Ep. 638 – Zen Mind Jewish Mind with Rabbi Rami Shapiro
Mindrolling with Raghu Markus
Be Here Now Network
4.7 • 543 Ratings
🗓️ 20 March 2026
⏱️ 63 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In this rich conversation bridging Zen and Jewish mysticism, Rabbi Rami Shapiro and Raghu Markus navigate nonduality, the shadow, and the living experience of the divine.
Grab a copy of Rabbi Rami’s newest book, Zen Mind Jewish Mind, HERE
This time on Mindrolling, Raghu and Rabbi Rami discuss:
- Veering off from traditional Judaism and into Jewish mysticism
- Nondual awareness as the realm of divine consciousness
- Going beyond the dead word and into the living word
- Inspiration from Shunryu Suzuki Roshi’s classic Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind and Thich Nhat Hanh’s series on How to Live
- Koan: the Zen practice of exhausting the logical mind to provoke direct, intuitive insight into reality and one's own nature
- Recognizing our own shadow rather than pretending it does not exist
- Holding multiple truths at once: there is no other, we are all part of a whole, and we do have differences
- How the Kabbalah expresses the name of God in an embodied way
- Seeing the divine in all humans and everything in front of us
- Special moments with Ram Dass, accepting silence and accepting the moment for what it is
About Rabbi Rami Shapiro:
Rabbi Rami Shapiro is an award-winning author of over two dozen books on religion and spirituality. He received rabbinical ordination from the Hebrew Union College: Jewish Institute of Religion, and holds a PH.D. from Union Graduate School. A congregational rabbi for 20 years, Rabbi Rami currently co–directs One River Wisdom School, blogs at r writes the foundation’s newsletter, Ask Rabbi Rami, and hosts the foundation’s podcast, Explore Spirituality with Rabbi Rami. Rami is also a contributing editor for Spirituality+Health magazine www.spiritualityhealth.com where he writes the advice column Roadside Assistance for the Spiritual Traveler. Rami can be reached at https://www.threads.net/@rabbirami
"The Jewish meditation practices, the spirituality within Judaism, never or at least rarely gets beyond or slips into the nondual to the extent that you drop the labels, that you drop the tribal. You get Saint Paul saying there is no Jew or Greek, slave or free, male or female, in Christ. To me, that's Christ consciousness, that's Buddha mind. When you reach that level of consciousness, all the labels fall away, your sense of separate self is gone.” –Rabbi Rami Shapiro
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hey, everyone, it's Ragu back with mind rolling. |
| 0:13.5 | And somebody I haven't talked to or we haven't communicated at all. |
| 0:17.3 | It's been a while Rabbi Rami Shapiro. Glad to have you, Rami. Nice to be here, Rago. |
| 0:25.7 | My pleasure. So, Rami has this, rabbi has this wonderful book. I really love this book. I don't know. When did you put it out? The end of last year or something? This book? Yeah, it came out in 25. |
| 0:43.3 | Uh-huh. Zen mind, Jewish mind, which is a takeoff on Suzuki Roshi, right? Right, Zen Mind, Beginners Mind. |
| 0:54.5 | Yeah. |
| 1:04.7 | So, I mean, my own personal interest is, I am Jewish as well, and grew up that way in Montreal. |
| 1:06.7 | And when I met up with Ram Dass in my early, or 23, 4, whatever it was, I, and went off and |
| 1:17.6 | followed him back to India. |
| 1:19.4 | So I got completely involved, of course, in Eastern thought, and particularly Hinduism and Buddhism. |
| 1:29.7 | And I wouldn't say left behind. |
| 1:33.6 | We probably talked about this, Rami, in a podcast years ago, you know, a couple of years ago. |
| 1:38.5 | But, you know, it's not that I left anything. |
| 1:43.9 | I didn't leave. You can't leave. And I, I, |
| 1:48.8 | but my engagement with it as a practice certainly was not in any way, shape, or form on a, you know, parallel with my involvement with Eastern mysticism, shall we say. |
| 2:08.9 | This book, so I saw this, I thought, well, this is attractive to me, and it really helped kind of reorient myself a little bit back towards much of what, I mean, I grew up, |
| 2:23.8 | I went to school in parochial school. I was in, like a Talmatora was the name of the school. |
| 2:30.7 | It was, you learned your lessons half the day in Hebrew and half the day |
| 2:38.0 | in English right so which was very difficult for me at that time I think difficult for anybody |
| 2:45.8 | I was going to say that's difficult for anybody that's serious. Yeah. And so there's a way in which I became a little negative, shall we say. |
| 2:58.6 | But more around what you bring up all the time is, you know, the core thing which I think really repels people is good and evil and heaven and hell and that duality. |
| 3:15.3 | Let me ask you just right off the bat. |
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