Neil Douglas-Klotz’s Aramaic interpretation of God, heaven, and the Lord’s Prayer[1]
Readers are advised that all the translations cited in this article have been described by a translator of Hebrew and Aramaic texts as “incorrect …. massively incorrect.” See the Postscript following the article for the full story, which is an interesting case where loose, inaccurate translating and one man’s pursuit of insight have created confusion for at least some of his readers.
PATRICK S. WOLFE
Webster’s New Collegiate Dictionary states that God is “the supreme or ultimate reality.” It also provides the Christian Science perspective on God as “the incorporeal divine Principle ruling over all as eternal Spirit : infinite Mind.”
In Prayers of the Cosmos: Meditations on the Aramaic Words of Jesus (1990), Neil Douglas-Klotz writes: “All the major contemporary traditions of the Middle East—Jewish, Christian, and Islamic…. originally called God either El or Al, which means ‘That,’ ‘the One,’ or ‘that One which expresses itself uniquely through all things.’ From this root arises the sacred names Elat (Old Canaanite), Elohim Hebrew), Allaha (Aramaic), and Allah (Arabic).”[2]
“There is no question,” Douglas-Klotz adds, “that Jesus and his followers spoke Aramaic.” It was “the tongue in which he expressed his teachings.”[3] But most English translations of his words come from Greek. For example, the first line of the King James version of the Lord’s Prayer is “Our Father which art in heaven,” which in Aramaic is Abwoon d’bwashmaya, which translates as: “O Birther! Father-Mother of the Cosmos, you create all that moves in light.”[4]
While abwoon is a derivative of abba, the Aramaic word for personal father, Douglas-Klotz points out that “its original roots do not specify a gender and could be translated ‘divine parent.’”[5] Moreover, there are four parts to the sound-meaning of Ah-bw-oo-n, which together represent a sacred exchange. From “A” (phonetically “Ah”), “the Only Being, the pure Oneness and Unity”; to “bw,” “a birthing, a creation, a flow of blessing, as if from the ‘interior’ of this Oneness to us”; to “oo,” “the breath or spirit that carries this flow, echoing the sound of breathing and including … magnetism, wind, electricity, and more. [All of it] linked to the Aramaic phrase rokha d’goodsha, later translated as ‘Holy Spirit’”; to “n,” “the vibration of this creative breath from Oneness as it touches and interpenetrates form … a substance that this force touches, moves, and changes. This sound echoes the earth, and the body here vibrates as we intone the whole name slowly: Ah-bw-oo-n.”[6]
As for the phrase “which art in heaven,” the term “heaven,” in Aramaic, “ceases to be a metaphysical concept and presents the image of ‘light and sound shining through all creation…. When Jesus refers to the ‘kingdom of heaven,’ this kingdom is always within and among us.”[7] Douglas-Klotz notes: “In d’bwashmaya, the central root is found in the middle: shm. From this root comes the word shem, which may mean light, sound, vibration, name, or word. The root shm indicates that which ‘rises and shines in space’ …. The ending -aya shows that this shining includes every center of activity, every place we see, as well as the potential abilities of all things. In effect, shmaya says that the vibration or word by which one can recognize the Oneness—God’s name—is the universe. This was the Aramaic conception of ‘heaven.’ The word is central to many of the sayings of Jesus and usually misunderstood. In Greek and later in English, ‘heaven’ became a metaphysical concept out of touch with the process of creation.”[8]
In the prayer’s first line—“O Birther! Father-Mother of the Cosmos, you create all that moves in light”—Douglas-Klotz says, “we remember our origins—not in guilt or imperfection, but in blessing and unity, in both vibration and stillness.”[9]
Referencing The Hebraic Tongue Restored (1815), by Fabre D’Olivet, a Hebrew sage and language scholar, Douglas-Klotz states that “the tragedy of biblical translations has been that expressions meant to resonate many levels of meaning—at least intellectual, metaphysical, and universal—have been whittled down…. This tendency to divide and overliteralize was reflected in the whole Newtonian era…. An unnatural division between God, Nature and humanity, unknown to people who lived close to the earth, crept into our language with the advent of modern civilization…. Unlike Greek, Aramaic presents a fluid and holistic view of the cosmos. The arbitrary borders found in Greek between ‘mind,’ ‘body,’ and ‘spirit’ fall away.”[10]
The Aramaic equivalent of the fifth line of the Lord’s Prayer, “Give us this day our daily bread,” is: “Grant what we need each day in bread and insight.” The Aramaic word lachma means both “bread’ and “understanding.” According to Douglas-Klotz: “It is derived from a more basic root relating to the divine feminine—HMA—which pictures growing vigor, verdancy, warmth, passion, possibility, and all instruments of this generative power. This root became the word hochma, translated as ‘Holy Wisdom’ in Proverbs.”[11]
POSTSCRIPT
I purchased my copy of Prayers of the Cosmos: Meditations on the Aramaic Words of Jesus in September 2001, spurred, I’m pretty sure, by something favourable/intriguing that I’d read or heard. My copy includes a Foreword by theologian and author Matthew Fox and blurbs on the back cover from Joanna Macy and from laudatory reviews that appeared in Creation, Science of Mind, Sufism, and New Dimensions. It turns out, however, that significant controversy and dispute about the book has arisen over the last quarter century.
