Teach Me Your Way

Teach Me Your Way

Mar 9, 2018 | by Rabbi Lisa Goldstein, Former Executive Director, Institute for Jewish Spirituality

Part of my daily practice includes a fragment of a teaching from the Piaseczner Rebbe, Kalonymus Kalman Shapira. He instructed his students to work with Psalm 86:11: “Teach me, YHVH, your way that I may walk in your truth. Unify my heart to revere your name.” He taught a particular melody for the verse which I learned from Rabbi Nehemia Polen. I chant it to myself at the end of my meditation and before my prayer.

When I began working with this verse, I was struck by the goal of learning to revere God’s name. I am not typically drawn to yirah, the particular combination of fear and awe that is the mainstay of so much “Old Testament” religion. Jewish spiritual masters focus on both love and reverence as the twin hallmarks of devotion and in this day and age, don’t we need more love? Don’t we have enough fear?

And yet, this verse calls to me. It is becoming a more and more compelling instruction in humility which opens the possibility of living my life in attunement to something much beyond myself that also includes myself. And it turns out that yirah is the key.

Here is how I am working with the verse as an intention for my day. When I say, “Teach me your way that I may walk in your truth,” I remind myself that there are so many ways to go through the day before me. I will doubtlessly encounter all kinds of people; I will probably be annoyed at some point; I hopefully will experience a little connection. However, no matter what greets me, the one thing I can be sure of is that some spark of Divinity will be present in it. Whether I see it or not is up to me. I place myself in the position of the student: teach me, God, to go through my day seeing you in everything I encounter. I don’t really know how to do this. But if I see you, maybe I will respond more wisely and appropriately.

“Unify my heart to revere your name.” This part of the verse gives me the chance to bring a little compassion to the fragmentation of my own heart, all its distractions, its insecurities, the fragile ego that always wants more love, more affirmation. And then it reminds me that the greatness in the world is not my ego after all. It is that life force in everything, that flows in me and through me and which I seek to serve. When I can remember that, my life takes on its greatest meaning.

To me, this whole practice is a practice of humility, of remembering that the value of my day is not whether it was a “good” day or not, or whether pleasant things happened to me. The value of my day is in how I learn to see the teeming network of life that I am a part of, that I contribute to and am impacted by. Yirah, fear and awe, opens to ahavah, flowing love. I am ready for my day.

Where Does Truth Live? (Within Us.)

Apr 24, 2017 | by Rabbi Lisa Goldstein, Former Executive Director, Institute for Jewish Spirituality

The truth is that telling the truth is not so easy. The sages of the midrash wryly told that when God decided to create human beings, the ministering angels broke into factions. Justice and Lovingkindness were in favor of this new creation, saying that people would do acts of tzedek and chesed. Peace objected that they would engage in war and Truth protested that humans would be filled with deceit. God’s response was to hurl Truth down to the earth, but the other angels rushed to its defense. “Is not Truth Your seal?” they said. And quoting Psalm 85, they added, “Let truth spring up from the earth!”

In this rabbinic take on human nature, Truth, of course, tells the truth that human beings have a hard time living truthfully. But I find the end of the midrash ambiguous. Did Truth return to the heavenly abode? Or did it remain among us to instruct and inspire us? What makes it so difficult to tell the truth?

I consider times I have knowingly lied and most of them arose from an attempt to save face. The greater damage to others, however, came from the times I lied almost unknowingly because I had not told the truth to myself. In those cases, the truth was too painful for me to face. I remember certain situations in which the truth sprang up in me as a clear voice, but I didn’t want to hear it and I looked away. I pretended I did not know and somehow I did not know. The lies I told then were the most harmful because I believed them myself.

How can we get better at telling the truth? One practice emerges from the mystical tradition, in which truth is the balancing point between the endless flow of loving kindness and the firm rigor of judgement. Truth is not the opposite of kindness; instead, it can be found by holding kindness and judgment at the same time. Sometimes an insight, an unpleasant judgment arises. If I am cultivating the habit of bringing loving kindness towards my experience, I have more space to notice: Oh, here is fear. Here is aversion. Here is the unbearable. And yes, here is truth, the truth I did not want to welcome, but which has come nevertheless.

What is true in our personal lives is also true on larger scales. In our national life, truth is under attack from many sides and yet, there are also some truths about our country that have come to the surface that have long been too uncomfortable for many of us to face. I hope that the practices in this newsletter can help us turn towards these truths with courage and compassion.