Dallas Morning News, Saturday, May 25, 2002, by Geoffrey W. Dennis

A national center devoted to popularizing Jewish mystical teachings recently held a series of lectures in Dallas. Unfortunately, I missed them, but I did have a chance to visit the center's office in New York while on my way to Israel.

I didn't know what to expect. It turns out that the center is in a corporate suite where consultations and lectures go on behind closed doors. It reminded me of a psychiatrist's waiting room—except that it had a gift shop. There I could purchase such things as Kabbalah sportswear. I could also buy candles with mystical scents. Scents with titles like "Certainty," "Protection," and (my favorite) "Prosperity." Ever wonder whether success really smells sweet? Well, now I know. It smells like sandalwood.

Enshrouded as it now tends to be in therapeutic and commercial husks, the truly unique aspects of Kabbalah, indeed of all mysticism, become obscured. Mysticism is hard for an onlooker to take seriously. Yet it is a subtle and sophisticated aspect of spirituality. So what does the word mysticism actually refer to?

Mystical systems vary widely across religions. Thus broad generalizations are prone to error. But Jewish, Christian, and Islamic mystics do seem to share these general traits:

First, mystics tend to see the Creator and the Creation as on a continuum, rather than as discrete entities. This is especially true with regard to the powerful mystical sense of kinship between God and humanity. Thus the Christian mystic John of the Cross, in his magnificent poem "The Dark Night," writes, "O night more lovely than the dawn/O night that has united the Lover with his beloved/transforming the beloved into her Lover." Heady stuff. And even mystics who refuse to so boldly describe a fusion of God and man nevertheless find the whole of creation suffused in divinity, breaking down distinctions between God and the universe. The Kabbalist Moses Cordovero writes: "The essence of divinity is found in every single thing, nothing but It exists. ... It exists in each existent."

Second, mystics yearn for a direct, intuitive, unmediated encounter with this close yet concealed divinity. As Abraham Joshua Heschel puts it, "They want to taste the whole wheat of spirit before it is ground by the millstones of reason." Which is not to say that mystics are anti-rational. All Western mystical traditions produce profound works of philosophy. But the mystic specifically seeks the experience of God, not merely knowledge about God.

Finally, in their quest to encounter God, mystics live spiritually disciplined lives. It is no coincidence so much Christian mysticism is associated with monasticism. Sufis tend to be ascetics. And Jewish mystics create hanagot, devotional practices that go above and beyond the normal demands of Jewish observance. Thus one Kabbalist recommended this regime to his sons: Periods of prayer, morning, afternoon, evening and midnight; two hours devoted to Bible, four and a half to Talmud, two to ethical and mystical texts, and two more for other texts; one and a half hours to personal care, time to make a living—and five hours to sleep.

All of which helps explain why, despite the many appealing aspects of mystical teachings, there are so few true mystics around. Many people are intrigued, but few can commit. And that is why real mystics are rarely to be found at book signings and weekend seminars. Regardless of the claims of popular media, the mystical path is no lazy man's road to enlightenment.

Still, there is much that the spiritually hungry non-mystic can learn from mystics within their own traditions: things such as self-discipline, enthusiasm (in its original sense, "being filled with God"), and above all, not settling for the superficiality and minimalism that characterizes so much of American spirituality today.