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Spiritual Integrity
In Spiritual Integrity, Martin S. Cohen argues that it is possible for a serious commitment to religion to coexist with a parallel commitment to the absolute integrity of the intellect. Written for people of all faiths by a working rabbi with decades of experience in the pulpit, Spiritual Integrity is its author’s attempt to use the evidence of his own faith to demonstrate that it is entirely possible to use the traditional trappings of religious commitment to live honestly in the world as a person of faith.
180 pages, Paperback
Published November 17, 2020
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September 26, 2024
---Plot/Intro---
With cards out in the form of an immensely dense (yet accessible!) book on how yes, one can still remain secure in one’s faith without having to separate oneself from society—something hard-line religious groups of most any flavor opt to do as perhaps a form of a ‘spiritual shortcut’ (my wording, not Rabbi Cohen’s), we get ten chapters—or Gates as they are called here—on the various ways one can integrity religiosity while living as a fully integrated ‘modern’. A magnum opus, almost a full-fledged sefer of yore with a Jewish core but written in a way that anyone of most any faith can find useful, yet among many other ‘religiosity in the modern age’ genre of books, can it stand on its own?
---Interesting Highlights---
“And it is also what separates them, at least emotionally, from the fanatics and fundamentalists of their own religious groups, men and women whose spiritual lives are dedicated to precisely the opposite principle: that someone with a loud enough voice can make a statement true by repeating it often and fervently enough, and by impugning the spiritual bona fides of any who dare demur.”
“...faith is the great suit of armor beloved by those who conduct their religious lives without acknowledging even the possibility of pursuing spiritual growth in an atmosphere of intellectual and emotional integrity. Nonetheless, there really is no such thing as making something so by insisting that you believe in it and, in the end, everybody really does know that. As a result, any who claim that they believe with all their soul and with all their heart and with all their might in notions and ideas about God that cannot possible be verified—and which, therefore, as far as they know, could also be totally false—are using the concept of faith to distance themselves from God and, especially, from the love of God.”
“The commandments are not magic keys to the knowledge of God, but rather opportunities for human beings to identify some specific avenue to faith they might otherwise have left unnoticed, hence untraveled, and then, through the observance of that particular commandment, to travel it.”
“...there actually is no more difficult task than reading the Bible without succumbing to the siren call of self-righteous delusion. Reading the book honestly and openly, taking words and phrases in their historical and literary contexts, refusing to impute indefensible interpretations to words just because doing so would appear to substantiate some unrelated piece of dogma—all of these are basic norms of reading that any normal reader would bring to any book worth studying with care.”
---Review (formerly Bottom Line)---
After reading Rabbi Cohen’s previous book, The Boy on the Door on the Ox, published about 12 years before this one, Spiritual Integrity, and finding it one of the best books on Judaism ever written, instead of normally semi-randomly deciding on what next to read, I opted to dive right into this book instead because it was ‘only’ about 150 pages.
What, however, no blurb nor reviewer told me was this book is the equivalent of fudge (Kosher, perhaps). It’s beautiful, has a divine taste with each and every bite, but in spite of only taking up such a small amount of real estate, these are some of the densest 150 pages ever written on an equally weighty spiritual matter.
Thus, while The Boy on the Door on the Ox also was no ‘easy’ read, due to the way it was structured, it has built-in off ramps for breathing room. Here, we get something from start to finish that reads like a long lost sefer of a rabbi of centuries past given a fresh, glittery translation. That, actually, for my less than scholarly brain became an issue: even breaking the book into smaller pieces read alongside others, it was a heavy, heavy read.
“The prose, the way one puts pen to paper concocting words, sentences, sentence with words, of words—and punctuation too—the way a writer conveys their meaning for the reader, be it one on a train heading to Baltimore or flying to Paris, the reader in a synagogue or on the way to one, is there to lift the reader far and away to another land—a place, the journey to their own personal Jerusalem which the author of Psalm 50:1 surely meant when he wrote: “God, the LORD God spoke
and summoned the world from east to west.” Indeed, the ability to construct passionate messaging has reached a reader over the millennia to put down what they are doing, grab a book calling out to them, and to dive back in—even when other more pressing matters may be at hand—to return once again to the journey—unfinished business if you will (and who doesn’t have a lot of it!)--and perhaps this time advance a step—two, or even three—before again returning to the normalcy of their lives.”
