Books and Cultural Transmission

Reading, like spirituality, is often depicted in Western culture as a solitary and private pursuit, obscuring the social nature of reading practices and the potential for books to promote religious and ethnic cohesion.Footnote ⁸ Individual publishing houses have often played an outsized role in constructing, legitimating, and transmitting a normative Jewish culture in America.Footnote ⁹

William Graham defined a book as “a written or printed document of reasonable length to which the basic access is through an individual's private, silent, reading and study.”Footnote ¹⁰ Reading in the United States today is an activity often considered a solitary pursuit. Reading, however, has not always been conceived of as a private activity, by a singular “passive” and “silent” “consumer.”Footnote ¹¹ Reading in biblical times, for example, always meant reading aloud. Daniel Boyarin contrasts reading in the biblical context with modern Western reading practices, explaining that “‘reading,’ in ancient Jewish culture, signifies an act which is oral, social, and collective, while in modern (and early-modern) Europe it signifies an act that belongs to a private or semiprivate social space.”Footnote ¹² More recent studies have emphasized how reading works as a socializing force on contemporary Western readers and the role of books in the formation of religious and spiritual subjectivities.Footnote ¹³

Historically, Jews not only developed a canon of key texts (the book) and a set of hermeneutics for understanding those texts, but also created a shared set of instructions for reading. The Masoretes, who scribed the earliest codices in Jewish culture in the eighth century, included diacritical notes both above and below the Biblical text.Footnote ¹⁴ These notes signaled proper cantillation, as well as pointing to disjunctions between ketiv, orthography, and keri, pronunciation. Thus, from the time of the earliest Jewish books, there was the text as it was written, which formed the main body of the codex, and the text as it was read, both pronounced and understood according to the Masoretic instructions. This marks a fascinating acknowledgement of a distinction between the core text preserved through writing, and beliefs about how said text should be properly consumed, information that was also shared and transmitted through commonly understood cues that accompanied the text.

Paul Connerton suggests two major vehicles through which societies transmit a shared set of cultural memory: inscriptive and incorporative practices. Inscriptive practices are those we might most readily associate with book publishing, both how we contain information and a “relationship with tradition which focuses on the transmission of what has been inscribed.”Footnote ¹⁵ In the context of Jewish history one might argue that, in the modern period, canonical texts were privileged as the primary container for social memory, transmitted through inscriptive methods.Footnote ¹⁶

Incorporative practices transmit social memory in the form of habits, constituting “a knowledge and a remembering in the hands and body.”Footnote ¹⁷ These distinctions are useful for thinking about education as a form of cultural transmission. Education is not only the transmission of knowledge but also of skills, habits, and dispositions.Footnote ¹⁸ But texts do not only transmit social memory through inscriptive practices; they demand incorporative practices as well. A body must know what to do with these texts. Should a book be kissed, burned, shared, or hidden? Read quickly or slowly, aloud or to one's self? And finally how should one feel about the book—should it be approached with reverence, scorn, amusement, or fear? Social memory is created and shared not only through texts but also through the cultivation of affect and experience through texts, the way one is taught to feel about what one reads. This belief in the incorporative possibilities of books and reading figured in the founding rationale for Jewish Lights Publishing and its strategy for changing a Jewish reading public.

Stuart Matlins and Judaism's Marketing Problem

Writing in the Jewish communal publication Sh'ma: A Journal of Jewish Ideas, the scholar and spiritual leader Art Green credits Jewish Lights with developing an American Jewish spiritual culture. He writes,

How did Jewish Lights become the publishing house associated with American Jewish spirituality? How was a publishing house able to, as Green suggests, change cultural perceptions such that American Jews began to seek spiritual meaning in Jewish books?

Jewish Lights Publishing was founded in July 1990, in Woodstock, Vermont, as a division of LongHill Partnership Inc., by Stuart and Antoinette Matlins.Footnote ²⁰ Stuart Matlins, a management consultant, had recently moved his practice to Woodstock. His wife, Antionette Matlins, was an advertising executive who had begun a new career as a gemologist. In 1987, the Matlinses self-published Antoinette's book Jewelry & Gems: The Buying Guide after a negative experience with her first publishing house.

