New West Book Review
God Takes a Hike: Rabbi Jamie Korngold’s “God in the Wilderness”
By Jenny Shank, 4-07-08
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God in the Wilderness
By Rabbi Jamie S. Korngold
Three Leaves Press/Doubleday
160 pages, $11.95
On any given weekend in Boulder, the bike paths, hiking trails, and open spaces are filled with people who are not in church. Or are they? As Boulder’s own ”Adventure Rabbi,” Jamie S. Korngold writes in God in the Wilderness: Rediscovering the Spirituality of the Great Outdoors with the Adventure Rabbi, many of her most powerful spiritual experiences have taken place outdoors, and she argues that she’s not wrong to take nature as her temple, because Judaism (and by extension Christianity) was founded outdoors, in deserts, on mountaintops, and by rivers. Humanity has always experienced the awe that many associate with a feeling of communion with the divine amid the beauty and wonder of the wilderness; it was only relatively recently that worship was brought inside. Although Korngold writes from a Jewish perspective, her book contains ideas that are relevant to people of all religions, or those who lack one, but simply love to be outside.
Rabbi Korngold will discuss her book at the Tattered Cover in LoDo on April 23 (7:30 p.m.). She’ll visit the Boulder Book Store on June 19 (7:30 p.m.).
Korngold writes that she was serving as the rabbi for a congregation in Canada when she began to feel restless; her obligations left her little time to enjoy the natural beauty around her. At one point some of her friends asked her to perform a conversion ceremony for their newly adopted daughter in the Grand Canyon, using the waters of the Colorado River as a mikvah, or ritual bath. As Korngold performed the ceremony and led the group (which included several of her friends’ college students) on a hike and camping trip, it began to dawn on her that combining nature with religion was her spiritual calling.
She sought to return to the United States, but all the jobs she was offered were at city-based temples. She instead took a leap of faith and moved to Boulder in 2001 with no job, and began to perform marriage ceremonies on mountaintops and lead groups on contemplative hikes. Judging from her website, which is packed with activities such as sold-out upcoming Passover retreat in Moab, winter ”Shabbat on Skis” trips and summer ”Fridays on Flagstaff” gatherings, the enterprise is now burgeoning.
God in the Wilderness pursues two basic tracks—Korngold gives the scriptural basis for praying and worshiping outdoors through citations from the Bible, and offers eight pieces of counsel to help nudge readers toward a more mindful way of living. Korgold notes that she is attempting to serve some of the 70 percent of Jews in America who do not belong to a congregation and writes, “I don’t ask people to change their lifestyle, or insist that they give up treasured weekend days outdoors to go to synagogue. I challenge them to refocus their attention.”
As the French philosopher Nicolas Malebranche wrote, “attention is the natural prayer of the soul,” and in the first lesson, “Cultivate the Patience to See Burning Bushes,” Korngold writes about a time she led a Jewish group on a hike and at first they were too distracted and too busy chatting to pay attention to their surroundings. Korngold postulates that Moses, if he were encumbered with a cell phone and a BlackBerry, might have missed the burning bush. “Heightened awareness,” she writes, “is the first step toward engaging the spiritual possibility that continually surround us.” I think many nature lovers already get this point; it’s why for so many of us, our favorite hiking partners are quiet ones.
One of my favorite chapters is called “Hear the Still, Small Voice Within.” In it, Korngold writes of two funeral services she performed, one for a kayaker who spent his whole, brief life pursuing dangerous sports, and one for a doctor who was a professional success but failed his family by never being available to them. The kayaker, whom she describes as “one of the best paddlers in Colorado, if not the country…spent his life pushing limits, and he was going to keep on pushing until something pushed back.” Korngold, of course, counsels against this extreme lifestyle of “no limits,” but she doesn’t do it from the perspective of a couch potato who can’t understand why anyone would behave so foolishly; she does it from the perspective of an avid outdoor athlete, who participates in triathlons among other endurance sports.
“For years,” she writes, “I ran ultramarathons in which it was unfortunate, but not terribly uncommon, for runners to end up on kidney dialysis after a race.” She describes an experience she had running the Leadville Trail 100, the highest altitude ultramarathon in the world. 94 miles in, she felt her lungs fill with fluid, and was sure that she would collapse and maybe die. She questions how this came to feel normal to her and decides, “The motto No Limits has become the motto of our time,” whereas “religion is all about limits and boundaries.”
Korngold shares the story of the prophet Elijah meeting the creator, who came as “a still, small voice,” and writes that though “we tend to look for meaning in the dramatic, big moments of life” in truth meaning is to be found in “the quiet moments of life, the ones we often rush through on our way to the bigger and better things.”
Many of the lessons Korngold shares aren’t new ones, but her book is an entertaining, easy-to-read reminder of ideas that people often let slip out of practice. What’s most refreshing about her perspective to those of us who belong to stricter religions than the one Korngold practices as a Reform rabbi (such as Catholics like me, with the not-very-cuddly Pope Benedict constantly wagging his finger at us), is that she’s willing to allow people to shape religion to fit their own lives. She enjoins readers to “Remember Sabbath Rest,” but thinks it’s okay if that rest involves hiking up a mountain—if you spend all week sitting at a computer, hiking is a form of rest, she argues. For people for whom the quest for meaningful religious experience seems farther out of reach than the peak of a fourteener, this is a welcome message.
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Comments
So - IF there is a Supreme Being/Creator - "IT" created the Wilderness of this Earth and participation IN this Wild is reverence and respect to the Creator!! It doesn't matter WHAT you believe,as long as you have respect for ALL that excists; living and what appears to be Non-living!!
That sounds like a good question for Bush, Rush, Hugh Hewitt, and Shawn Hannity.
Shalom
GP in Montana
http://www.fishcreekhouse.com
Barry Lopez wrote: "To speak frankly and unemotionaly of large-scale changes in the natural world that might be traced to human activity, however, remains anathema to people still furious with Darwin for suggesting that nature included man. In this way some religious convictions in America directly oppose the democratic process".