In recent days, several friends have forwarded me an article from The Atlantic. It’s by Olga Khazan and it highlights the work of Willoughby Britton, a former academic researcher who has raised questions about potential negative health effects of meditation in some individuals. For Britton herself, and it would appear for some other folks too, meditation—most often in large doses of hours a day, as is often done on retreat—has contributed to difficulty sleeping, increased anxiety, and even psychosis, i.e. really serious stuff.

To me, the article read as more than a bit tendentious (In non-academese: it felt like Khazan had an ax to grind). Britton’s data set is, by her own admission, astonishingly small, yet the article implied broad conclusions from it, despite a requisite nod to the overwhelming number of studies demonstrating the positive effects of meditation practice. Choice quotes seemed to be deployed to make major meditation teachers look bad. Some who were left unnamed were quoted as telling participants suffering negative experiences on retreat to “just keep meditating,” advice which may have been normative a couple of decades ago but which, at least at IJS and among the folks I know, would not be given now.

(Indeed, one of the ironies here is that our faculty at IJS, along with many other teachers in the mindfulness meditation world, have worked hard to learn about and use trauma-informed pedagogies—including through training with Cheetah House, the organization that Britton founded and leads.)

But my point in bringing this up is not to offer a defensive rejoinder to the Atlantic article. It is rather to observe the process that followed the stimulus of encountering it. Because, as we observe Rosh Hashanah, I think it’s a great opportunity for some reflection.

I’m going to go out on a limb and conjecture at part of the dynamic in this case. It involves encountering a story in the news media—particularly in a publication that codes as college educated, politically liberal, smart, and yes, to many Jews, Jewish (the New York Times and The New Yorker are neighbors to The Atlantic in this media zip code). For not a few folks, if a claim is printed in one of these publications, then it takes on a kind of weight or truth. We instinctively give it the benefit of the doubt, before our minds have even had a chance to decide.

But in a case like this, that process collides with another belief: We trust meditation. We know from our own experience that it has been helpful in our lives. And, if you’re reading this, it might also be that you believe in IJS, you trust our teachers, you might even contribute to us (it’s never too late, btw). So there’s some motivated reasoning already churning in the background, and that can lead to a feeling of internal destabilization and conflict: We want to believe both of these things, but they seem to be diametrically opposed, and holding two truths can feel like it will break us apart on some level.

As my colleague Rabbi Marc Margolius might say, “What an opportunity for practice!”

Regular readers will know that I’ve intentionally been writing about the experience of feeling at home for the last several months. (We also just wrapped up a 10-part miniseries on this topic over at the Soulful Jewish Living podcast.)

Regular readers may also know that one of my longstanding Elul practices is listening to a recording of the poet David Whyte. On this year’s encounter with it, my ear alit on a line in the final poem on the album, which is called Coleman’s Bed, in reference to a cave in the Burren region of County Clare. After inviting the reader/listener to “make a nest now” like Saint Kevin, who is said to have held his hands up long enough for a mother bird to have laid her egg and for the offspring to have hatched and flown away, Whyte writes:

and then bring in from those horizons
all discordant elements that seek a home.

Home, in this rendering, is a place or state of being in which “discordant elements” can reside together. That is different from the idea of home as a place of uniformity or homogeneity. In fact, it might even be a near total inversion: When we are at home, we feel strong and secure enough to contain multitudes (to quote another poet). Or, to turn it one more time, if we are able to hold contradictions, that’s a good sign we’re feeling at home.

Whyte continues:

Be taught now, among the trees and rocks,
how the discarded is woven into shelter,
learn the way things hidden and unspoken
slowly proclaim their voice in the world.
Find that far inward symmetry
to all outward appearances, apprentice
yourself to yourself, begin to welcome back
all you sent away, be a new annunciation,
make yourself a door through which
to be hospitable, even to the stranger in you.

Another definition of home here, though very much related to the first: Home is a state of being in which we can welcome guests—even, as Rumi might suggest, parts of ourselves. It is a place in which we can hold separation and brokenness within a larger frame of wholeness.

