Although we all have an internal wisdom, few of us are prophets. We don’t always dream of what lies ahead, and we often don’t follow the dreams and destinies that present themselves. Tomorrow is Thanksgiving, a day when many of us gather with family and friends and feel grateful. Grateful for our capacity to truly know, just like Joseph and Tamar, our uniqueness and specialness and the same truth for everyone else in the world and in our lives. And what if it wasn’t just one day? What if we did not wait for one holiday a year to give thanks for the bounty of our lives? What if we arose each morning with gratitude, five seconds of appreciation for the goodness in our lives? Just ponder this for a moment. Take a deep breath. What does it feel like, in your body, to absorb those few seconds of conscious stillness absorbing appreciation? How would incorporating that gratitude help us to meet the day’s challenges?

Gratitude does not come only in silence in the still of the morning. It can also come in the manic-ness of drumsticks, pumpkin pie, the sweet memories of grandma. It is these times together, maybe on Thanksgiving, seeing your familiar faces and catching up on the stories of our lives, that we re-connect, re-acquaint, and re-focus our lives to what is true.

Martin Buber said, “When two people relate to each other authentically and humanly, God is the electricity that surges between them.”  That is probably why Thanksgiving is so packed with energy – so many people coming together, the energy is palpable.

Practice Instructions around the Thanksgiving Table:

a) Offer everyone and opportunity to explore being settled and comfortable in their seats – feel the weight of your body settle into the chair, back upright – stretching upward, shoulders relaxed and hands resting comfortably on your lap. Close or rest eyes for a few breaths.

b) After a few breaths invite everyone to open their eyes, and without speaking, just look around the table. Take a few seconds to really look at everyone around the table, making eye contact, seeing them.

c) Go around the table, each person saying one thing for which they are grateful.

d) Together, concluding this short exercise by feeling and stating a collective gratitude and appreciation for coming together, maybe from far and wide, for those who prepared and organized and hosted this meal of Thanksgiving.

e) Happy Thanksgiving (don’t forget to fire up some apple cider).

Parsha Re’eh – ראה – Deuteronomy 11:26-16:17

This week’s parsha, Re’eh, begins with the line “See (re’eh), I place before you today a blessing and a curse.” Basically, Moses is offering the Israelites two options: follow the rules and be blessed; abandon God and be cursed. Moses instructs the people on the laws of the Temple, Kashrut, tithing, the Sabbatical year, and the three pilgrim festivals of Sukkot, Pesach, and Shavuot.

I love the idea of holding blessings and curses together. There’s a not so subtle directive that in order to discern between the two and choose a direction, we have to truly see what is placed before us. Through meditation we allow ourselves to create space in our lives to check in with our mind and heart. Sitting with and holding our deepest truths, fears, desires, we often find that it’s complicated. Blessings and curses, good and bad, pleasant and unpleasant- the longer we sit with something, the more our judgments and preconceptions shift and blend. We all know of someone who got exactly what they wished for and they still weren’t happy. Many times, we sit with physical pain and find that it’s a gateway to insight.

For most of my childhood, I took painting classes. One of the most important lessons was that if you were going to paint an apple (for example), you have to erase the idea of an apple from your brain and simply paint what you see. Painting an apple based on an established or even subconscious image of what an apple is supposed to look like will hold back your creative process and your resulting work won’t be very good. The art teachers who impacted me the most taught me to draw the space between objects, paint things upside down, and train my brain to see things as they are and not how I remember them or want them to be. When reading this week’s parsha, which starts with the instruction to “see,” these lessons came immediately to mind.

Meditation practice is a way to retrain our minds to see our thoughts, our lives, our histories, as they really are. Following Moshe’s instruction to see before us a blessing and a curse, we see that it’s rarely either/or and often both at the same time. We can mindfully use our Jewish practices, that Moses expounds upon in Re’eh, to know that our seeing and our understanding allows us to find our own path to blessings. As we sit in meditation, we may also find that the path itself is blessed.

A quick kavanah, intention, to guide practice: As you sit, follow your breath. Whenever you find that your mind has wandered, gently return to the present moment. Check in with your breath, your posture, and see what has drawn your attention from your intended focus. Allow yourself to see what you identify as a blessing and a curse and whether these designations shift as you watch them. Remind yourself that this is your task: to see before you blessings and curses and to learn to see them clearly.

I remember when I first started learning about mindfulness and realizing that the Jewish practice of blessing is basically a framework for mindfulness in our every day lives. We are tasked with paying attention to each thing we do, blessing and sanctifying and making the mundane holy. By elevating our experiences, we shift our awareness, stop, fill up with gratitude, and every action is somehow different, special, better.