Stuart Matlins was raised in the Bronx, where he grew up in a household that practiced what he called an Orthodox “peasant” Judaism (personal communication, April 24, 2012). He attended an Orthodox yeshiva through sixth grade, where the religious instruction, as he remembered it, consisted of translating the “Chumash (Five Books of Moses) from Hebrew into Yiddish, the Yiddish into English … dry, boring, and irrelevant.”Footnote ²¹

He was surprised when, as an adult, he attended Park Avenue's Central Synagogue and discovered the natural affinity he felt for the Reform Judaism practiced there. He began to regularly attend Rabbi Sheldon (Shelly) Zimmerman's Saturday morning Torah study group and felt that he finally understood what Jewish life was meant to be.

As early as 1983, Matlins spoke publicly about his vision for the Jewish community. In October of that year, Matlins participated in a panel at a conference on “Reaching Out to the Alienated: Ideas and Programs That Are Working,” sponsored by the Commission on Synagogue Relations of the Federation of Jewish Philanthropies. Most of the speakers were leaders of well-known congregations or national organizations. Matlins's byline read simply “Management Consultant.” The panel was titled “What Led Me to Where I Am.” According to Matlins's notes, he shared his own personal journey from disaffected Orthodox yeshiva dropout to highly engaged Reform synagogue member. It's unclear in what capacity he was invited to speak, as prodigal son or as a business executive.

Much of Matlins's talk that afternoon focused on schooling Jewish communal leaders on the difference between a “product problem” and “marketing problem.”Footnote ²² Matlins encouraged them to think about what their organization had to offer members, how it was “meeting their needs” (emphasis mine). Matlins had grown to feel that Judaism, the product, was strong. He explained in a later interview, “[T]he problem is not with Judaism, it's with [Jews’] knowledge of what Judaism is.”Footnote ²³

Matlins's approach differed from that taken by Jewish leaders in the nineteenth and early twentieth century; their reform efforts focused on making Judaism more spiritual.Footnote ²⁴ For Matlins, Judaism was not the problem; Jews, and their limited knowledge of their own heritage, were. Thus, the task was not to remake Judaism, but rather to remake Jews. Matlins explained, “Christians have done a rather brilliant job of developing an inspirational literature. … Jews in America have not.”Footnote ²⁵ The Jewish communal problem of an unaffiliated, disaffected population was simply one of representation, of bad marketing, a failure of Jews to communicate to other Jews via print media how Judaism could meet people's needs and inspire. As Jeremy Carrette and Richard King argued, “Spirituality has become the ‘brand-label’ for the search for meaning, values, transcendence, hope and connectedness in ‘advance capitalist’ societies.”Footnote ²⁶ And as Stuart Matlins saw it, Judaism needed to be rebranded. For Matlins, the key to transforming Jews on a mass scale was specifically through the dissemination of books. Embedded in this strategy were beliefs about the power of books to work on the self. How was it that books were imagined as the means of delivering the cure to what ailed American Jews in 1989?

New Age Books

Matlins's decision to found a publishing house came at a time when new forms of religious practice and identification were gaining popularity. In this period, a new genre crystallized in American religious publishing: New Age.Footnote ²⁷

A Wall Street Journal article that covered the emergent genre noted, “Nobody seems to know exactly what New Age means, but one thing is certain: New Age sells.”Footnote ²⁸ The article pointed to publisher Bantam's New Age line (founded in 1980), wholesale distributor Ingram's New Age catalog (begun in 1987), and the New Age Publishing and Retail Alliance (founded in 1986) as indicators of an emerging trend in the industry. Between 1985 and 1989, the number of New Age bookstores in the United States doubled to four thousand.Footnote ²⁹ Michael Schudson linked the growth in the New Age and self-help segments of the publishing industry with changes in American culture: “Growing numbers of people have taken on the task of reinventing themselves, whether in fashioning their own spirituality or gender or ethnic or racial identity or in selecting from myriad features of consumer goods to organize a ‘lifestyle.’”Footnote ³⁰