The above is an example not from the book, but rather my own emulation of how the majority of Spiritual Integrity is written. This is not exactly a jab at the author and certainly not the content. The book is great, but because of how it is written, it’s as noted closer to fudge than a light chocolate cake. Even staying focused (or attempting to at least), there surely was many a thing I missed on a first read. Thankfully, unlike confectionery, books have no expiration dates!
With cards out in the form of an immensely dense (yet accessible!) book on how yes, one can still remain secure in one’s faith without having to separate oneself from society—something hard-line religious groups of most any flavor opt to do as perhaps a form of a ‘spiritual shortcut’ (my wording, not Rabbi Cohen’s), we get ten chapters—or Gates as they are called here—on the various ways one can integrity religiosity while living as a fully integrated ‘modern’. A magnum opus, almost a full-fledged sefer of yore with a Jewish core but written in a way that anyone of most any faith can find useful, yet among many other ‘religiosity in the modern age’ genre of books, can it stand on its own?
---Interesting Highlights---
“And it is also what separates them, at least emotionally, from the fanatics and fundamentalists of their own religious groups, men and women whose spiritual lives are dedicated to precisely the opposite principle: that someone with a loud enough voice can make a statement true by repeating it often and fervently enough, and by impugning the spiritual bona fides of any who dare demur.”
“...faith is the great suit of armor beloved by those who conduct their religious lives without acknowledging even the possibility of pursuing spiritual growth in an atmosphere of intellectual and emotional integrity. Nonetheless, there really is no such thing as making something so by insisting that you believe in it and, in the end, everybody really does know that. As a result, any who claim that they believe with all their soul and with all their heart and with all their might in notions and ideas about God that cannot possible be verified—and which, therefore, as far as they know, could also be totally false—are using the concept of faith to distance themselves from God and, especially, from the love of God.”
“The commandments are not magic keys to the knowledge of God, but rather opportunities for human beings to identify some specific avenue to faith they might otherwise have left unnoticed, hence untraveled, and then, through the observance of that particular commandment, to travel it.”
“...there actually is no more difficult task than reading the Bible without succumbing to the siren call of self-righteous delusion. Reading the book honestly and openly, taking words and phrases in their historical and literary contexts, refusing to impute indefensible interpretations to words just because doing so would appear to substantiate some unrelated piece of dogma—all of these are basic norms of reading that any normal reader would bring to any book worth studying with care.”
---Review (formerly Bottom Line)---
After reading Rabbi Cohen’s previous book, The Boy on the Door on the Ox, published about 12 years before this one, Spiritual Integrity, and finding it one of the best books on Judaism ever written, instead of normally semi-randomly deciding on what next to read, I opted to dive right into this book instead because it was ‘only’ about 150 pages.
What, however, no blurb nor reviewer told me was this book is the equivalent of fudge (Kosher, perhaps). It’s beautiful, has a divine taste with each and every bite, but in spite of only taking up such a small amount of real estate, these are some of the densest 150 pages ever written on an equally weighty spiritual matter.
Thus, while The Boy on the Door on the Ox also was no ‘easy’ read, due to the way it was structured, it has built-in off ramps for breathing room. Here, we get something from start to finish that reads like a long lost sefer of a rabbi of centuries past given a fresh, glittery translation. That, actually, for my less than scholarly brain became an issue: even breaking the book into smaller pieces read alongside others, it was a heavy, heavy read.
“The prose, the way one puts pen to paper concocting words, sentences, sentence with words, of words—and punctuation too—the way a writer conveys their meaning for the reader, be it one on a train heading to Baltimore or flying to Paris, the reader in a synagogue or on the way to one, is there to lift the reader far and away to another land—a place, the journey to their own personal Jerusalem which the author of Psalm 50:1 surely meant when he wrote: “God, the LORD God spoke
and summoned the world from east to west.” Indeed, the ability to construct passionate messaging has reached a reader over the millennia to put down what they are doing, grab a book calling out to them, and to dive back in—even when other more pressing matters may be at hand—to return once again to the journey—unfinished business if you will (and who doesn’t have a lot of it!)--and perhaps this time advance a step—two, or even three—before again returning to the normalcy of their lives.”
The above is an example not from the book, but rather my own emulation of how the majority of Spiritual Integrity is written. This is not exactly a jab at the author and certainly not the content. The book is great, but because of how it is written, it’s as noted closer to fudge than a light chocolate cake. Even staying focused (or attempting to at least), there surely was many a thing I missed on a first read. Thankfully, unlike confectionery, books have no expiration dates!
Displaying 1 of 1 review