There are blessings to accompany everything you do from the moment you open your eyes. Waking, getting out of bed, getting dressed, going to the bathroom, eating, sleeping. I was at a salon about prayer last night and someone said “It’s not like you say a blessing for each breath. That would be impossible!” So, I’ve been thinking about that. I think a lot about the idea the God’s name is a breath (more about that here). If each breath is invoking the name of God, each breath is a blessing, then maybe we don’t have to do anything. The blessing is already built in. Sometimes during meditation I remind myself to pay attention to what it feels like to breathe. To remember that this is what it feels like to be alive.

On Monday night, the JMC’s first sit in our new home at 505 Carroll Street, our circle of meditators went around and said blessings for this transition into a new space and a growing community. I read a prayer that I had copied into my journal. I’m not sure who wrote it, but it was sung by Jhos Singer at Chochmat HaLev with the Yivarechecha, the Priestly Blessing:

May God bless and keep you, friend, and shine a light upon you.
And may the garden of the life you tend, bring forth graciousness and peace.
The road is long, and the journey, it can be quite hard,
And no one’s strong enough to travel it alone.
May you be a blessing and be blessed, by everyone who knows you.
And may you always do your best to serve your God with love.

I think I love this because of the line “May you be a blessing and be blessed.” It reminds me that the blessing practice, mindfulness, itself is a gift. That the act of blessing, of invoking holiness in our actions blesses us. When we say the blessings in the siddur, when we say the motzi or the blessing over the wine, we are blessing God. Baruch atah, Bless You. Every time we say a blessing we are also coming into relationship with divinity, with our breath, with life, which opens us up in some small way. It reminds me of the story of the Kotzker Rebbe. When asked where God is, he is said to have answered “God is wherever we let God in.” I think it can be difficult to “let God in” (whatever that may mean) sometimes, so any opportunity to open, make space, and feel that spaciousness, is a blessing.

Tu B’Shvat, the 15th of the month of Shvat, is the “New Year of the Trees,” kind of like the Jewish version of Earth Day… only with a whole bunch of mysticism. On Saturday night, we had a JMC/Brooklyn Jews Taste of Tu B’Shvat Seder in Brooklyn. It was a seder based on divine sustainability and mindfulness. We went through the Kabbalists’ Four Worlds, the four seasons, drank wine, ate fruit and nuts (and dinner), and ended with a seriously beautiful havdalah ceremony.

As we moved higher and higher and up through to the third world, Beriah, creation, we had already eaten fruit that is inedible on the outside and soft on the inside, fruit that is soft on the outside and inedible on the inside, and drank pure white wine and a glass of white with some red. In the third world, we drank a half and half mixture of red and white wine and ate fruit that is wholly edible. This world of creation is also the world of the mind. In this world there is an understanding of divine connection, the oneness of creation. Here’s the meditation that we did for the world of Beriah:

Start by connecting to your breath in this moment. Close your eyes or soften your gaze and breathe deeply. Inhale and exhale. Deepening your inhale and extending your exhale. Paying attention to your full cycle of breath. As you breathe in, remind yourself that your inhale is also the exhale of every green, living plant on earth. Your exhale is also the inhale of trees and plants. Our cycle of breath is part of a larger cycle of breath, of life. As we go through this short meditation, keep bringing yourself back to your breath and the breath of the world.

Thinking about the unpronounceable name of God, in the Torah, yud hay vav hay. Four letters, no vowels, and we really have no idea how to pronounce it. One of my favorite teachings is that if we transliterate these letters into English (but using an ancient pronunciation for the letter vav), it would be YHWH. YHWH, this combination of letters could be said as a breath: YH for the inhale; WH for the exhale. Every breath a reminder of our connection to all living things on earth. Every breath a blessing. Every breath a prayer of awe.

“Then we would not only eat, we would taste, we would not only hear, we would listen, we would not only be awake, but be aware, we would not only be standing, but be upstanding, then we would not only be released from prison, we would be free: Free to say our thanks, free to feel our love, free to feel our pain, free to struggle, free to submit, and free to inspire the breath of life infusing all matter, all energy in all time and space. When that breath is our breath, then every breath will speak the secret holy name.” (Rabbi David Cooper)

Let us use our breath to connect to the oneness of our world, to remind ourselves that isn’t any separation, to live fully and wholly, blessing the world and letting the world bless us.