Spirituality or checklist?

If this were a binary world, all black or white, then Alan Morinis’s most recent book would have been two books.

Dr. Morinis, who will speak at Temple B’nai Abraham in Livingston this weekend (see box) is, among many other things, an anthropologist whose doctorate is from Oxford, where he was a Rhodes scholar; a filmmaker; a writer and lecturer; a scholar of the Hindu tradition, and the founder of the Mussar Institute, a group that explores the ancient but deeply relevant Jewish spiritual traditional called Mussar.

His new book, “The Shabbat Effect: Jewish Wisdom for Growth and Transformation,” is two books, he said. “I have written a book that is about Shabbat and not about Shabbat, although of course, it is really about Shabbat.”

It was just a few weeks ago when the Torah portion was Yitro, which included God’s command to remember the Sabbath day and keep it holy. “In my book I bring in a wonderful midrash from the fifth century,” Dr. Morinis said. “It asks, what does God care if I sacrifice an animal from the front or the back of the neck? What does that matter to God?

“And the rabbis say that surely the mitzvah was given to refine people.” That doing something with precision, doing it exactly as specified, therefore doing it exactly right, necessarily refines the character of the actor. “The idea of the whole system of obligatory behavior has as its purpose refining us,” Dr. Morinis said. “The point is not the external action, but the internal change.

“I have to come to see, from my own experience, that this is absolutely applicable to Shabbat. When you take that holy day, that consecrated day, and clear away all the stuff that ordinarily fills our minds and our lives, that preoccupies us, that distresses us, that opens up the space where you can reach for a higher spirituality, which I call holiness.

“That’s the traditional Shabbat practice, to clear away the other six days.”

It might be possible, for someone who is not a traditionally halachically observant Jew, to pick another day of the week — say Tuesday — to practice this letting go and opening up, and “it is theoretically possible that you could raise yourself up to a very high degree of spirituality doing that,” Dr. Morinis said. “But it’s a really hard way to do it. And I think that there is a better way.”

There’s a way to empty our minds, “one day a week, to the things that ordinarily preoccupy us and fill our minds with stuff that doesn’t really make any difference to our lives or impact on the world. We argue so vehemently about things that have no impact on the world whatsoever. As you know, the Supreme Leader of Iran really doesn’t care what someone in, say, Poughkeepsie, thinks.

“So for one day a week we can spare ourselves those thoughts, and give ourselves a space for the soul. A space for nourishment, joy, pleasure, trust, and love.

“That’s my book about Shabbat.

“The book that’s not about Shabbat, which is the same book, is about the intersection of religion and spirituality in Jewish life and the paradigm of what is Jewish practice.

“I run into people all the time who say, ‘I’m spiritual but I have no interest in organized religion.”

On the other hand, “I also run into people for whom life is just a checklist. As long as I did and did and did and did these things and these things and these things, I’m fine. I observed Shabbat perfectly.

“The Mussar teachers, who are the basis of my own attitude, were down on that approach for about 1,100 years. And then Reb Shlomo Wolbe, who died in 2005, said that frumkeit” — the careful, precise practice of halacha — “is just one letter away from krumkeit,” a Yiddish word that means crooked, distorted, or convoluted.

In other words, it’s possible to be punctilious but not refined, or to be both punctilious and refined. “Being a refined person is a deep-seated Jewish paradigm,” Dr. Morinis said. “Or you can be just a checklist.”

That’s a “person who has done everything right and nothing wrong, but there is no spirit in it, no spirituality, no sense of higher purpose. For those people, doing is enough.

“And so this focus of the book is on the interplay of religion and spirituality.” Neither is enough alone, but when the two are joined, the effect can be powerful.

“Most people who say ‘I get my spirituality on the ski slope’ have an idea about what a spiritual experience is. They can have a spiritual experience walking on the seaside. They can have a spiritual experience anywhere.”

But that tends to be a one-and-done experience.

“Judaism is about a spiritual life,” Dr. Morinis said. “And a spiritual life is not a high experience. It is a step-by-step ascent. It can include experiences, but it doesn’t have to. I don’t get a high off it right away.”

