This week, we are stepping away from the weekly Torah portion to focus more closely on the Passover, or Pesach, holiday. As my connection to Judaism and spirituality has grown, changed, faded, and then evolved entirely, so has my understanding of Passover and how it relates to my modern day life. Such is a struggle with many seemingly outdated traditions and Jewish customs.

The story of Passover takes us to Egypt, where the Jews were enslaved by the Pharoah. After G-d inflicts ten horrific plagues on the people of Egypt, sparing the Jews in captivity, the Pharoah finally has no choice but to free the Jews, allowing them to return to their homeland. Naturally, the Jews were thrilled to be released from bondage, and they ran. Quickly. So quickly the dough they had prepared for bread didn’t have time to rise. Hence, matzah.

Passover is traditionally welcomed with a seder (or two for Jewish communities outside of Israel), which is the Hebrew word for “order.” The seder includes a very specific set of rituals performed in a very specific order, which all retell the story of the Jews’ struggle to free themselves from slavery in Egypt and return to the homeland. Personal liberation symbolism abounds.

One part of the seder mentions four children, all of whom, in one way or another, just want to know what’s going on and why they should care. There is the wise one, the wicked one, the simple one and the one who does not know how to ask. I want to focus on the simple child, as I have seen him described as simple and indifferent, implying that his simplicity is due to apathy.

However, I see it differently. I view this simplicity as a form of innocence and progress; a freedom from distraction. In our busy, hectic, hyper-stimulated lives, we tend to overanalyze, over think and over question everything.

Shortly after I graduated from college, I lived in Israel, where I spent some time in the Negev. This experience, years later, is still one I remember as pivotal. Prior to my first trip to the desert I was in Jerusalem, exploring Judaism with a closer eye than I ever had before. Almost everything in my life came into question: my relationship with and understanding of G-d, religion, the people around me, and myself.

Two days out of Jerusalem, I found myself sleeping in a tent in the middle of the Negev. No electricity, no city bustle, just pure silence. It was almost instantly that I felt myself at ease, free from the urban noise (both literal and metaphorical) that had so forcefully weighed down on me up until that point in my life. I was free from distraction. I was the simple one.

It was during this time that I connected deeply with people who would become very important to my personal growth during my journey through Israel. The connections were natural, as though they were just waiting to happen. Without the urban commotion I was used to, I was able to relate more honestly to my newfound friends and, perhaps most importantly, to myself. I began my personal work of finding out who I was and how I wanted to be in this world; doing so in a gentle and tolerant way. I was asking myself questions I had never asked before, and connecting with my surroundings in a way I had never experienced. The desert provided the perfect backdrop by which to simply exist.

So I offer up this kavanah, or intention, for this week of Passover. As we prepare to sit, may we focus on simplifying our thoughts, creating a more compassionate and tolerant self. How can this simplicity allow us to confront ourselves and others with the questions that we truly need to ask? How can these simple and unadorned thoughts bring us greater clarity and mindfulness in our meditation practice and in our daily lives? And how, despite the urban hustle and bustle by which we may be surrounded, can we use simplicity to bring us closer to ourselves?

Work by John Engman

I wanted to be a rain salesman,
because rain makes the flowers grow,
but because of certain diversions and exhaustions,
certain limitations and refusals and runnings low,
because of chills and pressures, shaky prisms, big blows,
and apes climbing down from banana trees, and dinosaurs
weeping openly by glacial shores, and sunlight warming
the backsides of Adam and Eve in Eden …
I am paid
to make the screen of my computer glow, radioactive
leakage bearing the song of the smart money muse:
this little bleep went to market, this little clunk has none.

I have to admit I’ve avoided writing this for a long time. Not because I didn’t want to write about it and not because I don’t love the topic – as a long-time meditator, longer-time Jew, Jewish Meditation Center Board member and sit leader in my local community, I’m pretty involved. It’s just that when it comes to my own process as a Jew, and (eek) writing as a Jew? Let’s say I’m pretty ambivalent.

But I’m also a mom and a birth doula, and when I was asked to write about Jewish meditation and birth, too many of my identities were wrapped up too neatly for me to say no.

So, why the ambivalence?  I’d trace it back to my beginnings; as the eldest daughter of a first generation New York Jew and a converted Presbyterian from the Midwest, identity was always a bit fuzzy for me.  My mother’s mother is a lifelong church-goer and card-carrying member of the Daughters of the American Revolution; my father’s mother is a Modern Orthodox Holocaust survivor.  We took the Christmas tree down and up at least three times one winter when both sets of grandparents happened to be visiting at the same time.  It’s not an unusual story these days.

