We cannot be imitators.
We cannot be just followers.
We are demanded, our people are commanded, to be a Kingdom of Priests.
The point is that a priest doesn't need another priest to officiate for him.
A Jew doesn't need a rabbi.
A Jew needs a personal connection with the "Boss," with the Lord Himself.
As a person I am demanded, and as a Jew I am demanded, to have such a connection.
I have one, and for me it's a very personal one.
I have to have some kind of meeting with the essence of my being a Jew.
So I think that every one of us has, at one point in his life, to find out what is his or her basic connection.
Some so-called spiritual people are always immersed in higher mysteries, and always try to deal with things that most people understand little about.
I'm trying to say something else.
I don't believe that if one has to look for the Lord, one has to look to the ceiling or to the heavens.
The Lord is everywhere, not just space-wise, but everywhere in every meaning of things.
To speak about the Almighty as being connected with the spiritual is correct, as long as we don't say that He is spiritual because He is not material.
But on the other hand, I can't say that He is material because He is not spiritual.
Both these terms are not adequate to describe that which is beyond all this.
Some say that the Lord is on high and that He's sitting in heaven.
We Jews say that He is even higher because He looks down upon heaven and earth.
The Lord is so infinite that He deals with the smallest physical being, with the molecule and the germ, with a grain of wheat, in the say way that he deals with angels, with the galaxies.
He is so great that all these things are in the same way insignificant, but very significant when all of them are together.
So in a way what I'm saying is that this is Judaism.
Judaism is the belief that connects the earthly and those things that are not earthly.
What is really of interest is something beyond us, and we can get to it by combining the two, by not leaning too much to one side or the other.
–Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz
From a conversation on October 19, 2006 between Rabbi William Berkowitz and Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz