Month: October 2026

DEPENDING ON WHO’S reading this, I am about to sound either enlightened or nutty; I don’t really care which, and it doesn’t really matter. (As this blog’s tagline goes, “Those Who Know, Chuckle.”)

One of my favorite rabbis/writers, Jay Michaelson, wrote a book some years ago called Everything is God: The Radical Path of Nondual Judaism. R’ Michaelson’s thesis is that “nonduality” – the idea that everything and everyone is a manifestation of the Divine, rather than G?d being somehow separate from or “above” the physical universe – has as significant a place in Judaism as it does in other mystical traditions (e.g., Vedanta, Sufism, Zen Buddhism, &c).

I began reading this remarkable book a few days ago, and before I had gotten twelve pages in I fired off a fanmail to its author thanking him for having “validated every spiritual experience I have ever had” (if you’re curious, here’s the most profound and lasting one). What makes this book so compelling, at least to me, is R’ Michaelson’s style: matter-of-fact without being “woo-woo,” widely educated but without pretension, and warmly relatable without dumbing down.

Above all, R’ Michaelson emphasizes that the nondual experience can’t be fully described – not because description isn’t allowed, but because isn’t possible. (Or, as he puts it: “In the Jewish tradition, secret traditions are not secret because they are rarely disclosed. They are secret because they are experiential, and thus cannot be disclosed at all.”)

Despite that such experiences don’t lend themselves to words, some teachers make doing so look easy. Rabbi Michaelson is one of those teachers, and Everything is God is one of those books.