A Sukkot Teaching about Holy Garbage and Sacred Leftovers

A Sukkot Teaching about Holy Garbage and Sacred Leftovers

Sep 22, 2026 | Blog, by Rabbi Miriam Margles, Senior Core Faculty, Institute for Jewish Spirituality

The legally minded Talmudic Sages, and all the commentators who interpreted their teachings, had a field day with the laws for building a Sukkah. They discussed and discerned details about every aspect of this temporary structure that we treat as if it were our permanent home for seven days, while we relate to our solid, weather-proofed, comfortable homes as merely temporary. They debated about the size of the sukkah, where it can and can’t be built, what its walls can be made of and how many are necessary. And the leafy-roofed schach, the most important and distinct part of the sukkah, garnered particularly detailed attention.

This year I learned a marvellous new detail about the schach. Talmud Sukkah 12a quotes the biblical verse׃ “After the ingathering from your threshing floor and your winepress, you shall hold the Festival of Sukkot for seven days” (Deuteronomy 16:13). The Sages of the Talmud interpret this verse to mean that after pressing the juice from the grapes you’ve harvested and threshing and winnowing the grain from their stalks, you are to take the husks, the bare vines and dry stalks and use them, use these empty leftovers, to grace the roof of your sukkah. 

This seems like such a contradiction to the general practice of hiddur mitzvah – adding beauty to each mitzvah we do. The other aspects of Sukkot are certainly oriented toward hiddur, like choosing the most beautiful etrog you can find, gathering in the gorgeous abundance of the harvest, decorating your sukkah and adorning yourself with joy – our hearts and faces shining with gladness. And yet, we use organic garbage for the schach.  

In Sod Yesharim, Sukkot 1:4, Rabbi Gershon Chanoch Henoch Leiner of Radzyn (1839-1890, a Hasidic rebbe of the Izhbitza-Radzin dynasty) teaches about the spiritual significance of this holy refuse.

He notes that what we regard as waste is actually the essential kelipah/the outer husk that protects the fruit. Under the schach made of kelipot, the sukkah protects us. There must be enough schach to create more shade in the sukkah than sun. It protects us from wind and light rain. And while our homes of brick and steel also protect us, when we are in them, the elements are concealed from us. Only in the permeable sukkah, where we are still exposed to the elements and feel them on our skin, do we experience a direct felt sense of refuge, simultaneously feeling both vulnerable and protected.

And it is through this embodied experience of physical protection that we let our hearts and awareness fall open to the underlying spiritual protection that is ever-present. The kelipot above our heads aren’t merely metaphor. In Hasidic understanding, everything in the physical world is the outer garb of divine Presence. Used and empty husks are as much expressions of holiness as are the ripe and beautiful fall squash and melons, the clear blue autumn sky and the radiant people around our tables. The Zohar describes the sukkah as tzila demehemnuta, the shade of faith/trust. We dwell in the shade of sacred husks and touch the truth that there is no place absent of divinity. Sitting in a simple hut under the most ordinary, discardable leaves, the physical and spiritual interpenetrate as you feel the way you are held in Life in a beautifully simple way. Consciously, softly, you allow yourself to trust enough to relax into the arms of it – bare and simple Life, life-ing all around you and in you, foliage-garbage gifting you a love for this world and being part of it. You deeply inhale the fragrance of this leaf-trash, a sweet mixture of its living and dying. Perhaps, resting under the canopy of the Holy One, it is safe enough to feel your own tender living and dying, the preciousness of the kelipah of your body in the kelipah of this world cradling the fruit of your soul.