When Jewishness is both of you and not of you, claiming it, speaking for it, is a strange process.  I began a meditation practice as a teenager, but have never felt as at home in it as I do in Jewish meditation sits.  Yet, even today as I lead JMC-style sits in my home town of Beacon, I don’t have a particularly great response to the persistent question: “So, what makes this meditation Jewish?”  Sylvia Boorstein has the best answer I’ve heard yet; at a retreat I attended she said folks would ask her, “Why Jewish meditation?  Why not just meditate?  Why complicate it with Jewishness?”  Her answer:  “Because I am complicated with Jewishness.”

So, I am complicated with Jewishness.  Complicated  being the operative word.  Jewishness, it seems, has that affect on many of us.

And what does this all have to do with birth?  Nothing?  Everything?  These are not rhetorical questions.  Some more thoughts:

When you’re as obsessed with birth as a person needs to be to work with laboring women, birth metaphors are everywhere.  And in many ways, the process of pregnancy, labor, and delivery are the ultimate metaphor, combining so many of humanity’s deepest tropes – the endless patience, sacrifice, and waiting of gestation, the utter lack of control and surrender of it all, the deep adventure into the unknown, the vulnerability.  The endurance, strength, power, and struggle of labor and the breakthrough of delivery.  The profound transformation of the woman as she becomes a mother, as her body, heart, and mind are changed forever, and the profound transformation of nothingness into everythingness: a new human life.

Because the Jewish calendar operates with the moon, many of our most important holidays fall on the full moon.  Many pregnant women also go into labor on the full moon.  At 37 weeks, I felt what I thought were my first labor pains on the second night of Passover.  As I drove to our community seder, I called my doula to let her know.  “Maybe I’ll name my child Moses,” I thought, as I sat through the seder, pretending nothing was happening.  I sat with the story of the final plague – the slaying of the first born – in a different way that night, and I giggled as we talked about freedom from mitzrayim: the narrow passage.

As it turned out, my daughter – who is not named Moses – waited for the NEXT full moon, and after a short labor and a long two hours pushing through our own little mitzrayim, she was born on the 31^st day of the Omer: Tiferet in Hod.  The simple translation of that day would be the inner balance in beauty and multiplicity.  Sound familiar?

And what does that have to do with meditation?  Nothing?  Everything?

At the last meditation sit I led, a participant asked, “What’s the goal here?”  We talked about the goals each of us bring to our practice, and I closed by reminding us that some meditation teachers would be horrified by the idea of having a goal at all.  I’m all about goals for pretty much everything, but it is incredibly important to have the right kind of goal.  This is the same advice I give to clients who are preparing for birth.  Don’t set yourself up for disappointment with a goal you very well might not achieve, whether it be enlightenment, forgiving a difficult person, or an epic vaginal delivery where all you feel is love in your heart.  One of the greatest lessons birth has taught me is that we are not in control of anything but the lens we use to see the world.  And one of the greatest lessons meditation has taught me is how to know and use that lens. I’ve always liked the idea of Passover as a birthing story: we labored, the water parted, we passed through, and were born as a people.

May we use this Passover as an invitation to bring the lens of birth and rebirth to the journey from mitzrayim and find liberation.

There Was Earth Inside Them by Paul Celan (translated by John Felstiner)

There was earth inside them, and
they dug.

They dug and dug, and so
their day went past, their night. And they did not praise God,
who, so they heard, wanted all this,
who, so they heard, witnessed all this.

They dug and heard nothing more;
they did not grow wise, invented no song,
devised for themselves no sort of language.
They dug.

There came a stillness then, came also storm,
all of the oceans came.
I dig, you dig, and it, the worm, digs too,
and the singing there says: They dig.

O one, O none, O no one, O you:
Where did it go, then, making for nowhere?
O you dig and I dig, and I dig through to you,
and the ring on our finger awakens.

Traditionally, Parsha Tzav (“command”) is read the Shabbat before Passover. Like much of Leviticus, Tzav, which comes from the sixth through eighth books, it can seem a bit arcane. It consists of the instructions for ritual sacrifice to be carried out by Aaron and the priestly class at the ancient Temple. But even rituals that we haven’t practiced for two thousand years can speak to our practice and the thoughts we observe every time we sit.

There are four sacrifices: the burnt offering, olah; the meal offering, mincha; the sin offering,  chattat; and the guilt offering, asham. The olah is the only one that is to be completely consumed by the fire, fat and all, and not eaten even by one of the high priests. The passage indicates that the fire burning the olah shall not be allowed to go out; the “kohen shall kindle wood upon it every morning, and upon it, he shall arrange the burnt offering and cause the fats of the peace offerings to go up in smoke upon it.”

