Earlier this week, my middle son and I woke up bright and early in order to beat Chicago rush hour traffic and make it to Champaign, Illinois in time for his orientation/registration day. While our older son is also a student at U of I, the new student process then was entirely online because of the pandemic. So this was a new experience.

Having grown up in another Big Ten college town (Ann Arbor) and spent much of my career in higher education, there was something reassuringly familiar about walking on the sleepy quad in the summer, entering the student Union building, and witnessing the beautifully diverse array of students and families on hand. At a time when universities have become sites of so much contention, this was a visceral reminder of their incredible positive possibilities.

[Related side note: Last year I published an article in the Shalom Hartman Institute’s journal, Sources, entitled, “American Jews & Our Universities: Back to Basics.” I’m pleased to share that it was recognized as the runner-up in the Excellence in North American Jewish History category of the Simon Rockower Awards for Excellence in Jewish Journalism. Shout-out in particular to the journal editor, my old college friend Dr. Claire Sufrin, for her excellent guidance.]

After a morning of the expected sessions (how to pay your bill, how to use the health center, getting oriented to your department/school), my son eventually went to register for courses. I waited in the campus bookstore (always on brand). As I perused the shelves, I came across a copy of “The Collected Essays of Ralph Ellison.” This was a delight, as Ellison is someone I’ve always wanted to read more of but for whatever reason have never gotten around to. I wasn’t disappointed.

For starters, I discovered that we shared some common interests: He too had studied music before embarking on a career as a writer and academic. Additionally—and perhaps related, or maybe not—Ellison and I share a preoccupation with questions about the nature of the American experiment, particularly the experiences of the minority groups with which we each respectively identify, while simultaneously claiming and holding fast to the label “American.” 

In 1970 Ellison published an essay in Time magazine entitled, “What America Would Be Like Without Blacks.” He observes that one of the enormous contributions of African-American culture to American life in general has been “to remind us that the world is ever unexplored, and that while complete mastery of life is mere illusion, the real secret of the game is to make life swing.” (The musician in me thrills to that metaphor.) Imagining an American history without African-Americans—an idea he dismisses as objectionable on both ideological and pragmatic grounds—Ellison observes that such a history would yield the absence of a “tragic knowledge which we try ceaselessly to evade: that the true subject of democracy is not simply material well-being, but the extension of the democratic process in the direction of perfecting itself.” And then he adds, “The most obvious test and clue to that perfection is the inclusion, not assimilation, of the black [sic] man.” 

A few months ago, my dear friend and synagogue rabbi Ari Hart delivered a sermon that opened with a critique of an aspect of some (perhaps a lot?) of contemporary mindfulness practice: nonjudgmental acceptance. Now, I hasten to add that Ari is a participant in our Clergy Leadership Program cohort that launches next month, and he was not offering this critique to knock Jewish spiritual practices grounded in mindfulness. He was pointing out something on which, frankly, I agree with him: The Torah and Judaism aren’t simply about accepting what is, but about changing our lives and the world to what they can and should be. If we’re going to practice mindfulness, it should be in the service not just of acceptance of what is, but bringing about what might be.

I don’t think that should be a controversial statement, yet I imagine it might prompt at least a moment of going, “Huh” in our minds. It should come as no surprise that as mindfulness practice has become commercialized it has emphasized the self-acceptance element—”You are absolutely perfect, just as you are”—and de-emphasized the self-improvement aspect—”with room for improvement,” as Shunryu Suzuki Roshi, founder of the San Francisco Zen Center, was known to teach. The former is good for sales; the latter, not so much.

Twenty years ago, when I was a freshly minted rabbi who just arrived in Evanston to work at Northwestern University Hillel, I came up with the idea of hanging a banner to advertise for the High Holidays. Intuitively, I decided to put a question on the banner, rather than just making an announcement: “What will you do better this year?” While the banner got a lot of positive response, one of the other staff members came to me with some concern: “I’m worried about the word ‘better.’ It’s kind of judgmental. It might push people away. What about ‘What will you do different this year?'” I responded, “It’s called the Day of Judgment. It’s okay to be judgmental.” (I was younger and brasher then.) Clearly this tension between non-judgmental acceptance of what is and gentle judgmental aspiration of what might be isn’t a new conversation.

A keyword in Parashat Shelach (Numbers 13:1-15:41) is the verb latur. “Send people to scout (latur) the land,” the Holy One tells Moses (13:1). He does so, and in his charge he elaborates on the mission of scouting: “See what kind of country it is” (13:18). The scouts are meant to take an honest look at the land and its inhabitants and bring back a report. They do so, of course, but famously they add their own commentary, full of judgmentalism and self-doubt: “The country that we traversed and scouted is one that devours its inhabitants. All the people that we saw in it are of astonishingly great size… We looked like grasshoppers to ourselves, and so we must have looked to them” (13:32-33). We know what comes next: the imposition of a 40-year period of wandering in the wilderness, so that the entire generation of the Exodus might die off.

Yet the word latur comes back at the very end of the Torah portion, in the mitzvah of tzitzit. By looking at them, the Torah says, v’lo toturu, we should be reminded not to follow after our hearts and our eyes “in your urge to stray” (15:39, JPS translation). Rashi, following the Midrash, connects this instance of latur with that of the scouts. As Rebbe Nachman of Bratslav puts it: “They are a method of self-rebuke, reminding us to fulfill the mitzvot and not simply follow the desires of our hearts and eyes.”

We can interpret these words harshly, as though they involve discounting and denying bodily sensations altogether. But I think that misses the point. The larger message here, it seems to me, is that our spiritual practice is meant to help us see clearly—both what is present in our mind-hearts and, gently, what of that which is present is not serving us well.

Thank God, we are created with desires generated by our bodies and our hearts. We have emotions, we have thoughts, we have imaginations, and we are able to experience an incredible range of feelings and sensations. The point of mindfulness practice in a Jewish idiom is to see all of these things clearly—so that we can make choices that reduce harm and suffering and, wisely and skillfully, bring about something better than what might be right now.