Crunch Time in Chelm: A Neo-Hasidic Tale and Mindfulness Practice for the New Year (as told by Rabbi Marc Margolius)

Crunch Time in Chelm: A Neo-Hasidic Tale and Mindfulness Practice for the New Year (as told by Rabbi Marc Margolius)

Sep 19, 2023 | Blog, by Rabbi Marc Margolius, Senior Core Faculty and Senior Advisor, Institute for Jewish Spirituality

[These events are true — or they could be. They took place in the town of Chelm, whose residents famously claimed that they themselves were not fools — it’s just that foolish things always happened to them.]

It was crunch time in Chelm. Or at least, it was supposed to be. Rosh Hashanah was scheduled to arrive early that fall, and the townspeople feared: what if the new crop of apples would not be ready for the holiday? How would they dip apples in honey for a sweet year?

The Chelmites arrived at what they considered a wise solution: to store apples from the previous fall in their root cellars. “We will certainly be blessed with ample apples for the New Year!” they thought.

But when the Chelmites went to their cellars on the eve of Rosh Hashanah, to their dismay they discovered that the stored apples had turned to mush. They had plenty of honey. But there was not an apple fit to be eaten in all of Chelm — only beets and potatoes and, as everyone knows, it would never do to dip those in honey.

The whole town was in a panic. “Yucky, mushy apples!” the children cried. “This will be a terrible, horrible, no good year!” Everyone ran to consult with the town’s foolish but brilliant rabbi, Reb Ashira Chaya, who sat drinking tea calmly in her study.

“Rebbe,” cried the whole town, “we have no apples for the New Year! Rosh Hashanah is so early, we knew the new apples on the trees would not be ready! But the apples we saved are mushy – and if we don’t have apples and honey, this will surely be a terrible year in Chelm!”

“My friends, don’t worry!” replied Reb Ashira. “Do you really think the Holy One of Blessing would let us begin the year without appropriate apples? Heaven forbid! Come with me – tonight, let us begin the New Year praying outside, in the apple orchard itself!”

With that, the rebbe led everyone out to the apple orchard of Chelm. The sunset was magnificent. The first sliver of the New Moon of Tishrei was rising. The stars were emerging. The air was clean and fresh and cool.

“Now,” said the rebbe. “Let’s slow down and just breathe together. Take a minute right now. Stop speaking; start listening. Place your hand over your heart. Remember how much God loves you. Breath that in. Embrace yourself.”

Everyone did so. They stopped. They breathed. They fell silent. Each Chelmite placed a hand over their heart and offered themselves the love they imagined coming towards them from the Holy One. Not a sound could be heard; just a breeze moving through the orchard. In the silence, in the stillness, they felt loved. They felt renewed.

“And now,” instructed the rebbe, “honestly ask yourself: how did I do as a human being this past year? How many mitzvot did I do for others? How many times could I have been more generous? Could have said the right thing? Could have stood up for others, tried to make peace, set things right?”

Each person took a moment to think of how they had missed the mark this past year, how they might have done better. Everyone felt a deep, palpable sadness and regret – and a desire to do things differently.

“Now,” she said, “take one more minute. Whisper to yourself: ‘I wish I had done better this year. I am sorry for anything I did that hurt another person. This year, may I be the best me as I can possibly be. May I be guided to do the right thing. May I do teshuvah, may the Holy One help me change my ways.’”

And everyone did as the rebbe said. Each and every Chelmite went over to someone they had hurt and said they were sorry and they would try to do better this year.

“Now,” said Reb Ashira Chaya, “take a look around.”

And to everyone’s shock, all the apples on the trees of the orchard — the very same apples which until that moment had looked too green and too small to eat — had turned beautiful. They were shiny, full, perfect for picking and eating. Everyone was amazed at what was, indeed, a Rosh Hashanah miracle.

“My friends,” said Reb Ashira Chaya, “everyone knows it’s impossible to keep apples crisp all year. They just keep getting mushier until we can’t even call them apples anymore. But even apples can turn. And when Rosh Hashanah comes, it’s crunch time! Tonight, we remember that we all have a chance to start over again, to have a fresh start. And suddenly the apples are hard and crisp, and when you take a bite, there’s a crunch.”

