<em>Devekut</em> in the Age of Uncertainty
Jonathan Zasloff
Jonathan Zasloff is Professor of Law at UCLA School of Law. He received his rabbinical ordination from ALEPH – Alliance for Jewish Renewal.
Credit: Kurt Hoffman
“If I had not believed that I would look upon the goodness of Hashem in the land of the living….”
— Psalms 27:13
It is not a complete sentence, but a fragment. It is uncertainty itself: in the original Hebrew text, dots appear over the word לוּלֵא, lulei, “if,” suggesting doubt and discomfort. There is something missing. According to Berakhot 4a in the Talmud, they appear because the psalmist, King David himself, was unsure of his future.
And so, this passage from Tehillim (Psalms) should serve as a motto for American Jews in the present moment. For we are unsure as well. How should we live with uncertainty? How should we live at all?
Uncertainty does not mean despair. It means getting comfortable with discomfort. It means living on a knife-edge and relishing that ambiguity as the cosmic test of this generation. We might not welcome our fate, as it requires fighting a collective moral struggle to preserve both our people and our values, particularly when these two goals seem to be in contradiction. But we can take at least some comfort that we know what the test is.
Living on the knife-edge requires living more deeply in Judaism. It means fastening ourselves more tightly to the best of our traditions by reconstructing those traditions for the contemporary world (as the rabbis did with Second-Temple-Era Israelite religion). “Fastening” evokes the notion of devekut, or “clinging to Hashem”—the touchstone of Jewish spirituality at least since Hasidism. We need a modern devekut to survive the current crisis. I argue below that this requires a new moral seriousness, a pursuit of what the ancients called phronesis, practical wisdom, the ability to make correct moral judgments under conditions of turmoil, disarray, and anguish. This pursuit must be anchored in spiritual practices that relentlessly interrogate the meaning of existence and the nature of the excellent life. Only with such a pursuit can the Jewish community fulfill its calling where all its people are prophets, filled with the spirit of Hashem (Num. 11:29).
I. A(nother) Jewish Identity Crisis
American Jews since World War II have based our identity on three tenets. First, we were full participants in American democracy, equal citizens in the struggle for a more perfect union. Second, we were Zionists, embracing a democratic Jewish state that, for all its imperfections, served as a means to express our connections to our people. Third, we embraced liberal politics and worked with other marginalized groups to join us in the first base of our identity. These three things were, for a majority of American Jews, what it meant to live as a Jew, a simplified version of what scholar Jonathan Woocher aptly referred to as “civil Judaism.” By far the most celebrated Jewish ritual in postwar America (outside rare lifecycle events, i.e., bar mitzvahs, weddings, funerals) has been the Pesach seder, easily transformable into a celebration of liberation that references the other three bases. Tikkun olam morphed from the Kabbalists’ restoration of the cosmic order into the establishment of earthly social justice.
Over the last decade, these three bases have collapsed.
No longer can we trust in American democracy as it rapidly decays into competitive authoritarianism; no longer can we trust Israel’s government as it betrays democratic Zionist ideals, engages in war crimes, and sows the seeds of the State’s destruction; no longer can we trust longtime progressive partners, many of whom are eager to liquidate the Jewish state in any form, frequently serve as apologists for Hamas, and repeatedly define away the metastasizing growth of antisemitism on the left. It appears as if the goodness of Hashem has departed from the land of the living.
II. The Primacy of Devekut
What is to be done? The basis of American Jewish identity and Jewish life must change.
Such a change does not imply any relaxation of commitment to democracy, or to a just Zionism, or to liberal politics. Far from it. But the collapse does imply an ancient truth: Jewish identity and the meaning of Jewish life cannot depend upon the civil sphere, upon external institutions and actors. Both as individuals and as a collectivity, American Jews have extremely limited power to repair the world and thus engage in tikkun olam. If our identity and meaning hinge on that repair, we have doomed ourselves.
If Jewish identity cannot depend upon the civil sphere, then what can it depend upon? Our task is to use and engage the tradition to pursue our people’s spiritual mission. That mission will imply social commitments, but its core is existential, not political. Tzedek, justice, is crucial, but devekut is primary. And that primary commitment might also solve the betrayal of trust that caused the problem in the first place. We will not be able to cling to institutions or the public sphere, but we must cling to Hashem.