The Radzyner Rebbe also notes that God’s protection becomes available where human effort and ownership are relinquished. He explains that we humans categorize psolet, waste, as things we don’t eat or utilize. Once we have put in our good work and extracted the consumable parts of the grain or grapevine, what remains is no longer of use to us. When we divide the world into the categories of useful and not useful, we humans separate ourselves from the rest of creation and assert ourselves and all of our wants, striving, and owning at the center of importance. But sitting under the leafy leftovers, we shift perspective. We let the un-beautiful, un-beneficial leaves cover us in the care and protection that we can only know by setting down our drive, releasing into faith in what is beyond our control, our preferences and our self-generating, self-dependent efforts. Just sit in the lap of the Divine and receive. Be unproductive and allow an opening of the hands and a “gentling of the heart.” To paraphrase poet Laura Gilpin, let “nothing be wasted in nature or in love.” Let yourself be as useless and as precious as the dry vines over your sukkah so that you remember your home in the family of all life, so you remember that your worth isn’t dependent upon what can be extracted from you. 

I don’t press my own wine or grow and winnow my own grain. This year, however, I want to start the practice of adding to my schach the wilted flowers, fallen branches and shriveled plants from my garden and nearby woods. If you don’t have your own sukkah, perhaps you can gather what you would otherwise cut down and compost and give it a home above your head. May we be blessed with the gifts of holy husks and sacred leftovers this Sukkot. May they unfurl within us sweet, simple joy and freedom in the protection of this divine shelter. 

Beyond Fight or Flight: Building Spiritual Stamina in the Face of Antisemitism

Beyond Fight or Flight: Building Spiritual Stamina in the Face of Antisemitism

Feb 20, 2026 | by Rabbi Miriam Margles, Senior Core Faculty, Institute for Jewish Spirituality, In the News

As seen in eJewish Philanthropy, February 19, 2026
Opinion Column by Rabbi Miriam Margles and Rabbi Jonathan Kligler

Over the past two years, being a Jew in the world has required a kind of spiritual stamina that few of us were fully prepared for. Since the terror of Oct. 7, 2023 and the ensuing war in Israel and Gaza, we have been navigating a rising tide of antisemitism. Jews, Jewish communities and Jewish institutions have been the target of violence, demonization, isolation and denial. As a result, many Jews are swimming, perhaps even drowning, in fear, despair, rage and a profound sense of isolation. 

But for Jewish clergy, educators and organizational leaders, the burden is doubled. They are being asked to hold the heartbreak and fury of their communities while they themselves are struggling.

In our work with Jewish leaders across North America, many describe being overwhelmed by the dangers and demands of this moment. They feel stretched thin, tasked with guiding others without the time or support to notice and sort out their own intense, often conflicting feelings. They find themselves attempting to straddle widening gulfs as the world polarizes and as fellow Jews turn harshly on one another.

While resources on combating antisemitism abound, not enough of them help leaders understand and address antisemitism’s internal impact on Jews: how centuries of systemic oppression have scarred us in ways that make us reactive, angry and fearful. This historic and ongoing persecution has primed Jews and Jewish communities to react to real or perceived threats out of ancestral trauma rather than respond with wise discernment.  

To lead effectively today, Jewish leaders need more than political strategy. We need safe spaces in which we can examine our fears, educate ourselves about the effects of trauma and receive spiritual and emotional support to lead with courage and clarity.  

The inner flood

The 20th century Hasidic sage Rabbi Shalom Noah Berezovsky, known also by the name of his work Netivot Shalom, offers a striking interpretation of the biblical flood that speaks directly to this moment. 

Rabbi Berezovsky notes that the Hebrew word for flood, mabul, shares a root with bilbul, confusion. He teaches that the waters of chaos and violence inundating the world also stir a torrent of confusion within us. This bilbul ha-da’at, a distorted, unsettled consciousness, is “the root of all harm.” When our inner world is overwhelmed by the storms outside, the threat of danger can make it very difficult to think clearly and act in alignment with our values. 

But he offers an antidote: yishuv ha-da’at, the practice of settling the mind. He suggests that when we face a flood of chaos, we should build an “inner ark.” This is an inner space of steadiness, where we connect with our holy vitality (chayyut), and ground ourselves so we can ride the waves rather than be thrown by them.

