Contemporary Spiritualities

So I started classes at Hebrew U today (finally!); some ok, and some absolutely amazing.
My favorite class by far is called "Contemporary Spirituality in Israel and the United States" in which we're going to "examine the varieties of Jewish Spirituality presently being developed and offered in America and Israel today." So, basically right up my alley. The professor, Eliezer Shore, is this amazing Bal Tshuva Tzadik, who spent the first 20 minutes of class telling us about his spiritual journey of dropping out of Sarah Lawrence, studying Buddhist in monasteries, meditating around England, living in isolation in the North Carolina woods for half a year, and finally turning to Jewish mysticism, taking everything he picked up along the way with him. This guy just radiates loving energy, is absolutely brilliant, and is going to be so much for, and so nurturing for the soul to study with. In the first class, he literally references every book that is sitting besides my bed that I was debating taking to Israel; Abraham Joshua Heschel, Martin Buber; I and Thou, Victor Frankl; Man in Search of Meaning; Ken Wilber; a Brief History of Everything, and of course the tanach.
So, yeah, this class is far from the Wesleyan religion department to say the least. We each had to say how we identified "spritually" with a combination of the labels, "spritual," "religious," and "secular/scientific" with the object being to define the terms; trying to define spirituality in the first class! That would probably be Peter Gotschalk's final essay question if he taught this class...
Anyways, I'll leave y'all with a quote we talked over for quite awhile. It is not particularly inspirational, and in fact, I think I quite disagree with it, but it is certainly thought provoking for the class, and those of us on the "transcendental" journey. I'll post a better quote from the class soon.
So much love from Jerusalem, and missing all of you already,
Micah

"We Start with the simple observation that the "metaphysics" of the spiritual traditions have been thoroughly critiqued - "trashed" is probably the better word - by both modernist and postmodernist epistemologies, and there has arisen nothing compelling to take their space"
-Ken Wilber; Integral Spirituality, p. 33

OK, changed my mind, here's a bit more uplifting quote:

"The crises of our time are challenging the world religions to release a new spiritual force transcending religious, cultural, and national boundaries into a new consciousness of the oneness of the human community and so putting into effect a spiritual dynamic towards a solution of the world's problems...We affirm a new spirituality, divested of insularity and directed towards planetary consciousness"
-Statement read before the U.N., October 1995 (don't know by who)