I think it’s safe to assume that you’ve heard of Yoda. If you’re not of a certain age, it may be a little less safe to assume that you’ve heard of another great animated spiritual master, Oogway. He’s a tortoise who appears in the Kung Fu Panda movies. But he has one of the best lines about spiritual practice in contemporary popular culture: “Yesterday is history, tomorrow is a mystery, but today is a gift: that’s why the call it ‘the present.'” As we say in the business: Gevalt.
It’s a heck of a quote because it cuts to the heart of mindfulness practice for many of us: Our attempt to stay present with what is happening now, in this moment, and then from moment to moment, while not getting caught in thoughts, judgments, or anxieties about what was or what might be. “Be Here Now,” as Ram Dass summed it up. For those of us who embrace such a practice, it indeed feels like a gift.
I think this approach, emphasizing sitting still and calm amidst the current of history, is one of the things that has attracted so many Jews to Buddhism in recent decades. Because Jewish history—especially in the last century, but stretching back considerably further than that—has been deluged by history, and we have been buffeted by it. Many of us carry, consciously and unconsciously, family histories, collective stories, and the residue of ancestral traumas. Practices like meditation and yoga offer us a way to be present in the moment, to re-ground in our actual lived experience rather than the realm of words and ideas—realms in which our people excels. That re-grounding and recentering offers healing. When framed and understood through the language of Torah and the ritual rhythms of our calendar, the result is a renewed relationship with Judaism.
This isn’t new, of course. Jewish mystical traditions, like other mystical traditions, offer something similar. And Hasidism in particular succeeded in offering an orientation of deep, present-moment spiritual significance in the words and practices of Torah. As Moses says in our Torah portion this week, ein od milvado (Deut. 4:35)—which the Hasidic tradition, based on the Zohar, understood not only as “there is no God but YHVH,” but that “there is nothing but YHVH.” Divinity is the substance of the universe, if only we can attune ourselves to that reality.
Yet, to quote the twentieth century Jewish poet Adrienne Rich, we frequently experience that, “The great dark birds of history screamed and plunged / into our personal weather.” Even as we are meditating and seeking to be present in the present, there’s a whole lot of history happening. Perhaps nothing testifies to this more acutely or painfully than the destruction of so much of Hasidic life, and so many Hasidic lives, during the Shoah.
Since I began the phase of my own spiritual journey involving Jewish meditation and a deeper lived relationship with the teachings of the Hasidic masters, two questions have nagged at me repeatedly: First, what is the place of history in this approach? Second, what is the place of tochacha (rebuke), and, more broadly, ethical and political speech and action? In reality, I think they’re two sides of the same coin, as they are both questions about what happens outside of the moments we’re in quiet contemplation. And, of course, they are both questions driven by dominant conceptions of Jewish life, conceptions that center knowledge and understanding of Jewish history on the one hand (Jewish Studies and much of liberal Judaism), and ethics and political activism on the other (other parts of liberal Judaism, along with the many political expressions of Judaism).
I will confess that I don’t have a neat synthesis to offer. I don’t think there is a single ethics or politics that flows naturally from this view. As Emory University anthropology professor Don Seeman writes in an essay entitled, “The Anxiety of Ethics and the Presence of God,” “To put it very bluntly… any religious phenomenology that is focused too closely on the immediacy of the Divine Presence will tend to undervalue the complicated human multiplicity that calls for balance and adjudication, that which might also be called ‘justice.'” That shouldn’t come as a surprise. The fact is that many folks who are committed Jewish spiritual practitioners wind up in different places politically, with different conceptions of history and different visions of the future.
Yet it bespeaks one of the most pressing and painful challenges for all of us in this particular moment: Our people is deeply, profoundly divided. We are living through a historical moment the likes of which we have scarcely, if ever, encountered in our many long centuries. It is a moment that raises what often feel like unprecedented questions about Jewish agency, sovereignty, peoplehood, and power—profound questions about our understanding of Torah itself, of ourselves as Jews, of what it means to serve the Holy One in this moment. Our responses reveal our enormous fractures, with large swaths of our people deeply feeling that other parts are not only wrong, but evil.
We have just observed Tisha b’Av, a day which marks our most profound divisions, on which we remember how our people’s baseless hatred for one another contributed to unfathomable pain and suffering and the exile of the Divine Presence from its home. The question I want to raise is not what our politics should be—many other good people are discussing that. My question is, How can we practice loving one another despite our deepest, most profound divides? And if love seems too strong, then at least goodwill. I think that’s a question to meditate on—literally.
As we turn from this low point on the calendar and begin the ascent towards our fall holidays, which ultimately culminates in the sukkah—a symbol of diversity and unity, of fragility and gentle strength—let’s not forget this foundational piece of our spiritual work. “Nachamu nachamu ami,” as Isaiah exhorts us: Extend comfort, extend gestures of goodwill, extend grace and compassion, even as we rebuke one another, even as we labor to make the Divine Presence more visible in the world.