Jewish Contemplatives: A HERMIT'S TALE: Part Three

The Author's 1954 Israeli Haggada

This is the third installment of A Hermit’s Tale.

Part One is HERE and PART TWO is HERE.

Though it is certainly true to say that my contemplative prayer-life had been on a back-burner for years,the 1990’s were a period of great religious intensity for me. I converted to Judaism, left my (then) spiritual home in Java, moved to Singapore, and was then struck by a tragedy that overturned everything.

In Part Two I described how the encounter with Javanese Gamelan and kebatinan prompted a deepening of my spiritual awareness. I had been born a Protestant in the early 1950s, converted to Roman Catholicism in the 1960’s, and on Java in the early 1990’s I was to convert to Progressive Judaism. ( I later underwent a conversion ki halakha as an Orthodox Jew in 2016.)

In this installment, we pick up the story just before I relocated to Singapore from Java.

CONVERSION TO JUDAISM

As a child I had felt some rather strange and unexplained connections with Judaism. To some, the following examples of this will seem like trivial and unrelated childhood memories. But even at the time—I knew something was being called to my attention, and in my later years these trivial events became stepping stones of awareness.

My mother told me that my father used to attend Passover seders every year (causing some animosity with my mother that I never understood) and though no Jewish ancestry was ever discovered, I know something was ‘going on’ there that was never explained.

We lived in a Victorian era "two up-two down" terraced house. My father’s half-sister, Eva Lowe, lived next door and one event has stayed firmly imprinted on my memory: I was singing one of my two favourite songs in the tiny and high walled back-yard. Near the coal-hole in the corner, I suddenly noticed my Auntie Eva who had stood on a stool to speak to me over the wall. She said, quite solemnly: “Every time you sing that song, I will put a threepenny-bit under this brick for you.” The song was the theme tune to the film “Exodus”with the lyrics: “This Land is mine, G-d gave this Land to me”. [i]

On another occasion when I was aged 10 or 11, I was waiting for my mother to finish work at Dashley's the Butcher's shop. To pass the time, I wandered into a nearby Oxfam charity shop. I picked up an Israeli Passover Haggada that was printed in the year of my birth....and was fascinated by the photographs and by the hebrew script. It cost me pennies to buy, and I used it ever after (as a Christian child and teenager during a private Maundy Thursday pseudo-seder). To this day, it sits on my table every Pesach.

Author's Haggada
(click to enlarge)

There were countless little premonitory starbursts like this throughout my Christian childhood and adolescence, but it is only when we see the “back” of G-d’s goodness that the pieces of the jigsaw can be seen fitting into place, kav l’kav. Everything has its season, and it was not until the Pesach lecture that Lionel Blue gave to the assembled Carmelite novices in 1973 that my eyes were,quite suddenly, opened. The choice I made in becoming a Carmelite was itself a kind of siman—the Order was founded in Israel and the white mantle with which we were clothed was thought to be a memory of the mantle Elijah passed on to Elisha and the Sons of the Prophets.

By 1990, the seeds sown by that lecture in 1973 had been germinating—and a series of coincidences, dreams, restored memories, and a lot of philosophical and psychological struggle all combined to produce the personal conviction that I was a Jewish soul reborn in a gentile body and that I needed to rectify that situation urgently through conversion. I picked up the phone in Jakarta and telephoned Lionel in London to speak to him for the first time in decades to tell him this.

At this point in the narrative, many of my rationalist and non-religious friends (and they are many) will sigh deeply and leave us. I can understand their imagined reaction to my last statement about souls and bodies. But for those readers who are unperturbed by talk of reincarnation and wish to continue reading, I will enlarge on my statement a little.

Though it is not generally known outside of academic and Jewish circles, the Jewish religion has a strong traditional (but optional) belief in various forms of re-incarnation. Many of these forms come under the heading of ‘gilgul’ (transmigration of souls) and some, particularly those developed by the scholar-mystics of Safed, propose systems whereby each soul is composed of fragments of other souls either on a short term or a long term basis—usually to expiate sins or to complete the mission of a ‘saint’ that had passed on. It is a very complex subject which you can research at will, but my aim here is merely to point out that in many Jewish denominations and thought-systems, it is a commonly accepted notion with a pedigree, even if it is not mainstream. But then neither am I, so please bear with me.

