September 11, 2011

Ten years ago today I was a college student and lived in the East Village. After the first plane hit the World Trade Center, a friend called and told me to look outside. Then my TV and phone lines went out. Running to school, the only place I thought felt safe, I heard people in their apartments and cars screaming. Another plane hit the second tower. Then the towers started falling. I spent the day talking with NYPD who set up a headquarters in our building. I waited for hours to use a payphone to call my parents, and I sat, under that clear blue sky, with friends, watching what felt like thousands of people covered in white dust running uptown.

I remember thinking that this must be what it feels like to be at war— to have your city bombed and to feel completely powerless and scared. I felt connected to everyone who has experienced war, knowing that my experience, although scary, was nothing compared to what most people have been through. I thought, this is what fear feels like.

A few months ago, my father died. It was sudden. It’s been painful. Before this, I had never experienced grief in such an intense way. I was shocked by the physicality.  My eyes stung and my throat hurt and my blood felt watery. My lungs didn’t seem to be working well, and breathing was a serious effort. I felt like my body shut down. My heart hurt. It still hurts. And that’s just the physical. Emotionally, I felt like a sad zombie. I wasn’t sleeping. I was constantly bursting into tears. At some point, I was reminded that people die at every moment, and their loved ones feel just like this. I thought this is what it feels like to mourn.

Ten years later, we are commemorating September 11^th in New York City. Where I lived at the time, all of the bus shelters, street lamp poles, any wall space was covered with signs of missing people. I remember for months, staring at those signs–  so many different faces of every color, age, background, all missing, most dead.  When I thought about our losses on September 11^th, I thought about those pictures. I felt sadness for all of those lost lives. This year, I’m thinking about them and all of their loved ones who have felt what I’ve been feeling in mourning and in grief. If this is what grieving feels like, I wonder how the world continues to turn, how anything gets done. If millions of people all over the world are going through this same, involuntary process of grief, how is it possible that we continue to make wars, consciously killing, if anyone with any power has ever felt like this?

After my father died, I was struck with this sticky, painful grief, but I was also faced with a caring and kindness and love that I didn’t realize was possible. And that made me remember the coming together of communities and the love that New Yorkers and the entire world extended to each other after September 11^th.  I remember visiting St. Paul’s church downtown where people came each day to offer rescue and recovery workers food and supplies. The pews were used as beds and the walls were covered with children’s art. Musicians came each day to play music. It was beautiful. And this is what it feels like to love and be loved. This is what it feels like to connect and care.

It’s in my meditation practice that I cultivate my own capacity to hold both love and fear. Sitting with both, holding both, is impossible and necessary, and this is what it feels like to be human, to be alive. Today at By Love Alone: A Day of Meditation on the 10th Anniversary of the World Trade Center Attacks, at the Shambhala Meditation Center of NYC, I offered the chesed, lovingkindness, practice where we blessed our loved ones, all those affected directly and indirectly by the attacks of September 11^th, those who we may know or not know who are difficult for us to love, ourselves, and the entire world with peace (shalom), joy (simcha), lovingkindness (chesed), and compassion (rachamim).

If you’re reading this, please take a moment to do this practice or at least just the last part: breathing in, you can say in your mind or out loud “May we be blessed,” and with an exhale, “with peace.” Breathing in: “May we be blessed,” and breathing out, “with joy.” “May we be blessed… with loving kindness.” “May we be blessed… with compassion.” It’s my hope that through this blessing practice we can remind ourselves that this is what it feels like to love. This is what it feels like to know peace.

May our practice of sitting with love and kindness let us know peace. May this peace not stay only with us, but radiate out in to the world through our thoughts and words and actions, and may we be of blessing. May everyone know peace.

This week’s Torah portion, Bamidbar, literally translating to “in the desert” begins the book of Numbers, a collection of stories pertaining to the children of Israel during their 40 years of wandering in the wilderness. The book gets it’s name from the events that open the book a little over two years after the events of the exodus from Egypt.

God says to Moses  “Take a census of the whole Israelite community by their clans and families, listing every man by name, one by one.”  The Torah portion for the most part relays the outcome of this census and deals with various number counts. The text states that the reason for this census is for military purposes. God says, “You and Aaron are to count according to their divisions all the men in Israel who are twenty years old or more and able to serve in the army.”  The text goes on to describe leaders of each tribe,  the arrangement of encampments under military to banners, and a separate Levite census which continues into the next portion of Naso.

