Mindfulness, Me And Judaism
I’m grateful to those of you who have sent me emails – especially those of you from Congregation Beth Israel – saying that you liked my previous posts and hoped to see more. I’m with you on that! I will say that I have more respect and appreciation for the challenges of blogging than I used to have. It is not easy to produce something of quality on a regular basis! But I’ll keep trying!
That said…
There is a tremendous amount of interest and excitement right now at the intersection of Jewish tradition and mindfulness practice. In fact, our Congregation Beth Israel 2016 Schechter Memorial Scholar in Residence, the first weekend in February, will be Rabbi Jonathan Slater. Jonathan has been one of a handful of key figures in the “Jewish mindfulness revolution,” especially in North America. He is a founding faculty member of The Institute for Jewish Spirituality, an organization that trains Jewish professionals and laypeople in working with mindfulness in a Jewish context, both communally and as individuals.
What is mindfulness? There are probably lots of ways to answer this question, but at my current level of experience and understanding, I would put it something like this. Mindfulness cultivating the ability to pay attention, to learn to summon a calm, clear and compassionate state of awareness, a state in which we are able to be with the truth of our lives and our experience without trying to ignore or push away what is unpleasant or get caught up in holding on desperately to what is pleasant. It is, in Jewish terms, a path for cultivating da’at, a deep relationship with the truth of our existence. And since, in Judaism, one of the Torah’s names for God is I Am What I Am or, What Is, or, Truth, the practice of mindfulness can also bring us closer to a relationship with the divine.
How I became fascinated with the work being done at the intersection of Judaism and mindfulness practice is, as they say, a pretty long story. Part of that story is told in this blog post, where I reproduced a Rosh Hashanah sermon about my struggles with depression and anxiety.
Part of my recovery process from that dark and difficult time was enrolling in a course called MBSR, or Mindfulness- Based Stress Reduction. There I learned a variety of mindfulness practices including yoga and meditation – practices to help a person “get out of their head” and into their body and the present reality.
These practices (combined with medication and psychotherapy) were a huge part of my recovery. But then I got to a point where I began to ask myself, “I have my yoga and meditation practice over here, and my Jewish practice over there… How are the two connected?”
It was then that I discovered a path that brought together the wisdom of Judaism and the wisdom of mindfulness. It began with a book by Rabbi Jonathan Slater entitled, “Mindful Jewish Living: Compassionate Practice.” My process of discovering the path of mindful Judaism continued when I enrolled in the Rabbinic Leadership Program of the Institute for Jewish Spirituality. Over the course of two years, I attended four retreats, one every six months, with a diverse, multi-denominational cohort of forty rabbis. On retreat we practiced silence, Jewish meditation, and yoga in a Jewish mode. And we also studied Hasidic texts with Jonathan. They were eye-opening, beautiful and compassionate. I had never studied text like this, texts that taught so much about being awake, loving and connected in one’s life. I was hooked, and subsequently enrolled in (and recently completed) an eighteen month follow-up course to train Jewish professionals and interested laypeople to be Jewish Mindfulness Meditation Teachers.
I am almost inexpressibly grateful for having the chance to do this work and to engage in this practice. It has helped me in the search for skillful, wise action and clarity of perception. It has renewed my Judaism and revitalized my rabbinate.
That’s why I’m so excited about Jonathan’s visit and why I hope that his sessions will draw people from beyond our “Adult Jewish Education Fan Club” at CBI.
Let me close this blog post with a quotation from Jonathan’s commentary on a Hasidic commentary about Yitro, this week’s Torah portion, which is most famous for containing the giving of the Ten Commandments. The Hasidic commentary that Jonathan is explaining and expanding here is called Birkat Avraham. The commentary itself is beautiful and subtle, but, to summarize, it plays on the giving of the Ten Commandments in a way that suggests that God “dwells” within every word of Torah and within everything in the world. Jonathan expands the teaching as follows:
Regarding God's speech at Sinai Moses reports the following: "YHVH spoke those words to your whole congregation at the mountain, out of the fire and the dense clouds - with a mighty voice that did not cease (kol gadol velo yasaph). He inscribed them on two tablets of stone, which He gave to me" (Deut. 5:19). The Dibberot [utterences] which God spoke were Anokhi [I am] and Lo Yehiyeh Lekha, [You shall have no other gods…] the first two commandments; they reverberate still, echoing in our hearts, resonating in Torah and in prayer. They are always available to us, to connect us back to our source, to the root of all. They remind us that neither prayer, Torah nor God is external to us, but present and constantly running through us. Even when we are ignorant, obtuse or inattentive, the call of those words is still present. We may think that God is absent, that we have to ascend the heavens or cross the sea to connect to God. That is not so. God is present to us in any moment we turn to connection. We read Ps. 30:8: "When You hid Your face I was terrified (histarta phanekha hayyiti nivhal)". An alternative reading might be: "Did You hide Your face? It was I who was confused!" We mistake our perceptions for the truth. We read the world solely from our personal perspective, only from our angle. When we are confused, the world is confusing. When we are sad, the world is bleak. When we are proud, the world is good to us, friendly and welcoming. But, none of our self-referential perceptions are correct. The world is the world; it is as it is. The darkness we perceive is only in our hearts, the blindness of our eyes. The confusion we experience is in our minds, but the world itself is pure, accurate, true. The goodness of the world we perceive in moments of pride is limited to ourselves, and in our ease we ignore the suffering of others, forget our own moments of struggle. Mindfulness practice brings us into relation with our experience with greater clarity, expanded perspective and less self-interest. We realize that what is true now is only true now. Jane Hirschfield, in her poem "It Was Like This: You Were Happy" reminds us about our lives:
Your story was this: you were happy, then you were sad,
you slept, you awakened.
Sometimes you ate roasted chestnuts, sometimes persimmons.
When we let go of "forever", and connect with "now" we meet Anokhi, [I am] we meet the truth of this moment. No one moment is "better" than the other: but, because we are living them, each moment of conscious attention can be received as benign, beneficial, blessed. My prayer:May I let go of preference and meet each moment as it is. Yes, I do like chocolate, but let its absence not cause me suffering, may its taste not seduce me to confusion. May I witness the pain of others with a broken heart, not a broken spirit, so that I might more fully respond to their needs without confusion, anger, distance. May I delight in the beauties and joys of the world without grasping, free. May constriction always open to love, great love, abundant love, ceaseless love.
As always, I hope you will post questions, reflections and comments to this blog post. I also hope that you will join us to learn with Rabbi Jonathan Slater throughout the weekend of February 5-7, 2016.
Shabbat Shalom!