On Rosh Hashanah, that inevitably brings us to the shofar and the brokenness-inside-wholeness of the shofar blasts. The fact that the middle blasts are called shevarim, broken, has been the genesis of many a sermon. It connects us to the midrashic story that the broken first set of tablets were placed inside the Ark along with the whole ones, which the Talmud then connects to the way we continue to honor sages even when, in old age, they have forgotten their Torah (a poignant note for those of us caring for elders with dementia). And, of course, it can take us to the Kotzker Rebbe’s classic teaching: There is nothing so whole as a broken heart.

Rebbe Nachman of Bratslav had his own Torah of brokenness. One of his stories, quoted in the Itturei Torah of Rabbi Aharon Greenberg (an indispensable resource I refer to weekly), comments on the verse that introduces the shofar service: “Happy is the people that knows the teruah” (Psalms 89:16). Rebbe Nachman glosses: That is, “Who know the wisdom of a broken heart (shevirat ha-lev).”

He offers a parable:

A king sent his son far away to learn the seven wisdoms of the world. When the son returned full and filled with wisdom, the father wished to test him. He commanded him to lift a large stone to the top of the mountain. The son mustered all his strength and rolled the stone up the slope of the mountain, and after great effort, brought it up to the peak.

When he came to his father and recounted his immense toil in rolling the stone, the father shook his head and said: “Is this your wisdom? What entered your mind to carry a stone so hard and heavy to the top of the mountain? You should have broken it into small pieces, and then it would have been easy for you to carry it to its place.

Rebbe Nachman concludes: “The Holy One commanded us to lift our heart—which is hard and heavy like stone—and the best advice is to break the heart of stone and shatter it into fragments (shevarim).”

This is the anti-Sisyphus: There is no nobility in the endless struggle to exert brute force to move the boulder up the mountain. Rather, genuine wisdom comes through what Whyte might refer to as a “robust vulnerability”: Allowing the heart to break open, not expecting perfection. It is precisely in the letting go, the seeming surrender, the brokenness, that we can encounter a greater wholeness, a deeper experience of home.

“Above all, be alone with it all,” continues David Whyte, “a hiving off, a corner of silence amidst the noise.” The silence, perhaps, between the blasts of the shofar. (To you shofar-blowers out there: perhaps there’s no need to rush. The silence has as much to offer as the sound.) He concludes with an image that, to me, evokes our ritual of Tashlikh, when we cast our sins into a moving body of water:

Become the source that makes
the river flow, and then the sea
beyond.

The sea is distinguished in being both container and that which we aim to contain. Which perhaps makes it a metaphor for the mind, or for our very sense of self (Spelled in reverse, yam, sea in Hebrew, is mi, who—as in, Who are you?)

To return to where we started: Of course meditation can have a shadow side. Everything can. That is one way to understand the story of eating from the Tree of Knowledge, which our progenitors did within moments of their creation, on Rosh Hashanah. As a result, multiplicity, contradiction, paradox, and the challenges—and opportunities—of living with them are hard-wired into the human condition.

On balance, there is little question in my mind that practicing to live with mindful awareness brings far more good into the world than not doing so. So as we begin this new year, I bless us all with the ability to allow our hearts to break open, to hold the pieces lightly and with care, to lovingly support each other on the journey up the mountain and toward the sea.

I had a couple hours between the end of a senior staff offsite meeting in Atlanta and my flight home to Chicago. My colleague Firkins wanted to visit the National Center for Civil and Human Rights before, so we went together and spent 90 minutes there on the way to the airport.

This was my second trip to the museum. My first visit was eight years ago, before I began a regular meditation practice. Of the many powerful exhibits, the one I remembered the most was a simulation of the 1960 Woolworth’s lunch counter sit-ins, which the museum’s website describes thus: “Visitors are invited to participate in a lunch counter sit-in simulation and place themselves in the shoes of non-violent protestors in 1960.”

What does that mean? You put on a pair of headphones and listen as an angry mob yells at you, pushes you (the chair vibrates), and makes you feel increasingly unsafe. Though the simulation lasts 85 seconds, many visitors take off their headphones before that because it’s frankly really intense. There’s even a space with comfy chairs and kleenex to decompress after you’re done.