What is so special about the olah? Why must all trace of it disappear? The Jerusalem Talmud points to a surprising answer: the olah is for “expiation for thoughts of the heart”. This is surprising because so much of Jewish law covers actions, and not thoughts; only the last of the Ten Commandments (Thou Shalt Not Covet), concerns one’s feelings, and even then, many have interpreted that commandment as proscribing the actions that flow from covetousness more than the desire itself.

So why do unhealthful thoughts require their own sacrifice, the only one from which humans can’t be nourished?  The Talmud suggests that controlling emotions and thoughts of sin is “kashe”—more difficult—than controlling sinful actions themselves (Yoma 29a).  Rashi added, “Sexual passion is more difficult to contain than the act itself; In accordance with the difficulty is the reward.”

As a meditator, I know this difficulty well: every time I sit, an endless stream of thoughts passes through my head; sometimes, the same handful of thoughts sticks around stubbornly.  Either way, I’m constantly reminded that there’s no such thing as an empty mind, and I can count on experiencing thoughts and desires I wish I didn’t have (of course, I’ll also experience pleasant and exciting thoughts as I sit). Gradually, I’m learning to adopt a more compassionate approach to those distractions: label the thought, make peace with it, and simply return to my breath and the experience of being.

The main benefit I’ve received from my meditation practice is in gradually becoming more compassionate with myself when I find myself distracted. I allow the distractions to come and go as they will, and I’ve internalized, at least a bit, that fighting them off—or trying to burn them to metaphorical ashes—is unrealistic and unnecessary. So I struggle with a parsha such as Tzav, and with its suggestion that our “impure” thoughts can be so easily eliminated. I’m not sure I would want my thoughts, even the most shameful ones, to disappear completely, if that was possible. Rather, through meditation I seek the self-control to make space for those thoughts without allowing them to consume me.

Perhaps there’s a lesson to be learned in the annual repetition of the olah sacrifice, or the annual reckoning with our transgressions on Yom Kippur: we exalt in the feeling of being cleansed, but predictably, we’ll be back next year to burn the animal fat or beat our chests during the Viddui.  What is the tradition telling us, then, about the effectiveness of such drastic measures and self-flagellation?

As we prepare to sit, let us consider how we grapple with our thoughts when they feel difficult, or even immoral.  Do we need to eliminate any space for the “bad” in order to keep ourselves whole and “good”? My kavannah, or intention, for this week is that when we experience thoughts that we’d rather not have, instead of trying to sweep them away, we explore what it feels like to simply make room for them.

Passover starts next week… Click below to get in the mood for the Passover holiday:

From the JMC Blog Archives:

Passover as a birthing story by Jessica Simkovic

Zissen Pesach/Gut Yontif/Chag Sameach/Happy Passover! by Shuli Passow

Between Chametz and Matzah by Moshe Berko

Let Your Pharoah Go by Alison Laichter

JMC’s Passover Haggadah Inserts:

Freeing Your Inner Pharaoh
Download it, print it, and use it at your seder.

Four New Questions to Liberate Your Seder
Please share it with your friends and family!
Click here for instructions and download

 On the Internets:

MAROR (BITTER HERBS)
A Passover short by Hanan Harchol that is beautiful and deep

Tweet the Exodus
It’s this year’s “What if Moses had Facebook”

Joan Nathan’s Matzo Balls
The New York Times offers a new and exciting way to prepare matzo. (spoiler: in soup!)

Passover Night and the Kabbalah
Rabbi Shlomo Jaffe delivers a capitaving lecutre

Pesach in Cancun!
Looking for the story of Exodus, shadow puppets, and klezmer all in one video?  Look no further.

Shalom Sesame’s Les Matzarables
Go ahead, sing along.

The Passover Seder with the Four Sons
G-dcast does Passover!

Platonic Form
Judith Shulevitz’s 2010 article on Tablet examines the Seder’s Greek origins

This Deepening Takes Place Again by Emily Kendal Frey

What if everything
were revealed: where I was
last night. You, etc. The rain
is coming down like salad.
My sister’s hair
reminds me of my sister
so much I can’t
stop looking. Who am I
to have arms? On the plane
one short dream:
a baby so small
it wasn’t even human,
just a bouquet
of light with wise
cellular eyes. If losing me
is the worst thing to happen,
your life is still a good life

This Shabbat, we begin the book of Leviticus, the center of the Torah. I love the idea that the first book, Genesis, is the story of beginnings and ends with enslavement in the narrow passages (mitzrayim, or Egypt). Next comes Exodus, the second book, the story of liberation. Exodus ends with the building of the mishkan, the holy traveling sanctuary, the dwelling space for divinity. We can understand the community’s elaborate process in creating the mishkan as an evolution of our connection with sacredness. Leviticus picks up here and gives a whole lot of rules about maintaining this connection… including sacrificing animals as worship.

