Writing as Spiritual Journey

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Writing is also a kind of wrestling. One translation of Israel, the new name granted to Jacob after his encounter with an angel, is "one who wrestles with El," one who struggles with God. It's said in midrash that the angel had the face of Jacob's enemy brother, Esau, so the wrestle was in part with the darker forces of the self. Robert Duncan, an American visionary poet deeply influenced by his reading of the Zohar, added another twist: he imagined the poet as Jacob wrestling with the angel syntax.

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Anyone who has struggled with an unruly sentence, the stubborn resistance of words that refuse to obey, will find Duncan's image powerful. So the wrestling with language is one kind of spiritual encounter that every writer faces word by word, sentence by sentence.

But there's also a level of soul wrestling involved. There's the effort to be true to experience, to bear true witness and not false witness to one's vision and shame one's soul.

This is particularly true in writing non-fiction, where there is a constant struggle between the truth as one remembers it and the truth as it actually was. Friedrich Nietzsche put the struggle nicely: Pride and Memory had an argument. Memory said, It was this way. Pride said, It couldn't be. And Pride won.

Throwing the match to pride is a kind of fake wrestling move that might win temporary applause from an audience that does not want to be disturbed by the truth, but in the long term faking cheapens the game. It's an issue that's particularly important when I am a witness not only to my own life story, as in simple autobiography, but also to experiences that belong to history. A very important example is the Holocaust, a difficult truth the Jewish people are trying to record and remember, at the same moment others are actively seeking to deny and erase. Every writer who tries to bear witness to the truth-which I think at core is what non-fiction is about-must enter the ring and wrestle with language and with soul.

That is why I asked my students "who writes?" I wonder if there's a paradox between the necessary egotism of the writer and the ability to be open to a true spiritual encounter. When I read the story of lekh lekhah, I wonder what the openness was to inner voices that allowed Avram to respond and act. If he had been ego bound, he might have dismissed those voices as inner nonsense. A person whose mind is always made up, who "knows what he thinks," could never be open to transformation. Nor could such a person be much of a writer.

Likewise, when I read the story of Hagar's vision at the well, I see that a person who is rejected, humiliated, utterly humbled may be granted a vision denied to a person who is secure in her ego. In short: if having an ego gets in the way of true spiritual encounter, and yet having an ego is necessary to be a writer, as it seems to be in our marketplace society, can one be both a writer and open to spiritual experience at the same time?

Being a writer is a tough racket. Out of the thousands of people who write, very few make a living from it alone. Most people feel that writers must have immense egos to survive and I think that's true.

One summer I studied in Jerusalem with a teacher named Colette Albouker-Muscat. I always called her Madame. Her students visited her in the cool of Jerusalem mornings, and she taught us how to dream while we were awake, and how to heal ourselves and others through our dreams. We spoke in French, which she enjoyed because she was born in Algeria and descended from a noble Jewish family. She claimed linage to the royal advisors of Charlemagne, those Jews who were made nobility at the beginning of Europe's history-and even more royally, from a family, like King Solomon, descended from King David himself.

Madame had a student who wished to write a memoir. One morning, in her Jerusalem apartment, she told this student she had to choose between the spiritual life or the life of a writer because a writer at bottom needs to have a sturdy ego and that is precisely what the person on a spiritual path would have to do without.

The student cried. Madame pulled out her handkerchief clinically and handed it over-she was quite used to producing such effects on her students, which she called donnant les petes chocs, giving little shocks.

The question struggles within me though I'm hardly far along enough to think I have no ego, the question struggles, at least abstractly and sometimes more concretely in my life. Was Madame correct?

One thinks immediately of the greatest spiritual teachers of all time-Socrates, the Buddha, Jesus-they never wrote a word. Or in the Jewish scheme of things, of the great ARI, Rabbi Isaac Luria, that master of the abstruse and complex, beautiful kabbalah of Safed, who raised up many students, but who himself could not write, complaining that the moment he set pen to page, so many ideas rushed to the tip at once he could scarcely write a sentence for all the confusion.

He said, "I can hardly open my mouth to speak without feeling as though the sea had burst its dams and overflowed. How then shall I express what my soul has received, and how can I put it down in a book?"

So yes, it can be that there are certain great oral masters like the Baal Shem Tov, who are always inspired in the moment of encounter, inspired by immediate contact with a student's need for wisdom. Such masters could no more write down in advance what they have to teach than they could later recollect that wisdom in tranquility. And this may be the deepest purest wisdom-the wisdom that cannot be written down but an only be told, face to face.