Only when our inner waters are calm can we discern what is true and act with integrity. Pausing for mindful awareness is not a luxury; it is a strategic necessity.

Four patterns of reactivity

When we don’t have that inner ark, our trauma responses take over. In our work at the Institute for Jewish Spirituality (IJS), we have identified four common patterns among Jews when safety and belonging are threatened:

1.) Urgency and hypervigilance: When we’re afraid, we tend to either freeze or leap into action. “Fight-or-flight” reactions are valuable when one is in immediate danger, but the grip of terror is exhausting and debilitating, and action driven by panic is usually counter-productive and/or ultimately ineffective.

2.) Over-reliance on physical security measures: We must be vigilant about physical safety. But when our attention focuses only on the external — guards, barricades, surveillance — we neglect our inner sources of grounding and trust. True resilience requires us to confront our vulnerability and develop a trust that doesn’t only depend on external conditions. We can draw strength from the company of others striving to be mindful and self-aware, and we can gain perspective and wisdom from our ancient Jewish tradition.

3.) Choosing sides instead of building bridges: As David Nirenberg, Dara Horn and others have shown, antisemitism targets Jews as the embodiment of what society abhors, the very source of “the problem.” That blame is unconsciously internalized and we redirect it toward one another. We run for cover in polarized camps and position ourselves as the “good kind of Jew” while attacking other Jews as “the problem” — the ones who are dangerous and shouldn’t exist. This intra-Jewish violence fractures our community precisely when we need greater cohesion.

4.) Grievance over grief: Beneath our legitimate grievances lies unacknowledged grief. We often focus on outrage, listing how we have been wronged or abandoned, because holding onto our grievances feels safer than touching our sorrow. But the truth is that grievances grip our hearts closed, trapping us in a cycle of injury and indignation.

The path forward

Recognizing these dynamics, IJS developed a new approach: mindful Jewish leadership in the face of antisemitism.

Our approach doesn’t train leaders in public messaging or advocacy; those resources exist elsewhere. Instead, our goal is to support Jewish leaders by helping them to gently and lovingly address the deep, difficult and often painful dynamics within themselves and within their Jewish communities. We use a deeply Jewish framework for building that inner ark, and we fuse that with trauma-informed mindfulness practices. We also offer time and non-judgemental space for leaders to speak about and sort out the challenges they have been facing. This helps leaders recognize when they are operating from historical trauma, and gives them the tools to choose a different response. As a result, they’re able to guide their communities with less reactivity and more wisdom. They can then support their communities to follow this path.

In the last year we have run pilot cohorts in Toronto and Chicago and nationally online. The results have been profound. Participants said that the training enabled them to more effectively engage in and lead difficult conversations again, even on the most charged topics. They were also able to model kind and clear communication in both public and private interactions. They were able to notice when they were agitated and now had the skills and tools to settle themselves and restore inner balance. As one participant noted, “I finally feel like I have a choice about how I show up.”

Mindfulness is not about passivity; it is about presence. To cultivate yishuv ha-da’at is to reclaim our ability to choose actions rooted in insight rather than panic. It allows us to build communities where grief is met with compassion, and where leaders are supported to lead rather than be constantly criticized and attacked.

In a time when antisemitism seeks to make us small, frightened and reactive, cultivating a clear mind and an open heart is a radical act. We have the choice, breath by breath, to respond not just with discipline, but with devotion to becoming ever wiser, more agile and better prepared.

Jews are rightly concerned about antisemitism. As our communities allocate precious time and resources to this challenge, let’s remember that hardening our exterior defenses can do only so much. In the midst of the storm, we need mindful, wise and courageous leadership to guide the Jewish people. Together we can build an ark to carry us through our turbulent and dangerous times.

Rabbi Miriam Margles is a member of the senior core faculty at the Institute for Jewish Spirituality, where she directs the Mindful Jewish Leadership in the Face of Antisemitism initiative.

