It’s hard to feel like you’re touching the face of God in traditional Orthodox Judaism, outside of Hasidism. You have to work for your spiritual highs, there’s little cheap grace. Most Orthodox Jews can’t just accept divine love and ride the current. My most significant spiritual highs in Judaism have come from the hard work of studying Torah (and following the intoxicating scholarship of Marc B. Shapiro and Aaron W. Hughes). Christianity makes spiritual highs more accessible. For most people, the easiest paths to transcendence and comfort are sports, music, and pop culture, along with romance, sex, and, for some, drugs and alcohol. Meditation offers a relatively direct way to touch something higher. Twelve-step programs are like God with skin—honest, raw, relational, and forgiving.
Here’s a list of healthy, popular ways Americans experience transcendence, ranked from easiest to hardest:
Music and live performance
Sports participation or fandom
Time in nature
Romantic love and deep friendship
Creative immersion (art, writing, design)
Service and volunteerism
Meditation and mindfulness
Group rituals or worship
12-step or recovery communities
Deep therapy or emotional surrender
Parenting and unconditional love
Solitude, contemplation, or retreat
Mystical experience or ego dissolution
The further down you go, the more inner work and surrender are required. The early ones are about stimulation and belonging; the later ones are about stillness and transformation.
