Aug 15, 2024 | Blog, Rabbi Josh Feigelson, PhD, President & CEO, Institute for Jewish Spirituality
One of the inside jokes my wife Natalie and I have shared over 23 years of marriage is what we lovingly call the “Really, you needed research to tell you that?” phenomenon. You might be familiar with it yourself. In our experience, it most regularly occurs reading articles in The New York Times in which scientific research demonstrates something that it seems like someone with common sense could have figured out on their own. “Having friends contributes to lower levels of loneliness” “More sleep helps you feel more rested.” “People who have more birthdays live longer.” That kind of thing.
That’s not to knock the scientists who do this work (okay, the last one was genuinely tongue in cheek). Studies into phenomena we intuitively know to be true are, in my experience, very valuable. They usually uncover dimensions we didn’t previously understand. They give us ways to quantify and talk about aspects of our lives that have previously been a little mushy. And they often offer ways in which science and religion can speak to one another.
One truly excellent contribution to this genre is Berkeley social psychologist Dacher Keltner’s recent work on awe and wonder. Keltner defines awe as “the feeling of being in the presence of something vast that transcends your current understanding of the world.” He and his team show that awe is a very deep emotion that serves a number of psychological, physiological, and social functions. I learned a tremendous amount reading his book.
It turns out that awe, like meditation, stimulates the vagus nerve, which helps to reduce inflammation in the body and in the processes that regulate our emotions. And so experiencing even a few minutes of awe regularly can help us be more humble and altruistic, feel more connected to community and the natural world, and see the world as less polarized. That, in turn, can help us alleviate multiple crises we’re experiencing: in mental and physical health, the epidemic of loneliness (about which the U.S. Surgeon General has issued a warning), political polarization, even climate change.
If you’re the kind of person who’s reading a Shabbat reflection from a rabbi who leads the Institute for Jewish Spirituality, you may well be hearing that little voice in your head I described at the top: Really, I needed a study to tell me that awe is a good thing? I know that from my own experience. True. And I’ll still highly encourage you to read the book and watch Keltner’s Ted talk, because you’ll probably learn things you didn’t know (I certainly did), including ways to experience awe you might not have thought of. And of course, it may be particularly useful for having a conversation with people in your life who don’t intuitively buy the argument.
Tuesday was the Ninth of Av, the lowest point on the Jewish calendar. Beginning this Shabbat and continuing for the next seven weeks, the haftarah, or portion of the Prophets we read liturgically, is drawn from the Book of Isaiah. Collectively these seven haftarot are known as the shiva d’nechemta, the seven haftarot of consolation.
This week’s haftarah is marked by an abundance of nature imagery: deserts, mountains, hills and valleys. “Who measured the waters with a hand’s hollow, and gauged the skies with a span, and meted earth’s dust with a measure, and weighed the mountains with a scale, and the hills with a balance?” (40:12-13). All of this, it would seem, is in service of reawakening within us a sensation of awe, helping us sense that we are part of something much larger than ourselves.
The haftarah concludes with the memorable verse, “Lift high your eyes and see: Who (in Hebrew: Mi) created these (eleh)? The One who sends out their host by count, who calls them each by name. Given such great might and vast power, not a single one fails to appear” (40:26). The Hasidic master Rabbi Menachem Nachum of Chernobyl comments that the act “lifting up our eyes” is a spiritual act, whereby we connect the mi (who) with the eleh (these), thus producing the letters that spell out elohim, the Creator.
The lesson would seem to be that a trailhead on the path of healing is re-grounding in awe. Our brokenness can lead us to places of constriction and isolation. But contemplating the vastness and majesty of creation–of which we are an amazing and yet infinitesimally small part–helps awaken with our bodies, hearts, and minds the sources of our own renewal.
In this, Isaiah would seem to be a precursor to Mary Oliver’s poem “Wild Geese,” which memorably concludes,
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting–
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.
