Spiritual Journey Home: Eastern Mysticism to the Western Wall

Spiritual Journey Home is a unique memoir by Professor Nathan Katz, of Florida International University, portraying his intense lifelong spiritual odyssey in search of religious enlightenment. Beginning as an ambivalent Conservative Jewish youth in 1950s Camden, New Jersey, and ending as a confirmed Orthodox Jew in Miami Beach, Katz devoted his professional life to study of the traditions of the mysterious East, including India, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Tibet, and Afghanistan, learning rich and closely held secrets of thought and meditation at the feet of Oriental masters and mentors like the Dalai Lama as well as from living among the Jews of Cochin, India. It is indeed a long, strange trip, as the reader weaves back and forth between the holy places of the subcontinent and the academic halls of the United States, where Katz also studied and then taught, a narrative of soaring deeds and searing disappointments. The reader enters into a world of mysticism in the throes of rationality that few besides Katz have been privileged to access. Told with an infectious wit and in a forthright style, Spiritual Journey Home is a profound and unpretentious exertion in religious passion with many unexpected turns, none of which could be more unexpected than the author s ultimate return to Judaism. Shattering preconceived notions, eliciting novel parallels, and bridging false dichotomies as history unfolds around him, Katz finds his place in the Torah because of and not despite his vast experience. This is a very personal story, but one that will be immediately familiar, regardless of background, to every seeker of truth.