Religious scholar Martin E. Marty, writing in the mainline Protestant Christian Century, noted the consolidation and proliferation of a new genre with some concern: “Next to the Bibles or on the shelf next to the Religion section will be a much larger category called ‘Metaphysical,’ ‘Occult’ or ‘Self Help.’ And now … there is a label that incorporates them all: ‘New Age.’” Marty argued that the popularity of these books revealed an underlying need among the American people, lamenting, “[H]ow desperate is the search for meaning, and how exploitable are the searchers.” He called upon “older faith traditions” to respond to this need, wondering if those traditions might begin to “find better voices … and books to express them.”Footnote ³¹ Marty paints a picture of the New Age genre taking up retail space alongside, but distinct from, Religion. He telegraphs that the New Age may be eroding into mainline religion's customer base. He notes, with its “$300 weekend seminars and … expensive books, [the New Age is] not a populist revolution.”Footnote ³² Religion was losing ground among the American elites, not to secularism, as had earlier been proposed, but to a strange distortion of religion. It was into this atmosphere that Matlins introduced his new vision for a Jewish publishing house.

Despite the encroachment of New Age books, sales of “traditional” religion books also grew in the 1980s and 1990s, with religious publishing expanding faster than the larger book industry as a whole.Footnote ³³ Schudson points out that, although “[r]eligious bookstores, ‘new age’ bookstores and ‘spirituality’ sections of general bookstores have all proliferated[,] … amid all this novelty the average American household possess four Bibles.”Footnote ³⁴ Both New Age and Religious publishing were flourishing in America in the late 1980s; among the readers of these books arose a peculiar new customer: “the student of New Age Judaica.”

The New Age movement featured a number of loosely connected religious beliefs and practices; prominent among them was Jewish mysticism, specifically Kabbalah. As interest in New Age spirituality flourished, so did popular enthusiasm for Kabbalah, despite its relative obscurity in mainstream American Jewish communal life. In an article in New Age Retailer, Arthur Kurzweil explained, “The student of New Age Judaica is looking for two kinds of teachers: teachers of yesterday … and teachers of today. … In both cases, the quest is for authenticity.” Unfortunately, “[a]uthenticity … is usually absent” in the Judaica section of the New Age bookstore.Footnote ³⁵ Noting that often books on Kabbalah have the Hebrew printed upside down, Kurzweil pointed out that many of these books were “written by the sincerest of individuals who are, nonetheless, not very well versed in their topic.”Footnote ³⁶ Happily, Kurzweil endorsed a new press, Jewish Lights, and their presentation of Kabbalah in the work of Lawrence Kushner as suitably authentic. Thus Jewish Lights positioned itself to meet a burgeoning American interest in Jewish mysticism, but for a more discerning reader—one who knew enough to recognize which direction the Hebrew should run.Footnote ³⁷

The popularity of New Age and Religion books also offered a distribution opportunity for a new Jewish press. Jewish books could now be shelved alongside a more eclectic range of offerings. In the early years, Matlins invested a great deal of money and effort to convince booksellers to put Jewish Lights books in stores and sections where they would reach a wider audience. Matlins asked them to “[s]top putting Jewish books in the ghetto of Judaica. … Put one copy in self-help and one copy in Bible.”Footnote ³⁸

Jewish Spiritual Revival: Corporate Arsonists of the Soul

Stuart Matlins claims that the idea of starting a Jewish press first occurred to him at a meeting of the Zimmerman Institute, an annual retreat sponsored by the Reform movement, in the late 1980s. Rabbi Lawrence Kushner's books, which had been published in the late 1970s by Harper and Row, were out of print. A fellow conference attendee and friend, who worked in corporate law, told Matlins that he should start a press to bring Kushner's books back into circulation. On a page of lined paper bearing the logo of the Edith May Conference Center, where the Zimmerman Institute was held in those years, Matlins scribbled notes for his new venture. Among the topics Matlins addressed in an early brainstorm were the beginnings of a business plan, which included legal considerations (“foreign corporation—use of free trade zone”), an assessment of the market (“turn congregations into booksellers”), and ideas about what to publish (“Kushner books, Shelly sermons, Shoken [sic] Jewish list”).