Aug 8, 2024 | Blog, Rabbi Josh Feigelson, PhD, President & CEO, Institute for Jewish Spirituality
I was blessed to spend this week at the Chautauqua Institution in upstate New York, during its 150th anniversary season. When I’ve had to explain what Chautauqua is to friends and loved ones, I’ve described it as some combination of Brigadoon, Mackinac Island, and adult summer camp for people who listen to National Public Radio. There are lectures and classes and cultural events galore, families that have been coming for generations, and an aspirationally utopian spirit about the place.
With thanks to IJS board member Bill Klingensmith (a fourth-generation Chautauquan), I was invited to give a talk as part of the summer-long interfaith lecture series, which is held at 2 pm every afternoon in the Hall of Philosophy, an outdoor amphitheater with doric columns (that also gives you some idea of the flavor–picture is of me speaking there). I took the opportunity to talk about some new work we’re developing at IJS around responding mindfully to antisemitism, particularly through an approach grounded in the intergenerational nature of Jewish trauma. I encourage you to watch the lecture and the Q&A and let us know what you think. (There’s a paywall, but I can tell you the $2.99 subscription is more than worth it.)
A particularly special element of this visit was that I was housed in a small B&B with the other Religion Department speakers for the week. And thus, by design, every day I had breakfast and spent time with an amazing group: Rev. Michael Curry, the head of the Episcopal Church (you may remember his famous sermon at the wedding of Meghan Markle and Prince Harry); Dr. Sunita Puri, a palliative care physician who draws on her Hindu background to write powerfully about death, dying, and living; Rev. Amy Butler, a pioneering Baptist minister who is leading a revolution in how Christians think about the work of the church. And we spent time with friends of theirs, with the staff at Chautauqua, and with regular folks who would just walk up, introduce themselves, and ask questions–all of which expanded the circle of conversation.
I found these conversations and these new friendships to be truly nourishing, and I think the same was true for the rest of the group. There was a lot of laughter as we identified the many realities and challenges we share across lines of faith and religion. And there was plenty of learning–about those realities and challenges, about the particular contours of each of our work. I had the advantage of speaking midweek, so I had more time to refine my talk–and those conversations caused me to make some adjustments (which were, hopefully, improvements).
Parashat Devarim (Deut. 1:1-3:22) is always read immediately before the Ninth of Av, our day of deepest sadness and shattering. On that day, we read the Book of Lamentations, Eicha in Hebrew, the opening line of which is, “Eicha – Alas, lonely sits the city once great with people!” In a linguistic preview, Moses utters similar words at the beginning of Deuteronomy: “Eicha – How can I bear alone the trouble of you, and the burden, and the bickering” (Deut. 1:12).
While our attention is drawn to the opening word of both verses–Eicha: “alas,” or “how”–the third word of both verses is also shared: Badad (alone) and l’vadi (by myself). I would suggest that parallelism invites us to some reflection. For me, it immediately evokes God’s words upon creating Adam: “It is not good for Adam to be alone” (Gen. 2:18). While solitude, the capacity to be happy in our own company, is essential for our well-being, it is ultimately a precondition for being in relationship with others–as intimate partners, yes, but also as friends, neighbors, and fellow images of the Divine in creation.
What we allow ourselves to experience on Tisha b’Av, then, is a profound loneliness, disconnection, isolation. This is a gift of the Jewish calendar, to concentrate that feeling in one day. We do need to feel it, to experience it. But then we emerge from it as we begin a seven-week journey of repair and renewal, en route to Rosh Hashanah–not alone, but together with friends and community.
One of the stories we justifiably tell ourselves about Jewish suffering is that we are alone. “None came to help her,” cries the prophet (Lamentations 1:7). Yet by making that the primary or only narrative we tell ourselves, we risk creating a self-fulfilling prophecy: no one has ever been our friend and no one ever will, so we have to go it alone. And I would suggest that, ultimately, that is not a healthy narrative to tell ourselves and it is not a healthy way to live. Moses himself shows us as much. Immediately after he wonders how he could possibly lead the people on his own, he and God agree on a plan to recruit more leaders (Deut. 1:13-14). He is no longer on his own; he has partners to share the burden. He is not, in fact, alone.