If you were to ask me what I considered to be the most significant and important event in human history— from the age of six or seven I would give the very same answer that I would give today:

“The most important event in human history was/is the Revelation of G-d at Sinai.”

That is not any pious revisionism of my life-story. Nor am I exaggerating or Judaising it. I believed this and stated this even when I was a Christian. And though almost all Jewish sources would place the Redemption of Israel from slavery in Egypt in that exalted position, I personally find the Epiphany at Sinai,during which all Israelites experienced prophecy, to be The Event sans pareil. From a very early age, I genuinely felt that I had a personal memory of the event. (Yes I was always an imaginative child, but imagination is not always psychotic). It was for this reason that my very first serious composition in the 1970’s was an attempt to share this “memory” in the Orchestral and vocal setting of the Sh’ma that I entitled “SINAI”.[ii]

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Not surprisingly, on hearing that my conviction concerning gilgulim was a prime reason for seeking conversion, Lionel tried to put me off—not because of the traditional three rabbinic rejections given to applicants for conversion to test their perseverance—but quite simply due to his benevolent common sense.

He didn’t say so, but I am pretty sure he merely wanted to give my over-imaginative enthusiasm time to settle. As he often used to say to me: “My dear Norman, if you etherealise any more you will simply disappear.”

Of course, there were philosophical and theological issues involved in my decision and request to be accepted as a ger tzedek (a Jew who becomes so by conversion)— but, to me, the significant factor was something much less tangible: an intuitive sense of spiritual genetics that acted like a kind of magnet whose power was irresistible. I had no evidence of any biologically identifiable Jewish DNA, but I simply ‘felt’ Jewish. I had paradoxically been viewing myself as a "Jewish Christian" for decades before that phone call: celebrating my own solitary erev Shabbat liturgy since 1975, and with a personally written (pseudo) mezuza on my door since 1979. It really did feel like pieces of a pre-prepared jig-saw were fitting together.

Several months and three or four phone calls later he accepted me as a candidate for conversion. Oddly enough, it was actually an ‘ethereal’ event which finally convinced him: I had heard a melody for the Birkat HaKohanim in my sleep, written it down immediately on waking, and I sang it to him over the phone.

(click to enlarge)

After an inordinately long silence he simply said : “Well, that sounds very ancient.We’ll, have to try and get you into the tribe then”. Which he did.

Rabbi Mark Solomon was forthwith despatched as the Reform Synagogues of Great Britain’s emmisary to interview and instruct me. He did this with an enthusiasm which went far beyond the call of duty: While I was at work, he was making (cantorial standard) tapes of liturgical texts and chants and preparing hand-written study materials for me. On my return from work he taught me intensively till the early hours of the morning. His visit lasted only a week, but it was something of a (much appreciated) boot-camp.

Like Stephen Pratt, my Composition Tutor, his motto might well have been “If you want something done, ask a busy man”, and also like Stephen, his outpouring of knowledge was extremely generous, kind, and freely given.

On later trips to London he also chose the books that formed the basis of my library (from John Trotter’s Manor House Bookshop ) and selected traditional Judaica and ritual paraphernalia (from Jerusalem the Golden in Golder’s Green). All of those books and accoutrements are with me still, and within my reach here in my Safed hermitage as I write.

He had intuited that I ought to have more than the basic conversion course materials, and he had also picked up my hasidic, and mystical bent. Thus I returned to Jakarta with suitcases full of Scholem, Kaplan, Buber, Rosenzweig, Heschel, Steinsalz, Green, Waskow,Weisel, Greenberg, and Matt. I read the Buber "Tales of the Hasidim" daily for many years after that, and to this day I regard Aryeh Kaplan as one of my "personal' mentors. Amongst the books selected for me was a second hand copy of Nehama Leibowitz's "New Studies in Bereshit" . This book led me to search for the other volumes in the series and I found them on Ebay and purchased them one at a time. For over twenty years, on every Shabbat, I have continued to read and re-read these wonderful commentaries on the weekly Parsha. I never tire of them.

oooOooo

In the late 1980's and early 1990's, there was no resident rabbi in Jakarta, and its multi-denominational community met only on major festivals. Consequently I was more or less left to my own devices to study and pray alone—Teaching myself to read and write some Hebrew, and davening with the aid of the materials Mark had left me. I did not have a computer at the time, and, of course, the internet was not yet globally functional, but I studied thoroughly and intensively enough to be accepted both by that Jakarta Community and by the Beit Din of the London RSGB.