But the rabbis saw a different message in the counting: they said that God’s children being counted is similar to someone counting a valued possession. The rabbi’s saw the census as a symbol of God’s possessive love for the people.

I decided to look at the Haftorah for a deeper insight into this idea. [The practice of reading Haftora came about during a time when Jews were under persecution, and they weren't able to read Torah publicly. The  rabbis chose chapters from the books of the prophets and the writings which related in some way to the weekly Torah portion.] This week’s Haftorah comes from the book of Hosea and the seeming connection is that when Hosea speaks of God redeeming the nation of Israel from exile (“the number of the children of Israel will be like the sand of the sea, which can be neither measured nor counted”) there’s an obvious parallel between the census being taken in Bamidbar and the inability to count Israel in a future time due to it’s vast growth.

I saw a deeper message of God’s love in the complicated story of Hosea’s life. According to the text, Hosea is commanded by God to take a woman, who is referred to as a “harlot,” as a wife and to have children with her. The typical interpretation is that this woman wasn’t a prostitute, but she was a woman whose ways would lead to promiscuity. Hosea took her as a wife and had children with her. He loved her very deeply but she inevitably strayed from him on many occasions. Each time she had no
choice but to return to him, and each time he took her back out of the love and deep commitment he had for her. From this experience, Hosea began to feel a sympathy towards the God of Israel. He saw a parallel of his own experiences with his wife to the relationship of God to the Jewish people.

This people, in relationship with God, were asked to be faithful to God. At times they were, but on many occasions they were not. The people would stray and fail at the charge they were given as a nation. Eventually they would ask forgiveness, and God
would take them back, just like Hosea and his wife.

The text actually says that God commanded Hosea to marry this woman but many commentators, including Abraham Joshua Heschel, don’t believe that was the sequence of events. They believe that Hosea married a woman that he truly loved,  and through this experience of love, commitment and subsequent betrayel he developed an understanding of God’s relationship to Israel. Through this relationship, he was inspired to bring this message to the world. Hosea became a great proponent of spreading the word of God’s continuing love for his people, despite their inconsistent reciprocation. I think this is a beautiful
story that shows us just why God wants to count and recount the nation of Israel.

It’s my kavanah that we can sit with awareness and realize when we’re loved and when we should give love back. We have loved ones who ask of us and expect of us. Are we there for them? Do we give to them when they need us?

We each have a relationship with God. God calls to us and charges us with Torah. Do we listen? Do we act?

We each have a soul that asks for feeding, a body that asks for support. Do we sustain them? Do we support them?

Let us have intention to those who ask of us and to that which is asked of us.
Let us have compassion and patience to those who we ask of and to that which we ask of ourselves.

The Haftora (and this blog) ends with a beautiful verse speaking of this undying love that is recited daily at the wrapping of the tefilin: “I will betroth you to me forever. And I will betroth you to me with righteousness, with justice, with kindness and with mercy.  And I will betroth you to me with fidelity. And you will know God.”

Shabbat Shalom

“I have loved you, but yet you keep asking how I have loved you!” Said God.

Thus opens the second line of Chapter 1 of Malachai, this week’s Haftorah portion. Upon first reading, the Haftorah is standard prophet-fare. The Jewish people – and the Jewish priests in the temple – are behaving badly, disconnected from God and from their better selves. God, through Malachai, is trying to bring them around.

While a lot of the text could be read as finger-wagging moralism, I was struck by how the first line God speaks through Malachai is a much more complicated, much more compassionate take on why the people are misbehaving.

“You are a loved creature, a creature composed of love” God is saying, “and yet you can’t see it!” Malachai and/or God is flabbergasted at this state of affairs – this fundamental blindness that seems to be at the root of all of Israel’s misdeeds.

Once on a meditation retreat, I started to realize how at my deepest core, I wasn’t sure I felt love. Instead I felt emptiness, or alienation. I wasn’t sure I loved myself at all, and I certainly wasn’t sure God (whatever that meant) loved me. I remember wishing I was Christian and had a Jesus – someone who explicitly said “I love you. God loves you. You are nothing but love.” I thought that if I had that more explicitly in my tradition, there is a chance I would believe it to be true.