On reflection, I have found that my time at Chautauqua, and especially my many conversations with friends new and old, have helped me to recalibrate my settings in this zone between solitude and loneliness. It seems to me that’s what Jewish history and Jewish life have long demanded of us. And while I believe we need to remain clear-eyed about the real threats to Jews and Jewish life today–they are very real, and they are very dangerous–I also hope we can nurture our capacity to trust good people from beyond our community, to imagine a shared future together, to sense that we all can be at home. To me, that is a required stop on the road to redemption.
Aug 1, 2024 | Blog, Rabbi Josh Feigelson, PhD, President & CEO, Institute for Jewish Spirituality
In the past month I’ve had two really troubling conversations with young adults. One was with someone I know in their 20s. We were talking about the presidential campaign. And this very intelligent, caring person said, “Honestly, I just can’t get excited about politics. The damage we have done to the planet is irreversible, and it feels like we only have a few years left no matter who’s in power. It just doesn’t matter.”
In another conversation, I was talking with an Israeli woman in her early 30s. Again, supremely intelligent, a committed Zionist and IDF veteran, a caring and compassionate person. She has two young children. And she told me that she’s been actively looking at places to live outside of Israel because she just can’t see how the country, and its Jewish population, will survive for many more years. She was totally serious.
Both of these conversations caused me to lose sleep. It isn’t as though they were telling me things I wasn’t aware of. In just the last couple of weeks we have experienced day after day of “the hottest global temperature on record.” We are living with the realities of climate change, and absent some messianic shift those realities are going to worsen in the coming years. Likewise, Israel lives with instability and very serious threats on every one of its borders–not to mention the profound challenges it faces within them.
Yet somehow, knowing those realities hasn’t led me to the place of fatalism I heard in the voices of these young adults. That could simply be my naivete. It could be a form of optimism functioning as spiritual bypass: I can acknowledge it but, because the possibility of it being true is just too shattering to contemplate, I kind of put the knowledge aside and function as though everything is normal. But hearing people younger than me articulate so honestly and powerfully how they felt–it was really jarring. As, frankly, it should be.
I recently started listening to a podcast called We Are the Great Turning. It features a series of interviews with the legendary activist and Buddhist teacher Joanna Macy, conducted by Jessica Serrante and produced by Anya Kamenetz. In addition to the interviews, the series also includes practices–meditative, conversational–to do. The overall point of the series is to help us not to look away at what’s happening, but instead respond with connection, care, and compassion.
Jess and Joanna don’t waste any time. There are tears in the first episode. At one point, Joanna describes her awakening to the global climate crisis half a century ago, and the long months of depression and silence it produced in her: “There’s the loneliness of the unheard witness of what’s befalling our planet. You’ve been holding it back because you don’t want others to know how bad it is. You don’t want others to know how great is the grief. I didn’t want my family to know how much pain I was in. I didn’t want them to know my own suffering because it was enough to drive you mad to think that we were heading over the brink as a species, to bring this sense of anguish and isolation to my beloveds.”
Eventually, however, Joanna came to understand that even, or perhaps precisely amidst, that pain and grief, relationship and connection were more important than ever. Finding ways to share the grief, and finding ways to help others respond to the crisis while not sugar-coating reality–that has more or less been her life’s work since then.
Towards the end of Parshat Matot-Masei, close to the conclusion of the Book of Numbers, we encounter this verse in the Torah: “You shall not defile the land in which you live, in which I Myself abide, for I YHVH abide among the Israelite people” (35:34). It’s an evocation of the words God uses to describe the building of the Mishkan: “Make me a sanctuary, that I may dwell among them” (Exodus 25:2). The Holy One reaffirms that It dwells in our midst.
But we already knew that. So what does this verse come to add? Rashi, quoting the Midrash, tells us: “even when the Israelites are ritually impure, my presence remains amongst them.” This is a larger theme, of course. As we approach the 9th of Av, we recall the teaching that even when we are in exile, the Holy One is with us. It’s as if the tradition is coming to remind us, again and again, that Divinity does not reside only in one holy, perfect place. Rather, the loving life force of the universe is constantly present, constantly available, constantly beckoning us to reconnect–even when we are lonely, even when we are in pain, even when we feel totally cut off.
