the oneness of life, which is a beautiful and important part of life. However, the purpose of life is not to flee from the ego, but to use it to serve God.
As I learned more about the Torah I slowly began taking on more of the commandments. During this time I was still driving to synagogue on the Sabbath until a most amazing event happened to me.
I had met a man many years ago outside a yoga class. He was wearing a colorful Jewish hat and reading a Hebrew book. I told him I was a Greek scholar and we began talking about the different ancient languages. He happened to be a religious studies scholar and his wife was very interested in Plato. We planned to get together and for many years I had his phone number on my cork board, but we never spoke. After becoming religious I began to look for someone with whom I could ask my questions about philosophy and other spiritual traditions. I remembered the man I had met briefly over five years earlier. I no longer had his phone number, but I remembered that he lived in Irvine, California. It was a Wednesday and I called a synagogue in Irvine to see if they knew who he was. No one answered the phone.
That Saturday I went to my synagogue for the Sabbath in Laguna Beach, California. After the prayers, we sat down to have lunch as we did every week. There were some guests with us and I heard one of them say that he was from Irvine. He sat directly across from me at the table and I asked him, "Do you know a man from your town who is a teacher and religious studies scholar?" He said, "Yes, that's me." I was in astonishment. I said, "Do you know that I made a phone call looking for you the other day." He replied, "Yeah, I was wondering why I got the desiret this week to come visit Laguna Beach for the first time."
That day I decided not to drive to synagogue any more. I saw clearly that God was in the world watching me and guiding me back to the Torah. I met this man for no more than a few minutes over five years earlier. I had never spoken to him since. Suddenly, I think of him and pick up the phone to search for him. A few days later he shows up at my synagogue and sits across the table from me for lunch. This was not a coincidence. It was the hand of God before my very eyes.
This is one of many such experiences I had. It is in these moments that I became aware that the events of life are not random. There is a director to the script of life. The more that I came closer to the Torah, the more I began to see these awesome moments in my life. They are awesome because in these moments we get a glimpse that God cares for us and loves us, and that He is directing the world. Although most often He is hidden from us, in these remarkable moments He shows His presence.
Jewish people feel this presence through our study of the Torah and our practice of God's commandments. One of the things that was most surprising to me when I entered the Jewish world is how no one questions the existence of God. As a professor of philosophy, I dealt with this question with so many students and as a central part of Western philosophy. In the Jewish world it is not an issue, and this is because religious Jews feel the presence of God.
My experience is not unique. Over the past thirty years, after hundreds of years that have seen the overwhelming majority of Jews leave their religion, tens of thousands of Jews from all over the world have turned back to the Torah and the practice of the commandments. Each one of them have a unique story. But the basic experience is an awakening of the spark that is in the Jewish soul, a spark that carries the message of the purpose of the Jewish people that was given in the Torah by Moses and carried through the generations from father to son, mother to daughter.
My journey back to the Torah began with my grandfather's death. Twelve years after he died I asked my mother for the first time if I had a Hebrew name. She told me that my Hebrew name was Abraham, after my grandfather. "But his name is Robert," I said puzzled. "No," she said, "his name is really Abraham. They called him Abey, and that turned into Bobby." Thus, my grandfather Bob Shad the famous Jazz and rock music producer, like many other famous Jews, was really born with a much more Jewish sounding name -- Abraham Shadrinky.
On my first night celebrating the holiday of Shavout, the day we received the Torah on Mount Sinai, the rabbi gave a talk and said that the patriarch Abraham was originally called Abram by his parents. Later God added the letter H and changed his name to Abraham. The rabbi then explained that his original name meant "lover of wisdom," but when it was changed it meant "lover of God." I cried when I heard this because I saw that in my very name was the story of my life. I was a philosopher, which literally means, "lover of wisdom," and now, like my namesake, Abraham, I too was becoming a lover of God.
Just as God was hidden from me, also hidden from me was the entire story of my life. I possessed a name I didn't know for thirty-one years of my life. No one in my family had any idea what our last name Apatow meant. (I found out later that it was a city in Poland that had a thriving Jewish community before the holocaust.) People used to hear it and think I was an American Indian. In other words, I grew up without any knowledge of my true identity. Moreover, I did not know the teachings of my people, our history, or my connection to God.