“These apples are a lot like we are tonight: crispy and crunchy. When we start a new year, on Rosh Hashanah, we try hard to be the best person we can be. But when the holidays are over, it’s tough to keep that going. We slip back into bad habits. Our best intentions, our clear ideas about who and how we want to be, begin to get a little bit softer. We start making mistakes. Just like the apples, we begin to get mushier.

“But the Holy One knows that we’re just human beings,” she said. “None of us is perfect. We all make mistakes. We already know that we’ll probably do some things this year that we’ll be apologizing for when Rosh Hashanah comes around a year from now. But tonight, let’s try to keep our promises to God as long as possible – let’s be as crisp and crunchy as we can, for as long as we can.

“Now, everyone, pick an apple, and take some honey. Let’s lift up our fresh apples, and our fresh promises, and let’s pray together that we can take the crispness, the firmness of our resolve and carry it into the New Year as best as we possibly can. May we in our humble village, may our people everywhere, may the whole world be blessed with a year of sweetness, of healing, of justice, of shalom!”

On the Daily Sit Kaddish and the Persistent Sound of Jewish Community

On the Daily Sit Kaddish and the Persistent Sound of Jewish Community

Sep 19, 2023 | Blog, by Max Bamberger

Every weekday, the Institute for Jewish Spirituality brings together a hundreds-strong community for half an hour of Jewish meditation on Zoom, called the Daily Sit. This summer, as an intern at IJS, I held the tech space for these Daily Sits. Each Daily Sit offers many powerful teachings, but the practice that has most stayed in my heart is the Mourner’s Kaddish prayer, which marks the close of each IJS meditation.

Rabbis in the 13th century originally recited the Aramaic text of the Kaddish to conclude sessions of Torah learning. IJS likewise closes each Daily Sit by inviting mourners and those who wish to join them to unmute themselves and chant the Kaddish line by line, to which the community’s hundreds of voices chant back, “Amen.” A special sound rises from the conglomeration of these multiple individual Kaddishes. Voices pour in from across the United States and beyond, singing the same words in different accents, rhythms, and registers. The voices of the community overlap and stagger out of sync as names of dearly missed loved ones fill the Zoom chatbox. The voices pass over and under one another in a tapestry of Aramaic words and human lives, all punctuated by amens. An outside listener might describe the sound as a cacophony, but musicologists call this kind of sound “heterophony,” the texture of multiple voices singing variations of the same melodic line all at once. It is a unique sound, and one might assume that this heterophony is just an artifact of the new Zoom medium, where it’s not yet possible to be totally together in time.

As such, when I heard the heterophonic Zoom Kaddish at the end of my first Daily Sit, I was surprised to find the sound familiar and even nostalgic—in fact, it brought back forgotten memories. In the Modern Orthodox synagogue of my childhood, while most of the prayer service was led by the prayer leader or sung by the whole community simultaneously, the Mourner’s Kaddish was unique. This prayer was led by a few individuals spread out across the sanctuary: just those members of the community who were in mourning on that given day. Different mourners chanted the Kaddish at different paces, and the sound of this prayer—scattered voices, communal amens, and all—became one of layered heterophony. I had always assumed that this lack of unison was simply an uncomfortable side effect of the fact that Mourner’s Kaddish was led by multiple laypeople and not by one central leader. However, hearing the IJS Kaddish at the Daily Sit made me wonder if the unique sound of this age-old practice had a meaning of its own.

At the height of the pandemic, I sometimes walked past my synagogue’s padlocked doors and searched in the windows for the light of the eternal lamp burning inside. I wondered when Jewish practice and community would return, and what it would look like in a changed world.

The Daily Sit itself was conceived as a response to the isolation of the pandemic, though it has now outgrown the circumstances of its creation.

From my perspective, as communities begin to look and function radically differently than they did in centuries past, the heterophony of Mourner’s Kaddish carries onward the comfort and complexity of the Jewish collective. No one person can carry all of a community’s loss or its connection to the world of yesterday. Rather, each community member chants in their time, leading the collective with personality and vulnerability. This is the heterophony of the Mourner’s Kaddish. We each draw close to and away from grief, losing and rebuilding our complicated relationships with those who came before us. Community means that when our time comes to mourn, we will be met with staggered amens and when we pass, scattered voices will rise in our memory. I’m grateful to have joined the Daily Sit community this summer as one of many voices chanting out overlapping amens.

Hear the Daily Sit Mourner's Kaddish

Max Bamberger was an Intern at IJS this past summer. He is currently a junior at Yale University, majoring in Film and Media Studies.