Rabbi Jonathan Kligler is rabbi emeritus at the Woodstock Jewish Congregation in Woodstock, N.Y., and adjunct faculty at the Institute for Jewish Spirituality.

Send Out the Raven Ahead of the Dove

Send Out the Raven Ahead of the Dove

Oct 23, 2025 | Blog, by Rabbi Miriam Margles, Senior Core Faculty, Institute for Jewish Spirituality

I’m imagining us in Noah’s ark.
As the Hebrew month of Cheshvan begins and a new cycle of Torah reading is initiated, we read Parshat Noah. We encounter an ark; Noah, his family and a few of every living species; and a flood of utter destruction that wipes out all life on earth.

For the past two years, I have been holding the narrative of Noah’s ark close to me as a source of spiritual inquiry and practice, engaging with questions like – What qualities did Noah cultivate that preserved him in a violent generation? What is the spiritual practice of taking refuge in the midst of the flood of corruption and chaos? How did sanctuary in the ark school Noah’s heart and mind during the three hundred and seventy-eight days he lived in it?    

These are worthy questions but in the fragile newness and uncertainty of the Israel-Hamas ceasefire, I am holding a different question. I am folding into this other question all the feelings of witnessing the return home, finally, of twenty living hostages with weeping, relief and something adjacent to joy but too cracked and broken to wholly call it joy, and with heartbreak for the families who are still waiting to receive the bodies of their killed loved ones, and with unresolved questions about sufficient aid entering Gaza, and witnessing Palestinian families returning to the rubble that was their homes, and holding my breath (and still breathing) as the unclear, unstable future of these two nations slowly takes shape amid layers of profound grief, pain, possibilities and an unclear road ahead. The flood is not over but, perhaps, the worst of the destruction has ended. I’m imagining us in Noah’s ark, coming to rest, finally, on the peaks of the mountains of Ararat as the floodgates of heaven and the deep are stopped up and the waters begin to recede. I’m asking – What spiritual guidance can we draw from Parshat Noah about the beginning of transition out of destruction and survival, and into the next stage of reclaiming life?  

After a hundred and fifty days tossed on unstable water, the ark comes to stillness on a mountaintop. Tenuous as it is, there is enough solid ground for the ark to rest – va’tanach ha’teyvah. The ark rests. Noah rests. And he opens a window to the wide sky, an opening to the air, to light and to the devastation outside. Then, in order to track the slow progress of the receding waters which takes another two hundred and twenty-eight days, Noah first sends out a raven. Later, in multiple attempts, he sends a dove. 

What is the dove/yonah? The dove is a small, slender bird. Be’er Mayim Chaim notes that in the Song of Songs, the dove is referenced as yonati, tamati – my dove, my love. It is the tender, cherished beloved. It becomes the symbol of peace. But so soon after horror, loss, anger and fear, this tenderness cannot be released first. It will not have anywhere to land. 

So before sending out the dove, Noah sends out the raven/orev, a large, rough squawking bird that “went back and forth.” Hasidic commentators understand this movement as a reference to the changing dynamic of spiritual expansion and contraction – ratzo va’shov. Spiritual growth in general is not a linear progression. All the more so in extreme circumstances – we are constricted, we fall open, we expand and we shrink. Be’er Mayim Chaim adds that orev also means “a mixture.” The raven embodies a complicated mixture of opposites, “of bad within the good and good within the bad.” What a mixed, fraught moment this is, in which the heart floods open, washed with relief, able to finally take deeper breaths, and the heart grips with pained constriction, back and forth.

At the Jerusalem rally on October 11th, after the ceasefire was declared and the return of the remaining hostages was imminent, Rachel Goldberg Polin expressed this potently. Speaking about the book of Kohelet/Ecclesiastes, which we just read on Sukkot, she said that Kohelet teaches, “there is a season and a time for everything. But now, today, we are being asked to digest all of those seasons, all of those times, at the exact same second – winter, spring, summer, fall – experience all four right now. It says there is a time to be born and a time to die and we have to do both right now. It says there is a time to weep and a time to laugh and we have to do both right now…It says there is a time to tear and a time to heal and we have to do both right now…and it says there is a time to sob and there is a time to dance and we have to do both right now.”

