I have been searching for faith and a spiritual life for many years. I am still working on it. I was born a Jew but have never found the Jewish faith one that could give me a way of understanding or looking at the world. My spiritual life is eclectic, one part Thomas Merton, another Quakerism, yet another the Kabbalah, some C.S. Lewis, a touch of Buddhist acceptance.

My faith is a brew, a rich mix, and I have never seen the point of shutting out so many wonderful ideas by adhering only to one. The old Testament always seemed angry and blood-thirsty to me.

A few years ago, I heard of a gifted and charismatic rabbit in Vermont. I went to meditate with him, liked him very much,  I paid him $50 a week for a few months to talk to me about Judaism and see if he might help me get more comfortable with the language, ritual and angry traditions of the faith.  We had our ups and downs, he showered me with dense texts I didn’t like and ponderous books I couldn’t read.

I enjoyed speaking with him, and eventually, we clicked. He began to figure me out, and he turned me on to the Kabbalah, a series of mystical writings about faith that I was able to embrace. I got him to get his first Iphone and think about a blog.

The Kabbalah isn’t exactly a faith, but it is a way of looking at the world. I love reading from the Kabbalah, it is  gentle, loving and mystical. Nobody knows who wrote it – most of it was written in medieval times – and you will not hear a word about it in most Temples or from most rabbis. An outsider faith, for sure.

In it, powerful women angels terrorize God and chase him across the heavens in chariots for screwing up parts of the world and sting environmental polluters in the cheeks with cherubs. God warns the people of the earth that they had better find some joy for the poor, or the world will bleed. There are spirits, wise donkeys, all kinds of angels and prophets.

This is not the Judaism I was taught as a kid. It is much about peace, generosity and everybody seems to be making love.

During one of our talks  (he took a job on the other side of the country one day and left,  sadly, he never said goodbye and I never saw him or heard from him again, this was emblematic of my history with rabbis)  he showed me a beautiful prayer shawl that he wore during services. We both thought getting a shawl and wrapping myself in it might make me feel closer to my religion that I had been able to do myself.

He put me in touch with someone in Jerusalem and some shawl-makers  – their families had been doing it for hundreds of years – agreed to hand weave a rainbow shawl for me. I forget what it cost, it was not terribly expensive. The shawl makers were artists who used special fabrics and colors and I love the idea of a rainbow shawl. In a couple of months, my shawl arrived from Jerusalem, it was beautiful, woven in soft fabric, rich in color, made for me.

I was glad to have it. If I couldn’t be at ease in the Jewish faith, I could at least remain connect in it, wrap myself in it from time to time.

I wore my shawl whenever I meditated for a few months, I loved the feeling of bring wrapped in it, my shawl is big and I can drape it over my head and around my shoulders and feel as if I am in a cave. I feel some very powerful things when that shawl is wrapped around me, I feel grounded and very open. After a few months I forgot about the shawl, during our clean-up Maria came across it and reminded me of it.

But as various shrinks have told me, one of my learning disabilities is that I forget the things I cannot see, and I had lost all consciousness of my shawl. When Maria reminded me of it, I felt a great wave of joy.

This morning, we both meditated together and I wrapped my shawl around me, and it was like meeting an old friend. I wrapped it over my head, I felt as if I were in a spiritual womb. My shawl  connects me to the faith I was  born in and to the very idea of faith. It transcends Judaism and brings me comfort.

These times feel angry and fraught, and I work to ground myself, my shawl appeared for a good reason, as things do .

Finding it was an  epiphany, and in my reading of the Kabbalah this morning, I read about renewal:

“An epiphany enables you to sense creation not as something completed, but as constantly becoming, evolving, ascending. This transports you from a place where there is nothing new to a place where there is nothing old, where everything renews itself, where heaven and earth rejoice as at the moment of Creation.”

Everything renews itself. If I can keep it in sight, I intend to keep wrapping myself in my shawl from time to time, whenever I need it.