Yoga and Judaism Are Incompatible—But Not In the Way Menachem Wecker Thinks

In his Mosaic essay on Judaism and yoga, Menachem Wecker strongly urges faithful Jews to be wary of a practice that is now a ubiquitous part of the American culture of wellness and fitness. The reason: it is impossible to disentangle yoga’s current, secularized iteration from its millennia-old links to both Hindu and Buddhist spiritual traditions. Yoga teachers, Wecker writes, “indisputably employ a vocabulary, and inculcate physical positions, that derive from centuries-old religious worship”—the worship, in short, of false gods.

Indeed, the very etymology of yoga—the word, Wecker reminds us, derives from the Sanskrit for union—attests to this vestigial idolatry, implying as it does “the conjoining of worshipper and gods” and thereby risking, for an observant Jew, the transgression of a core commandment. “The issue at stake, then,” he concludes, “is how much of the old devotions and ideas inhere—or can be seen to inhere—in the stripped-out exercise that most today are familiar with. I believe that enough of them still do inhere to make religious Jews cautious.”

Wecker’s perspective resonates with other, more common objections to yoga harbored by members and/or advocates of organized religion in general. Just this year in Alabama, for example, state lawmakers have reluctantly, with reservations, allowed for a denatured form of yoga in public schools—minus the customary chants or phrases like “Namaste”—after decades of prohibiting it altogether as a form of religious endorsement.