Like so many things, that is easier said than done. And it is certainly easier to try to look past the genuine suffering in the world and just insist that everything will be all right. It might, and it very well might not. But as Joanna Macy teaches, as our own tradition and our ancestors teach us, even in the midst of that suffering there is still a great deal of love and goodness and even possibility to be nurtured. May we support one another in experiencing it.
Jul 26, 2024 | Blog, Rabbi Josh Feigelson, PhD, President & CEO, Institute for Jewish Spirituality
I will admit that I wasn’t prepared for the emotional response I experienced upon reading President Biden’s letter announcing his decision to turn down renomination this week. I was really moved. Upon reflection, what touched me most was the rarity of witnessing the most politically powerful person in the world acknowledge his limitations and, after some reluctance, ultimately volunteer an act of profound sacrifice for what he perceived to be the greater good. While I’m used to stories of sacrifice from soldiers, first responders, and even everyday people, this kind of story isn’t one most of us encounter frequently.
“Of all the rituals relevant to democracy, sacrifice is preeminent,” writes the contemporary political theorist Danielle Allen. “No democratic citizen, adult or child, escapes the necessity of losing out at some point in a public decision.” (Talking to Strangers: Anxieties of Citizenship since Brown v. Board of Education, 28) Allen notes that while it is essential that sacrifice be distributed equitably—that is, that one or a few groups not bear a disproportionate share of the burden of sacrifice—at bedrock, democratic life depends upon the willingness and capacity of every citizen, from the most humble to the most powerful, to be able to sacrifice their desires for the greater good. It happens every time the losing minority concedes a vote in a legislature or an election (something we have learned cannot be taken for granted). That, it seems to me, is one of the things Alexis de Tocqueville meant when he wrote about the habits of the heart necessary for democracy.
Such habits are fundamentally spiritual things. As the list of communal sacrifices in Parshat Pinchas reminds us (Numbers 28), sacrifice is central to the spiritual life described in the Torah. And while we do not bring animal sacrifices anymore, the gesture of sacrifice itself—the willingness to give up something we own, want, or even love for the sake of a greater good—remains central to our spiritual life today. It is what we practice through mindfully surrendering our workday lives over Shabbat, our wealth through tzedakah, our dietary desires through kashrut. The point of so many of the mitzvot is to condition us to the awareness that we are indeed part of something much larger than ourselves—and, by practicing them, to nurture within our hearts the ability to sacrifice for a greater good.
Just before the list of sacrifices, the Torah tells the story of the Jewish people’s first transition of power. “YHVH said to Moses, ‘Ascend these heights of Avarim and view the land the at I have given to the Israelite people. When you have seen it, you too shall be gathered to your kin, just as your brother Aaron.” Moses pleads with God to appoint a new leader, someone who “will go out before them and come in before them, who will take them out and bring them in.” God tells Moses to take Joshua and place his hands on him in front of all the people, and in doing so, to invest him with authority. And that’s what they do.
Commenting on Moses’s description of the leader as one who goes out before the people, Rashi, quoting the Midrash, elaborates: “Not as is the way of kings who sit at home and send their armies to battle, but as I, Moses, have done,” leading the people personally, with my own body on the line. At this profound moment of transition, Moses grounds the function and authority of leadership in the willingness of a leader to sacrifice through personal example—and, in so doing, to inspire meaningful, life-affirming sacrifice among their flock.
President Biden would probably be the first to say, “Don’t compare me to Moses.” I don’t mean to make him a saint (in any case, that’s the business of the Catholic Church). And I don’t mean to offer a political endorsement (in any case, he has taken himself out of the race). But in my lifetime, this is one of the more remarkable moments of leadership and sacrifice I have witnessed. No matter our political persuasions, I hope it can inspire in all of us an appreciation of the importance of the spiritual habits of the heart, and help renew within us the capacity and willingness to sacrifice for the greater good.