Devekut is, in its essence, devotion to Hashem. Its touchstone Torah verse is Deuteronomy 11:22, which commands Israel to “keep all this Instruction that I command you, loving Hashem your God, walking in all His ways, and holding fast Him.” “Hold fast” in this case translates דָבְקָה, dav’kah, which generates devekut. It also is translated as “cleaving” or “clinging” to Hashem, but it is best described by Maggid Yitzhak Buxbaum, the author of the great work Jewish Spiritual Practices (1999), who calls it “God-consciousness.” As the sixteenth-century Kabbalistic text Reshit Hochmah succinctly explained, “‘To cleave to Him’—this means the cleaving of the mind to Him, for there is no devekut except that of the mind and the meditation of the heart.” This is a constant command.
Rabbi Yechiel Michel, the Zlotchover Maggid, explained that Abraham was able to keep all the mitzvot even before they had been given at Sinai because “he was always conscious of Hashem, and any action that would disrupt his attachment to Hashem he refrained from doing; and any action that he saw would increase his attachment to Hashem he realized it was a mitzvah, and that he would do” (Buxbaum, Jewish Spiritual Practices). While some early Hasidic masters interpreted devekut as an elevated mental state in which they seemed drunk or insane, such an understanding reflects the specifics of eighteenth-century Eastern European culture rather than devekut itself. Devekut does not mean a divinely intoxicated stupor or religious fanaticism. It represents, rather, a relentless focus on living a meaningful life—on living the life that Hashem wants one to live. Hashem need not be, and in fact is not, An Old Man in the Clouds Telling Us What to Do, but rather an expression of our highest and best aspirations to achieve and embody moral and spiritual excellence, which is itself an expression of the divine. Hashem is not “Up There” but rather “In Here.”
Devekut is a state of mind, but more profoundly, it is a way of life.
Focusing on devekut poses an enormous difficulty: it is very, very hard if not impossible to do. Maimonides said only saints could do it, and later Hasidim said we must rely upon intervention from the tzadik—submission to an authoritarian charismatic leader against which Americans should revolt. Thus, American Jews find ourselves confronted by a searing impasse: we must relentlessly seek Hashem’s face while knowing that we will always fail. The reward of struggle will simply mean greater and deeper struggle.
That might seem contradictory. That might also be the point. “The test of a first-rate intelligence,” F. Scott Fitzgerald famously observed, “is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.” Much less famous is what follows: “One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise.” Remaining devoted to the idea that Hashem commands us to fiercely embrace that contradiction is what devekut in our age is all about.
III. Joshua’s Devekut
To make it clearer, we might look to a most unlikely biblical precedent: Joshua. Joshua serves as the paradigmatic example of devekut in the modern world, for his experience shows how we must hold fast to Hashem, even as Hashem pushes us away.
The Talmud makes clear that from the very beginning of his leadership, he was deeply flawed and quite unworthy of his charge:
Rav Yehuda says that Rav says: Just before the time when Moses, our teacher, left this world and went to the Garden of Eden, he said to Joshua: Ask from me all the cases of uncertainty that you have, so that I can clarify them for you. Joshua said to him: My teacher, did I ever leave you for even one moment and go to another place? Didn’t you write this about me: “But his minister, Joshua, son of Nun, a young man, did not depart out of the tent” (Ex. 33:11)? I paid close attention and retained the laws that you told me. Immediately after he said this, Joshua’s strength weakened, and three hundred halakhot were forgotten by him, and seven hundred cases of uncertainty emerged before him, and the entire Jewish people arose to kill him. (bTemurah 16a)
Confessions of uncertainty are rarely popular, and the sugya goes on to relate that Hashem told Joshua to distract the people from their desire to kill him by starting a war—an aggadah that in our age carries the shock of recognition.
But this commentary also demonstrates that someone can survive and even thrive amid the most searing uncertainties and lack of clarity. Joshua did not conquer the entire land, and he did not establish a stable succession. His frustration with seemingly pointless deaths caused him to speak to Hashem with impudence, according to the rabbis (bSanhedrin 44a). Yet he did successfully create a system of intertribe boundaries, and he left Israel with a modicum of security. Israel did serve Hashem during his lifetime (Josh. 24:31). Joshua left a legacy of holiness, even though he repeatedly failed to achieve what he set out to and very often did not even know what he was supposed to do.
Consider this moment in Joshua’s story:
Once, when Joshua was near Jericho, he looked up and behold! A man standing before him, drawn sword in hand. Joshua went up to him and asked him, “Are you one of us or of our enemies?”
He replied, “Neither. I am captain of Hashem’s host. Now I have come!” Joshua threw himself face down to the ground and, prostrating himself, said to him, “What does my lord command his servant?”
The captain of Hashem’s host answered Joshua, “Remove your sandals from your feet, for the place where you stand is holy.” And Joshua did so. (Josh. 5:13-15)
That is it. We then move on to the famous battle.
