I have been lucky enough to travel to many places, and in some of them the sky seemed distant, almost unreachable. But there is one place I still remember, even decades later, as the opposite experience: Tibet.

I remember walking there with the strange feeling that the sky had come closer to the ground, as if heaven had lowered itself just enough for human beings to notice. The air was thin. The landscape was enormous. The mountains did not feel like scenery, but like witnesses. And everywhere, in the wind, there were small prayer flags waving above roads, homes, monasteries, stones, and empty spaces.

I had seen religious symbols before. I had seen churches, synagogues, mosques, icons, candles, books, rituals, processions. But in Tibet, something felt different to me. The prayers were not kept inside a building. They were not locked inside words spoken by a priest or a rabbi. They were written on small pieces of cloth and given to the wind. The wind carried them. Or at least this was the belief and also how it felt.

For the first time, I understood physically what until then I had mostly understood intellectually: that spirituality is not only an idea. It can live in the body, in the land, in the air, in the mountain, in the steps we take, in the way a flag moves when touched by something invisible.

Tibet remains, for me, probably the only place on earth where I felt so directly the connection between spirituality and land. Not as a theory. Not as poetry. As a fact of experience. And perhaps this is also why, years later, I began to understand Judaism differently.

I have always struggled inside Judaism between its particularism and its universalism. On one side, Judaism is the story of a people. A small people. A family, really. With its names, memories, traumas, foods, languages, laws, arguments, melodies, jokes, cemeteries, exiles, and returns. Judaism is Abraham and Sarah, Egypt and Sinai, Jerusalem and Babylon, Spain and Poland, Corfu and Italy, Israel and America. It is the story of a people that somehow survived history by remembering who it was. But on the other side, Judaism is not only about Jews.

From its first pages, the Torah speaks about the creation of the world, not the creation of a tribe. Adam and Eve are not Jews. Noah is not a Jew. The first human being is created alone, the Mishnah teaches, so that no person can say to another, “my father is greater than your father”. “All of them (humans) are his (Adam’s) offspring, and not one of them is similar to another. Therefore, since all humanity descends from one person, each and every person is obligated to say: The world was created for me, as one person can be the source of all humanity, and recognize the significance of his actions.” (Mishnah Sanhedrin 4:5) 

Before there is a Jewish people, there is humanity. Before there is Sinai, there is creation. Before there is........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)