Jul 18, 2024 | Blog, Rabbi Josh Feigelson, PhD, President & CEO, Institute for Jewish Spirituality
A couple of friends sent me David Brooks’s column in the New York Times last Friday. While the headline made it seem that the column was about “Trump’s enduring appeal,” the column itself might more accurately be summarized as a reflection on, as Brooks put it, “the deeper roots of our current dysfunction.” As one of my friends said, they thought I might resonate with Brooks’s analysis, and especially his conclusion, that the “work of cultural repair will be done by religious progressives, by a new generation of leaders who will build a modern social gospel around love of neighbor and hospitality for the marginalized.”
They were right. I do like a lot about Brooks’s analysis, and I do resonate with his conclusion. I think that in many ways the work we do here at IJS is about laying the spiritual foundations, in both thought and practice, for “a Judaism we can believe in” (with apologies to Barack Obama), one that helps us to hold and navigate the tensions of self and other, neighbor and stranger, such that, as Parker Palmer puts it, our hearts break open rather than apart.
Last week I wrote about some of the anxieties I have been experiencing this summer in the current political climate, and about how I’ve been trying to both be aware of their roots within me and respond to them mindfully. The response to that reflection was unusually voluminous. It seemed to have struck a chord. And that was before the former president escaped assassination by a hair’s breadth. The anxiety has only increased.
What I find myself coming back to, what I think Brooks helpfully named, is that the challenge and the crisis is not something that will be solved quickly. It is generational. It is structural. Regardless of who the President is on January 20, the deeper challenges will remain. Brooks identifies two: 1) developing and agreeing on systems of government to provide meaningful representation in a postmodern era of technology and communication; and 2) filling the “void of meaning… a shared sense of right and wrong, a sense of purpose,” as he puts it. He leaves out some other biggies: Developing approaches to economic livelihood that do not depend on extracting and depleting natural resources; adapting to a less-hospitable climate; coming to some shared understanding about race and whether and how we want to continue to redress America’s original sin of slavery; continuing big questions about gender and sexuality; there are more.
These are not short-term projects, of course, and Brooks, it should go without saying, is not the first to talk about them. In the short-term, it seems a good bet that we will experience more collective turbulence, more emphasis on identity politics on both right and left, and more verbal and physical violence–especially at those who are perceived by a large group as “other” and therefore seem to impede calls for “unity.” (Jews know from this.) These tensions will continue to animate American political life, and American Jewish life too.
One of the reasons I believe our Torah at IJS is so potentially helpful for this moment is that it draws much of its inspiration from Hasidism. As I like to point out–and it still blows my own mind–Hasidism is an Enlightenment-era project. The Ba’al Shem Tov (1698-1760) and Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790) were contemporaries. Yes, Hasidism happened in Eastern Europe, and thus wasn’t directly in the conversation about democracy happening in the West. But Hasidism responds to some similar questions as Enlightenment thinkers. The Enlightenment asked: How do we understand and organize our political lives when sovereignty is not exclusively concentrated in a king or emperor, but is instead shared among all citizens? Hasidism asked: How do we understand and organize our religious and spiritual lives when divinity is not exclusively concentrated in a Maimonidean unknowable unmoved mover, but is instead shared among all images of God and all of Creation?
Those questions led the Hasidic masters to articulate a theology that emphasizes the inherent dignity, uniqueness, and interconnection between all created beings. And they led Hasidism to develop both ecstatic and contemplative forms of spiritual practice, so that these ideas weren’t only intellectual assertions but actual ways of being in the world. (Unlike some Protestant traditions, however, they did not lead to democratic forms of deliberation and decision-making.) Our founders here at IJS were, thankfully, wise enough to recognize how much good such an approach can do in the world today.
This coming Tuesday on the Jewish calendar marks the Seventeenth of Tammuz, the beginning of the three week period leading to Tisha b’Av, known as bein hameitzarim, or the time of constriction. Over that span we become increasingly pulled into the orbit of despair that characterizes the saddest day of the year, the day when the Temple was destroyed and the Divine went into exile along with the Jewish people. Yet Jewish history is nothing if not the story, told again and again, of resilience and renewal in the face of hardship. As we enter into that orbit this year, I find myself breathing deeply–not only in an effort to stay calm and open, but also to tap into the deep spiritual roots of our people and our tradition. It is the sorcerer Balaam who, in this week’s Torah portion, reminds us that we have everything we need: “How good are your tents, O Jacob, your divine dwelling places, O Israel.” (Num. 24:5)
It is a long journey. It always has been. And we are still on it together.