In the Jewish world there is also an entirely different calendar (one based on the moon and the sun, as opposed to the western solar calendar), so that every date in the life of a Jew has a different significance in the context of the Hebrew calendar. I was therefore curious to see if the day of my grandfather's death also fell out on my birthday in the Hebrew calendar. The day of someone's death is considered a very powerful and positive day in the Jewish world. It is the day when that soul reaches its completion and ascends to higher worlds. It is also a day that is celebrated every year and on which the person who has died as a special power to bring blessing into the world for the people he loves. However, it was still a difficult and painful memory for me. I looked up these days on the Hebrew calendar and saw that the day of his death did not fall on my Hebrew birthday. But I saw something that was even more remarkable. I discovered that my grandfather -- who I loved so deeply and was so deeply connected to, the man I was named after and whose passing began my spiritual journey in life – that he and I were born on the very same day in the Hebrew calendar. There are no accidents. He was born to a father who was a communist and he lived in the time of the Holocaust when it was so hard to believe in God and His Torah, but somehow God had planned that he would have a grandson named after him and born on the same day who would return to the ancient faith of his fathers.
This is the story of the Jewish people today, a people slowly but steadily returning to their purpose and the fulfilling of God's ancient promise to the world.
I grew up in a family that was completely separated from its Jewish roots. Although both my parents are Jewish, I did not go to Hebrew school, attend a synagogue or celebrate any Jewish holiday. We were the first in our reform Jewish neighborhood to have a Christmas tree.
When I was a child I asked my father what Judaism was. I asked him, "Do we believe in God? He said no. "Do we believe in a soul or the afterlife?" He said that we didn't. So I asked then, "What is Judaism about?" He said that it was a tradition of customs. I had no interest in traditions or customs for their own sake, and so this conversation was the first and last time I spoke about religion in my family. Having been raised in the era after the holocaust, it was understandable that my father and mother had no interest in practicing Judaism.
My grandfather was the son of an immigrant from Russia, a communist who was exiled by the Czar before the revolution of 1917, and so he was raised as an atheist. Until the age of 31 I had never met a Jew who believed in the Jewish religion. Consequently, I had not the slightest thought in my mind that there was a God. When I was a child my entire life centered around music, movies and television. My grandfather Bob Shad was one of the most famous men in the music business; he recorded the Platters, Janis Joplin, Ted Nugent, and all the legendary figures in Jazz, such as, Coleman Hawkins, Ben Webster, Count Basie, Charlie Parker, and Sarah Vaughn. My brother Judd is well known today as one of the premiere comedy writer/directors in Hollywood. Entertainment and money was our family religion.
My grandfather and I were very close. He did not have any sons, and when I was born I was named after him and given a middle name after his father. My grandfather treated me like his son, but with the special bond that only a grandfather and grandson can share. He was an amazing man, full of the love of life. When I was a small boy of only five, he used to take me flying in his twin engine Cessna airplane. The flights in his airplane were like spiritual experiences for me. I remember so vividly the roar of the engine as we sped down the runway, soared into the air and flew above the clouds.
When I was nineteen, the phone rang early in the morning on the day of my birthday, March 13, 1985. It was my aunt who told me that my grandfather died of a heart attack at the young age of sixty-five. I cried so intensely and out of the depths of my tears and pain I shouted and screamed out at God for taking my grandfather away from me. For over an hour I continued to shout out loud at God in my anger.
I never thought about it until many years later how strange it was that I was shouting at God. I had no belief in God, not even a thought about Him. And yet in this moment, I spoke to God face to face -- God who was present and real, the Creator and Director of all events. Hidden in my soul was the complete faith in God and this tragic shock brought it out of me. But after this initial shock, this strange, intuitive knowledge of God disappeared.
The death of my grandfather led me on a spiritual quest. I had just begun studying Greek philosophy in college and learning about the idea of the immortal soul. I had not considered these ideas seriously, but after my grandfather's passing I concluded that the beauty and love I saw in him could not just vanish. This was the most real thing I had experienced in my life. Plato's teaching of the immortalty of the soul and the Eternal Ideas of Truth, Beauy, and Wisdom became my religion, but I did not think about God.
I went on to devote my life to the philosophy of Plato. Plato presents a spiritual teaching that is the foundation of all Western thought and new age philosophy. I went on to study with a contemporary master named Pierre Grimes, who had revived Plato's philosophy and developed a whole path of life around this ancient wisdom. Pierre taught me his new paradigm for psychology based on Plato and his teacher Socrates, and the art of dream interpretation. We also practiced the discipline of Zen meditation and I studied with Maezumi Roshi, the founder of the Zen Center of Los Angeles.