Rosh Hashanah 5784: Homeward Bound

Rosh Hashanah 5784: Homeward Bound

Sep 13, 2023 | Blog, Rabbi Josh Feigelson, PhD, President & CEO, Institute for Jewish Spirituality

Dear friends,

My Elul practices for the last decade or so have included listening to an album recorded by the poet David Whyte called Solace: The Art of Asking the Beautiful Question (also available here on iTunes). I generally listen to 10 or 15 minutes at a time as I walk the dog in the morning after I drop off my youngest son at the bus. Listening to Whyte’s beautiful and penetrating language, recited in his unique English-Irish brogue, has become one of my favorite parts of Elul.

Over the years I’ve become familiar with the album and the poems and stories Whyte recites and tells. Yet, like a good work of Torah that one revisits year after year, I find that on each listening a different part emerges to speak to me. Without fail, each year there’s a point at which I have to stop because I’m struck by a passage and by the need to note the time on the recording so I can come back to it.

This year, that happened when I listened to this little bit:

One of the great tenets of a beautiful question is that it brings you to ground in your life as it is now. And in some ways, along with the amnesia of what we’ve forgotten, we step into a sense of having forgotten something which needs to be remembered and which is foundational to our future. And one of the remarkable things, I think, about being human, one of the incredible things about being human is, you only have to articulate exactly the measure of your exile, exactly the way you feel far from yourself, exactly the way you feel as if you don’t belong—and as soon as you’ve said it, exactly as it feels, you’re on your way home. You’ve started the journey back, just by describing the way you feel imprisoned, or the way you feel far from yourself, or far from life.

The closing Torah portions of Deuteronomy—which is to say, the closing Torah portions of the Torah—are suffused with the language of exile and homecoming. Here is one characteristic passage from last week’s Torah portion:

When all these things befall you—the blessing and the curse that I have set before you—and you take them to heart amidst the various nations to which YHVH your God has banished you, and you return to YHVH your God, and you and your children heed God’s command with all your heart and soul, just as I enjoin upon you this day, then YHVH your God will return with you and take you back in love. [God] will bring you together again from all the peoples where YHVH your God has scattered you. Even if your outcasts are at the ends of the world, from there YHVH your God will gather you, from there [God] will fetch you. And YHVH your God will bring you to the land that your ancestors possessed, and you shall possess it; and [God] will make you more prosperous and more numerous than your ancestors. Then YHVH your God will open up your heart and the hearts of your offspring—to love YHVH your God with all your heart and soul, in order that you may live. (Deut. 30:1-6)

One of the remarkable things about this passage is the way it fuses teshuva, spiritual returning and renewal, with the end of bodily and political exile. In this passage, to be far from the Divine is to be far from not only our spiritual sense of at-homeness, but also from the more literal sense of at-homeness in the land where our ancestors lived. Yet the vast majority of Jewish history has been lived in a state of political and geographic exile. Thus Rashi, quoting the Rabbis of the Talmud, parses verse 3: “Our Rabbis learned from this that, if one can say so of the Holy One, the Divine presence dwells with Israel in all the misery of their exile, so that when they are redeemed, the Ineffable makes Scripture write ‘Redemption’ of Godself that the Divine will return with them.”

There is a paradox here: The Divine is with us in exile and estrangement, even as our returning to home—in all its senses, physical and spiritual—is also a returning to the Holy One. All, it seems, we have to do is make an internal move—in David Whyte’s language, articulate exactly the measure of our exile—and we’re on our way home. Yet that “all we have to do” is, of course, no simple thing. Again, Rashi: “The day of the gathering of the exiles is so important and is attended with such difficulty that it is as though the Holy One must actually seize hold of each individual’s hands dragging them from their place.”

There is a reason we read these Torah portions in the weeks before Rosh Hashanah. Confronting the reality of our various exiles—whether they take the form of estrangement from our own bodies, our identities, our families, communities, societies, geographies—is the work of this season. Wherever we are this New Year, in any of these dimensions, the sound of the shofar beckons us to wake up and see, courageously and clearly, who we are and where we stand right now, in the totality of our wholeness and our brokenness. It invites us to gaze, with genuine honesty, within ourselves and discover that access to the Creator is not in heaven or across the sea, but on our lips and in our hearts. And in that recognition, we might experience that we are already on the way home.

