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!

The Reach of Our Light

The Reach of Our Light

Nov 15, 2023 | Blog, by Rabbi Miriam Margles, Senior Core Faculty, Institute for Jewish Spirituality

I was a teenager the first time I was in Jerusalem for Hannukah. Coming from Christmas-centric life in Toronto where every grocery, pharmacy, and book store was splashed in tinsel and endlessly rang out Christmas muzak, I remember how surprising, how moving it was to be in Jerusalem and feel the presence of Hannukah everywhere. Sitting in an Italian restaurant, the whole dining room was brought to a hush as the owner lit the candles of the hannukiah and everyone in the restaurant sang together. Entire main streets of store windows had electric hannukiah bulbs shining into the night. But I found the most striking sight walking in older neighborhoods where the four-story apartment buildings with little courtyards in front of them had low stone walls abutting the sidewalk – and there, sitting on the stone walls, at the edge of each building’s property, were glass aquariums with lit hannukiyot inside them. Along the length of these quiet streets, the sidewalks were flanked with these glowing, flickering outdoor flames.

The Sages of the Talmud teach – it is a mitzvah to place the hannukiah at the entrance of your home, on the outside.  And if you live upstairs, they alternatively assert, place the hannukiah in the window, facing the public domain. Igniting the flame (hadlakah) is only half of the practice at the heart of lighting the Chanukah candles. The lighting is partnered with the act of placing the candles (hanacha) so that they are visible to the outside world. This can be within the warmth and enclosure of your home, shining outward, but if possible, we are called upon to bring this light to the outer edges of our property, to the farthest boundary that our personal domain can reach, touching the public sphere.

What a beautiful image for practice. Chanukah candles serve such a different purpose than Shabbat candles. Shabbat candles are meant to give light to our individual homes, to bring pleasure as well as utilitarian light to the intimacy of our meal and to the company of those gathered around our Shabbat tables. Even the circling gesture of waving our hands three times around the Shabbat candles gathers their light inward. The placement of Chanukah candles, on the other hand, is guiding our intention and attention outward. It is striking that the light of the Chanukah candles should not be functional. It is not intended to light up our homes and we are prohibited from making any mundane use of it. We are instructed simply, subtly, just to look at the light of the candles, and to make it accessible, available for others to be able to look at it too. It becomes our conscious intention for the light that we ignite to touch all those whose lives brush past our own. The boundary between inside and outside dissolves along with the boundary between insider and outsider. And it’s the light that connects us to one another.   

So let’s ask the question that carries the literal flame of the candles into the illumination of our souls – in this dissolving of boundaries, how do we strengthen and direct our inner light so that it extends to the outer limits of our reach, enabling many, many others to be lit up by it? 

R. Levi Yitzchak of Berditchev (18th century Hasidic master) teaches that hanacha, placement, comes from the same root as menucha, rest. He states, “And menucha – rest is called the container in which you put love.” The practice of lighting and placing the Hannukah candles is teaching us to locate a quality of restfulness within. There, we create a container within us for love to be nurtured and amplified so that it can be felt by others, so that it becomes visible to others in the softness and warmth of our gaze, our presence. As the hours of sunlight grow brief and night stretches long, as the air gets colder and the impulse to hibernate and withdraw might feel strong, we are invited to instead extend warmth and light through our whole beings to everyone we encounter.  We’re invited to be creative about the ways we reach beyond our usual circles, to extend loving. We’re invited to be daring in thinking of the directions we extend ourselves – to reach toward painful places, to meet people in the rifts of conflict, in the dissonance of difference, to find delightful strangers and mirror to them their beauty and goodness and to receive others mirroring your own beauty and goodness back to you.

We have the opportunity to help each other in this. Know that we are in a collective project, generating collective energy in reaching light outward with compassion and kindness. Know that you can bring relief. Know that you can bring love into much needed places. The more we practice, the more radiant the inner container becomes, and the further and clearer its light can extend.