The ultimate questions of philosophy are what am I? And what is reality? These deep questions are asked also in Zen as puzzles that become the focus of mediation practice. In Japanese they are called koans. In Zen, a student focuses all his meditation and energy on such a question until he exhausts every possible thought and answer. This leaves the student in a complete state of wonder and openness that awakens the mind to direct experience of existence. In life, we are usually thinking about pains and pleasures, different thoughts, fantasies and fears. All these thoughts become the object of our experience. It takes a lot of effort to purify the mind in order to just experience the world simply and really as it is without our mental interference.
After many years of intense meditation, I had my first "enlightenment experience." In the middle of the meditation hall I burst out in laughter at the joy of the moment. Later that day one of the other students asked me why I laughed and I answered him saying, "I saw the smile of God." This was the pure description of my experience. My answer to the Zen Koan, but oddly enough, I still had no interest or belief in God.
Despite this experience, I continued on in Buddhist practice and came close to becoming a Buddhist and a teacher of this religion. The ultimate quest of the Buddhist is to discover “your original face before your mother and father were born.” This “original face” is the realization of “nothingness” and the illusion of the soul and all individuality. The irony is that my intense journey in Zen and quest for enlightenment led me to the opposite – I discovered behind all the experience of the world and beyond “emptiness” was the “smile of God.” It was this realization that helped me to continue on my journey and discover that my original face is a Jewish one (big nose and all).
About four or five years later when I was thirty-one I began to be curious about Kabbalah. I was then a professor of philosophy and I had studied nearly every spiritual tradition of the world, but I was completely ignorant about the Jewish tradition. Many people were at that time beginning to speak about Kabbalah. It was just becoming a trend, and I was a little embarrassed that I knew nothing about it. I visited a synagogue in my town and began a class in Jewish philosophy.
All I can say is that something within me that was sleeping woke up. For thirty-one years I had no interest in anything related to God or Judaism, but suddenly from out of nowhere my soul longed for the Torah, faith, and God. I remember picking up the Torah for the first time in my life to study it. I did not know or understand what I was reading, but my soul was exulting in ecstasy. It was one of the strangest experiences in my life.
You may think that this is a natural thing because I was finally waking up to my Jewish identity, but I can tell you the experience was not so simple. You have to understand that I was perfectly content in my life and with my spiritual path. I had no feeling that anything was missing. When this passion awakened within me, I still did not have any idea what the Torah really was. In fact, everything that had I learned previously about it seemed rather simplistic and silly. I did not believe in those ancient stories, and I considered religious people to be ignorant of science, wisdom and spirituality. I had no desire whatsoever to be identified with this camp of people. In fact, my very connection to this group was deeply disturbing to me as well as my friends and family. My interest in Judaism became so disturbing to me that eventually I concluded that the religion was like a cult and that I had to separate myself from it before it took me over and destroyed my life.
I left the synagogue for many months, but during that time I felt a terrible sadness in my soul. I had a good friend at synagogue and one day I decided to go back and visit with him. As soon as I entered the door, all the deep feelings of love for God and the Torah reawakened within me. My soul was flooded with happiness. I couldn't deny it. I then said to myself, "I don't really care if the religion is true or not, I obviously am a Jew and need to be connected to my religion and people."
For five years I walked around thinking I was going crazy. I was following a religion that I did not believe intellectually. How is it that I could take seriously the stories of the Bible? God, Adam and Eve, Noah and his ark, all these miracles..., and yet my soul was on fire with passion for its teaching and its prayer and practices.
The Torah may seem very simplistic to those of us who are not educated in it. This is because the Torah is written in a language of simple stories. God did this for a very special reason. He wants the Torah to relate to everyone, child or adult, wise or simpleton. Every person can read the Torah and understand it on some level. However, the depths of the Torah's wisdom are infinite. Throughout history the greatest minds of the Jewish people, minds greater than Einstein, Freud, or Marx, have devoted every moment of their lives to the detailed study of the Torah because of its profound depths.
Even though I had begun to study and practice Judaism I had no conception of these depths. I was inspired by the feelings of love and faith that I was experiencing for the first time in my life. No matter how strange the religion seemed to me, there were several teachings that did ultimately convince me of its truth.
