Last night, we discussed some of the challenges we face in this moment. This morning, let’s explore how we can strengthen ourselves to meet them, focusing on this as a spiritual endeavor.
This may seem like a strange thing for a rabbi to say, but I don’t think of myself as a spiritual person. Somehow that phrase conjures up an idea of someone who is either perfect or other-worldly. I am, it will not surprise you to learn, neither.
But there is a different way to think about being spiritual, or religious, which requires neither perfection nor renunciation of the material realm. Jewish mystical tradition teaches that we exist simultaneously on four levels: physical, emotional, intellectual, and spiritual. We readily accept the need to develop the first three. We exercise and eat well for physical health, seek therapy for emotional well-being, and pursue education for intellectual growth. Yet, we often mystify our spiritual capabilities, viewing them as fixed traits rather than skills we can cultivate.
I like to remind myself: “It’s called spiritual practice for a reason.” Just as we nurture our bodies, feelings, and minds, we can develop and strengthen our spiritual capacity.
What does practicing Jewish spirituality look like? It’s about infusing your daily life with greater purpose and awareness. Jewish tradition offers several opportunities for mindfulness and reflection throughout the day. While the traditional three daily prayer services may not fit modern schedules, we can incorporate moments of spiritual practice in other ways.
For instance, upon waking, I recite the modah ani prayer. Rather than focusing on its literal meaning of thanking God for returning my soul, I use it as a moment to express gratitude for life and set intentions for the day. I also recite an excerpt from the morning prayers: “Adonai, the breath of life you have given me is holy.” For me, this functions as an affirmation that human beings are essentially good and we can begin each day with a fresh start.
Another mindfulness/gratitude/awareness practice is that of blessings. English use of the word “blessing” often gives the impression of conveying sacredness. “Let us bless our meal,” sounds like we are making our food holy. In Judaism, blessings do just the opposite. They acknowledge the holiness already present in creation and express gratitude for our ability to partake of it. Many of us are familiar with the blessings for food, lighting Shabbat or festival candles, reading Torah, or marking special occasions. But there are also blessings for nature, connecting with other people, study, and acting for social justice. The rabbis taught that we should say one hundred blessings a day. They did not mean that we should keep a checklist but that we should experience our days as filled with endless opportunities for wonder.
The poet, Marge Piercy, suggests a contemporary approach to this tradition:
This is the blessing for a ripe peach:
This is luck made round. Frost can nip
the blossom, kill the bee. It can drop,
a hard green useless nut. Brown fungus,
the burrowing worm that coils in rot can
blemish it and wind crush it on the ground.
Yet this peach fills my mouth with juicy sun.
This is the blessing for the first garden tomato:
Those green boxes of tasteless acid the store
sells in January, those red things with the savor
of wet chalk, they mock your fragrant name.
How fat and sweet you are weighing down my palm,
warm as the flank of a cow in the sun.
You are the savor of summer in a thin red skin.
This is the blessing for a political victory:
Although I shall not forget that things
work in increments and epicycles and sometime
leaps that half the time fall back down,
let’s not relinquish dancing while the music
fits into our hips and bounces our heels.
We must never forget, pleasure is real as pain.
The blessing for the return of a favorite cat,
the blessing for love returned, for friends’
return, for money received unexpected,
the blessing for the rising of the bread,
the sun, the oppressed.
…the discipline of blessings is to taste
each moment, the bitter, the sour, the sweet
and the salty, and be glad for what does not
hurt. The art is in compressing attention
to each little and big blossom of the tree
of life, to let the tongue sing each fruit,
its savor, its aroma and its use.
Attention is love, what we must give
children, mothers, fathers, pets,
our friends, the news, the woes of others.
What we want to change we curse and then
pick up a tool. Bless whatever you can
with eyes and hands and tongue. If you
can’t bless it, get ready to make it new.