“Spirituality That Sells”Footnote ³⁹

The earliest ads for Jewish Lights ran in the fall of 1990, advertising what the press labeled the “Kushner series.” These were the three books by Lawrence Kushner that Matlins had been encouraged to reprint. A Christian Century reviewer of one book in the series, God Was In This Place and I, I Did Know, noted the heavy PR campaign that accompanied the book's release: “Jewish Lights comes on strong with more promotional quotes per book cover and publicity sheet than we have seen in a long time.”Footnote ⁴⁰ From 1991 onward, Jewish Lights regularly ran full-page ads in both the Jewish press and publishing industry magazines.

In the late 1990s, Jewish Lights moved deliberately into the ecumenical spirituality market, which began to crystallize into a new genre much like New Age had done a decade before. In 1999, they began publishing under a sister imprint, SkyLight Paths Publishing. Still, Matlins claims not to have lost sight of the original intended reader, the disaffected Jew. He explained,

According to Matlins, spiritually inspiring books could, through careful packaging, lure in unsuspecting Jewish readers and change their lives.

As they began to roll out SkyLight Paths, Stuart, Antoinette, and their marketing staff experimented with new slogans, highlighting the effect that the books would have on the buyer. One new advertisement for both Jewish Lights and SkyLight Paths read in large letters, “I am not who I was. Spirituality has changed my life.”Footnote ⁴¹ Another read, in large bold letters, “It looks like we publish books, but actually we change lives.”Footnote ⁴² These advertisements, which appeared both in industry publications and the Jewish press, and became a signature advertising campaign for the press, cued future readers about what kind of experience to expect from a Jewish Lights or SkyLight Paths book.

By the mid-1990s, Jewish Lights firmly established itself in the new spirituality market, with their books regularly included in industry publications. The Jewish Lights mission and marketing strategy played out in a series of tiny tweaks and adjustments too numerous to represent in this article. Along the way, Jewish Lights's sense of the market, as well as its sense of its own purpose, subtly shifted both into a mission and a subculture dedicated to changing the reader and Jewish culture through books.

Several of their early books became strong sellers. In the first six months, Jewish Lights published only three books, “The Kushner Series,” selling 4,800 copies of Rabbi Kushner's out-of-print books in four months.Footnote ⁴³ From November 1990 through July 1993, over 75,000 Jewish Lights books were sold.Footnote ⁴⁴ By their second year, they claimed $900,000 in sales.Footnote ⁴⁵ By February 1993, several bestsellers had emerged, most notably Kushner's books and a children's book, God's Paintbrush by Rabbi Sandy Eisenberg Sasso, which would go on to sell over 100,000 copies.Footnote ⁴⁶

Jewish Lights had detractors. In a review of Lee Meyerhoff Hendler's The Year My Mother Got Religion, Jacob Neusner also offered his thoughts about the publishing house and the burgeoning spirituality subculture he saw it as representing. He wrote, “Jewish Lights Publishing Co., specializing in ‘spirituality,’ in general has corrupted Judaic public discourse by presenting, as Torah, book after book of facile, meretricious babble. … While some of these [books] merit serious reading, most lack intellectual rigor and exhibit remarkable self-indulgence.”Footnote ⁴⁷

After five years, Matlins's memo to the February 1996 advisory board meeting took a reflective tone. Looking back over the last few years, Matlins wrote, “the focus of attention in the progressive Jewish world has shifted significantly. When we began, ‘spirituality’ was a cutting edge concept. … [O]ur editorial program was viewed with suspicion by many, and even with derision by some. Now we are viewed as ‘mainstream’ by many.”Footnote ⁴⁸

