New Year’s Eve has always been an overwhelming occasion for me. The emphasis, it seems, is on the exact moment of transition. We sit glued to the television, watching the ball drop in Times Square, counting 10, 9, 8… Those last few seconds are both eternal and all too short. Will the ball make it all the way down to the bottom this year? Will we pass across the threshold? Or will this be the year we get stuck? Will the world disappear at the stroke of midnight?

So much rests on that tiny moment, that instant when one year ends and another begins. Many spiritual traditions have practices like this, “rehearsal for death” practices, so to speak. In fact, I think that New Year’s Eve, as we practice it in the US, is very similar to Yom Kippur, to Ne’ilah specifically. There is the moment, the closing of the gates… we build up to it, we anticipate it, we fear it — and then ready or not, it passes. Sometimes I despise this type of practice. So much pressure! I hate the feeling of having only one chance, and then blowing it. In a way, this type of ritual is entirely counter to the practice of meditation. Meditation is all about flow, about moving through an infinity of moments and watching as things come and go. It’s not about placing expectations on one specific moment that has been designated as “the” important moment.

On the other hand, I think “rehearsal for death” practices are the very essence of meditation. Yes, it is easy to go into a frenzy of anticipation, and then regret, when focusing on one inevitable, irrevocable moment. However, this type of practice teaches us that none of that anxiety helps. No matter how hard we “try” to get the moment right, we can never hold onto it forever — it passes, no matter what we do. I always return to the title of Alan Lew’s (z”l) book about the Days of Awe: This is Real and You Are Completely Unprepared. That is the nature of the present moment — it is impossible to be prepared for it, because it is always passing. To “prepare” is to look toward the future, or in other words, to fail to be present. Once this is understood, it becomes possible to enter into a kind of surrender. “Bring it on,” we say. “I’m here waiting, just as I am.”

That is the teaching of New Year’s Eve, I think, and of other “rehearsal for death” practices. They remind us, sometimes infuriatingly, that we can never be ready for the present moment. As the adage goes, “Life is what happens when you are busy making other plans.” If we don’t stop trying to get ready for the moment, and start living in the moment, we will miss all the moments we have. New Year’s Eve is about watching the seconds tick by, and remembering how precious every one of those seconds is — no matter how imperfect, how messy, how broken.

Also, I think New Year’s Eve is a reminder of the paradoxical nature of cycles. Meditation reminds us that nothing lasts. Every ending is a beginning, and every beginning, an ending. But for there to be cycles, there must be moments of transition, of impossible passage from a state to its opposite and vice versa. For me this year, the transition felt illogical. It was December, I was finishing up my year, I was feeling the weight of completion. (One year since college graduation. One year since moving to New York.) And yet, one infinitely brief moment passed, and suddenly I was in January, looking ahead at a fresh year, light and empty with promise. How could I be expected to go from end to beginning, from heavy to light in the space of an instant? Maybe the transition would have been easier had I attended or created a New Year’s ritual. However, I think that there is a lesson in that naked moment between opposites. Like the moment when an exhale turns into an inhale, there is a moment where opposites both exist simultaneously — or where nothing exists at all. Nothing but the present moment, shining, absolute.

The views expressed by guestbloggers do not necessarily reflect the Jewish Meditation Center of Brooklyn’s positions, interests, strategies or opinions. But that’s what keeps it interesting.

I’ve just come to the end of Rabbi Alan Lew’s “This is Real and Your Are Completely Unprepared.” The book takes the reader from Tisha B’Av through Sukkot on a beautiful, spiritual journey that deepens the significance of each day of this period.  According to Rabbi Lew, Sukkot ends this period on a triumphant note:

He writes:

“This journey starts at Tisha B’Av, the day we remember the destruction of the Temple. It’s a logical start on the journey to reconciliation, toward wholeness. Tisha B’Av is the day that we acknowledge our estrangement–from God, from each other, from ourselves. That’s how you being a journey of reconciliation–by acknowledging your estrangement… Here we are at Tisha B’Av, sitting on the floor mourning this broken house…

Months later, at the end of the journey, we’re sitting in another broken house, the sukkah. Only now, we’re rejoicing. We’re singing and dancing. At first we saw the fact that the house was broken was a great catastrophe. And now we see we don’t need it. We can sit outside with the stars in our hair and the wind in our face, and we’re perfectly fine. And that’s the real journey. It has two major parts–the first coming to the realization that we are completely unprepared, that we are in a state of urgent and desperate emergency. And then second realizing that it’s alright.”