This is not only descriptive of what so many of us feel. It is prescriptive of the soul-work that is ours to do. This is a time to consciously feel and know the intense mixture of expansive joy and the contraction of pain, of release and anger, grief and celebration, all at once. It is exhausting, messy and intense. It is also alive, agile and true. To attend to each one means not letting opposing truths or feelings cancel each other out. As we turn to face all the realities that are present and all that have been present over these two years, the wild mix of emotions deserves space, patience and mindful attention so they can move through us and so that we can keep our hearts as agile and our thinking as clear as possible. 

So often, only after the worst is over, only when it is safe enough to let go of the ways we have been pushing or gripping in the face of looming danger and teetering vulnerability, can we begin to attend to the extent of the wreckage, and also begin to heal, build and hope. Our hearts are raw and tender from these past two years. The flood is not over but this time of receding waters asks us to learn from Noah’s waiting, meeting each stage of transition with presence and patience and discerning what is needed. This period asks us to exercise our hearts and awareness with a different kind of diligence, a different kind of attention to the many oppositional dimensions that exist together at once – to meet them, feel them, know them and release them into flight. Only then can we access the tenderness underneath. Only then can the dove, the tender wings of loving and new life, leave the protective shelter of the ark and find a genuine place to begin to build its nest.

I want to leave you with an excerpt from Leonard Cohen’s poem, Prayer for Messiah, giving these images moving expression.

O send out the raven ahead of the dove
O sing from your chains where you’re chained in a cave
your eyes through my eyes shine brighter than love
your blood in my ballad collapses the grave

¹ Hasidic commentator, Rabbi Chaim Tyrer of Czernowitz (1760–1816).
² The mother of Hersh Goldberg Polin who was murdered in Hamas captivity.

 

 

 

Mindfulness Practice of Radical Welcoming at the Seder

Mindfulness Practice of Radical Welcoming at the Seder

Apr 2, 2025 | Blog, by Rabbi Miriam Margles, Senior Core Faculty, Institute for Jewish Spirituality

As we gather for the Seder, this meditation invites us to open our hearts—welcoming those present and absent, every part of ourselves, and the world’s joys and struggles. May we enter Pesach with deep presence, warmth, and gratitude, ready for renewal.

Mindfulness Practice of Radical Welcoming at the Seder

by Rabbi Miriam Margles

At Home in the Darkness

At Home in the Darkness

Dec 10, 2024 | Blog, by Rabbi Miriam Margles, Senior Core Faculty, Institute for Jewish Spirituality

At this time of year, where I live in Toronto, the trees have shed almost all of their leaves and their branches stand bare against the grey sky. Day by day, the hours of sunlight shorten while darkness holds on longer to the mornings and rolls in earlier and earlier in the evenings. Overhead, skeins of Canada geese honk their way south, and I almost take their leaving personally, abandoning me along with the snow and cold. With the loss of light and warmth, I find myself habitually focused on what I am losing, fighting against the changing season and its natural impact on me. When I face these outer and inner changes unmindfully, I fall into habits of either pushing myself to resist rest, forcing myself to be busy and social, or collapsing into fatigue as thoughts of loneliness and lack curl in next to me on the couch. 

To respond to the depletion and sense of lack that many of us feel at this time of year, there are abundant Jewish teachings for Chanukah and the whole Hebrew month of Kislev about bringing light into the darkness. But I want to invite us to linger in this month’s long nights, to explore making ourselves spiritually at home in the darkness and to learn from its gifts. 