How to Use This Book

The grammatical construction of Jewish Lights book titles offer clues about how the books might act on the presumed body of the reader. Early in the publishing house's catalogs, a trend emerged that figured the reader's active participation in the book's project. Almost all the Jewish Lights front-list books published in the 1990s feature titles that used either “How to” or a gerund, or addressed the reader in the imperative. The Jewish Lights reader is an active, busy body: Seeking, Godwrestling, Turning, Discovering, Embracing, Healing, Finding, Talking, Living, Coming of Age, Mourning, and Remembering. In the 1995 catalog, excluding reprints (which were titled by their original publishers, not by Jewish Lights), fourteen out of eighteen titles include a gerund or the phrase “How to.”Footnote ⁴⁹

Through their book titles, Jewish Lights conjures an agentic, active, embodied reader, both advocating and marketing a more incorporative telos for reading. A book is properly read or consumed when it is diffused into the self, when the self is remade through the act of reading, and when the body has acquired what Connerton calls “habit-memory.”Footnote ⁵⁰

Could a book teach the reader not just about religion, but about how to have an authentic religious experience? Stuart Matlins believed that it could. Like many Americans, Stuart Matlins had opportunities to learn about religion outside of formal religious education and worship. In the early 1970s, he was a hard-driven executive at the management consulting firm Booz Allen. He asked his secretary to schedule a vacation for him. In the airport he casually picked up a book on meditation. When he arrived, he found that the resort was geared for families, not single men. With no one to socialize with, Matlins decided to spend the week meditating. Matlins claims to have known nothing about meditation before that week.

Matlins here credits a book with transforming his life. In his account, reading a book introduced him to new forms of bodily practice, physical sensation, and religious experience—all through verbal description consumed visually. Matlins rejects the book's assertion that meditation is properly learned through a guru, claiming that he induced a meditative experience through reading alone. Matlins felt secure that the sensations he experienced in his own meditation practice directly correlated to the sensations outlined in the book.Footnote ⁵¹ From his perspective, the book was a vehicle that could elicit true psychospiritual change. A book successfully supplanted the tradition of transmission from master to disciple.

In an interview in the Jerusalem Post, Matlins explained that Jewish Lights was responding to a “spiritual hunger” among Jews.Footnote ⁵² Notions of religious books as food or water appeared in the early 1990s, both in Jewish Lights early marketing material and, more broadly, in the Jewish press. It is unlikely Matlins first articulated the idea; rather, he was responding to a trope already in circulation.

Arthur Kurzweil, writing in New Age Retailer, explained the particular need for books on Jewish spirituality, as opposed to other kinds of Jewish books, which were readily available: “You don't feel thirst when looking for books on politics or the Middle East. … [T]here is a gap when we look to satisfy our inner yearnings.”Footnote ⁵³ Journalist Rahel Musleah wrote of the emergence of Jewish Lights and other attempts to produce Jewish spiritual books: “[P]ublishing houses large and small have been trying to slake readers’ thirst to uncover the soul and the emotion in a Judaism too often viewed as dry and rational.”Footnote ⁵⁴ Journalist Sandee Brawarski wrote, “[A]lmost every publisher, editor, bookseller and author interviewed agrees that there is a growing hunger for Jewish knowledge”Footnote ⁵⁵ beyond the kind of reading material that had been previously available. Jewish Lights marketing material promised its books were “Jewish soul food.”Footnote ⁵⁶

Other writers suggested an empty Jewish body in need of filling. Rabbi David Wolpe explained, “People have nice houses, nice families, nice cars, yet they feel empty inside and they don't know why. … There's a yearning for the transcendent.”Footnote ⁵⁷ Rabbi Harold Kushner echoed this sentiment, likening the consumption of Jewish spirituality to “trying to fill that void.”Footnote ⁵⁸