You might not want to go to a shiva — probably you don’t want to — but you go because it is an obligation, and you feel better for having done so.

It’s like going to Costco, he said. “These spiritual experiences are free samples. But if you want to take home the box, you have to be a member, you have to get in line, you have to pay for it, you have to put it in the car. You want to eat the granola, but you have to go through all this other stuff first.

“That’s an accurate analogy of what spiritual life is like. So in my book, and in my public talks, I talk about making kiddush, because it ties the two parts of Shabbat” — the spiritual and the obligatory — “together.”

How so?

“When we make kiddush to begin Shabbat, we make it with a cup,” Dr. Morinis said. “A firm vessel. And we make it with wine.

“Wine is a classic symbol for spirituality, and it is itself transformed. It’s not grape juice. You know that because it costs 20 times what grape juice costs. It’s the fruit of the vine, but it’s transformed, and it is a much-elevated substance compared to grape juice. Even the alcohol content has an elevated, transformative quality.

“The point of the ritual is spiritual. The blessing is over the wine. The kiddush cup doesn’t get a mention. But if it weren’t there, the wine would just run through your fingers. That’s the way spiritual experiences are.” They are ethereal. You cannot hold onto them. “They run through your fingers, unless you have something unglamorous but solid to contain them.”

The cup can be made beautiful. There is no reason not to do so, and positive reasons to do it. It need not be purely utilitarian. The concept of beautifying the mitzvah applies here. But it is not necessary.

“So that brings the book about Shabbat and the book not about Shabbat together. The cup is religion, and the wine is spirituality. Judaism makes the spirituality the point, and the rest is means, not goal. But without the cup, there is no wine.”

These two different worldviews developed out of the American Jewish experience, Dr. Morinis said. The spiritual-is-all ethos developed in the liberal part of the Jewish world, he said, and it’s grown to the point where a Reform rabbi objected to his talk about Shabbat. It’s provocative, Dr. Morinis reported on being told. “Do you just want me to come to reassure you?” he asked.

That comes from “chandelier Judaism,” he said; it was a term that had been new to him until he began this book tour, but is about the kind of religion practiced in sprawling suburban edifices, where the point for a long time has been fitting in. “We finally got to join the mainstream, and it feels weird to leave it behind.”

And on the other side, “you get a doubling down on mitzvah, and on chumra. On stringency. Even when people don’t say it, there is an ethos of ‘We both do this, but I do it a little better than you do it.’ There’s an almost competitive feeling about how stringent you can be.

“So on the one side you have a beautiful cup and on the other side you have wine dribbling down your pant leg.

“The point is that the essential Jewish paradigm is a combination of the wine, which is the point, because the bracha is only on the wine, but you can’t do it without a cup. We have inherited a tradition, and it’s our job to find the meaning in it.”

Part of that meaning comes from community. “There’s something very profound in knowing that you’re having Shabbat at home, and you know that hundreds of thousands of other homes are doing the same thing at the same time.”

Dr. Morinis talked a little about Mussar, the Jewish tradition where he’s found his spiritual home. Mussar is about self-knowledge and self-discovery, so it involves much looking inward, but it is not only about self-improvement.

“Because it is Jewish, it couldn’t just be about yourself,” Dr. Morinis said. “One of the slogans we use at the Mussar Institute is that it is about working on yourself but not for the sake of yourself. You will make a much better contribution to the world if you are a person of more fulfillment and realization.”

That brings it back to Shabbat.

“Rabbi Chaim Leib Shmulevitz of the Mirrer Yeshiva, who died in 1979, said that if you come out of Havadalah exactly the same person you were on Friday night, you didn’t really have a Shabbat. There has to be some transformative affect. It’s incremental. You’re going to be the same person, but incrementally different, because you worked on something.” That’s even true — maybe even particularly true — if what you worked on was doing absolutely nothing.

Who: Dr. Alan Morinis, founder of the Mussar Institute

What: Will be scholar in residence at Temple B’nai Abraham in Livingston

When: On Friday, March 20, and Saturday, March 21

For more information: Go to tbanj.org