Rebbe Nachman of Breslov, the great Hasidic sage of the late 18th century, teaches that the medicine for this season is a practice of sighing. He quotes the famous verse from Zekhariah (4:6), from the Haftarah we read on the Shabbat of Chanukah -“Not by might and not by power, ki im be’ruchi – but only by My ruach (spirit/ wind/ breath)”. The repair for what is lacking cannot be found through force or fighting. Instead, we consciously, gently, engage with ruach. 

Rebbe Nachman explains that because everything that exists has come into being through Divine ruach, vital lifebreath, and because the secret of renewal lives in that same enlivening ruach, when there is lack, it is because there is a lack of ruach. Healing, therefore, needs an infusion of flowing, vitalizing ruach. While the winter earth becomes dormant and many animals hibernate, drawing their ruach inward until they are renewed in the spring, we humans, teaches Rebbe Nachman, can meet the lack or depletion of ruach within us with a conscious and soft flow of breath.

He teaches:

“See how precious is the sigh and groan {the krekhtz } of a Jewish person. It provides wholeness [in place] of the lack…And sighing is the extension of the breath. It corresponds to erekh apayim (patience)—i.e., extended ruach. Therefore, when a person sighs over the lack and extends their ruach, they draw ruach-of-life to that which they are lacking… Therefore, through the sigh, the lack is made whole” (Likutei Moharan, Torah 8:1).

We might think that the practice that is called for in response to the lack of light and lows of this season would be to generate strong and powerful breath, bracing against the cold, or quick and activating breath to overcome the darkness and our impulses to collapse under the covers. But the quality of ruach that we nurture in the month of Kislev, preparing for Chanukah, needs to be distinct – different from the fresh aliveness of spring or the luscious vitality of summer. For this time of year, Rebbe Nachman prescribes long, extended ruach-of-life breaths that share the qualities of the darkness outside – slow, heavy, spilling and spacious with soft and blurred boundaries. Between the poles of fighting and collapsing, we access this clear and gentle ruach-aliveness. 

Let yourself sigh a few times. Notice what the release feels like in your body. Feel how air tumbles out of your body, uncontrolled, unmeasured. The chest softens and falls, in and down. With the palms of your hands resting heavily against your chest, a sigh can partner with gravity to move stagnant ruach out of your body. Sighing is assisted by an open mouth and open throat so the fluff and flow of breath can pour out, unhindered. 

And of course, each sigh is fed by the inhalation that fills the body before and after it. The deeper and fuller the inhalation, the more fluid and restorative the sigh can become. Instead of pulling the next breath in, you can allow your belly to expand softly, patiently, allowing fresh air to fill and expand your lungs, to widen your ribcage, to let your mouth fall open, expanding from the inside out, becoming more available to release the next sigh. As you continue this sighing practice (and as some yawning might unfurl with the same qualities of soft expansion, quieting and release), you might notice a gentle increase of energy that is restful and warm but not sleepy or forced. 

You can let your vocal cords vibrate so that some sound rides on the flow of breath, just enough to give voice to what is felt within – sadness or ache, relief or pleasure. Rather than opening into big emotional catharsis, this is a practice of permission and presence so that feeling can move through us, supported and comforted by the movement of air through our whole bodies. With each holy sigh, ruach and emotion roll from the dark cave within to the darkness that surrounds. And from the darkness outside, enlivening ruach expands and fills the dark and wondrous galaxies within. Tehom el tehom koreh – Deep calls to deep (Psalm 42:8).  

Just as the small, flickering Chanukah candles enable us to be present with the stretch of night outside our windows, the practice of sighing embodies spiritual wisdom gleaned from the darkness. It doesn’t alter the weather or the slant of the sun but it fosters a sense of wholeness within us, breath by divine breath, so that we are increasingly at home in the darkness, lacking nothing.

