What is the difference between religion and spirituality?

In Jewish thought, the question itself might prompt a gentle challenge. The popular modern framing, which positions spirituality as personal, warm and alive, and religion as institutional, cold and mechanical, is one that many Jewish thinkers would find puzzling, even a little suspicious. Not because they want to defend institutions for their own sake, but because Judaism has never really understood the inner life and the outer practice as two separate things that happen to coexist. The Hebrew word for law, halacha, literally means "the way of walking." It is not a set of rules dropped onto life from above. It is the shape that a life takes when it is oriented towards something greater. For Judaism, how you walk through the world, what you eat, how you rest, how you speak to people, how you mark time, these are not obstacles to spiritual depth. They are its very texture.

The Hasidic tradition, which emerged in Eastern Europe in the eighteenth century, is perhaps the place where this integration is explored most beautifully. Figures like the Baal Shem Tov and, later, teachers like Levi Yitzchak of Berditchev, placed enormous emphasis on devekut, a word meaning cleaving or attachment to God. This was not a rejection of practice but a insistence that practice be filled with presence and intention. The Hasidic masters worried about going through the motions, about observance that had become hollow. But their answer was never to abandon the forms. It was to bring the whole self into them, to pray with passion, to perform a mitzvah with awareness of what you were actually doing and who you were doing it before. The spiritual fire, in their view, needed the structure of practice to burn steadily rather than flare up briefly and go out.

Earlier still, the medieval kabbalistic tradition had developed rich inner maps of the divine and of the human soul. The Zohar and the later work of figures like Isaac Luria in sixteenth-century Safed described layers of spiritual reality beneath the surface of everyday life and religious practice. Crucially, this was not a private mysticism for lone seekers. It was embedded in communal prayer, in Shabbat, in the cycles of the Jewish year. The kabbalists were not spiritual people who happened also to be religious. The religious forms were the pathways through which the spiritual depths were accessed. Separating them would have seemed, to these thinkers, like removing the banks of a river and wondering why the water no longer flows anywhere in particular.

This matters enormously if you are someone who feels drawn to something beyond the ordinary but finds formal religion uncomfortable or unfamiliar. Judaism would not dismiss that feeling. The longing you feel is taken seriously, even honoured. But it would gently ask what you plan to do with it tomorrow morning, and the morning after that. The philosopher and theologian Abraham Joshua Heschel, one of the great Jewish voices of the twentieth century, wrote and spoke at length about what he called radical amazement, a posture of wonder before the sheer fact of existence. Yet Heschel was also deeply committed to practice, to prayer, to the rhythms of Jewish life. For him, wonder without discipline tended to dissipate. The traditions, the obligations, the community, these were not cages for the spirit. They were the conditions under which the spirit could actually develop.

There is also something in Jewish thought about the danger of making spirituality purely personal. The covenant at the heart of Jewish identity is not between God and a collection of individuals who each have their own private relationship. It is between God and a people, entered into together, carried together, argued over together across generations. The Talmud, with its centuries of rabbinical debate, is perhaps the most communal document imaginable. Questions of how to live are worked out in argument, in relationship, in response to real circumstances. A spirituality that can be practised entirely alone, without obligation to others, without community, without the friction and richness of shared life, would look, from a Jewish perspective, like something important had been quietly removed. You can have profound moments of personal encounter with the divine. Judaism absolutely allows for that, celebrates it even. But those moments are meant to send you back into the world, back to the community, back to the obligations that make love something more than a feeling.