But then I read this passage from the book, “The Cloud of Unknowing,” a mystical Christian text written by a monk in the 14^th Century:

“For although [Mary Magdalene] could never rid herself of the deep sorrow of her heart for her sins…yet it still can be said…that she had greater sorrow of heart for her lack of love than for any awareness of her sins. She had a more sorrowing desire, a deeper sighing; she languished almost to the point of death for her lack of love, though she had a very great love. And we are not to wonder at this, for it is the nature of a true lover that the more he loves, the more he longs to love.” (Chapter 16)

Even Mary Magdalene, front and center for Jesus’ love, kept asking, like the people Israel in the book of Malachai, “Why aren’t I loved?” It seems no matter how much Jesus or God or our parents or friends tell us they love us, there is a gap in the moment of truly getting it. Of believing it for ourselves.

I think the Christian monk’s assessment of Mary is really true- it is the nature of true lovers that they will always feel not adequately loved, even when they are. This theme is also echoed in this week’s Torah portion, when Jacob awakes in awe from a dream to say “the divine was in THIS place, and I didn’t know it!”

What if God’s love is in THIS place, our core, and we just didn’t know it? What if that which we perceive to be emptiness at our core is an emptiness filled with love? And while I’m asking questions, what actually is love? For me, it’s a sense of being seen, being understood, being held, and feeling the fibers of my self enclosed in warmth and meaning. There is a totality about love – a full, unconditional acceptance. What would it mean to feel that TOTAL love from the very air you breath, the steps you take, the sights that meet you eye? What would it mean to be feel it accompany each thought, each passing emotion?

What would it mean to look in the mirror and say with conviction, “I am loved by God. And it’s so obvious”?

What does it mean to love or find love as part of your spiritual path? I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately, mostly about my extreme aversion to approaching love in any sort of rational way. What makes sense to me is that if you live your life in a contemplative way, if you have a spiritual practice, your faith and trust in yourself and your world expands and includes love. I was thinking the other day about how I feel some sort of new freedom to be honest with myself and others, to not be so hung up on how I’m received, and to trust that everything will work out- that it is working out perfectly, and I don’t need to worry so much. Or, at all. That feeling was all about my career, money, etc, and decidedly not about finding someone to partner with, but now I’m seeing it in this place, too.

I’m finding that when you truly sit with yourself and you train yourself to love (let’s call it metta or g’milut chasidim or just plain love), self-love happens and it’s sort of hard to contain, to keep all to yourself. This process of really opening your heart, being receptive to and generous with love, is a leap of faith. Feeling like God (however you want to define or not define the concept) has your back, that it’s all going to be okay- that makes sense to me. Applying logic to love makes me short-circuit, and it’s just not the kind of life I want to live. Honestly, I know I’m treading some sort of hippie line here. And part of me can’t even believe I’m writing (or feeling this), but I think it’s true.

Meditation seems like good training wheels for unconditionally loving. To love someone means to see, respect and accept all of them fully, their faults and their amazingness, their potential and their past, and most importantly their present reality- and to love all of it. A meditation practice teaches you to do this with yourself- what a great experiment! Here you have this subject that you can observe from the inside-out, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Learning to be gentle with yourself, to hear all of the negativity and judgments and hatred that we all have somewhere inside and to softly move it forward, past fear and into understanding, this is the great human experience.

It’s been an important part of my meditation practice- to deeply listen to myself, to feel compassion, and to believe that I am capable and have the capacity to grow and learn and change. Because of that, I also believe that others are capable of the same thing. And, here’s where faith comes crashing in- cultivating an open heart is difficult, I feel vulnerable, I feel sort of forced to be brave, but on the other side of that, I also feel less afraid of all of those maybe ridiculous worst-case scenarios that pop up in single-life (“I’ll never find anyone,” “I might be alone forever,” etc). I don’t want to minimize these fears. They’re real, but they don’t have to move in and set up shop. Just like in meditation, it’s possible to have these fears but not attach to them, to let them come up and let them fall away. I’m learning to have faith that love sort of works like my breath, and I’m working on noticing those subtle moments when an inhale becomes an exhale and paying attention to the way it feels when my breath leaves my body completely and then comes back without me running after it.