Over time, our practices evolved and changed, and we now offer prayer instead of sacrifices. In fact, many of our prayer rituals are based on the rules of the burnt offerings. Parsha Vayikra, “and He called,” begins with G-d calling to Moses and going on and on about all of the rules associated with sacrificing animals, including different sacrifices to atone for different kinds of missteps. On first read, it’s difficult to see how these details could possibly be relevant to our lives… but that’s the beauty of Torah, right? When I started getting curious about this parsha, I learned something kind of exciting.

The Hebrew word for sacrifice is korban. The root of korban means “to draw near.” When I think of the idea of sacrifice, I think of giving something up, and there’s a tension in the giving up or giving away. Korban flips that connotation and offers the idea of an act that allows us to approach G-d or holiness or whatever you want to call the ineffable. When I re-read the parsha with this concept in mind, something changed—maybe it was me.

In Leviticus, the very center, the heart, all of Torah radiates out from this central idea of what we do to get closer. In my meditation practice, I start each day with an intention. I go through phases, and my intentions shift and evolve, but for many years, I’ve watched them circle around the same three desires: an open heart, to be of service, and to be kind. It seems to me that the only way to have an open heart is to open my heart. The only way to be of service is to serve, and the way to be kind is to practice kindness at every opportunity. These actions, whether internal or external, can be seen as offerings, and as korban, drawing nearer and nearer.

My kavanah, or intention, for this week is to see our seats as our altars and to offer our whole selves up as korban. Practice sitting and breathing and feeling pulled closer and closer to something larger than ourselves and also nearer and nearer to our own hearts.

A Lover by Amy Lowell 

If I could catch the green lantern of the firefly
I could see to write you a letter.

This week’s parsha (torah portion) is actually composed of two portions, Vayakhel (meaning “and he assembled”) and Pekudei (meaning “accounts”), which are combined when there is no additional month of Adar in the Jewish calendar. Over the past few weeks the torah has been telling us of G-d’s detailed instructions for the building of the Mishkan (Tabernacle), the portable dwelling place for G-d. The first parsha, Vayakhel, starts with a very brief disclaimer regarding the regulations of Shabbat and explains that no work pertaining to the Mishkan or otherwise will be done on the Sabbath. Moses then “assembled” the people of Israel to solicit G-d’s request for a free-will contribution of supplies to build the Mishkan which was met with an outpouring of generosity. Next, those craftspeople with G-d-given skills were called upon to begin the design and construction using the donated materials. The body of the parsha meticulously details the construction of the tabernacle (right down to the curtains made of goat hair) and the making of its various components such as the ark, the table, the lampstand, the altar of incense, the altar of burnt offering, the bronze basin, and the court. Pekudei then continues with an account of the precise amount of talent and shekels (money) used for the materials, and continues further to detail the making of the priestly garments and the process of erecting the Mishkan. Finally, only in the last four verses is the goal of the Mishkan achieved and G-d’s inhabitance of the dwelling place declared.

I find the extensive depiction of the process of building the Mishkan to be a striking mindfulness practice as well as an interesting contrast to the very brief discussion of the final product. As I’m sitting in a very goal-oriented culture, this portion of the torah refreshingly celebrates the process itself rather than solely revering the final accomplishment. It makes me wonder how we can utilize a similar shift in focus, or rather disbursement of attention, to bring authenticity to our experiences.

As in building a Mishkan, planning a wedding takes community involvement and includes many steps. My cousin recently got married and I had the honor of being involved in many of the preparations and pre-wedding activities. For me, much of the beauty of the wedding occurred even prior to the main event. I had the chance to meet some of her friends and become good friends with them myself; I learned about the evolution of her friendships; and I had the opportunity to hear touching family stories from the parent and elder generations about marriage. Making place cards was not just a task to complete, it was a glimpse into the relationships that form my cousin’s network and new family. And for the couple themselves, the preparation process is not just for the wedding, but seems to be for the marriage as well. With the wording of the ketubah (marriage document) to agreeing on the style of ceremony, the steps to plan a wedding can set much of the tone of the beginning of a marriage. Similarly, building the tabernacle is not just to provide G-d with a dwelling place, but to lay the groundwork for a sacred space for the people of Israel.

My kavannah (intention) for this week is to take some time to celebrate and bring attention to our own processes. How can we bring greater awareness to the “making of” our craft, our work, our day, our selves, and our lives? And what potential benefit could that mindfulness to our processes bring us?