(Marge Piercy, “The Art of Blessing the Day,” from The Art of Blessing the Day)
Many of us find that a sense of wonder is most accessible when we are outdoors. Two hundred years ago, the Hasidic teacher, Rabbi Nachman of Breslov, wrote a prayer which is included in many contemporary prayerbooks:
Grant me the ability to be alone; may it be my custom to go outdoors each day among the trees and grass – among all growing things and there may I be alone, and enter into prayer, to talk with the One to whom I belong. May I express there everything in my heart, and may all the foliage of the field – all grasses, trees, and plants – awake at my coming, to send the powers of their life into the words of my prayer so that my prayer and speech are made whole through the life and spirit of all growing things, which are made as one by their transcendent Source.
While we may not phrase it as sending “the powers of their life” into our prayers, we can relate to a sense of the healing and invigorating power of nature. We don’t have to dedicate ourselves to days of hiking, camping, or wilderness trekking to appreciate this. I realized during the pandemic that the need to go outside to walk my dogs everyday was perhaps even better for me than for them. Even that relatively brief time noticing trees, plants, and the sky left me relaxed and refreshed.
Nachman concluded his prayer with a description of a spiritual practice which he created: “May I then pour out the words of my heart before your Presence like water, O Holy One, and lift up my hands to You in worship, on my behalf, and that of my children!” Called hitbodedut, “solitude,” this remains a central practice of his followers, the Breslover Hasidim. It involves literally pouring out one’s heart, speaking aloud all the concerns, feelings, problems, and frustrations you are experiencing. While Nachman may have spent hours this way, even a short time is significant. My teacher, Rabbi Lionel Blue, encouraged his students to sit for ten minutes a day in conversation with our Higher Power.
There are variations on this practice which are perhaps more accessible to contemporary Jews. One is meditation, sitting in silence and concentrating on a word or an image with the idea of emptying one’s mind and, therefore, the limitations of the individual self. In this regard, Jewish meditation is not unlike Hindu, Buddhist, or even Christian contemplative practices. As we know, many Jews have found meditation valuable. I have found that the ability to sit in silence for a period of time has also given me the ability to sit with feelings and problems in a way that gives me time for a sense of resolution.
Another spiritual gateway is music. Before I became a rabbi, I used to say that I went to synagogue so I could sing with other people. We relate to music in so many ways – through memory, joy, grief, comfort, movement. The Hasidic tradition of singing niggunim, wordless tunes, for long periods of time, can create an ecstatic euphoria. Listening to music can itself be a form of meditation.
For those who don’t find meaning in meditation, there is the foundational Jewish practice of study. Regular reading and, even better, discussion of classical Jewish texts invite us to consider the big questions: what is our purpose in life? how do we create a good society? what do we value? There are many excellent teachers of those texts, interpreting them for a contemporary sensibility. One example is the work of Rabbi Lawrence Kushner, who has made Jewish mystical traditions accessible to many modern Jews. Those of you who have attended shabbat services may recognize a passage of his in the prayerbook:
Entrances to holiness are everywhere.
The possibility of ascent is all the time.
Even at unlikely times and through unlikely places.
There is no place on earth without the Presence.
I keep those words posted on my refrigerator as a reminder of how I need only a moment of wonder and gratitude to feel connected to the sacredness of the world. Kushner expands on them as a commentary on the moment in Exodus where Moses approaches the burning bush and God commands him:
“Remove your shoes from your feet for the place upon which you are standing is holy ground.” (Exodus 3:5) Not that ground then. But this ground now. Not Jacob or Moses…. But you who are reading these lines. You do not have to go anywhere to raise yourself. You do not have to become anyone other than yourself to find entrances. You are already there. You are already everything you need to be. Entrances are everywhere and all the time. [As the Talmud teaches ]“There is no person who does not have their hour and no thing that does not have its place.” (Avot 4:3)
(Rabbi Lawrence Kushner, “Entrances to Holiness,” from Eyes Remade for Wonder)
While I do occupy myself with traditional texts on a regular basis, I also find inspiration in contemporary Jewish literature, especially poetry. Over the years I have found certain poems that serve as prayers for me. Some remind me of the kind of person I wish to be. Others encourage me to have hope. And there are those that have opened my heart and my vision.
My favorite poem, “Natural Resources,” is by Adrienne Rich. The concluding lines have been on an index card over my desk since I first read them in 1977:
My heart is moved by all I cannot save:
so much has been destroyed
I have to cast my lot with those
who age after age, perversely,
with no extraordinary power,
reconstitute the world.