As part of this Reform Jewish conversion, I underwent a conversion brit milah (circumcision) and tevilah (immersion) both with deputised expatriate witnesses from the Jewish community in Jakarta. A follow-up certification from the Reform Beit Din of London was then forwarded to me. From there I went on to become the Jakarta community Cantor and Secretary from 1992-1995.

Finding a suitable mikveh in Jakarta for the conversion tevilah was no easy task. (For non-Jewish readers, part of the conversion ritual involves a totally naked immersion [tevilah] in a body of natural water in a tank called a mikveh, or in the sea, a river, or a natural spring). It must be witnessed by three Rabbis or their appointed representatives.

The Jewish witnesses were two expatriate businessmen, and the USA Embassy´s Cultural Attache—all very busy people—consequently the venue needed to be in or close to the City. Local rivers and the Batavia coast were too polluted to be considered, but we eventually discovered a natural spring and pool in a holiday resort between Jakarta and Bogor that was clean and also met halakhic standards. I took the name Aharon Nachman ben Avraham—the former because of the connections to ‘light’ (my birthname being Norman and my ‘Javanese’ name being Nur) and the latter—at Rabbi Solomon’s suggestion—because of the Breslover Rebbe who had promoted solitary prayer.)

These photos of the pool in which I was immersed were taken on the day before the ceremony iteself which took place at night after the resort had closed its gates to the public.

In the late 1980’s and 1990’s, the Jakarta Jewish Community was a small and informal community of expatriates which met semi-clandestinely (during the Suharto period) under the eminent leadership of Joseph Stern and Jonathan Fink.

It was composed largely of American Conservative and Reform Jews with a few very broadminded Orthodox members. Joseph Stern (an Auschwitz survivor, Economist, and Harvard Lecturer) and Jonathan Fink (a passionate Musar facilitator from a zealous rabbinical line) led the services and I sang/led anything that needed to be sung. I have never had a cantorial voice by any stretch of the imagination, but I did my best. Until 2014, those four years were my only experience of official membership of a geo-physical Jewish congregation.

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An Interlude: Stations on the Path

My relationship with G-d may have been transplanted several times, but I am certain that The One I have been attempting to relate to, all along, is One and The Same. He, at least, has been consistent in maintaining an intense relationship with me, however much I may have vacillated or strayed from Him. I am still convinced that the deepest/highest part of my soul has always been Jewish, and that my realisation of this has also been a matter of Providentially arranged evolution. Some might view my religous progress as a series of conversions motivated by restless spiritual materialism. I see it as a slowly unfolding journey on a single path of development.

I believe that we can never ‘see’ G-d without some form of intermediate enclouding and veiling, and for that reason it is not so hard for me to accept other people’s visions of Him. I would go so far as to say that, for me, this multi-form presentation is an aspect of the Merchav-Kah referred to in Psalm 118—the wide open and expansive realm of existence which is a part of G-d Himself—a mysterious environment of the knowledge of G-d in which people of all Faiths can share.

The process of religious maturation is not just the preserve of converts who have moved between religious traditions. It is part of the process of a developing knowledge of G-d that can be experienced by all contemplatives. Conversion need not always mean that we view ourselves as having moved from error to truth. It can also mean that we have simply found our personal “religious home”.

But, perhaps, a religion is actually not so much a home as a mode of transport.

We are all seekers, wayfarers on a journey—some walk, some like buses and trains, some float or fly—and we can all take a respect for those on different paths with us as we move into our own personal futures.

As a Catholic I had believed in what is termed the “Real Presence” of G-d in the consecrated bread and wine of the Eucharist. The term Eucharist refers to the Christian liturgical service of Holy Communion (the Mass) but also to the consecrated bread-wafer eaten at such services. When I was a Christian, that moment of ingestion in the Roman Catholic Mass was, for me, a very special focus of communication with the Divine.

