Evolving Dharma and iSpirituality | San Diego
at San Diego Center for Jewish Culture
4126 Executive Drive
La Jolla, CA
More Info / Registration
The vision for Yom Limmud is to create an environment in which the community comes together to participate and celebrate Jewish education. Yom Limmud is a one-day major event, bringing together different elements of the community, including Jews and non-Jews, adult learners and educators, teens and college students.
Jay will be giving two talks during the day:
Evolving Dharma: Meditation and Enlightenment in the Jewish Context.  By now, it’s not unusual for American Jews to meditate, to do so in Jewish contexts, and to mix and match among Jewish, Buddhist, and other forms. But while the goals are clear in most Buddhist traditions (liberation through less clinging) and most secular Western approaches (stress reduction), what is the point of Jewish meditation? How can we work with our practice as it evolves to maximize those goals? Or are “goals†the wrong way to talk about this?
iSpirituality: A Personal Story of Boundaries and Boundary-Crossers.  What are the boundaries of contemporary Jewish experience? In the last fifteen years, Jay Michaelson has taught Kabbalah at Yale and Burning Man; sat five months in silent Buddhist meditation retreat; written a doctoral dissertation on a great Jewish heretic; beat out Christopher Hitchens for a journalism award, for a notorious article called How I’m Losing My Love for Israel; come out as gay and founded two LGBT Jewish organizations; and has sampled the spiritual paths of Sufism, Tibetan Buddhism, earth-based spirituality, Peruvian shamanism, mystical Christianity, neo-Hasidism, paleo-Hasidism, and even plain old Judaism. Speaking from his own experience as well as his perch as a contributing editor to the Jewish Daily Forward, Jay will provoke questions and conversation on the construction of identity and the ways in which American Judaism is evolving in the 21st century.