(Adrienne Rich, “Natural Resources” from The Dream of a Common Language)
These words speak to me of the transformational power of ordinary lives. They echo the rabbinic teaching that “You are not required to complete the work but neither are you free to desist from it.”
Another Rich poem, “Dreams Before Waking,” also reminds us of the significant part each of us has to play as well as encouraging us to dream beyond realities of the present:
What would it mean to live
in a city whose people were changing
each other’s despair into hope?—
You yourself must change it.—
what would it feel like to know
your country was changing?—
You yourself must change it.—
Though your life felt arduous
new and unmapped and strange
what would it mean to stand on the first
page of the end of despair?
(Adrienne Rich, “Dreams Before Waking,” from Your Native Land, Your Life)
Some of you may be familiar with Diane Ackerman through her book and film, The Zookeeper’s Wife. Her nonfiction work includes books and numerous magazine articles and she is also a poet. The title of this poem, “School Prayer,” implies an alternative Pledge of Allegiance which challenges our culture’s ordinary definitions of loyalty and honor:
In the name of the daybreak
and the eyelids of the morning
and the wayfaring moon
and the night when it departs,
I swear I will not dishonor
my soul with hatred,
but offer myself humbly
as a guardian of nature,
as a healer of misery,
as a messenger of wonder,
as an architect of peace.
In the name of the sun and its mirrors
and the day that embraces it
and the cloud veils drawn over it
and the uttermost night…
and the plants bursting with seed
and the crowning seasons
of the firefly and the apple,
I will honor all life
— wherever and in whatever form
it may dwell — on Earth my home,
and in the mansions of the stars.
(Diane Ackerman, “School Prayer,” from I Praise My Destroyer)
Finally, I return to the work of Marge Piercy, whose poem about blessings I shared earlier. I think of this as a form of the Aleinu, the traditional prayer which looks forward to a just and compassionate world. Like most of my favorite poems and prayers, it speaks to the holiness of the ordinary. As you will see (hear), it is also especially appropriate at this time of year:
Connections are made slowly, sometimes they grow underground.
You cannot tell always by looking what is happening.
More than half the tree is spread out in the soil under your feet.
Penetrate quietly as the earthworm that blows no trumpet.
Fight persistently as the creeper that brings down the tree.
Spread like the squash plant that overruns the garden.
Gnaw in the dark and use the sun to make sugar.
Weave real connections, create real nodes, build real houses.
Live a life you can endure: Make love that is loving.
Keep tangling and interweaving and taking more in,
a thicket and bramble wilderness to the outside but to us
interconnected with rabbit runs and burrows and lairs.
Live as if you liked yourself, and it may happen:
reach out, keep reaching out, keep bringing in.
This is how we are going to live for a long time: not always,
for every gardener knows that after the digging, after
the planting,
after the long season of tending and growth, the harvest comes.
(Marge Piercy, “The Seven of Pentacles,” from Circles on the Water)
However we cultivate our inner gardens, taking the time and having the persistence to develop the spiritual abilities we all possess gives us a richer, meaningful life. It gives us, in Kushner’s words, “eyes remade for wonder.” The talmudic sage, Rabbi Shimon ben Lakish, taught that each person is given an additional soul on Shabbat. In other words, the reflection and renewal of the Sabbath adds an additional dimension to our lives. In much the same way, spiritual practice opens up another level of consciousness on a daily basis.
Equally important is the fact that spiritual growth gives us the ability to face adversity with a sense of perspective and even serenity. Jews have been nothing if not resilient and the sacred wisdom of our people has much to teach us in that regard.
I hope that our time together in the coming days will encourage us to commit and re-commit ourselves to nurturing our spiritual lives. In this sacred season of introspection and renewal, let us embrace the transformative power of our traditions. May we find sustenance in them as a path to resilience and wonder. And may our spiritual growth not only enrich our own lives but radiate outward, bringing more wisdom, compassion, and understanding to our families, our communities, and our world.
L’shanah tovah – may this year bring reawakening and renewal to us all.