In a letter to Jewish Lights, Robert Epstein, the librarian at Mount Zion Temple in St. Paul, Minnesota, cited a quote from the theologian Abraham Joshua Heschel: “Our young people are craving for a deeper meaning, a religious outlook. And what they get is stone, not bread.”Footnote ⁵⁹ Epstein explained that he had always connected Jewish Lights with the “antidote” to this problem. He also told something of his own life:

Epstein concludes that, in cases of “young people searching for bread, I can direct them to both the children's and adult books that Jewish Lights produces.”Footnote ⁶¹ The writer, albeit a librarian and therefore professionally invested in books, points to the lack of appealing Jewish books as a source of despair in childhood, as well as the possibility that the presence of books might prevent emptiness in his own child. Books fill a hunger.

A number of Jewish texts from late antiquity equate Torah with food, often honey or milk. Moses, the mythic giver of the foundational Jewish text, is sometimes figured as having breasts from which the Jewish people draw forth milk. Medieval Jewish Ashkenazi rituals of childhood, practiced to this day in some communities, involve children licking honey off of Hebrew letters.Footnote ⁶² As Joel Hecker argues in his analysis of eating in the theosophic kabbalah, “[E]ating and mystical discourse are strongly linked. … The lines between these two acts—consuming food and consuming Torah—are thus effectively and explicitly analogized.”Footnote ⁶³ Reading religious texts has a physical effect on the self. Text, like food does not feed only one part of the body, but is circulated throughout. Unlike a “banking”Footnote ⁶⁴ approach to learning, which suggests a concentration and hoarding of knowledge in the mind, there is a belief that text can be infused into the self and diffused throughout the body.

How to Do versus How to Feel

Jevin Eagle was the first staff person hired for Jewish Lights and a key thought partner for Matlins in the press's early years. In considering the goals of the press in its first years, Eagle articulated a distinction between the aims of a Jewish book in teaching a reader how to do and how to feel. Reflecting on the imagined Jewish Lights reader, he compared the goals for how a Jewish Lights book might change the self with the goals of another immensely popular Jewish “how-to” series, The Jewish Catalog: A Do It Yourself Kit, published in 1973 by the Jewish Publication Society. Part of the burgeoning Havurah movement, The Jewish Catalog, designed as a Jewish Whole Earth Catalog, advised a new generation of observant Jews on how to build a sukkah and how to make their own kosher wine. It advocated for an egalitarian approach to Jewish ritual, in which a manual and a do-it-yourself attitude supplanted the expertise of a rabbi. Eagle used The Jewish Catalog to differentiate between two alternative approaches to “how-to.”

Eagle explained, “The Jewish Catalog was ‘how-to’ [in the sense of] this is what you do when. It [The Jewish Catalog] was primarily about Mitzvot. It was about the Havurah” (personal communication, June 1, 2012). Eagle tied the “how-to” nature of The Jewish Catalog to liberal Jews seeking to live a ritually observant life outside the institutional structure of a synagogue.Footnote ⁶⁵ For The Jewish Catalog Reader, the “how-to” directly related to commanded ritual action.

Eagle continued, Jewish Lights “wasn't halakha [Jewish law]. It was mitzvoth [commandment] with a small m.” According to Eagle, Jewish Lights took a different approach to what it meant to inhabit Jewishness. Jewish ritual requirements became reframed. They were not about Mitzvoth with a big M, that is, following prescribed Jewish law, but rather were about a disposition toward Jewish activities. Eagle explained that, although Jewish Lights books were “how-to” books, readers “don't use them the way you would the Shulkhan Arukh [a sixteenth-century authoritative legal codex] to look up a rule. Jewish Lights books are useful for, how do you find meaning? It is ‘how-to,’ but it's a different ‘how-to’” (personal communication, June 1, 2012).