Shanah tovah, Blessings for a sweet and joyous New Year,
Rabbi Josh Feigelson, PhD
President & CEO

Return to the Land of Your Soul: Nitzavim-Vayelekh 5783

Sep 7, 2023 | Blog, Rabbi Josh Feigelson, PhD, President & CEO, Institute for Jewish Spirituality

I recently went on a wonderful five-day silent meditation retreat in the Pacific Northwest. On the final morning, I found myself with about 45 minutes of unscheduled time. It was after breakfast and before our final session, and the light drizzle that had sprinkled the landscape had given way to a patchy sunshine. As I discerned where my feet would take me, I found myself walking—mindfully, with awareness—toward the forest. There was a short trail there I had hiked each day after lunch. And there was a particular spot I knew I wanted to go to—a spot where I really just wanted to say thank you and goodbye.

My destination was a part of the trail dominated by a cluster of five great Western Cedars. These are enormous, ancient conifers that shoot up 150 feet or more in the sky. Their trunks are massive. They tell you, with a great quiet majesty, that they’ve been around a lot longer than you have. And in a number of cases, they have formed in such a way that parts of their enormous roots are visible above the land, almost as though they’ve grown a neck. (One of them, pictured above, reminded me of a giant giraffe.) These trees grow on the edge of a babbling brook, standing watch over the maples and birches, the ferns and the mosses, that grow beneath them.

What led me to this spot? I’m not entirely sure. But at the end of five days of silence, filled with sitting and walking meditation and silent meals in this vibrant ecosystem, I could discern something tugging at me to go here and connect with its vitality, its quiet, its timelessness. I stood there for a while in silent meditation, and then found myself slowly and lovingly singing Shlomo Carlebach’s song for this season of Elul:

Return again
Return again
Return to the land of your soul

Return to who you are
Return to what you are
Return to where you are born and reborn again

I said goodbye to the trees and headed back towards the meditation hall. And then something amazing happened: I encountered three banana slugs on the trail. I had been told that these creatures were a special feature of this landscape, but only now, with barely an hour left in the retreat, did I find them—a blessing brought about by the rains that had softened up the ground overnight.

If you’ve never seen a banana slug, you should look one up on google. They’re not big (in this case, they were more the size of a small pickle than a banana). They’re gooey and slimy. But most notably, they move verrrry slooowwwly. I mean, really, really slow. And here, after five days and a resultant slowness and fluidity in my own breath and being, I found myself enraptured at these tiny little creatures who embody taking your time. Our instructor on the retreat saw me squatting down to behold them and aptly said, “I think you’ve found your teacher.” I stayed there for about fifteen minutes just marveling at them and keeping them off the path (so as not to get squashed by people).

I think of the trees and the slugs as I contemplate the opening words of Parashat Nitzavim: “You stand this day, all of you, before YHVH your God”—from the chiefs to the water-drawers. No matter our station, whether the mightiest of the trees or the lowliest of the slugs, we stand in the midst of YHVH—the breath of life, the source of being, the animating force of the universe. We are all interconnected, made of the same stardust, here for a brief flicker in the span of cosmic time. And we, humans, are blessed with the gift of awareness, the capacity to be conscious of that interconnection—and thus the ability and responsibility “to work it and steward it,” in the words of Genesis.

Rosh Hashanah is nearly upon us, the day on which we commemorate the sixth day of Creation, when we humans were formed and placed amidst all these other creatures. In this week before that moment of renewal, I’d like to encourage you to deepen your own practice. In the midst of the cooking and cleaning and all the other preparations, make time for spiritual preparation too. Most importantly: Slow. Down. Spend some time meditating this week. Spend some moments in the natural world. Take the time to reconnect with the world, with yourself, with your breath, with the source of life. In doing so, we have the opportunity to return again to who and what we are, to where we are born and reborn again.

Gently Welcoming Ourselves as We Are

Gently Welcoming Ourselves as We Are

Aug 15, 2023 | Blog, by Rebecca Schisler, Core Faculty, Institute for Jewish Spirituality

As we enter the month of Elul, we are invited to enter into a practice of cheshbon hanefesh, soul accounting. As we engage in this practice and reflect on the past year, we ask ourselves – Are our actions in alignment with our intentions? Are we awake to our lives?

