I was riding in a Lyft at 4:30 a.m. on Sunday morning, en route to LAX to make a flight home in time for my son’s 12th birthday party. My driver, a middle-aged African-American woman, asked me where I was headed. “Chicago.”
“Chicago?! Take me with you! That’s where I’m from.”
“Oh, where in Chicago did you grow up?”
She proceeded to name what felt like 25 different neighborhoods: First she lived in Evergreen Park, then in Bronzeville, then in Rogers Park, then PIlsen, then another, and another, and another. It felt a little like the passage in the Torah that describes the 42 different places the Israelites encamped. I got the sense that she had experienced a lot of insecurity in her life.
I told her I was glad to have traveled to Los Angeles right after the election. It was a welcome change of scenery after the tension and divisiveness of the campaign.
“You know, I really don’t pay attention to politics,” she said. “I don’t vote. And you know why? Because I have panic attacks. I have so much stress and anxiety, and I just need to try and stay calm and focused so I can pay my bills. It’s a real struggle for me to stay calm–and all that election stuff doesn’t help.”
The conversation has lingered with me all week as I’ve talked with many others about the outcome of the election and how we’re each responding. Most of the people I interact with at work and in life are college-educated American Jews, and most of them are high-information voters. Many folks volunteered on campaigns, many donated money, and virtually all voted and paid attention to the election cycle. This lovely person who was my driver in the wee hours of Sunday morning lives a very different life.
What I was most struck by was how she described struggling with anxiety and depression–because that’s something it seems we all share. So many people in my life suffer in a similar way. For so many people, across socio-economic strata, our minds, our hearts, and our bodies are overwhelmed by the weight of the world. Yet, for many of the people I know, that anxiety gets channelled into even more compulsive engagement in the news–which is, perhaps, a sign of their relative privilege of not worrying quite as much about paying their bills on a month-to-month basis. I imagine there are many other lessons and explanations.
One of the people who suffers the most in Parashat Vayera (Genesis 18:1-22:24) is Hagar, Sarah’s handmaiden who is the mother of Ishmael. While Sarah originally had encouraged Abraham to have a child with Hagar, her mood changed almost immediately–and in this week’s Torah portion, now with a child of her own, she demands that Abraham kick Hagar out of the house. Hagar and her son find themselves dying of thirst in the wilderness, and Hagar, understandably, can’t bear to watch her son suffer.
It’s at this moment that an angel calls out to Hagar and tells her that God has heard her son’s cry, ba’asher hu sham. It’s difficult to translate this phrase, but it suggests something like, “exactly where and how he is right now.” Rashi, following the Midrash, says it means that God hears and judges Ishamel exactly as he is in this moment–without consideration for what he may become in the future. And right now, he is a crying, suffering child.
Mindfulness practice teaches us to try to quiet the mind in order to be present with the truth we’re experiencing in this moment–not to become caught in the stories our minds can spin about what might be. That is, our practice encourages and guides us to listen to ourselves and others ba’asher hu sham–exactly as we are in this moment, not what we could be in the future. That’s not to say we shouldn’t be wise and discerning about what may come, or that we shouldn’t plan for the future. It’s rather to say that we should practice grounding ourselves in the truth of our experience right now, and from that grounded place try to make good judgments.
I think that’s an enormous struggle for many of us in the world we live in. For some of us, the constant overwhelm of media, the firehose of political news, the ongoing challenges in the Middle East–it can generate a state of anxiety about the world and what we take to be true. For others, like my Lyft driver, forces like economic precariousness and constant moving about might leave us without a sense of ground, an ability to feel really at home in our lives.
The invitation of our practice is to give ourselves the gift of acknowledging where we are, ba’asher hu sham–in this moment, in this time, in this place, in this body. When we do so, we have the opportunity to sense firmer ground beneath our feet, greater support amid the turbulent seas of life, water to drink amidst what can feel like a parched desert.