On my first visit, I definitely didn’t make it through the full time (which, of course, is a fraction of what the activists themselves endured). But on this visit, I sat through the whole thing, buoyed both by my knowledge of what was coming and also by preparing myself with a short meditation before putting on the headphones, which I continued as the simulated violence got more intense.

On a wall near the lunch counter were some notes from a CORE training session on nonviolence. There is so much wisdom here:

I was particularly intrigued by two items here. The first was the attitude the protesters were trained to adopt: “Serious. Committed. Believe. Passion (for the issue, not against other people). Calm confidence.” As much as anything, that reflects a profound and mature spirituality, what Rabbi Mordechai Yosef Leiner of Izhbitz referred to as the yishuv hada’at, or calm, settled mind, of the Hebrew midwives who defied Pharaoh’s decree.

The second thing that grabbed me was the emphasis on song: “Creating unity, easing fear, establishing moral superiority, forcing attackers to deal with demonstrators as a group rather than focus on an individual… Everyone sings, no exceptions. If you can’t sing, sing louder.” This reminded me of Moses’s words in Parashat Vayelekh: “And when many evils and troubles have come upon them, this song shall confront them as a witness, for it will live unforgotten in the mouths of their offspring” (Deuteronomy 31:21). Rebbe Nachman of Bratslav comments, “By means of this song one can awaken goodness from wherever one finds oneself, even at the end of these many generations, such that one can remember their inherent virtue and return to their deep spiritual roots.”

Another exhibit about Martin Luther King’s antipoverty work featured a quote from his 1964 Nobel Peace Prize lecture: “Ultimately a great nation is a compassionate nation.” That brought to mind another powerful teaching, from the early Hasidic master Rabbi Shmelke Halevi Horowitz of Nikolsburg (1726-1778). It comes on the verse, “Then YHVH your God will return your captivity and have compassion upon you…” (Deuteronomy 30:3). The rebbe comments, “A sign of a person’s teshuva (repentance/return) is whether they conduct themselves with the attribute of compassion (midat harachamim). For transgressions generate cruelty in a person’s heart, whereas it is written: “Then YHVH your God will return your captivity—and compassion will come upon you.”

I love that this teaching brings the question of teshuva out of the theological realm and into the profoundly personal. How do we know if we’ve done genuine teshuva, if we’ve really returned to the paths of peace that are the paths of Torah? One good indication is whether our hearts are soft, open, and compassionate, or hard, closed, and angry. If we’ve really done the work of teshuva, then we should be able to feel it in our hearts. If we can’t, then there is probably still more work to do.

In that spirit, one final item at the museum spoke to me on this visit. It was a video of President Lyndon Johnson’s 1965 speech to Congress advocating for passage of the Voting Rights Act. One of the most moving parts of that speech was when Johnson said this: “Their cause must be our cause, too. Because it is not just Negroes, but really it’s all of us who must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice. And we shall overcome.” As the exhibit at the museum reminds viewers, Martin Luther King was said to have been moved to tears when he heard the President say these words.

“You stand this day, all of you, before YHVH your God,” says Moses, “your tribal heads, your elders, and your officials—the entire body of Israel—your children, your wives, even the stranger within your camp, from woodchopper to waterdrawer” (Deuteronomy 29:9-10). In other words, it takes all of us. No group of people—not African-Americans, not Jews, not Muslims, not anyone—should be made to sacrifice themselves for another. Rather, as the phrase goes, none of us is free until all of us is free.

It can sometimes feel like we’re a long way from that: When politicians call for Jews to sacrifice our own safety for the greater good, when our fellow Jews wantonly assault Palestinians in a warped and dangerous perversion of Torah, when we’re reminded of how long and how much the struggle for human dignity and equality can take.

Yet, as Rebbe Nachman teaches, it is precisely in such moments that we can turn to “this song”—the song of Torah, the song of our tradition, the song of our spiritual practice, to help us reconnect with our spiritual roots. That is the essence of teshuva, the essence of this season.

For Reflection & Conversation

• • • What do you make of Rabbi Shmelke of Nikolsburg’s teaching that a sign of teshuva is behaving with more compassion? Is that a helpful approach to the idea of spiritual returning and repentance? How, if at all, does it differ from other conceptions you’ve encountered?