Soon after my original article, “An Aramaic lens on God, heaven, and the Lord’s Prayer,” was published on May 3, 2025, in the Times Colonist newspaper and online in its “Spiritually Speaking” blog, a rabbi and translator of Hebrew and Aramaic texts reached out to express his concerns about “the specific translations cited in this article.” I was advised to read critical comments on Amazon.ca about Prayers of the Cosmos. I was initially stymied when I tried to do this. On May 8, I found 709 customer reviews which gave the book an average rating of 4.7 out of 5, with 79% of reviewers rating the book 5 star and only 2% rating it 1 or 2 star. The rabbi helped me by providing one of the critical reviews, which reads: “Enjoyable, valuable and fascinating but I agree with other reviewers that the translation technique is flawed. In the author’s own explanations of his technique, he reveals unsupportable leaps of logic. He infers too much and turns a word or two into multiple lines. He goes beyond translation and extrapolates according to his own values and philosophy…” The rabbi also emphasized that the translations I “cited from the book are all incorrect…. massively incorrect.” This was my introduction to the fact that along with the endorsements of and praise for Prayers of the Cosmos, there’s also notable controversy and dispute about it.
In his introduction to Prayers of the Cosmos, Douglas-Klotz states: “A tradition of both native Middle Eastern and Hebraic mysticism says that each statement of sacred teaching must be examined from at least three points of view: the intellectual, the metaphorical, and the universal (or mystical). From the first viewpoint, we consider the face value of the words in question—what so-called modern people normally call the ‘literal’ meaning. According to native Middle Eastern mysticism, however, each Aramaic word presents several possible ‘literal translations.”[12]
Douglas-Klotz goes on to say: “My innovation … has been into the realm of the mystical expression of Jesus, the third level, particularly as it is found in the Aramaic roots of the words…. I have approached Jesus’ words as a translator, poet, student, and teacher of native mysticism, rather than as a theologian.”[13]
Douglas-Klotz maintains that his versions of the Lord’s Prayer and the Beatitudes “show that including the mystical level of translation clears up a number of difficulties. I have also provided for comparison parallel renderings for each section from the King James Version. In most cases … these versions are not wrong, but so limited in expression that they have proved misleading. I do not believe that any of the modern versions are substantially better; in each case where the Greek text has been taken as a source, translations have spawned theological concepts that are foreign to Aramaic thinking as well as, I believe, the thinking of Jesus himself.”[14]
On March 6, 2012, Douglas-Klotz was interviewed for the podcast Insights at the Edge by its host, Tami Simon. A transcript of this 57:33-minute podcast was published on July 28, 2021. Both the podcast and the transcript are available on the internet.[15]
Douglas-Klotz tells Tami “my work is about spiritual experience and trying to decode, if you will, Jesus’ way of prayer, his meditation and his spirituality—it’s important to give people some sense of how this could have felt.”[16]
The following is intended to elucidate Douglas-Klotz’s approach. He states, “there are several things which ended up really making a huge difference the more I looked at them. And this has to do with small things, like prepositions. Jesus primarily talks about not believing in him. He doesn’t say, ‘Believe in me.’ He says, Believe like me. Believe as I do’ …. Western churches … chose to translate ‘believe like me’ into ‘believe in me.’”[17]
A second example: “the word that Jesus uses that is often translated as ‘spirit’ really means ‘breath.’ Spirit is sometimes seen in some theologies as …. something disembodied, something not of this world, disconnected.”[18] He maintains that “once we start to retranslate or insert the word ‘breath’ wherever Jesus uses spirit, that gives us a real hint as to his way of prayer or meditation…. I have tried to offer what I would consider to be the types of prayer, the types of meditations that Jesus would have done, which involve simple chanting, simple inner breathing with certain words, much as it’s done sometimes today in the tradition of Contemplative Prayer or Centering Prayer.”[19]
