Struggling to Uplift Divine Sparks

Abstract

Orthodox Jewish Israelis increasingly practice Buddhist-derived meditation techniques—primarily to increase self-familiarity and encounter godliness within. However, they often experience an inability to sufficiently realize all three of their main values—religious propriety, spirituality, and worldliness—in every setting they go to for meditating. Each site turns out to be too Buddhist, spiritually ineffective, or overly ascetic, forcing them to make fraught compromises. Anthropologists with diverse topical interests and analytical foci often report encountering value conflicts—namely, situations in which realizing one ultimately desirable goal means realizing others to a lesser extent. Such circumstances are pervasive in human experience and evoke characteristic dimensions of ethical life (e.g., dilemma, reflection, judgment). While anthropologists have analyzed socially institutionalized routes (rituals, relationships, and practices) for handling value conflicts, normally, these routes only partially resolve them. No studies, it appears, have conceptualized people’s specific strategies for contending with these conflicts beyond such routinized forms. To do so, this article distinguishes between two types of value conflicts (“inherent” and “contingent”). It then extensively examines two largely noninstitutionalized strategies (“intensification” and “accumulation”) that Orthodox Jewish meditators employ to handle the contingent conflicts that they face. These strategies also partially explain what occurs in additional ethnographic cases—ones of inherent conflict.