Many people turn to Eastern philosophy because they are looking for a path to enlightenment. These paths are beautiful and many do reach the wisdom and enlightenment that they are looking for. Enlightenment is the realization that there is a greater reality than the perception of life we ordinarily experience as an individual soul observing the world. The experience of enlightenment is an experience of life in a state of freedom from all sense of self. When a person “lets go” of the sense of self he or she is able to experience the “oneness” of life where there is no sense of separation between the perceiver and what he or she is perceiving, (that is between you and the world you are experiencing). The deeper levels of enlightenment lead to experiences that are free of any mental category or description and so are called in Buddhism the experience of “emptiness.” This “emptiness” is also paradoxically called “completeness,” because when we are free of the self we are free from all desire.
There is a path of spirituality that leads to the experience of enlightenment and the transcending of self or ego – that is, the experience of “emptiness,” as it is called. But there is a problem with this enlightenment (and all practitioners of Buddhism are keenly aware of this). After a person reaches "enlightenment" he still has to live in this world of pain and suffering. The Eastern religions teach that pain and suffering are part of the illusion of existence. Maybe many people can accept this, but one who is honest and sincere cannot be satisfied with such an answer. Pain and suffering raise the biggest questions of existence. The fact that one can reach a perception of existence that penetrates to a deeper level where there is no pain, is not an answer. It is an escape. This experience reveals that pain and suffering are not the ultimate end of life, but it does not explain why there is such enormous suffering in the world or if it will ever end.
The Torah deals with the suffering of life in way that is honest and with integrity. First and foremost the Torah accepts the reality of suffering. Life is not an illusion. It is the handiwork of the Creator. “In the beginning God created the Heavens and the Earth...” This is the foundation of reality. The world and its pain is a part of the creation. The reason for suffering is a deep mystery, but also deeply meaningful (as we shall discuss later on).It is part of the process for the birth of a world that will be ultimately free of pain and suffering. The Torah teaches that the world that we all long for in our hearts, a world of love and peace, is the purpose of God's plan, and the pain we experience is part of the process to achieving this end. I remember sitting in synagogue alone reading about this and crying tears of joy and relief when I realized that there is truly a purpose to history and an ultimate meaning of human life in this world.
Another fundamental teaching of the East is that we must free ourselves of the ego. One rabbi explained to me that this is not possible through meditation. In the practice of meditation one can experience life free from the limitations of the ego, but these experiences are always temporary and the meditator returns to his regular consciousness. Indeed, this is what my Zen teachers taught me as well. There is no permanent "enlightenment." This is an illusion and false advertising in the Eastern religions. In fact, it is well known that many of the world's leading teachers in the Eastern traditions suffer from various addictions and sexual problems because they are unable to deal with the conflicts between their spiritual life and their ordinary life.
This rabbi explained to me that whenever someone is seeking enlightenment no matter what they think, they are ultimately doing it for themselves. He said that the only true way to get beyond the ego is if we do something for a higher reason.
"This is one of the reasons why God gave the Jewish people commandments. It is out of love, because when one performs a commandment he can do something for God, and not for the ego. This the only way to break the power of the ego."
I had spent over ten years of intensive experience in Zen I saw very clearly the truth of what the rabbi said. Although Zen practice brings one to experiences and feelings of "egolessness," the only freedom from the negative aspect of the ego comes when we recognize God and dedicate our life to serving Him. This is what brings true healing and wholeness to one's life. The Eastern philosophies cannot achieve this because they do not acknowledge the reality of the individual soul. They train people to feel egoless and to feel the oneness of life, which is a beautiful and important part of life. However, the purpose of life is not to flee from the ego, but to use it to serve God.
As I learned more about the Torah I slowly began taking on more of the commandments. During this time I was still driving to synagogue on the Sabbath until a most amazing event happened to me.
I had met a man many years ago outside a yoga class. He was wearing a colorful Jewish hat and reading a Hebrew book. I told him I was a Greek scholar and we began talking about the different ancient languages. He happened to be a religious studies scholar and his wife was very interested in Plato. We planned to get together and for many years I had his phone number on my cork board, but we never spoke. After becoming religious I began to look for someone with whom I could ask my questions about philosophy and other spiritual traditions. I remembered the man I had met briefly over five years earlier. I no longer had his phone number, but I remembered that he lived in Irvine, California. It was a Wednesday and I called a synagogue in Irvine to see if they knew who he was. No one answered the phone.