A third example relates to the “I am” sayings of Jesus: “I am the way, the truth, and the life”; “I am the door.” “In Aramaic,” Douglas-Klotz says, “the word that is later translated as ‘I am’ is really ‘I-I.’ Aramaic doesn’t have a ‘being’ verb. You can’t actually say ‘I am’ in ancient Aramaic, nor can you do it in ancient Hebrew…. So really what Jesus is saying is, ‘I-I.’ The connection of the small self, which in Aramaic is called nafsha, is the self that is growing, evolving, learning through life. And the connection between that and the greater self … or the One, or God …. And just simply breathing Ina-Ina, the ‘I-I.’ Through these words that Yeshua/Jesus spoke, we’re connecting to his way of prayer, his way of being.”[20]
Douglas-Klotz maintains that Jesus used the “I am” sayings (the “I-I” teaching) to prepare “his disciples for him leaving and trying to point them back to themselves, to dive more deeply into themselves as a source of guidance rather than relying on him because he realizes that he’s not going to be around much longer.”[21] Douglas-Klotz adds that “it’s more of an inner circle teaching rather than what [Jesus] was expressing outwardly to everyone else.”[22] Jesus is “pointing to different pathways, different meditative pathways that [the disciples] can use after he is gone…. he wanted them to do the things he had done and greater than these. And the way that they would do that is not by idolizing him or putting him on a pedestal, but in trying to look towards where he’s pointing them. Look toward their own connection, Ina-Ina, through him to sacred unity.”[23]
By “simply breathing Ina-Ina, the ‘I-I’,” Douglas-Klotz says Jesus is “asking us to dive more deeply into our own inner self and connect that through him to the greater sense of life, of reality, of the Holy One.”[24] In Aramaic, according to Douglas-Klotz, “I am the way, the truth, and the life” becomes “something like, ‘If you connect Ina-Ina, this will show you the path. It will show you the sense of right direction’—that is, when you come to a crossroads, that’s the so-called truth.”[25]
Regarding translation, Douglas-Klotz says, “in my very first book, Prayers of the Cosmos, [I translated] each line of the Lord’s Prayer, of Jesus’ prayer, five or six different ways. So these are possibilities. No one translation is the definitive translation. But there’s a richness. There’s a breadth there. There’s a depth there in which people can hear what they need to hear and still connect, you could say, through breath, through spirit to the person who said the words.” This approach “is called Midrash. You take a translation, [and] rather than do a so-called a literal translation [sic], you do maybe five or six different literal translations, because the Hebrew, Aramaic, and Arabic [each] allows for different literal translations of the same word.” He objects “when people try to boil things down to an ‘only translation’ or an ‘only correct belief’ in any religious or spiritual tradition, this is where things tend to get a bit volatile.”[26]
This is an ironic conclusion given the concern-exasperation-volatility Douglas-Klotz’s approach has sparked in knowledgeable quarters. Although controversy around his method is never specifically mentioned in the interview, I wonder if it was hovering in the background. Tami at one point observes: “I have this awareness that people can be very attached and convinced of their interpretation of Jesus’ words, and that it’s very easy to offend people—not intentionally, but just by offering an alternative view.”[27]
Douglas-Klotz admits that his approach to translation involves “glossing certain things. Then after ‘glossing’ we say, ‘this is what we’re talking about.’ For instance, in the first line of Jesus’ prayer—we’re talking about the line that was translated, ‘Our father, who art in heaven.’ Now let’s look at that in the Aramaic, and what are some of the other, more expanded deeper meanings around that. So you’re always sort of dealing in translation. And the way that I’ve worked around that is to keep opening up the translation rather than to let it be limited to one particular translation, or to say, ‘OK, this is the definitive translation.’ But keep opening it up…. I’ve been gratified to see that as people have used my books … used the recorded programs that I’ve done through Sounds True through the years, they have written to me and say, ‘Here, I’ve done my own Midrash and this is what I’ve gotten from it. Here’s another version or way of looking at it.’ And that’s very gratifying to me, because it means that it keeps the words and teachings living rather than let them be set in stone or set in immutable clay.”[28]
While some of Douglas-Klotz’s supporters may regard his approach as inspired, other of his readers, based on my own experience and the aforementioned Amazon reviews critical of his translation technique, have found his approach misguided and misleading. Is it legitimate to “work around” the restrictions of translation by continually widening or loosening the interpretation of the translated text without being forthright that this is a highly unconventional method?