Eagle offered the Jewish Lights book on the bar mitzvah ceremony, the 1992 Putting God on the Guest List,Footnote ⁶⁶ as one example. He explained, “the subtitle of the book is How to Find Meaning. It wasn't How Do You Conduct a Bar Mitzvah. There's some nuance there” (personal communication, June 1, 2012). Jewish Lights books were not designed to teach an imagined reader what to do, but rather to tell the reader how one should feel about the doing, what attitude one should take toward it, how the doing should mean and feel to the do-er.

As another example, Eagle pointed to one of Jewish Lights’ earliest publications and most popular sellers, the 1993 Mitzvah & Mourning: A Guided Journal for Walking the Mourner's Path from Grief to Healing.Footnote ⁶⁷ Despite the use of the word mitzvah in the title, Mourning and Mitzvah won't teach you how to fulfill the Jewish ritual obligations associated with death and mourning (of which there are many). Eagle explained, “If someone died I wouldn't look there for halakha [Jewish law] but for solace. If you wanted to know why you were feeling the way you feel, I would look there. If you want to know what to do [don't look there]” (personal communication, June 1, 2012). Again, Eagle highlights the distinction between what to do and how to feel about the doing. But does Mourning and Mitzvah explain why readers are feeling the way they are feeling, or teach readers how to feel?

Mourning and Mitzvah comes complete with explicit instructions for reading titled “Guidelines for Using This Book.” As one large heading in the Guidelines explains, “The exercises and questions are designed to help you find your true feelings.”Footnote ⁶⁸ The small print continues, “The questions in this book are designed to trigger emotional responses and stimulate a process of change which take place unconsciously as well as consciously.” According to these instructions for use, the book will not teach you how to feel so much as stimulate latent, natural feelings that have as yet been untapped or unexpressed.

Teaching American Jews How to Feel through Reading

Harold Kushner, in offering a definition of the term spirituality, explained that “most people use it to refer to bringing more emotion into religion rather than keeping it cerebral and rational.”Footnote ⁶⁹ He further explained, “A book on spirituality is a book that not only gives you information but makes you care.”Footnote ⁷⁰

In putting religious emotion at the center of the Jewish Lights project, Matlins's own thinking echoed the work of many foundational scholars of religion. The question of religious emotion has long been at the heart of modern study of religion, and thinkers as diverse as Durkheim, James, and Freud all argued for an emotional core to religious experience.Footnote ⁷¹ Schleiermacher and Otto both understood the encounter with the sacred as inducing a particular emotional repertoire of response, figured as “mysterium tremendem” and the “numinous.”Footnote ⁷² Contemporary scholars have offered substantive critiques of this normative approach to religious emotion, in which certain emotions become constitutive of true Religion.Footnote ⁷³ Matlins's own outlook, in many ways, operates within this normative framework in that he diagnosed the American Jewish community with a fundamental lack of inspiration or proper religious feeling. As such, Matlins rejected an understanding of Judaism as a religion best expressed by a commitment to proper action, in favor of a Judaism best expressed by inhabiting proper meaning and feeling.

Beliefs about religious emotion have a special resonance when applied to the American Jewish engagement with spirituality in the postwar period. Indeed, as spirituality gained salience and currency in the larger American landscape in the 1990s, many wondered if such an orientation was essentially out of reach to American Jewry. In an article that appeared in the Jewish Daily Forward, Eve Jacobson wondered how likely American Jews would be to take to the “new spirituality,” given “the historically rationalistic bent of American Jewry.”Footnote ⁷⁴ This account of the American Jewish mentalitè, as a historically rational people, is a popular one; Jews are associated with too much intellectualism at the expense of spirituality, a charge dating back to Christian polemics. A belief in the possibility of Jewish spirituality challenges popular stereotypes about Jews and Jewishness, which Jews, themselves, have often accepted as legitimate portraits of their own temperament, though the rejection of this belief in the rational, cerebral Jew.Footnote ⁷⁵

Despite an association that developed in the Enlightenment between reading, rationality, and the cognitive,Footnote ⁷⁶ Jewish Lights uses books to teach a people how to feel. Underlying the Jewish Lights project is a belief that feeling and finding meaning are skills that can be taught, as well as a theory about how the printed word mobilizes the human sensorium, through the kindling of a latent ability in the body. Information consumed through the eye elicits particular sensations in the body. Jewish spiritual experience is a learned skill and Jewish Lights books will teach not only you, the dear reader, but the whole Jewish people, how to achieve it. The repertoire of skills Jewish readers are being inducted into is not one that can be measured by observation of behaviors, but rather by a set of affective habits.

