Jewish Spiritual Guidance: Finding Our Way to God.

Carol Ochs and Kerry M. Olitzky. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass Publishers, 1997. 199pp. $23.00 (cloth)

Attend any number of synagogues on a Saturday morning and you will hear references made to spirituality. But what precisely is Jewish spirituality, and how does one tap into it? In this book, Carol Ochs and Kerry M. Olitzky present their vision of the Jewish spiritual path within the context of the "guide-seeker" relationship. Their text works as an introduction to the subject of Jewish spirituality, as well as an invitation for the reader to become involved in the spiritual process the describe in the book.

According to Ochs and Olitzky, a "spiritual guide" is anyone who "places their knowledge and experience of the spiritual life at the service of seekers who wish to grow in the life of faith" (11). In practice, the work of the spiritual guide often resembles the work of a therapist who holds sessions with clients to help them develop their relationship with God. Ultimately, the book draws on the authors' own experiences as spiritual guides and seems to be an account of their self-devised method of providing spiritual guidance.

The first chapter, "Finding Our Spiritual Maps," explains the purpose and method of the Jewish spiritual journey. The purpose of the journey is to help the seeker establish a personal relationship with God, what Ochs and Olitzky call "covenant." This covenant is not necessarily bound by Jewish law, but rather resembles a Buberian I-Thou encounter, where the seeker engages in an ongoing dialogue with God. Once the seeker establishes a mature relationship with God, then she stands as an inheritor of the revelation at Sinai and enters into God's covenant with the Jewish people. In order to do this, the guide teaches the seeker to use relevant "sacred texts" as a way to develop her vision and language for spiritual inquiry.

The core chapters walk the reader through the landscape of the spiritual journey. The stops along the way include: prayer, call, hearing, fear, imagining God, study, sin, endurance, and community. These chapters can be read in succession, offering the reader an overall feeling for the spiritual life, or they can be meditatively reflected upon as koan-type guides for individual spiritual practice. Of particular note are the chapters on prayer, constructing images of God, sacred study, and sin.

In "Meeting God Through Prayer," Ochs and Olitzky display a striking awareness of the transformative power of prayer. They remind us that prayer has the power of "changing perspectives. We begin with our narrow, self-centered perspective, but once we pray we are forced to see things or situations in the context of God's" (34-35). Prayer can and ought to afford us the change of perspective uniquely possible when we stand before God, but the obligation to pray can overshadow this transformative power. The authors help to reawaken an awareness of this potential within prayer and invite the reader to pursue it.

In "Revisiting Our Images of God," Ochs and Olitzky discuss how guides can prompt seekers to arrive at and make use of multiple images of God. While many of us remain statically wedded to the concept of God we learned as children, the authors turn to kabbalistic theology to introduce the idea of multiple pictures of God that can help us locate and appreciate God's presence in our world. For some years now, feminists have encouraged both women and men to re-script their images of God. As Ochs and Olitzky show us a number of the different pictures of God they have encountered, we begin to realize how easy and natural feminists' call to altering our traditional images of God as king and father can actually be.

The authors discuss in "Engaging God Through the Study of Texts" the role that study can have in nourishing the seeker's approach to God. They provide questions to help the seeker mine the depth of meaning in Jewish texts. This approach can provide contemporary Jewish readers a new way to explore the beauty afforded by the study of the Torah. Whether we enter into the long and winding road of Jacob's life or revisit Miriam's devotion to her children, Ochs and Olitzky believe we all may cross the barriers of societal difference between our time and that of the Bible to recognize its monumental themes of creation, enslavement, redemption, and revelation in our own lives.

In the context of a project which seems to equate "the good" with seeing God in our world, one wonders how Ochs and Olitzky will contend with the problem of sin. In Chapter Eight, "Encountering Temptation and Sin," the authors discuss the problems of sin and temptation as we encounter them in the spiritual journey - and, consonant with their theology, they understand sin as estrangement from God, "the result of distance from God" (151). They demonstrate their religious insight when they point out that our will to sin is often rooted in an unmet desire for love or recognition, which, if acknowledged, can result in the process of teshuvah (a return to God) instead of the misdirected sinful act.

Despite its many assets, Jewish Spiritual Guidance lacks theological rigor. For example, Ochs and Olitzky's analysis of sin as estrangement from God fails to recognize that sin is more than an internal phenomenon. Sin often has real consequences that jeopardize more than the sinner's own relationship to God. In the Jewish tradition, sin is not simply the failure to locate meaning and love in our world, it is the egregious departure from the will of God, who will ultimately display wrath and judgment.

Similarly, the book fails to wrestle authentically with the problem of evil. While the authors quote sections from Etty Hillesum's Letters from Westerbork to show that a seeker can observe the real presence of God even in the face of terror and evil, such a view fails to consider the power of radical evil. In the face of radical evil, like that experienced in the Holocaust, God's meaning and design are not always as recognizable in our world as Ochs and Olitzky would have us to think.

Nonetheless, Jewish Spiritual Guidance provides a lucid and sensitive account of the moments included in the spiritual journey. The book also offers a new and refreshing look at the beauty of the Jewish tradition, one that will be inviting to many who have sought a route back to Judaism but have felt distanced from conventional paths of return. For those seeking new ways to replenish their spiritual lives while consulting with the wisdom and beauty of the Jewish tradition, Jewish Spiritual Guidance provides useful and sensitive guidance.

RANDI RASHKOVER