While brief, this encounter is extraordinary—and underplayed in both classical and modern commentaries. The text says little to nothing about what the man (whom the classical commentators describe as a messenger of Hashem) is doing there. This is the entire story. There is no message, no lesson. We have a dramatic apotheosis and then: nothing. How can it be explained?
Its very power rests on its ambiguity. Joshua asks whether the angel is with Israel or its enemies, and he answers: “neither.” One might expect that the messenger would respond that he is with Israel; after all, the entire point of the book of Joshua is that Hashem is on Israel’s side. But no: he faced a myriad of uncertainties.
These ambiguities do not merely concern which side Hashem favors; they concern more profoundly what Hashem wants. Joshua has forgotten hundreds of laws, has been overwhelmed by uncertainty—and Hashem provides no answer. How should Israel come close to Hashem? How should we perform devekut? Silence.
Why? Because any human endeavor can only very imperfectly reflect divine purposes. Hashem’s thoughts are not our thoughts; neither are our ways Hashem’s ways. Joshua’s devekut is the devekut of formidable ethical challenge. Even on the eve of a struggle that Hashem has promised Israel it will win, Hashem’s messenger still denies that the divine is on Israel’s side. Nevertheless, Joshua prostrates himself and submits. And if Hashem was not on Israel’s side in that conflict, kal vachomer, קַל וָחֹמֶר, all the more so, for us right now. Joshua’s devekut forces us to live on the knife-edge of constant ambivalence.
IV. Devekut and Phronesis
One might call this the Problem of Good: If the right thing to do is obvious or easy or carries the promise of reward, then it really is not much of an ethical choice. Ethics is often ambiguous, difficult, and counterintuitive. It requires what the ancient Greeks called phronesis, sometimes translated as “practical wisdom,” which is not simply the desire to do the right thing or to act upon the best impulses but to act well, to know how to translate our best virtues into concrete action in the right way and at the right time.
Devekut means that we continually search for such translation. Put another way: When we seek to hold fast to Hashem, what are our souls doing? Devekut demands that our souls consistently long for truth and goodness while recognizing that we are mortal and can only glimpse things at a distance. Notably, this truth and goodness is not limited to traditional Jewish text. Hashem is truth (Ps.119:142), יהוה אֱלֹהֵיכֶם אֱמֶת. Similarly, Hashem is goodness: הוֹד֣וּ לַיהֹוָ֣ה כִּי־ט֑וֹב. We cannot cling to Hashem without clinging to truth and goodness. Phronesis is crucial in allowing us to do that. What has Athens to do with Jerusalem? A whole lot, it turns out.
We should not be confused: While phronesis has substantial rational elements, it is not merely intellectual; it depends upon “judgment or intuition more subtle than any articulate major premise.” We can only expect precision in each class of things so far as the nature of the subject admits, and all the more so with the devekut that seeks phronesis. Pursuing practical wisdom as a way to come close to Hashem connects us with the Eternal and enables us to “catch an echo of the infinite, a glimpse of its unfathomable process, a hint of the universal law,” in the words of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
The unification of phronesis and devekut requires rigorous exercise, and we have a precedent: Philo of Alexandria, a first-century Jewish philosopher ignored by much of our tradition, but who represents, to my mind, the model for contemporary Jews. Philo combined intense Torah and philosophical study to develop a list of spiritual practices, which should form the basis of modern Jewish life in the age of uncertainty. This is why devekut is a way of life, not merely a mental state: It represents practices that allow us to pursue truth and goodness, and that effect all of our waking hours (at least).
Little wonder that devekut is so hard to do. It requires mental concentration at every moment. Consider the famous line from Pirkei Avot: “Who is wise? He who learns from everyone” (4:1). My teacher Alan Morinis, founder of the Mussar Institute, suggests a spiritual practice based upon this (which comprises many parts of Philo’s categories): Actually try to learn from everyone you encounter on a daily basis. Not just your family and friends; what about the grocery store cashier or barista—or the guy who cut you off in traffic? And then write it down. If you keep it up, you will have a superb journal to will to your descendants. You will also be exhausted.
But that is what devekut means. It is what Judaism means. It is what a commitment to Torah means: It is the greatest good for a Jew to discuss and to exercise some aspect of Torah (considered broadly as both Jewish and non-Jewish wisdom) every day, and that requires the relentless pursuit of wisdom, truth, and goodness. In other words, it requires phronesis. “Let not this Torah depart from your lips, but meditate upon it day and night” (Josh. 1:8).