Riv-Ellen Prell, in tracing the emergence of the Havurah movement, follows the development through a series of questions of what it means to fulfill one's obligation as a Jew. She writes, “The traditional question for Jews, ‘What do I do?’ was replaced by the new American question, ‘How do I complete this religious requirement?’ Shortly, the question became ‘Why do I do it?’”Footnote ⁷⁷ The founding rationale of Jewish Lights gestured to the formation of a new question as central to American Jews: “How do I feel when I do it?”

Books and the Spiritual Transformation of American Jews

Books play a unique role in the cultivation of Jewish spirituality, and in the creation of a Jewish spiritual body. The very religious traditions that spiritually engaged Jews seek to revive, largely mystical theologies and practices, were often not written down or written in only oblique terms. These traditions were intended to be passed from master to disciple though direct physical interaction. This face-to-face transmission was profoundly disrupted in the modern era, when, through murder, immigration, and the haskalah, connections between living Jews and the past were severed. American Jews seeking to revive these traditions were left only with texts, and these texts needed to be animated with some kind of incorporative practice. Core to the Jewish Lights project is the belief that one can learn to induce authentic religious emotion and experience through a book, absent the guidance of a master, just as Matlins, himself, learned to meditate. Thus, Jewish Lights books provide readers with cues, sometimes in the books themselves and sometimes in the accompanying marketing materials, so that they can learn to inhabit the text correctly, through proper meaning and feeling.

In the creation of Jewish Lights Publishing we see both the identification of a need for American Jews in the late twentieth century to be transformed into a people inspired by Judaism, as well as the means through which to achieve that end: the production and dissemination of books. Matlins and Jewish Lights advanced a strategy for changing American Jewry through new instructions for reading that called upon an active reader to effectively incorporate spiritual teachings. Jewish Lights did not simply offer readers Jewish spiritual content; it proposed a pragmatics for spiritual reading, cueing readers as to the expectations they should have for how a Jewish spiritual book could change the self. Ironically, books, usually associated with the rational, were marshaled to induct American Jews into new modes of feeling. The solution to too much book knowledge among American Jews was more books.

The history of Jewish Lights Publishing illustrates one way in which American Jews participated in the burgeoning culture of spirituality that emerged in the United States in the 1990s.Footnote ⁷⁸ Under the direction of Stuart Matlins, Jewish Lights identified not only a unique market for Jewish spiritual books, but also a unique capacity and unique need. Whereas the narrative of American spiritual culture has long emphasized the universal and centered on highly individual, interior experience, the case of Jewish Lights demonstrates how one religio-ethnic group was able to effectively mobilize the language of American spirituality to respond to a set of concerns conceptualized as both highly particular to and collectively shared by a distinctive group.

We could read the development of Jewish Lights as an attempt to capitalize on an emerging publishing market, and the profitability of Jewish Lights is no doubt an important part of its story—but it's not the only story. Careful analysis of the early materials associated with the development of a new Jewish press in 1990 demonstrates some of the unique cultural work that spiritual books were called on to do for Jews at the end of the millennium. Among the founding rationales of Jewish Lights Publishing was a theory of the potential of spiritual books, if properly consumed, to reshape a collective American Jewish reading public in need of intervention. In articulating the role of spiritual books not simply as packages to deliver content knowledge but as vehicles to induct readers into authentic spiritual disposition and sentiment, Jewish Lights signals the centrality of proper feeling as one key component of contemporary American spiritual culture.