Jul 11, 2024 | Blog, Rabbi Josh Feigelson, PhD, President & CEO, Institute for Jewish Spirituality
This isn’t a political space and I don’t intend to make it one here. But I also feel a need to talk about politics this week. Wish me luck.
For the last couple of weeks I’ve been experiencing a deep feeling of unease. I have found it hard to focus. I’m more easily distracted than usual. My sleep hasn’t been as good. And it’s not about anything in my personal life–everyone is more or less okay, thank God–or even, at this point, having to do with the situation in the Middle East, which we’ve been living with for too many months.
No, the source of my anxiety is pretty clearly the combined effect of some enormously significant Supreme Court rulings at the end of June and the national conversation that has erupted in the last two weeks around President Biden’s aging and his fitness as both a candidate and holder of his office.
When I sit with it, I find that my anxiety seems to be primarily rooted in both the instability of this moment itself, the prospect of instability in the future, and the powerlessness I experience of living with that instability. It feels like the earth is quaking beneath my feet and there is precious little I can do about it.
The thing is, of course, that that’s not really news–certainly not for many people in the world. While I happen to have been born into a set of conditions that has allowed me to presume a lot of stability (privileges both earned and, probably more often, unearned), so many other people have had a different, more precarious, experience. But this is happening to me now. So here I am, living with my experience.
Again, when I sit with it, I find that what I first really seem to want is just that basic stability. It was so much easier when I felt like I could rely on the idea that some things were settled, that there were big rocks to stand on. In the absence of those big rocks, I sense an impulse–a perfectly natural impulse–to find some other terra firma on which to rest. My mind starts spinning stories about what will happen. Even if they’re unhappy, negative stories, at least they’re rocks.
Chukat is a Torah portion about death and transition. In this Torah portion we read of the deaths of Miriam and Aaron and the transition of the High Priesthood to Aaron’s son, Elazar. Moses, likewise, learns that he will not enter the Promised Land, even as the Israelites make their way to its borders. The times, they are a-changin’: big rocks crumble, uncertainty abounds.
A counterpoint to that uncertainty is the opening section of Chukat, the law of the red heifer, which responds to the destabilizing reality of death through purification. “This is the ritual law that YHVH has commanded,” the Torah says: “Instruct the Israelite people to bring you a red cow without blemish, in which there is no defect and on which no yoke has been laid.”
Why a counterpoint to instability? On one level, because of its simple assertion: As the midrash notes, this is a “chok,” a law without reason (unlike, for instance, the commandment not to steal). Performing it is thus an expression of faith, an affirmation that we do some things because of our commitment.
But I think it’s deeper than that. Rashi, based on the Midrash, suggests that the entire ritual is tikkun, a repair, for the sin of the Golden Calf: “Since they became impure by a calf, let its mother (a cow) come and atone for the calf.” And the impulse to erect the Golden Calf was itself rooted in the dis-ease of living with the unknown: “Come, make us a god who shall go before us,” the people said, “for that fellow Moses—the man who brought us from the land of Egypt—we do not know what has happened to him” (Exodus 32:1). The people’s discomfort at not knowing, their fear of living with uncertainty, prompts them to yearn for something solid: an idol.
We do not perform the ritual of the Red Heifer today, we only read about it. Yet I find that it speaks to me at moments of profound uncertainty, like this one. For me, it’s a reminder to be mindful of how I respond to the very human impulse for stability, to be careful in where I invest that yearning, to be wary of seductive solutions. Because in truth, instability is ever-present. The sands are always shifting beneath our feet–sometimes quicker and more visibly, sometimes slower and less obviously. The Red Heifer is an invitation to live with awareness of that instability, and to respond to it with wisdom, expansiveness, and compassion.