A Practice in Drawing Close: A Teaching for Shavuot

A Practice in Drawing Close: A Teaching for Shavuot

Jun 11, 2024 | Blog, by Rabbi Miriam Margles, Senior Core Faculty, Institute for Jewish Spirituality

Each time we take the Torah out of the ark in synagogue, chanting its verses in community, we are reenacting revelation at Mount Sinai. Though not nearly as dramatic as the Torah’s description of fire and smoke, thunder and lightning, a quaking mountain and a shofar blast growing louder and louder, our rituals of standing up on our feet as the ark is opened, witnessing as the scrolls are revealed, and bringing the Torah from the “mountain” of the raised bimah into the midst of all those gathered, enable us to evoke Sinai in the present moment.

On Shavuot (the festival celebrating the giving of the Torah, which begins this year in the evening of June 11th), we seek to inhabit the experience of Sinai even more fully as the very scene of revelation is read from the Torah, surrounding us with the images of flashing fire and the voice of God rumbling through the chanted Ten Commandments. On Shavuot, we seek to be present not only as witnesses to the powerful experience of the giving of the Torah, but to join our ancient Israelite kin in actively receiving Torah and opening ourselves to receive Divine Presence.

But in the biblical description of Matan Torah (the giving of the Torah) there is a disruption in the Israelites’ receptivity. Although they collectively call out “All that YHVH has spoken we shall do!”, actively taking hold of the commitment to live their lives in alignment with Divine will and sacred practice, at the very moment of direct Divine encounter, the Israelites sever connection. They become so gripped by fear, afraid that they will die if they remain present to the unfolding revelation, that they ‘stand at a distance.’ They plead with Moses to interrupt this intimate intensity and ask him to be their flesh and blood, familiar, human-scale intermediary.

I feel the loss that this reaction created. In the face of such potent, available closeness, the Israelites created distance. With Shavuot’s invitation to embody revelation, an approach of mindful spiritual practice invites us to both inhabit the deepest wisdom of our ancestors’ experience, as well as learning from and bringing tikkun/repair to our ancestors’ limitations. We can turn our attention to explore the question for ourselves – when does fear cause you to distance yourself from that which is intimate, sacred, powerful and true?

Revelation in its varied forms can be unsettling and stir fear. As Rabbi Gordon Tucker writes the embodiment of revelation “should cause us to tremble.” It “should penetrate one’s entire person, one’s entire body.” Whether in the close, revealing presence of another person, in a breathless, awe-opening moment in nature, in an unmasking and emptying experience of solitude or in prayerful surrender, the ego-gripped self can’t help but loosen. In such experiences, we get a glimpse of Divine reality – more vast and far more intimate in its awareness than the small self that we know, tethered to the comfort, stability and safety of its self-enclosure. It can be frightening to release the protective grasp on our sense of self. It can be frightening to feel all that this demands of us – holding us in the commitment to show up again and again – enlivened, open and connected – not retreating back into a contracted way of being, not going back to sleep.

In the liturgy of the Torah service, there is guidance to practice meeting the fears that revelation’s intimacy stirs. And while these words are part of every Torah service, I want to engage with them as a practice particularly for Shavuot:

Just before Torah reading begins, as the first person is called up to the Torah for an aliyah, the gabbai recites, “May Divine Presence help, protect and save all who trust in You…” And the community responds – “Ve’atem ha’dvekim b’YHVH Eloheykhem chayyim kulkhem hayom/You who cling to YHVH your God, are all alive today.”

First we are invited to consciously root ourselves in the qualities of Divine protection and support, present in our bodies, souls and breath, present in community, present in the ancestral strength and love that reverberate through us and through prayer, ritual and Torah. When we take these few words as instructions, we practice leaning into trust and the power that saves us and holds us. Then the community responds together by consciously, deliberately, drawing close. In our voices and our presence with one another, we mirror to each other that which is true – “You who are dvekim” – you who keep moving closer, who attach yourselves to Limitless Presence, who cling to intimate connection even when you are afraid – you are alive today! As we stand together at the foot of Sinai, ready to receive living, breathing, ever-unfolding revelation, we have the opportunity to repair the distance that fear can engender. We practice becoming dvekim, those who choose to consciously, lovingly, bravely draw close.

Chag same’ach!