Many years ago, when my oldest son (now 21) was little, he asked for me to read him stories from a children’s bible on our shelf. It had belonged to my wife as a kid, and I was excited that Jonah wanted to hear these stories.
But of course it got complicated, because these stories are not, in fact, children’s stories for the most part. They talk about some pretty adult topics.
I particularly remember when we got to the Binding of Isaac. I was worried–talk about a story not made for children. How is he going to respond here? Do I need to do some on-the-fly editing? I read with some trepidation. And then I arrived at, “And Abraham took the knife and lifted up his hand,” and Jonah interrupted: “Whoa, whoa, whoa!”
“Here it is,” I thought. “I’m about to traumatize my child, and he’s picking up on it” (yes, I noted the irony). I stopped reading and turned to him.
“Yes?”
“Where did he get the knife?” (N.B. Evidently this wasn’t a straight translation, as the knife is mentioned in the Torah in verse 6.)
My mind had spun out a whole story about this interaction, a big set of assumptions. But it turned out that Jonah’s question wasn’t my question, and the problems he had weren’t my problems. Imagine that.
We find an incredible contrast like this in Parashat Chayei Sarah (Genesis 23:1-25:18). Abraham sends his servant to find a wife for Isaac–and we learn that the servant is a wordy fellow. A good deal of the Torah portion is taken up with recounting his private dialogue with God and then telling the story of his encounter with Rebecca–including all his concerns: How will I know she’s the one? What if she doesn’t want to come? What if I fail in this mission? Understandably, his mind seems rather unsettled right now.
And yet when the time comes and Rebecca’s family asks her, Do you want to completely change your life and go off to a foreign land and marry Isaac–who you’ve never even laid eyes on, she answers with a single word: Elekh, I’ll go (Gen. 24:58). Whatever her concerns may have been, the story conveys a sense that Rebecca’s mind, in contrast to Abraham’s servant, was calm. Her elekh is a kinetic translation of hineni–Here I am.
People often ask me, Do you think meditation is a countercultural thing in Jewish life? Honestly, yes. Why? Because we are such a wordy people. We love–and I mean love–language. We love studying through language, praying through language, playing with language. We even espouse the belief that the Creator brought the world into being through language: “And God said, ‘Let there be light.'” Jews are a people not only of the book, but of the word and the letter–of story, of law, of academic study and publication. Jews love words–and thank God for that!
Yet like so many things, this extraordinary feature of Jewish life can present a shadow side: we can become caught in our stories, trapped in our words, subsumed by our worries. We can develop an understanding that the primary or perhaps only way to respond to life is developing language around it–in our own heads, in conversation, in law or policy.
We know there are alternatives, though. There are other models of being in our minds–including the way of mindfulness meditation, an aim of which is to calm the discursive mind: that part of our mind that lives in language, that is always evaluating, judging, planning, worrying, spinning stories about the past or future. We seek to quiet it down, to practice hashkatah, quieting, as the Piacezner Rebbe put it. We try to cultivate another way of thinking, a different kind of thought–not spinning up or out, not constantly thinking new thoughts, but slower, calmer, more spacious. And that makes the kind of quiet and silence we practice in meditation still a rather counter cultural thing in Jewish life.
Yet the roots of this kind of approach to mind and language are deep in Jewish life. We can find them (irony, again) in our texts–“Better few words with intention than many without,” as the Shulchan Arukh says–and in our many practices and traditions that focus primarily not on words in the mind but actions of the body and feelings of the heart. And we can find them in our knowledge of people–friends, family, neighbors, ancestors–who embody and exemplify a life of quiet presence and spacious wisdom.
Rebecca, with her simple elekh, “I’ll go,” is one of those ancestors–as is Isaac, who goes out, simply it would seem, to pray in the field (Gen. 24:63). And in a time when we are surrounded with a surfeit of language inside our heads and out, we might tap into the strength of the spiritual inheritance of quiet they leave us.