Douglas-Klotz says his approach “doesn’t eliminate necessarily any of the literal translations that were done in the past. But what it does do is perhaps broaden and deepen a person’s spiritual experience.”[29] At the same time, if someone prefers the King James Version of the Lord’s Prayer, he says they should “stay with that because it has meaning” for them.[30] Indeed, with his work, he adds, “there’s no sense of being definitive. I’m just adding my bit into what people have done before me.”[31] Yet, he maintains elsewhere (on the “Abwoon Community” web site) that what he “unveiled about Jesus’ spirituality was for real, not refutable.”[32]
Although I find a tension bordering on manipulation and/or evasiveness in some of Douglas-Klotz’s arguments defending his approach, I nonetheless feel that he is sincere. He writes that the “interest and passion” that underlies his work “were driven by childhood experiences of Jesus as well as later ones when I began to chant the first word of his prayer in Aramaic: Abwoon.”[33]
Patrick Wolfe writes about current events, history, spirituality and global warming.
A shorter version of this essay, under the original title “An Aramaic lens on God, heaven, and the Lord’s Prayer” and with no postscript, was published in the FAITH FORUM column, Times Colonist, Saturday, May 3, 2025, C12, and on the Times Colonist’s “Spiritually Speaking” blog. It was subsequently removed from the blog for being misleading. ↑
Neil Douglas-Klotz, Prayers of the Cosmos: Meditations on the Aramaic Words of Jesus, First HarperCollins Paperback Edition, 1994, 7. ↑
Neil Douglas-Klotz’s Aramaic lens on God, heaven, and the Lord’s Prayer
Neil Douglas-Klotz’s Aramaic interpretation of God, heaven, and the Lord’s Prayer[1]
Readers are advised that all the translations cited in this article have been described by a translator of Hebrew and Aramaic texts as “incorrect …. massively incorrect.” See the Postscript following the article for the full story, which is an interesting case where loose, inaccurate translating and one man’s pursuit of insight have created confusion for at least some of his readers.
PATRICK S. WOLFE
Webster’s New Collegiate Dictionary states that God is “the supreme or ultimate reality.” It also provides the Christian Science perspective on God as “the incorporeal divine Principle ruling over all as eternal Spirit : infinite Mind.”