In converting to Judaism, I left such sacraments (outward ritual signs of an inward grace) behind me, along with the notions of the Trinity and the Incarnation. Nevertheless, I can still recognise a profound continuity between those earlier moments of Eucharistic communion and the deeper moments in my regular mental prayer sessions. It is only my perception of the Divine that has changed, along with the clothing and veils which filter His ultimately inconceivable Essence. “Everything changes , but G-d changes not.” [iii]

If I am honest (and I am) I miss the easy and daily access to intimacy with the Divine that the consumption of the Host offered. As a Jew, even though all grace is ultimately a Divine gift, one usually has to work harder to reach any awareness of the Divine Presence in one’s soul.

Notwithstanding, my own knowledge of G-d may have become more apophatic, but my awareness of His action in my soul and my attempt to meet Him in prayer seem to share a common essence —in all stages of my life and in all my religious homes. They are on a spiral of learning that has involved the casting-off of certain perceptions and the assumption of certain newly-shouldered principles— but the Spiritual Goal is unchanged.

The real and actual Presence of G-d in Creation may be constant, but our awareness of it vascillates and our fickle hearts often choose to ignore it. To us, it sometimes seems that the Divine Presence is utterly inaccessible and hidden. Sometimes any awareness of it is witheld from us in times of education, purification, and streamlining in the refining fire of our personal and individually tailored experience of revelation. This refining askesis is sometimes assumed intentionally by mystics as a blessing to be sought-out. Sometimes, Providence arranges a therapeutic or purifying experience for us against our will. That is what Providence had in store for me when I least expected it, and now it is time for me to take you into that dark part of this story.

SINGAPORE

I moved from Java to Singapore where I worked for several years as Director of Music at Tanglin Trust School. As I mentioned in Part Two, I was fortunate to be able to develop a Javanese gamelan curriculum there as the school owned both a pelog and a slendro Suhirdjan gamelan.

Tanglin was an ever expanding institution with around 1,500 students. At BIS I had teaching responsibilities for all Junior and Senior classes, at Tanglin, I had teaching duties that included Reception, Primary, Junior and Secondary classes. Each year group was composed of eight classes of around 20-25 students. Tanglin was a demanding educational establishment and, apart from those teaching duties, I managed a department of five talented and hard-working music teachers and a fleet of (three resident and ten visiting) dedicated instrumental tutors.

Tanglin’s Music Faculty was a school and a concert-production company unto itself whose many consecutive termly concerts involved Infant, Junior, and Senior School Ensembles,Choirs, and Orchestras on a grand scale—concerts which also required annual programmes of music that were ever-changing. Our so-called extra-curricular Music activities programme consisted of some 27 ensembles which extended the teaching timetable of the music staff well beyond the normal school day. Standards and expectations were high and the job certainly taught me the meaning of ‘full-time’ employment.

But those intense and productive years at Tanglin ended unexpectedly and I will now take you through the event which ejected me from the world of Music teaching and back into contemplative life.

As I hope you will appreciate: the motivation for telling the story at all is not to record and share a mere journal of events in reminiscent nostalgia, nor is it to evoke any kind of pity—but to give some form of encouragement to those who find themselves unexpectedly challenged by apparent tragedy,illness, or disability. And we are many.

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The Challenge

It began quite unexpectedly and almost stealthily in 1999: I began to lose my sense of hearing through ischemia of the cochlea.

To my great horror and distress, I was becoming rapidly and progressively deaf.

At the early ‘hard of hearing’ times, I was able to teach music effectively as my pitch sensitivity was still intact. But I swiftly became inaccurate when judging volume levels, and began to experience difficulty in conversation, though hardly anyone seemed aware that I was losing my aural and practical musical ability by stealth.

I left Singapore in 1999, ostensibly in order to devote time to the personal compositional tasks that I did not have time for at Tanglin—but in fact I had heard (as it were) the alarm bells ringing to announce the inevitable progress of the deafness. I was simply not prepared to face its implications publicly. Nevertheless, I actually returned to work at Tanglin a few years later at the school’s request as a supply teacher, teaching Years Two, Four, and Six classes together with some orchestral and gamelan teaching to both children and adults.