This Philonic Judaism is not so far away from later versions:
The Baal Shem Tov would bathe every evening with his students in the nearby river. One time, on the way there, a rough-looking imposing Cossack stepped into their path and demanded: “Who are you? What are you doing here?”
The Baal Shem Tov explained that he and his students were going to bathe in the river.
The Cossack said: "I won't let you pass unless you give me a gold coin."
The Baal Shem Tov reached into his pack, gave the Cossack a gold coin and began to go on his way. Then, suddenly, he returned to the Cossack and excitedly gave him an entire bag of gold coins. The Cossack was taken aback: was this some sort of joke?
The Baal Shem Tov exclaimed: “I’m not giving you all these gold coins so you’ll let us pass. I’m paying you in advance to return here every night and stand in this spot and ask me: ‘Who are you? What are you doing here?’”
The Age of Uncertainty demands that Jews ask themselves this question every day. It is for all of us, not just tzadikim, not just Hasidim. Such a demand is indeed exacting, but consider how we actually spend our lives, particularly in the age of social media and phone-staring. In the words of T. S. Eliot’s “Burnt Norton,” we live:
Over the strained time-ridden faces
Distracted from distraction by distraction
Filled with fancies and empty of meaning
Tumid apathy with no concentration
Devekut as a way of life represents an attempt to break through such a distraction. Take, for example, cheshbon hanefesh, the accounting of the soul, a very traditional yet also innovative daily discipline for bringing Torah into one’s life. The soul’s accounting demands that we do not allow ourselves to be “distracted from distraction by distraction,” and that we instead meditate day and night on the conduct and meaning of our lives.
We spend hours planning our retirements and our finances; we must spend as much time writing our ethical wills. And that generates something more:
Rising, streetcar, four hours in the office or the factory, meal, streetcar, four hours of work, meal, sleep, and Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday and Saturday according to the same rhythm—this path is easily followed most of the time. But one day the “why” arises and everything begins in that weariness tinged with amazement. (Albert Camus, “The Myth of Sisyphus”)
One might, as Abraham Joshua Heschel does, even call it “radical amazement.”
We should not think, however, that such a posture will be comfortable. Far from it. We find ourselves in what might be called a Yavneh moment: the old is dying, and the new has yet to be born. In the interim, a variety of morbid symptoms appear. For the time being (and certainly for a short essay), we must content ourselves with the trial and error of finding new institutional forms to make devekut a communal practice.
We must develop a series of individual and communal devekut practices and philosophies designed to enhance phronesis in our own time and place, what we might call Talmud Ha’artzot Habriti, the Talmud of the United States. We should be prepared not only not to know precisely how to do this, but to be condemned as we attempt to live out any commitments as public values. We will be attacked by the post-colonial Left for being white, and by the fascist Right now ascendant in the Republican Party for being not white enough.
As a committed two-state liberal Zionist, I have been called both a kapo and a Nazi, which I did not think possible. But I have gotten used to it. We will all need to get used to a lot more of it. And it will not matter, because with Talmud Ha’artzot Habriti, we can withstand it: “Just as a solid rock is not shaken by the storm, the wise are not affected by praise or blame” (Dhammapada §81).
It took the rabbis half a millennium to complete the Talmud Bavli in the wake of catastrophe. We have time to figure it out. And a long way to go.
V. Lincoln’s Torah
We have been here before as Jews, and we have been here before as Americans, caught in a struggle where the previous bases of faith have disintegrated, and unable to find from God any solutions. Yet, if anything, such predicaments buttress the focus on devekut in the Age of Uncertainty. Unlike Joshua, a mythic figure whose historicity is contested, Abraham Lincoln provides a concrete, historical model of how to cling to the Almighty through the constant search for wisdom—even as the divine refuses to answer “yes.” Lincoln thus serves as an actual embodiment of devekut in pursuit of phronesis.
The year 1862 was horrific both for the United States in general and for Lincoln in particular. Not only did the Union suffer a series of catastrophic humiliating battlefield defeats, but the president himself in February suffered the loss of his 11-year-old son Willie from typhoid. Often, Lincoln would seclude himself in the White House and weep. The experience was not new for him; thirteen years earlier, Willie’s older brother Eddy had died from tuberculosis at age four.
The next several months delivered repeated military and political humiliation, at least in the East, culminating in the debacle at the Second Battle of Bull Run, where the Union suffered 14,000 casualties to the Confederacy’s 1,000. The South prepared to invade the North.