In Prayers of the Cosmos: Meditations on the Aramaic Words of Jesus (1990), Neil Douglas-Klotz writes: “All the major contemporary traditions of the Middle East—Jewish, Christian, and Islamic…. originally called God either El or Al, which means ‘That,’ ‘the One,’ or ‘that One which expresses itself uniquely through all things.’ From this root arises the sacred names Elat (Old Canaanite), Elohim Hebrew), Allaha (Aramaic), and Allah (Arabic).”[2]
“There is no question,” Douglas-Klotz adds, “that Jesus and his followers spoke Aramaic.” It was “the tongue in which he expressed his teachings.”[3] But most English translations of his words come from Greek. For example, the first line of the King James version of the Lord’s Prayer is “Our Father which art in heaven,” which in Aramaic is Abwoon d’bwashmaya, which translates as: “O Birther! Father-Mother of the Cosmos, you create all that moves in light.”[4]
While abwoon is a derivative of abba, the Aramaic word for personal father, Douglas-Klotz points out that “its original roots do not specify a gender and could be translated ‘divine parent.’”[5] Moreover, there are four parts to the sound-meaning of Ah-bw-oo-n, which together represent a sacred exchange. From “A” (phonetically “Ah”), “the Only Being, the pure Oneness and Unity”; to “bw,” “a birthing, a creation, a flow of blessing, as if from the ‘interior’ of this Oneness to us”; to “oo,” “the breath or spirit that carries this flow, echoing the sound of breathing and including … magnetism, wind, electricity, and more. [All of it] linked to the Aramaic phrase rokha d’goodsha, later translated as ‘Holy Spirit’”; to “n,” “the vibration of this creative breath from Oneness as it touches and interpenetrates form … a substance that this force touches, moves, and changes. This sound echoes the earth, and the body here vibrates as we intone the whole name slowly: Ah-bw-oo-n.”[6]
As for the phrase “which art in heaven,” the term “heaven,” in Aramaic, “ceases to be a metaphysical concept and presents the image of ‘light and sound shining through all creation…. When Jesus refers to the ‘kingdom of heaven,’ this kingdom is always within and among us.”[7] Douglas-Klotz notes: “In d’bwashmaya, the central root is found in the middle: shm. From this root comes the word shem, which may mean light, sound, vibration, name, or word. The root shm indicates that which ‘rises and shines in space’ …. The ending -aya shows that this shining includes every center of activity, every place we see, as well as the potential abilities of all things. In effect, shmaya says that the vibration or word by which one can recognize the Oneness—God’s name—is the universe. This was the Aramaic conception of ‘heaven.’ The word is central to many of the sayings of Jesus and usually misunderstood. In Greek and later in English, ‘heaven’ became a metaphysical concept out of touch with the process of creation.”[8]
In the prayer’s first line—“O Birther! Father-Mother of the Cosmos, you create all that moves in light”—Douglas-Klotz says, “we remember our origins—not in guilt or imperfection, but in blessing and unity, in both vibration and stillness.”[9]
Referencing The Hebraic Tongue Restored (1815), by Fabre D’Olivet, a Hebrew sage and language scholar, Douglas-Klotz states that “the tragedy of biblical translations has been that expressions meant to resonate many levels of meaning—at least intellectual, metaphysical, and universal—have been whittled down…. This tendency to divide and overliteralize was reflected in the whole Newtonian era…. An unnatural division between God, Nature and humanity, unknown to people who lived close to the earth, crept into our language with the advent of modern civilization…. Unlike Greek, Aramaic presents a fluid and holistic view of the cosmos. The arbitrary borders found in Greek between ‘mind,’ ‘body,’ and ‘spirit’ fall away.”[10]
The Aramaic equivalent of the fifth line of the Lord’s Prayer, “Give us this day our daily bread,” is: “Grant what we need each day in bread and insight.” The Aramaic word lachma means both “bread’ and “understanding.” According to Douglas-Klotz: “It is derived from a more basic root relating to the divine feminine—HMA—which pictures growing vigor, verdancy, warmth, passion, possibility, and all instruments of this generative power. This root became the word hochma, translated as ‘Holy Wisdom’ in Proverbs.”[11]
POSTSCRIPT
I purchased my copy of Prayers of the Cosmos: Meditations on the Aramaic Words of Jesus in September 2001, spurred, I’m pretty sure, by something favourable/intriguing that I’d read or heard. My copy includes a Foreword by theologian and author Matthew Fox and blurbs on the back cover from Joanna Macy and from laudatory reviews that appeared in Creation, Science of Mind, Sufism, and New Dimensions. It turns out, however, that significant controversy and dispute about the book has arisen over the last quarter century.
Soon after my original article, “An Aramaic lens on God, heaven, and the Lord’s Prayer,” was published on May 3, 2025, in the Times Colonist newspaper and online in its “Spiritually Speaking” blog, a rabbi and translator of Hebrew and Aramaic texts reached out to express his concerns about “the specific translations cited in this article.” I was advised to read critical comments on Amazon.ca about Prayers of the Cosmos. I was initially stymied when I tried to do this. On May 8, I found 709 customer reviews which gave the book an average rating of 4.7 out of 5, with 79% of reviewers rating the book 5 star and only 2% rating it 1 or 2 star. The rabbi helped me by providing one of the critical reviews, which reads: “Enjoyable, valuable and fascinating but I agree with other reviewers that the translation technique is flawed. In the author’s own explanations of his technique, he reveals unsupportable leaps of logic. He infers too much and turns a word or two into multiple lines. He goes beyond translation and extrapolates according to his own values and philosophy…” The rabbi also emphasized that the translations I “cited from the book are all incorrect…. massively incorrect.” This was my introduction to the fact that along with the endorsements of and praise for Prayers of the Cosmos, there’s also notable controversy and dispute about it.