Once again, to everyone but myself, my ability as a teacher and musician seemed intact, but by the year 2003, I was unable to hear very high pitches and harmonics and was preparing and conducting large scale concerts, in an echoey venue, largely by lip-reading (for choirs) and by sight (for orchestras). My last concert was a Year Five & Six concert in 2003.

But it was no use—I could, for example, no longer distinguish an “f” from an “f sharp” in the higher registers and I had become unable to judge the volume level of my piano accompaniments reliably. I finally accepted the inevitable, and decided that I must say goodbye to my career as a musician. Within the short space of three years, I was thus forced to surrender both musical performance and music teaching in one blow.

"O du Liebe Augustin----Alles ist hin!"

Frodsham Gamelan 1984

BIS Jakarta Concert

BIS Jakarta Infant class (1980's)

BIS Junior Orchestra (1990's)

BIS Concert 1990's

Tanglin Y6 classes 1990's

Choral Lesson at Tanglin 1996

Tanglin orchestra 1990's

Tanglin Adult Gamelan 2003

Tanglin Y5&6 Concert 2003

Music had been my deepest spiritual, artistic,

and creative form of expression for over forty years.

It was my voice and my language. My song in joy and in sorrow.

It had given me many of the deepest spiritual epiphanies in my life to that date.

Teaching and Education was my career and my trained profession

—my only profession—my source of income,

and the small but significant way I felt able to influence the world for the better.

All gone.

I was no longer able to function with accuracy as a musician, but I was not yet severely deaf. I wore hearing aids for many years that enabled me to hear conversations sufficiently well. But by 2016 even the hearing aids failed to help, cochlear implants were not an option, and by 2017 I was severely and near-profoundly deaf. (I became an Israeli citizen in 2019, and in 2020 I was granted disabled status as a deaf citizen.)

Back in 1999, with over half of my life-savings, I had bought a small cave-house in Andalusia as a retirement home, and in 2003 I left South-East Asia, Music Teaching, and the security of a well-paid career for good.

In Spain, I mourned the loss of my hearing for almost three years. Though I never doubted that there must have been a reason for the loss, I still spent many months in self-pity and depression over it. In sharing these sad events and poignant photos with you in this website post, my aim was to take you with me into that slough of despond for just a brief moment. Forgive me.

But take heart.

I recovered and so will you (I trust)

when you read what then happened.

The Baal Shem Tov is reputed to have said that there are no accidents/mere coincidences because everything falls within the plan of Divine Providence (Hashgacha Pratit). The Midrash assures us that the lowliest blade of grass or leaf on a tree grow and die by an expressly declared decree from Heaven, [iv] and we are encouraged to search-out the hidden meaning and message concealed within every act of Providence—even when such acts appear to be negative at first sight.

I worked hard on that task, and eventually I came to the conclusion that I had been forcibly turned around and made solitary by this deafness for a reason: to focus again on the interior life and to make something which seemed to be a negative into a true positive—to see the answer within the question, and to view the obstacle as a disguised blessing. It was an obstacle that threatened my will to live, but within it was the seed to generate renewal.

Very slowly (and not without initial struggle) I decided that I had been re-called to live as a ‘dedicated contemplative’.

In Part Four I will tell you how that awareness developed into what is, in fact, my newly re-discovered career—the practice of living as a Mitkarev, a Dedicated Jewish Contemplative.

PART ONE of A Hermit’s Tale is HERE

PART TWO of A Hermit’s Tale is HERE

NOTES

[i] The other song was “Nelly the Elephant”, but this did not attract audience support in quite the same way!

[ii] The work was scored for full orchestra with solo voice and solo violin. Orchestration included a full battery of gongs,bowed cymbals,a thunder sheet and a shofar. The bars quoted were sung against a fortissimo orchestral background and the soprano soloist required subtle electronic amplification (to create the impression that the voice was heard intimately and internally).

[iii] Percy Dearmer’s hymn based on Malachi 3:6

[iv] Midrash Rabba, Bereshit 10:6.