This week’s parsha, Chayei Sarah, begins with the death of Sarah, at age 127. Abraham, her husband, purchases a burial property for her, and later marries another woman, Keturah,  who bears him six more children. He also sends his most senior servant to his birth land to find a wife for his son Isaac, and most of the parsha details this servant’s journey and discovery of Isaac’s bride, Rebecca.

The servant travels to the city of Nachor and begins his search for a wife for Isaac among the women gathering water from the well. Feeling unsure of how he will recognize the right woman, he prays to G-d for help, saying, “If I say to a girl, ‘Tip over your jug and let me have a drink,’ and she  replies, ‘Drink, and I will also water your camels,’ she will be the one whom You have designated for Your servant Isaac.” The first woman he approaches is Rebecca; when she offers him and his camels a drink, he knows he has found Isaac’s bride.

In the servant’s journey and his prayer to G-d, I saw a reflection of something I often think about: when we’re searching for something – be it a romantic partner, a new job, a new house, a new community – we can put ourselves out there and look, but at the end of the day, there is a lot of luck involved in us finding what we’re seeking. Accepting this reality can often be a struggle for me, and at times I grow discouraged and think, If so much of life is random and out of my control, why bother trying? I risk shutting down and shutting myself off from new connections and new opportunities.

There was a second part of the parsha that seemed to offer some inspiration for this struggle: as the servant is bringing Rebecca to meet Isaac, the Torah reads that he “went out to meditate in the field toward evening. He raised his eyes, and  saw camels approaching.” With the camels came Rebecca, who he not only wed but loved. I love this image, of Isaac sitting still in a lush field as, unbeknownst to him, his bride and future love is riding toward him. In this picture I see what meditation does for me: it stills the fear inside of me – of being hurt and disappointed, of things being out of my control – and helps me live with the fact that much of life is uncertain, and see that sometimes uncertainty can lead to positive outcomes.

So my kavanah (or intention) for this week is the following: let our meditation practice help us open our eyes to whatever life is bringing our way, and let us recognize that sometimes those things might be just what we’ve been looking for.

Here we are in the Days of Awe, between Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur. The books of life and death are open. This is the time, we’re told, that the gates to heaven are open. Teshuvah (returning/realigning/repenting) is most possible now. It’s a good time to meditate, I think. We can watch our own shifts and resistances and desires. We can take some time to reflect on what we love and what’s difficult for us, to see where we are in our worlds. 

I’ve been thinking about how we read the story of Jonah on Yom Kippur. In reading a lot of interpretations and drashes on Jonah, I keep coming back to one thought: Jonah is super unlikeable. And, Jonah is just like us.

In the story, Jonah’s prophesy is unwanted and resisted. God tells Jonah to go to Ninevah (probably to tell them to repent), and Jonah says no. He’s not interested in being a prophet. He doesn’t want people to think he’s crazy, and also, he’s scared. Of all outcomes. So he purposefully goes in the wrong direction: he goes west when God tells him to go east. When there’s a storm, sent by God, to sink the ship he’s tried to escape on, he goes to sleep in the ship’s hold [Can't we all relate to that? We're in the midst of a storm in our lives and all we want to do is crawl under the covers.], then asks to be tossed off the ship and is swallowed by the fish.

After praying and getting released from the fish, Jonah reluctantly goes to Ninevah, tells the people to repent… and they do! They totally listen and the city is saved by God, and Jonah is not happy. There’s more, but it’s the same thing. Then it ends. It’s a mysterious story. There’s no real change in Jonah’s unlikeability. He doesn’t seem to have redeemable qualities, just familiar ones.

Aviva Zornberg’s theory about Jonah resonated with me. She asks what exactly Jonah is resisting, and finds that he’s completely uncomfortable sitting between life and death. Jonah can’t acknowledge that no one has any security, that life is uncertain. Zornberg says that it’s unbearable for Jonah to recognize that we’re not firmly in life or death; we’re somewhere in between. She says that Jonah is “deeply allergic” to standing in uncertainty, and it’s actually an unbearable position for any human being. Except that this is exactly what life is, standing before God, in between life and death, always.

In the story, we find that Jonah would rather die, and asks for it, than stay in this in-between, of life. When Ninevah is saved, after he fulfills his prophecy, he is disturbed because this is also uncertain. His perspective might be that God is showing that nothing is for sure. Jonah thought the people would ignore his prophesy and be punished, but instead they all repented and saved their lives. This doesn’t make any sense. It’s frustrating. In a logical world, where Jonah, and probably all of us, would feel more comfortable and safe, evil people would be punished, good people rewarded. But this is not the world.  

This sounds a lot like the kabbalistic concept that the world is broken, and the path is messy.

On Yom Kippur we pray the al chet- the prayer with all the sins, it’s usually translated as sin, but it really means missing the target. So teshuvah is returning to the target, returning to the path. It’s also what we’re doing in meditation. We have a target in mind: focusing on the breath, a prayer, sitting in awareness, awaking our hearts and minds to compassion and kindness. And then we misstep, we miss the target and we return again and again and again. We distract ourselves often because we, like Jonah, feel completely uncomfortable with our human-ness, with standing before God, sitting between life and death, and when we run away from that reality, we misstep. We make mistakes, and we hurt ourselves and others.

We can use our meditation practice, especially in this time of the Days of Awe, as an invitation to sit in that in-between. We can recognize our uncertainty and be gentle with it. Here’s an opportunity to not approach this intellectually and not think about it, but to feel what it’s like to return, to practice teshuvah, to allow our practice of returning be a reminder of what it feels like to sit in uncertainty, to feel what Jonah felt, but not to run away.

Somehow Jonah’s story is a little bit inspiring in that “what not to do” way. We learn that resisting and running away may lead to our worse case scenario, and sitting with the way things are often changes our perspectives and strengthens our capacity to practice teshuvah, returning and realigning with our true and best selves.

May we all have meaningful and sweet new years.

One of my favorite meditations is about listening. Listening to all of the sounds around me- the morning birds, passing car radios, upstairs footsteps, kids yelling, my breath- and in me- my heart beating, ears buzzing, throat swallowing, and also a deep silence around all of these sounds. Thinking about this reminded me of a story. This is from Rabbi Rami M. Shapiro’s chapter in Meditation from the Heart of Judaism:

One morning a group of teenagers asked Reb Yerachmiel, “What is the point of human life? Why are we here?

The rebbe replied, “If a tree falls in the forest, does it make a sound?” The children debated this for a while, and then the rebbe replied, “Here is my understanding. Without an ear to register the vibrations of the falling tree, no sound is produced. Sound is not a thing but a transaction between things. For there to be a sound, there must be a falling tree and an ear to hear. Why are we here? We are the other half of the transaction. We are here to hear.”

“But other beings hear!” a student said. “And dogs can hear sounds humans can’t hear. Are dogs more important than us?”

“True,” Reb Yerachmiel said. “Dogs can hear what we cannot. But we can hear what even dogs cannot. We can hear the cry of a broken heart. We can hear the outrage of injustice. We can hear the whisper of empathy. We can hear the silence of death. We are here to listen not only to what everyone else can hear, but also to that which only we can hear.”

I think the story is a good reminder about paying attention, not only to everything around us, but also to that deep knowing inside that guides us toward our path in this world, to being more kind, working to create a just world, growing and learning to be honest about who we are and how we engage with ourselves and others. (Also, who doesn’t love a made up rebbe who contemplates a tree falling in the forest?)

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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