At the Crossroads, on Tisha B’Av: Mindfulness, Suffering, & Redemption
As we move in the Jewish year towards Tisha b’Av, the nadir of the Jewish year, how shall we confront the reality of pain and suffering spiritually? Given the cataclysms of our world, where is there any space to allow for the real possibility of redemption or repentance? Where is there room for empathic, mindful practice in a harsh world that seems so utterly distant from it all? Commenting on the concluding verse of the Book of Lamentations, the great Hasidic teacher Rabbi Levi Yitzhak of Berdichev offers a mesmerizing take:Another explanation for “take us back, YHVH, to You, and we will return; renew our days as of old.”¹ What is the explanation of the words, “of old,” in the context...
Okay (Pinchas 5786)
When my youngest child was four years old, our local movie theater had a special showing of the original Lion King movie (not to be confused with the star-studded remake from a few years ago). It started at 7 pm, so I knew we’d be pushing the limits of his bedtime, but this seemed like an important special opportunity, so off we went. The movie was great. As we pulled out of the parking lot, I felt some trouble with our minivan’s engine. By a few blocks later, the transmission was kaput. We were stuck at a traffic light. At 9 pm on a Sunday evening, I started looking for a tow truck. When I finally found one, they told me it would be 45 minutes until they could fetch us. Toby had always...
Counting the Intelligence of Each Thing
When I was a little girl, my mother taught my brothers and me to make chains of colored construction paper, one loop for each day before a longed-for event. Each evening before going to bed, we would ceremonially tear one loop off the chain and know how many days were left. In the spring we counted down to summer vacation; in the fall I counted down to my birthday. As a people, we are similarly...
Reflections on the Omer and Life
By Rabbi Joshua Levine Grater My kids are getting older, and with their aging, they are starting to ask questions about time, length of life and death. They understand the concept of being born, as they have cousins who have been born recently, and they understand that life ends, both from their obsession with Harry Potter, which has main characters dying, and from the fact that their dad is...
Hametz Meditation
By Rabbi Toba Spitzer Passover is ultimately about freedom and new beginnings. The exodus from Egypt is a birth story - the birth of the Israelite people, and of a new kind of society, covenanted in love and justice. Passover is also a spring holiday, celebrating the first harvest and the new birth of the flocks. So part of the practice of clearing out hametz is linked to this sense of...
Running Commentary
By Lisa Zbar Up until recently, my runs haven’t been mindful, although they have been full of my mind. They’ve taken one of two forms. Either I have been filled with innumerable, maybe even hundreds, of thoughts and feelings, in a full-body experience, without any observation or even curiosity—one might call it a running commentary. Or, I’ve gone into a vortex of near obsession about a situation...
Musings of an Amateur Gardener
By Rabbi Nathan Martin Over the last few years I have turned my attention to growing summer vegetables. This project often starts in April with my attempts to cultivate early sprouts in the seed trays in our dining room (with dirt spills and all), and continues until the cool November frosts lay to bed the last of my tomato plants. I take great pleasure in announcing, with fanfare, the elements...
Practice Off the Mat
Last month I was called for jury duty and I was surprised how much the experience of sitting for three days in the jury room was similar to being on a silent retreat. Don’t get me wrong: It was not because the jury room was a still container that facilitated deep truth telling and inner exploration. Rather, in the enforced quiet of the jury room, I had a fresh opportunity to notice the...
A Complex Position
One morning in early January I left my Upper West Side apartment to go to work. The thermometer read 4 degrees Fahrenheit. I was all bundled up; I finally figured out how to keep my scarf over my nose and mouth without having to hold it there with a mittened hand. But I hadn’t calculated on the wind. When I emerged from the subway in Midtown and walked head-on into the gusting wind, my eye...
Waxing and Waning
There is something about waning that draws the attention to change in ways that waxing does not. It is in the evening liturgy, not the morning prayers, that we remind ourselves about the ordered orbits of the constellations and the way that light rolls away from darkness and darkness from light. When the day is new and light is abundant, we prefer to speak about renewal. But in the gathering...
Transitions – Haibun
By Rabbi Sheila Peltz Weinberg This transition in my life from full time to part time work and toward retirement and old age is reflected in the season. It is a dappled time. It is a golden time. Golden sunshine Bright golden leaves Nearly blinding I move toward acceptance and wisdom, deeply wanting to give myself away, but in a different way. I want to enjoy life, feel nurtured, and truly...
Yom Iyyun: Engaging in Prayer as Practice
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To Become a Living Shofar
So much of our spiritual life is about remembering to remember, trying to really wake up and live our precious lives. It is so easy to be lulled into sleepiness: the sleepiness of busyness, of mindless technology, of the closed heart and the superficial. We know those things are hevel, meaningless, but we keep falling asleep anyway. Nachman points out that “hevel” also means “quickly...
Avodah Meditation
Larry Yermack 5773 I am privileged to lead two meditations during the High Holidays this year at my synagogue. One will be during the Shofarot section of Mussaf on Rosh Hashanah and the other during the Avodah Service on Yom Kippur. This is largely a result of my participation in Jewish Mindfulness Meditation Teacher Training II, and the good work of my teachers Jeff Roth and Sheila Weinberg in...
If Not Now, When?
Elul 5773 Rabbi Jonathan Slater A profound shift in human consciousness took place when someone imagined that God spoke and the world came into being. Previously the cycles of nature were the basis on which people conceived of time: fixed in a pattern of birth and death, decay and renewal where nothing truly new or innovative could take place. Now, time stretched in a linear fashion from a point...
Repeating Patterns
I recently learned the Yiddish phrase: “Iz geht schon auf Elul.” It’s just about Elul. Even though the sun feels like the height of summer, the soul’s season is moving steadily towards teshuvah, towards turning back to the way we know things ought to be. One of the advantages of the holidays beginning so unusually early is that we have different metaphors from the natural world to inspire...
Jewish Mindfulness Meditation Teacher Training Program: Cohort 3
"The JMTT program created a context for me to access and expand my knowledge of Jewish text and traditions from a perspective of mindfulness. This perspective brought Torah into my daily life on an on-going basis. The JMTT program created a context for me to begin to read and understand Torah from a Mindfulness perspective." "The combination of Jewish and Buddhist texts were excellent. I was...
Embodied Practice: Full Moon at its Fullest
Myriam Klotz 6/20/2013 Just as the moon has cycles of growing fuller and then empty, so too our bodies move through cycles of filling and emptying. This Saturday and Sunday (June 22-23), the moon is at its fullest, and closer to the earth, than it will be at any other time of the year. Some commentators use the Hebrew word keseh to refer to the full moon. Keseh echoes the word kos, which means...
Summertime Travels
Summertime – the great annual habit-breaker. If we are lucky, we have the opportunity to look up from our usual routine and try something new. Often that newness involves travel. And it’s curious: some of us sit still to try to reconnect with clarity and insight. But there are some insights that are easier to come to through motion. It’s like when we stand in front of a wooden fence. When...
Templeton Foundation Grant: Mindfulness & Tikkun Middot Project for Jewish Organizations
I have a very exciting announcement to make. But first, let me set the stage. We have long believed that cultivating mindful Jewish leaders could have a profound and even transformational impact on Jewish communal life. However, one of the persistent questions we have struggled with has been how to help alumni of our cohort programs transmit the practices that we have found so personally...