Cheshbon hanefesh is part of a broader practice of teshuva, a returning to our essential nature, to who we really are. The month of Elul is enveloped in the power of love throughout this process of soul accounting and returning. We invite you to join Rebecca Schisler in a practice to help us soften and gently welcome ourselves fully as we are.

Looking with the Eyes of Our Hearts

Looking with the Eyes of Our Hearts

Aug 15, 2023 | Blog, by Rabbi Myriam Klotz, Senior Core Faculty, Institute for Jewish Spirituality

The first word of the Torah portion we read as Elul begins is “Look!”–”Re’eh!” Look, really see, that before you today, this day, is a blessing and a curse. Choose life!, we are told in this parasha (Torah portion). It is right here before you, in the life you are living now.

The core practice this month is to practice looking with the eyes of our hearts at what is before us and inside us, this life in its complexities and contradictions, its messiness and its authenticity.

Rabbi Alan Lew of blessed memory writes in This is Real and You are Completely Unprepared: “Pay attention to your life. Every moment in it is profoundly mixed. Every moment contains a blessing and a curse. Everything depends on our beholding our lives with clear eyes, seeing the potential blessing in each moment as well as the potential curse, choosing the former, forswearing the latter.”

Elul calls to us with daily shofar blasts to help us wake up, to hear and behold ourselves more clearly, to engage in the practice of cheshbon hanefesh–a spiritual accounting–in order to help us better discern how to make choices that are life-affirming blessings.

It’s not necessarily obvious how you and I are to do this work of looking deeply and open-heartedly into the life we have been living, or not living, this year, in order to choose the life-giving path of blessing going forward. Alan Lew suggests three practices to help us to see ourselves more clearly and with greater perspective: prayer, meditation, and/or, focusing on one thing.

Prayer:
Lew writes that “the Hebrew word for prayer is tefilah. The infinitive form of this verb is l’hitpalel-to pray-a reflexive form denoting action that one performs on oneself”, and in this way, it can be a way we come to know ourselves more deeply and clearly. For me, prayer is a need that my soul has. Just as my body has the need to drink in order to hydrate, the soul within has a need to pray for spiritual hydration, for being nourished by reaching inward and outward to the Ineffable Mystery by which I am born into each new moment. The practice of praying–liturgically or otherwise–can help you return to the Self of your self, to touch the deep core of your existence, and perhaps in that way to loosen the grips that shame, bias, doubt and the like might have upon you and enable you to get down to the work of teshuva that Elul is about.

Meditation:
During Elul, you can set an intention to devote time each day to rest in the quiet awareness of breath and sensation. You can choose a focal point for your attention, such as breath, or sound, or a visual anchor like a candle flame or a flower. Let yourself drop into the present moment, and pay attention to all that arises and passes in your awareness. Saturating your attention in the present moment of your life, Lew writes, can help you see yourself more clearly. Meditation can help you to “see that [you] are something larger than yourself. This is an essential aspect of Rosh HaShanah–seeing [yourself] as not just a discrete ego, but as part of a great flow of being.”

Focus on one thing:
Truth be told, for some of us, prayer and meditation may not be helpful tools; the resistance to engaging them is too great. Lew writes that many of us “will never get over finding the daily prayer service tedious and opaque. Many others will always either be frightened to death or bored to tears by the prospect of meditation.” For some of us who have experienced trauma (including religious trauma), prayer and meditation may for now harm more than help. The simple practice of focusing on one thing in your life may be a more helpful way to see your life more clearly.

You can choose to practice focusing on just one thing for this month of Elul. Lew suggests that you focus on one fundamental and simple aspect of your life, and “commit yourself to being totally conscious and honest about it for the thirty days of Elul”. Since everything we do is an expression of the entire truth of our lives, paying attention to one thing–like when we go to sleep, or eating, or how we engage on our cell phones through the day–we can begin to see our patterns, aversions, desires, and the like more clearly. Focusing on one thing in our life this month can help us see ourselves more clearly and help us wake up.

Lew writes, “So we can pray, we can meditate. Or we can simply choose one thing in our life and live that one small aspect in truth, and then watch in amazement as the larger truth of our life begins to emerge. The truth is, every moment of our life carries with it the possibility of a great blessing and a great curse, a blessing if we live in truth, a curse if we do not…All that’s required of you is to see what’s in front of your face and to choose the blessing in it.”

May you choose blessing in your life as this year begins to draw to a close, and may we together know the blessing of wise discernments and loving hearts.