That Saturday I went to my synagogue for the Sabbath in Laguna Beach, California. After the prayers, we sat down to have lunch as we did every week. There were some guests with us and I heard one of them say that he was from Irvine. He sat directly across from me at the table and I asked him, "Do you know a man from your town who is a teacher and religious studies scholar?" He said, "Yes, that's me." I was in astonishment. I said, "Do you know that I made a phone call looking for you the other day." He replied, "Yeah, I was wondering why I got the desiret this week to come visit Laguna Beach for the first time."
That day I decided not to drive to synagogue any more. I saw clearly that God was in the world watching me and guiding me back to the Torah. I met this man for no more than a few minutes over five years earlier. I had never spoken to him since. Suddenly, I think of him and pick up the phone to search for him. A few days later he shows up at my synagogue and sits across the table from me for lunch. This was not a coincidence. It was the hand of God before my very eyes.
This is one of many such experiences I had. It is in these moments that I became aware that the events of life are not random. There is a director to the script of life. The more that I came closer to the Torah, the more I began to see these awesome moments in my life. They are awesome because in these moments we get a glimpse that God cares for us and loves us, and that He is directing the world. Although most often He is hidden from us, in these remarkable moments He shows His presence.
Jewish people feel this presence through our study of the Torah and our practice of God's commandments. One of the things that was most surprising to me when I entered the Jewish world is how no one questions the existence of God. As a professor of philosophy, I dealt with this question with so many students and as a central part of Western philosophy. In the Jewish world it is not an issue, and this is because religious Jews feel the presence of God.
My experience is not unique. Over the past thirty years, after hundreds of years that have seen the overwhelming majority of Jews leave their religion, tens of thousands of Jews from all over the world have turned back to the Torah and the practice of the commandments. Each one of them have a unique story. But the basic experience is an awakening of the spark that is in the Jewish soul, a spark that carries the message of the purpose of the Jewish people that was given in the Torah by Moses and carried through the generations from father to son, mother to daughter.
My journey back to the Torah began with my grandfather's death. Twelve years after he died I asked my mother for the first time if I had a Hebrew name. She told me that my Hebrew name was Abraham, after my grandfather. "But his name is Robert," I said puzzled. "No," she said, "his name is really Abraham. They called him Abey, and that turned into Bobby." Thus, my grandfather Bob Shad the famous Jazz and rock music producer, like many other famous Jews, was really born with a much more Jewish sounding name -- Abraham Shadrinky.
On my first night celebrating the holiday of Shavout, the day we received the Torah on Mount Sinai, the rabbi gave a talk and said that the patriarch Abraham was originally called Abram by his parents. Later God added the letter H and changed his name to Abraham. The rabbi then explained that his original name meant "lover of wisdom," but when it was changed it meant "lover of God." I cried when I heard this because I saw that in my very name was the story of my life. I was a philosopher, which literally means, "lover of wisdom," and now, like my namesake, Abraham, I too was becoming a lover of God.
Just as God was hidden from me, also hidden from me was the entire story of my life. I possessed a name I didn't know for thirty-one years of my life. No one in my family had any idea what our last name Apatow meant. (I found out later that it was a city in Poland that had a thriving Jewish community before the holocaust.) People used to hear it and think I was an American Indian. In other words, I grew up without any knowledge of my true identity. Moreover, I did not know the teachings of my people, our history, or my connection to God.
In the Jewish world there is also an entirely different calendar (one based on the moon and the sun, as opposed to the western solar calendar), so that every date in the life of a Jew has a different significance in the context of the Hebrew calendar. I was therefore curious to see if the day of my grandfather's death also fell out on my birthday in the Hebrew calendar. The day of someone's death is considered a very powerful and positive day in the Jewish world. It is the day when that soul reaches its completion and ascends to higher worlds. It is also a day that is celebrated every year and on which the person who has died as a special power to bring blessing into the world for the people he loves. However, it was still a difficult and painful memory for me. I looked up these days on the Hebrew calendar and saw that the day of his death did not fall on my Hebrew birthday. But I saw something that was even more remarkable. I discovered that my grandfather -- who I loved so deeply and was so deeply connected to, the man I was named after and whose passing began my spiritual journey in life – that he and I were born on the very same day in the Hebrew calendar. There are no accidents. He was born to a father who was a communist and he lived in the time of the Holocaust when it was so hard to believe in God and His Torah, but somehow God had planned that he would have a grandson named after him and born on the same day who would return to the ancient faith of his fathers.
This is the story of the Jewish people today, a people slowly but steadily returning to their purpose and the fulfilling of God's ancient promise to the world.