In his introduction to Prayers of the Cosmos, Douglas-Klotz states: “A tradition of both native Middle Eastern and Hebraic mysticism says that each statement of sacred teaching must be examined from at least three points of view: the intellectual, the metaphorical, and the universal (or mystical). From the first viewpoint, we consider the face value of the words in question—what so-called modern people normally call the ‘literal’ meaning. According to native Middle Eastern mysticism, however, each Aramaic word presents several possible ‘literal translations.”[12]
Douglas-Klotz goes on to say: “My innovation … has been into the realm of the mystical expression of Jesus, the third level, particularly as it is found in the Aramaic roots of the words…. I have approached Jesus’ words as a translator, poet, student, and teacher of native mysticism, rather than as a theologian.”[13]
Douglas-Klotz maintains that his versions of the Lord’s Prayer and the Beatitudes “show that including the mystical level of translation clears up a number of difficulties. I have also provided for comparison parallel renderings for each section from the King James Version. In most cases … these versions are not wrong, but so limited in expression that they have proved misleading. I do not believe that any of the modern versions are substantially better; in each case where the Greek text has been taken as a source, translations have spawned theological concepts that are foreign to Aramaic thinking as well as, I believe, the thinking of Jesus himself.”[14]
On March 6, 2012, Douglas-Klotz was interviewed for the podcast Insights at the Edge by its host, Tami Simon. A transcript of this 57:33-minute podcast was published on July 28, 2021. Both the podcast and the transcript are available on the internet.[15]
Douglas-Klotz tells Tami “my work is about spiritual experience and trying to decode, if you will, Jesus’ way of prayer, his meditation and his spirituality—it’s important to give people some sense of how this could have felt.”[16]
The following is intended to elucidate Douglas-Klotz’s approach. He states, “there are several things which ended up really making a huge difference the more I looked at them. And this has to do with small things, like prepositions. Jesus primarily talks about not believing in him. He doesn’t say, ‘Believe in me.’ He says, Believe like me. Believe as I do’ …. Western churches … chose to translate ‘believe like me’ into ‘believe in me.’”[17]
A second example: “the word that Jesus uses that is often translated as ‘spirit’ really means ‘breath.’ Spirit is sometimes seen in some theologies as …. something disembodied, something not of this world, disconnected.”[18] He maintains that “once we start to retranslate or insert the word ‘breath’ wherever Jesus uses spirit, that gives us a real hint as to his way of prayer or meditation…. I have tried to offer what I would consider to be the types of prayer, the types of meditations that Jesus would have done, which involve simple chanting, simple inner breathing with certain words, much as it’s done sometimes today in the tradition of Contemplative Prayer or Centering Prayer.”[19]
A third example relates to the “I am” sayings of Jesus: “I am the way, the truth, and the life”; “I am the door.” “In Aramaic,” Douglas-Klotz says, “the word that is later translated as ‘I am’ is really ‘I-I.’ Aramaic doesn’t have a ‘being’ verb. You can’t actually say ‘I am’ in ancient Aramaic, nor can you do it in ancient Hebrew…. So really what Jesus is saying is, ‘I-I.’ The connection of the small self, which in Aramaic is called nafsha, is the self that is growing, evolving, learning through life. And the connection between that and the greater self … or the One, or God …. And just simply breathing Ina-Ina, the ‘I-I.’ Through these words that Yeshua/Jesus spoke, we’re connecting to his way of prayer, his way of being.”[20]
Douglas-Klotz maintains that Jesus used the “I am” sayings (the “I-I” teaching) to prepare “his disciples for him leaving and trying to point them back to themselves, to dive more deeply into themselves as a source of guidance rather than relying on him because he realizes that he’s not going to be around much longer.”[21] Douglas-Klotz adds that “it’s more of an inner circle teaching rather than what [Jesus] was expressing outwardly to everyone else.”[22] Jesus is “pointing to different pathways, different meditative pathways that [the disciples] can use after he is gone…. he wanted them to do the things he had done and greater than these. And the way that they would do that is not by idolizing him or putting him on a pedestal, but in trying to look towards where he’s pointing them. Look toward their own connection, Ina-Ina, through him to sacred unity.”[23]
