Book Talk with Rabbi Caryn Aviv
We are grateful to Rabbi Caryn Aviv for speaking to us about her new book, Unlearning Jewish Anxiety: How to Live with More Joy and Less Suffering. Please enjoy the conversation recording below.Rabbi Caryn Aviv (she/her/hers) serves as Rabbinic and Program Director at Judaism Your Way, as well as Director of Studies at ALEPH. Caryn loves to create and facilitate transformative Jewish experiences that spark joy and meaning for Jews and loved ones. Prior to becoming a rabbi in 2020, Caryn earned a PhD in sociology from Loyola University Chicago in 2002. She taught, mentored students, and published research in Jewish Studies and sociology at University of Colorado at Boulder and the...
Roots & Shoots (Bamidbar 5786)
Like many other people, the Covid pandemic brought my extended family a bit closer. Like many Jewish families, that happened as a result of “Zoom kiddush,” a Friday afternoon gathering of first cousins, aunts and uncles, that included some catching up, some reminiscing, and a performance of a few Shabbat rituals. Six years later, our family’s Zoom kiddush is still going. Every Friday afternoon I go over to my mom’s place and the two of us get on the call together. At this point in her Alzheimer’s journey, she doesn’t have all that much to say, but she’s very happy to be there. Yet when the time comes and she sings the Shabbat evening kiddush, it’s as though a light switch has flipped, and...
Wisdom from Our Teachers
I am coming up on the conclusion of seven years as the director of IJS – a full cycle, like the fullness of creation or the cycle of the fields. I am so proud of the work of IJS and how we have grown, offering spiritual seekers opportunities to deepen their practice, and reaching out to connect with new people who may not have even thought of themselves as spiritual seekers. I have learned so...
First Comes Effort, then Comes a Gift
Several years ago, the New Yorker featured a cover that showed a woman sitting in the lotus position, ostensibly meditating. You can tell she is so wound up that she is about to jump out of her skin. If you look carefully in the direction of her baleful glare, there is a little fly, innocently tooling around. One of the reasons I find this image so funny is that I have been there myself so many...
Act Kindly (Demand Justice)
The first time I led a seder was my sophomore year in college. There were nine of us in Perkins Hall, three Jews and six Catholics. I was so proud of my charoset and matzah balls. I borrowed haggadot from Hillel and confidently led us through the readings. But when we started the part after the meal, I stopped in confusion. "Pour out Your wrath on the nations that do not know You...for they have...
Teach Me Your Way
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...
Add More Light
There are times when joy is an act of resistance. I have to remind myself of that occasionally. On these days when there is so little daylight, when the headlines are so dire, when my beloved home state of California has been engulfed in flames, joy can feel like an effort that is just too heavy. Sometimes joy is characterized as wimpy or self-indulgent. It is seen as being something private or...
Creating and Destroying Worlds
Although occasionally I am told that I should have been a lawyer, the truth is that I really don’t like arguing very much. As a child and young woman, arguments and disagreements frightened me. But since, like it or not, arguments are part of how this life is, I have tried to learn how to conduct them wisely, whether they happen over the Thanksgiving table or on the larger political scene. One...
Beneath the Surface to the Heart
My husband and I are almost finished with a course that is preparing us to be foster parents. Neither one of us has parented before and we are eagerly learning the theories that will hopefully help us once we have been certified and can bring children into our home. For example, we know that children who have been removed from their families of origin carry with them various levels of trauma....
Imperfections
A number of years ago, I approached the High Holy Days with a great sense of inadequacy. I was keenly aware of all the ways in which I missed the mark, that I fell short of my own expectations and that I was unable to keep to my intention. It was a sobering and unpleasant realization. As I was working with this sense of inadequacy, I was looking forward to the part of the Rosh Hashanah service...
Praying with Our Feet
The other day I got together with a friend who is one of the wise advisors in my life. I told her about a particular issue I was grappling with. She shared a meditation instruction of bringing attention to the sensation of my feet on the floor and really focusing on the way gravity presses the feet down into the support of floor. As I practiced with this instruction, I felt a kind of...
The Shelter of Shabbat
The morning I wrote this greeting, I woke up very early. We had just concluded the final retreat for our second Clergy Leadership Program cohort and I was heading to the airport to return home for Shabbat. In the eastern sky there was the tiniest sliver of the crescent moon, just rising, heart-breakingly beautiful. It was just a few days before the month of Av began, with that same crescent moon...
How do I hold myself with love?
Early this spring, I traveled to California to celebrate my father’s 90th birthday. Members of my extended family from as far away as Fiji and New Zealand came to gather, and I was amazed by the connections I saw between cousins who so rarely have the opportunity to meet in person, the instant bonds of love that we offered—even though we live such different lives! One of my favorite...
Where Does Truth Live? (Within Us.)
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...
Now is the time for spiritual practice.
Perhaps the author Paul Auster said it the most succinctly: “It occurred to me that the inner and the outer could not be separated except by doing great damage to the truth.” One of the most radical intuitions that can emerge from contemplative spiritual practice is how profoundly everything is interconnected. There are so many ways we can talk about this experience. Jewish mystical texts...
Embodied Practice for Hanukkah
There is a mystical teaching that the light of the first day of Creation is hidden away in this world as the Or HaGanuz, the Hidden Light. This light is no ordinary light. The Or HaGanuz brings the heat of timeless, limitless energy that penetrates and permeates matter and animates our physical bodies. It also exists as light waves of thought and feeling within our more subtle bodies of emotion...
The Light in the Darkness
Many of us have come to recognize the symbolic power of the lights of Hanukkah. Hanukkah begins on the 25th of Kislev, which means around the last five days of the lunar month. Particularly when the festival falls later in December, it coincides with the winter solstice, the longest night of the year. When you combine the longest nights with waning of the moon at the end of the lunar month, when...
This is Enough
Imagine how we might respond if someone said to us, as Joseph does to Pharoah in next week’s Torah portion, Miketz: כט הִנֵּה שֶׁבַע שָׁנִים בָּאוֹת שָׂבָע גָּדוֹל בְּכָל־אֶרֶץ מִצְרָיִם: ל וְקָמוּ שֶׁבַע שְׁנֵי רָעָב אַחֲרֵיהֶן וְנִשְׁכַּח כָּל־הַשָּׂבָע בְּאֶרֶץ מִצְרָיִם וְכִלָּה הָרָעָב אֶת־הָאָרֶץ: לא וְלֹא־יִוָּדַע הַשָּׂבָע בָּאָרֶץ מִפְּנֵי הָרָעָב הַהוּא אַחֲרֵי־כֵן כִּי־כָבֵד הוּא מְאֹד...
What Now? A Practice for the Aftermath of the Election
There have been so many beautiful and helpful responses to the aftermath of the election. I would like to offer something a little different: In my practice recently, I have become aware of certain universal human experiences that seem to function like fields of energy. The experiences can be love and trust, anger and fear. When these “fields” manifest in our lives, they take on a garb, the...
Interconnected: An Intention for Elul
Scene one: I went to the local farmer’s market and bought some berries. I brought them home and when I opened the box to finish my lunch with fresh fruit, I noticed that the whole package was laced with mold. I was annoyed; the berries weren’t cheap! I grabbed my purse and the box and marched back up to the market in the hot afternoon sun. I got in line at the stand, only to be told by the woman...