A few months ago, my dear friend and synagogue rabbi Ari Hart delivered a sermon that opened with a critique of an aspect of some (perhaps a lot?) of contemporary mindfulness practice: nonjudgmental acceptance. Now, I hasten to add that Ari is a participant in our Clergy Leadership Program cohort that launches next month, and he was not offering this critique to knock Jewish spiritual practices grounded in mindfulness. He was pointing out something on which, frankly, I agree with him: The Torah and Judaism aren’t simply about accepting what is, but about changing our lives and the world to what they can and should be. If we’re going to practice mindfulness, it should be in the service not just of acceptance of what is, but bringing about what might be.
I don’t think that should be a controversial statement, yet I imagine it might prompt at least a moment of going, “Huh” in our minds. It should come as no surprise that as mindfulness practice has become commercialized it has emphasized the self-acceptance element—”You are absolutely perfect, just as you are”—and de-emphasized the self-improvement aspect—”with room for improvement,” as Shunryu Suzuki Roshi, founder of the San Francisco Zen Center, was known to teach. The former is good for sales; the latter, not so much.
Twenty years ago, when I was a freshly minted rabbi who just arrived in Evanston to work at Northwestern University Hillel, I came up with the idea of hanging a banner to advertise for the High Holidays. Intuitively, I decided to put a question on the banner, rather than just making an announcement: “What will you do better this year?” While the banner got a lot of positive response, one of the other staff members came to me with some concern: “I’m worried about the word ‘better.’ It’s kind of judgmental. It might push people away. What about ‘What will you do different this year?'” I responded, “It’s called the Day of Judgment. It’s okay to be judgmental.” (I was younger and brasher then.) Clearly this tension between non-judgmental acceptance of what is and gentle judgmental aspiration of what might be isn’t a new conversation.
A keyword in Parashat Shelach (Numbers 13:1-15:41) is the verb latur. “Send people to scout (latur) the land,” the Holy One tells Moses (13:1). He does so, and in his charge he elaborates on the mission of scouting: “See what kind of country it is” (13:18). The scouts are meant to take an honest look at the land and its inhabitants and bring back a report. They do so, of course, but famously they add their own commentary, full of judgmentalism and self-doubt: “The country that we traversed and scouted is one that devours its inhabitants. All the people that we saw in it are of astonishingly great size… We looked like grasshoppers to ourselves, and so we must have looked to them” (13:32-33). We know what comes next: the imposition of a 40-year period of wandering in the wilderness, so that the entire generation of the Exodus might die off.
Yet the word latur comes back at the very end of the Torah portion, in the mitzvah of tzitzit. By looking at them, the Torah says, v’lo toturu, we should be reminded not to follow after our hearts and our eyes “in your urge to stray” (15:39, JPS translation). Rashi, following the Midrash, connects this instance of latur with that of the scouts. As Rebbe Nachman of Bratslav puts it: “They are a method of self-rebuke, reminding us to fulfill the mitzvot and not simply follow the desires of our hearts and eyes.”
We can interpret these words harshly, as though they involve discounting and denying bodily sensations altogether. But I think that misses the point. The larger message here, it seems to me, is that our spiritual practice is meant to help us see clearly—both what is present in our mind-hearts and, gently, what of that which is present is not serving us well.
Thank God, we are created with desires generated by our bodies and our hearts. We have emotions, we have thoughts, we have imaginations, and we are able to experience an incredible range of feelings and sensations. The point of mindfulness practice in a Jewish idiom is to see all of these things clearly—so that we can make choices that reduce harm and suffering and, wisely and skillfully, bring about something better than what might be right now.