By “simply breathing Ina-Ina, the ‘I-I’,” Douglas-Klotz says Jesus is “asking us to dive more deeply into our own inner self and connect that through him to the greater sense of life, of reality, of the Holy One.”[24] In Aramaic, according to Douglas-Klotz, “I am the way, the truth, and the life” becomes “something like, ‘If you connect Ina-Ina, this will show you the path. It will show you the sense of right direction’—that is, when you come to a crossroads, that’s the so-called truth.”[25]
Regarding translation, Douglas-Klotz says, “in my very first book, Prayers of the Cosmos, [I translated] each line of the Lord’s Prayer, of Jesus’ prayer, five or six different ways. So these are possibilities. No one translation is the definitive translation. But there’s a richness. There’s a breadth there. There’s a depth there in which people can hear what they need to hear and still connect, you could say, through breath, through spirit to the person who said the words.” This approach “is called Midrash. You take a translation, [and] rather than do a so-called a literal translation [sic], you do maybe five or six different literal translations, because the Hebrew, Aramaic, and Arabic [each] allows for different literal translations of the same word.” He objects “when people try to boil things down to an ‘only translation’ or an ‘only correct belief’ in any religious or spiritual tradition, this is where things tend to get a bit volatile.”[26]
This is an ironic conclusion given the concern-exasperation-volatility Douglas-Klotz’s approach has sparked in knowledgeable quarters. Although controversy around his method is never specifically mentioned in the interview, I wonder if it was hovering in the background. Tami at one point observes: “I have this awareness that people can be very attached and convinced of their interpretation of Jesus’ words, and that it’s very easy to offend people—not intentionally, but just by offering an alternative view.”[27]
Douglas-Klotz admits that his approach to translation involves “glossing certain things. Then after ‘glossing’ we say, ‘this is what we’re talking about.’ For instance, in the first line of Jesus’ prayer—we’re talking about the line that was translated, ‘Our father, who art in heaven.’ Now let’s look at that in the Aramaic, and what are some of the other, more expanded deeper meanings around that. So you’re always sort of dealing in translation. And the way that I’ve worked around that is to keep opening up the translation rather than to let it be limited to one particular translation, or to say, ‘OK, this is the definitive translation.’ But keep opening it up…. I’ve been gratified to see that as people have used my books … used the recorded programs that I’ve done through Sounds True through the years, they have written to me and say, ‘Here, I’ve done my own Midrash and this is what I’ve gotten from it. Here’s another version or way of looking at it.’ And that’s very gratifying to me, because it means that it keeps the words and teachings living rather than let them be set in stone or set in immutable clay.”[28]
While some of Douglas-Klotz’s supporters may regard his approach as inspired, other of his readers, based on my own experience and the aforementioned Amazon reviews critical of his translation technique, have found his approach misguided and misleading. Is it legitimate to “work around” the restrictions of translation by continually widening or loosening the interpretation of the translated text without being forthright that this is a highly unconventional method?
Douglas-Klotz says his approach “doesn’t eliminate necessarily any of the literal translations that were done in the past. But what it does do is perhaps broaden and deepen a person’s spiritual experience.”[29] At the same time, if someone prefers the King James Version of the Lord’s Prayer, he says they should “stay with that because it has meaning” for them.[30] Indeed, with his work, he adds, “there’s no sense of being definitive. I’m just adding my bit into what people have done before me.”[31] Yet, he maintains elsewhere (on the “Abwoon Community” web site) that what he “unveiled about Jesus’ spirituality was for real, not refutable.”[32]
Although I find a tension bordering on manipulation and/or evasiveness in some of Douglas-Klotz’s arguments defending his approach, I nonetheless feel that he is sincere. He writes that the “interest and passion” that underlies his work “were driven by childhood experiences of Jesus as well as later ones when I began to chant the first word of his prayer in Aramaic: Abwoon.”[33]
Patrick Wolfe writes about current events, history, spirituality and global warming.
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