In his office, Lincoln wrote in his diary, which was later found by his personal secretary, John Hay (subsequently Secretary of State from 1898 to 1905), who then wrote of one particular fragment:
Mr. Lincoln admits us into the most secret recesses of his soul…. Perplexed and afflicted beyond the power of human help, by the disasters of war, the wrangling of parties, and the inexorable and constraining logic of his own mind, he shut out the world one day, and tried to put into form his double sense of responsibility to human duty and Divine Power; and this was the result. It shows—as has been said in another place—the awful sincerity of a perfectly honest soul, trying to bring itself into closer communion with its Maker.
The president had written:
The will of God prevails. In great contests each party claims to act in accordance with the will of God. Both may be, and one must be, wrong. God cannot be for and against the same thing at the same time. In the present civil war it is quite possible that God’s purpose is something different from the purpose of either party—and yet the human instrumentalities, working just as they do, are of the best adaptation to effect His purpose. I am almost ready to say that this is probably true—that God wills this contest, and wills that it shall not end yet. By His mere great power, on the minds of the now contestants, He could have either saved or destroyed the Union without a human contest. Yet the contest began. And, having begun He could give the final victory to either side any day. Yet the contest proceeds.
With these words, Lincoln was asking: Why would God continue to inflict such carnage upon the world? Was God on the side of the Union or its enemies? The answer: neither.
Eventually, Lincoln understood God’s meaning and concluded that “the Almighty has His own purposes.” In the Second Inaugural Address, considered his greatest speech, he told the country:
If we shall suppose that American slavery is one of those offenses which in the providence of God must needs come but which having continued through His appointed time He now wills to remove and that He gives to both North and South this terrible war as the woe due to those by whom the offense came shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a living God always ascribe to Him… if God wills that [the war] continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword as was said three thousand years ago so still it must be said “the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.”
Lincoln’s brilliance and his awesome strength lay in recognizing that even the most just war develops partially due to the previous sins of the victimized nation—a message that should carry particular meaning after October 7.
So, did this recognition represent some sort of triumph of understanding and wisdom? Hardly. The very forces that resisted the expiation of slavery’s sins not only murdered Lincoln but also murdered Reconstruction, and dragged the nation into 80 years of Jim Crow brutality that only diminished briefly. Less than two decades after Jim Crow’s demise, and in an irony of history, Lincoln’s own party started working assiduously to resuscitate it and has now come perilously close to accomplishing its goal.
In other words, the trauma of bitter conflict, in which Hashem refuses to give either side the “final victory,” continues to this day. Hashem, like His messenger to Joshua, relentlessly answers “neither” to the question of whether He is with us or with our enemies. We remove our shoes and prostrate ourselves in the hopes that we are on holy ground. Then the struggle continues.
Lincoln understood as much. When a clergyman told Lincoln that he hoped God was on the Union side, Lincoln replied that he was not concerned about that, for God is always in the right, but “it is my constant anxiety and prayer that I and this nation should be on the Lord’s side.” In other words, Lincoln prayed for devekut, in pursuit of phronesis. We cannot do more and must not do less.
Perhaps we can see the charge through Rabbi Tarfon’s oft-quoted (maybe too-oft-quoted) dictum that “it is not for you to finish the work, but neither are you free to desist from it” (Pirkei Avot 2:16). For a long time, I misinterpreted Rabbi Tarfon’s statement. I assumed it meant that the work will be finished someday, and so we are building for the future. But that is wrong. Rabbi Tarfon never suggests that the work will be finished by anyone at any time. He simply says that we must continue the work of Torah, and the reward for that work will be Torah itself.
Conclusion: The Rock of Israel
If calling for devekut seems clichéd, we should examine what such a call rejects. It straightforwardly implies that Torah’s ways are not ways of pleasantness, and all its paths are not peace (Prov. 3:17). It suggests that the struggle to achieve devekut will be something close to permanent. There will be no rest.
Or perhaps we might rethink King Solomon’s notion of “pleasantness,” an English term that translates the Hebrew נֹעַם, noam. What is pleasantness, and what causes it? It is not a temporary feeling of joy, but rather a settled conviction that one is living one’s life in the right way. “Pleasantness” is not mere enjoyment, what we call from ancient Greek hedonic, but rather human flourishing rooted in purpose and virtue. The Greeks called this deeper form of happiness eudaimonia, and it reflects not an emotional state, but spiritual well-being.
That is how we can actually look upon the goodness of Hashem in the land of the living. Just as a solid rock is not shaken by the storm, the wise are not affected by praise or blame. Even as we push the rock up the mountain only to have it careen down again, we can see ourselves as happy. That will make it the Rock of Israel. In that Rock, we will carve out new terrains to sacredly survive in the future.