I love these last two sentences so much. My family always had a Sukkah growing up, and I’ve always loved the holiday. Sleeping, eating and living outside is such a magical experience. To me the holiday doesn’t have the spirit of wild, unbridled joy that Simcha Torah or Purim have, but it has something equally precious – a feeling of freedom and connection. A fluidity between the outside and the inside. A feeling that what we have is just what we need.

I’m excited that several of the JMC events this  month are outside (JMC meditation picnic in Prospect Park October 18th, Meditation walk across the Brooklyn Bridge October 29th).  Hopefully it will allow people without their own Sukkah, like me, to take in the spirit of the Holiday – bundling ourselves up, breathing the fall air, remembering that even as our structures are ramshackle and makeshift, we are, and will be, okay.

Chag Sameach – Have a wonderful Sukkot!

I wanted to write a blog about Jewish meditation and dating. As I got deeper into it, I realized that what I really wanted to write about was loneliness and fear – the two elements of dating that suck any semblance of fun out of the experience and produce an enormous amount of suffering and despair. And today happens to be Tisha B’av – the anniversary of the destruction of the great Temple. This is a day rife with lessons about the Jewish people’s spiritual home literally crumbling around them, leaving them feeling desperately alone.

Rabbi Simon Jacobson, a well-known Jewish author and educator, notes that in the Book of Lamentations, traditionally read on the evening of Tisha B’Av, we read the words, “Aichah Yoshva Bodad” which means “How lonely it is to be sitting alone.” He says the Jewish people at this historical moment experience a cosmic loneliness, as the holy structure that has held them together falls apart.

That sentence is loaded with a feeling I deeply recognize. Sitting alone. Naked. Lost.  No walls to hide or protect us. With all our faults exposed, who would love us? Who are we to be loved?

When one is single and doesn’t want to be. It can be bone-crushingly lonely. It can feel like you are being punished for something, and you don’t know what for.

Loneliness, alienation, and fear go together for me. I feel lonely when I feel alienated from who I really am. I feel like there is a chasm within me, and I don’t know how to bridge it.  I can’t see what there is to love about me, because I don’t feel very loving towards myself. I then feel fear because I don’t see an end in sight, and I, like the author of lamentations, feel cosmically alone and terrified. When the walls come down, that is what is left standing for me. That is what loneliness really is.

So what should we do in that place, in the ashes of the destroyed temple of our lives, amid the rubble of insecurity and alienation and fear? Rabbi Alan Lew writes, “our suffering, the unresolved element of our lives, is also from God. It is the instrument by which we are carried back to God, not something to be defended against, but rather to be embraced.”

My wish for this Tisha B’Av is to be able to see loneliness as a gift – a phone call from that alienated, broken, mistreated parts of ourselves, desperate to be seen and loved in the cold harsh light of day.

Now that we’ve started the JMC, a lot of people have been asking a lot of questions about meditation, which is great. We included a quick summary of how we define Jewish meditation on the site, Yael wrote a brilliant post about the reasons for meditation, and I’ve been answering the questions in conversations with a pretty clinical description of what meditation is, the history of meditation in Judaism and, well, I think I’d rather give a more personal answer. Here’s my story of Jewish meditation:

I first started meditating with the instruction and guidance of a Buddhist monk. He visited my college a few times to offer classes on meditation and mindfulness.  I was struggling at the time with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, which came with every symptom in the psychology textbook: anxiety, daymares, insomnia, panic attacks, etc. To put it mildly, school was a challenge, and to put it honestly, so was life.

And then I meet this sweet, older, Tibetan monk in long robes and the softest, gentlest voice I had ever heard. He explained simple techniques about watching your breath, and offered a lesson on how we don’t have to be attached to our thoughts- that we can simply observe them, validate them, and then move back to our breath. Over and over again, get distracted, observe, don’t judge, move back to your breath. We practiced this for a few seconds at a time, then a few minutes at a time, and at some point I realized that for the first time in months, my mind cleared. Even though it was only for a few seconds, I felt like I had found a respite, or, even better, some sort of nirvana. All of the scary memories, sad and painful thoughts, along with the extremely self-critical dialogue that had been filling my head 24 hours a day for months took a break.

So that’s where I started. I fell in love with Buddhist meditation. And, as I studied and practiced more, my healing process sped up.  Along the way, I worked with western and eastern healing practitioners and found an integration that worked for me.  It was the most difficult time of my life, and also the experiences that I’m most grateful for. Don’t worry, the Jewish part is coming up.

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