Bring Them Home Now (Vayeshev 5785)

Bring Them Home Now (Vayeshev 5785)

Dec 20, 2024 | Blog, Rabbi Josh Feigelson, PhD, President & CEO, Institute for Jewish Spirituality

 

On Tuesday morning this week, I stood amidst the ruined homes of young members of Kibbutz Kfar Aza, one of the kibbutzim overrun and decimated by Hamas terrorists on October 7, 2023. These small apartments had provided a way for the kibbutz to help young people get their start in adult life. Their location, closest to the western fence of the kibbutz, made them the first line of attack. Along with the murders, there was evidence of rape, and the brutality of the home violation — bullet holes in walls, ransacked belongings — is still visible in plain sight, as the kibbutz members have not yet returned to their homes and decided what to do with this area: create a memorial, rebuild, or something else.

From the same spot on that fence in Kfar Aza, I could see the northern Gaza neighborhoods of Jabalya, Beit Lahiya, and Beit Hanoun. If you enter these areas in Google Maps to try to calculate the distance between them and Kfar Aza (I just did), you’ll get an unusual response: “Can’t find a way there.” These neighborhoods have been emptied since the Israeli military response after October 7, thousands of homes damaged and destroyed. Standing there on Tuesday morning, I could hear the constant hum of aerial drones along with occasional explosions.

This was my first visit to Israel since October 7. The visit was organized by The iCenter and included over 70 Jewish educators from around the world. It was a short and intense trip: four days of meeting with Israelis, hearing their stories, listening. We talked with teachers at Sha’ar HaNegev regional high school about the challenges of supporting and educating children who have suffered incredible trauma — even as they, the educators, dealt with their own. In Sderot we listened to Youssef Alziadna, a Bedouin Arab Israeli who drives a minibus and heroically saved 30 lives of young people — many of whom he has known since they were young children — at the Nova Festival. We talked with educators and families from Kiryat Shmona, in the north of Israel, who have been living in hotels for the last 14 months, unsure when they can go home.

That theme, home, was what seemed to keep coming up for me again and again. Visiting Kikar Hahatufim (Hostages Square) Wednesday morning in Tel Aviv, I felt myself at the epicenter of a campaign that has touched virtually every public space in the country: machzirim otam habayta achshav, Bring Them Home Now. The hostages need to come home. The soldiers need to be able to come home. The people of Kfar Aza and Kiryat Shmona and all the other hundreds of thousands of displaced Israelis need to be safe to come home — just like the people of Beit Hanoun and Jabalya and Beit Lahiya and throughout Gaza. Everyone — every human being — needs to be safe, needs to be able to come home.

I have been to Israel many times, and I’ve lived in the country for two-plus years of my life. Visiting Israel always raises enormous questions about home for me — as I expect it does for many Jews (as it should, I believe). There is an at-homeness I experience in Israel that is just unimaginable for me in America, and at various points in my life I’ve thought about whether and how Israel could really be home for me. That internal conversation is always complicated and hard. But this trip it was even more so, because so many more people are experiencing their own displacement, their own not-at-homeness — even in, especially in, a place they think of as home. (This was only accentuated by the air raid sirens that greeted us 20 minutes after our arrival in Tel Aviv and woke us at 2:30 a.m. on Thursday night.)

The story of Joseph and his brothers is many things, but it is certainly a story about the complexities of family and home. It prompts us to ask questions like, Whom do we treat as family, and what does it mean to do so? How do we create and sustain a shared home together? And, perhaps most acutely in the story of Joseph himself, what spiritual capacities might we be capable of nurturing in those moments when we are far from home: alone in a pit without water, working as a servant in the home of a foreigner, forgotten in a prison in Egypt (or a tunnel in Gaza)?

While I have always admired people who do so, it has not been my practice to kiss the mezuzah when entering and leaving a place. But Tuesday morning in Kfar Aza, entering the shelled out childhood home of our tour guide Orit, I found my right hand instinctively rising up to the mezuzah on the way in and out. Without really even thinking about it, my body seemed to be practicing a kind of mindful awareness: You are in a home, a Jewish home, be mindful. There were family pictures, puzzles that over the years had been completed and glued together and hung on the wall, artifacts of a family’s life through decades of children and grandchildren.

Perhaps my hand was prompting my mind to pray: May Orit’s family, may all these families on all these borders, return home from their exile. May they, may we, experience healing. May they, may we, be safe. May they, may we, return home now.

Josh in Conversation with Joshua Leifer

Josh in Conversation with Joshua Leifer

Dec 12, 2024 | Blog

We are grateful to Joshua Leifer for sharing his insights with us. Please enjoy the conversation recording.

Joshua Leifer is a journalist, editor, and translator. His essays and reporting have appeared widely in international publications, including The New York Times, The New York Review of Books, The Atlantic, The Guardian, The New Statesman, Haaretz, The

Nation, and elsewhere. A member of the Dissent editorial board, he previously worked as an editor at Jewish Currents and at +972 Magazine. He is currently pursuing a PhD at Yale University, where he studies the history of modern moral and social thought.

Tablets Shattered is now available for purchase.

At Home in the Darkness

At Home in the Darkness

Dec 10, 2024 | Blog, by Rabbi Miriam Margles, Senior Core Faculty, Institute for Jewish Spirituality

At this time of year, where I live in Toronto, the trees have shed almost all of their leaves and their branches stand bare against the grey sky. Day by day, the hours of sunlight shorten while darkness holds on longer to the mornings and rolls in earlier and earlier in the evenings. Overhead, skeins of Canada geese honk their way south, and I almost take their leaving personally, abandoning me along with the snow and cold. With the loss of light and warmth, I find myself habitually focused on what I am losing, fighting against the changing season and its natural impact on me. When I face these outer and inner changes unmindfully, I fall into habits of either pushing myself to resist rest, forcing myself to be busy and social, or collapsing into fatigue as thoughts of loneliness and lack curl in next to me on the couch. 

To respond to the depletion and sense of lack that many of us feel at this time of year, there are abundant Jewish teachings for Chanukah and the whole Hebrew month of Kislev about bringing light into the darkness. But I want to invite us to linger in this month’s long nights, to explore making ourselves spiritually at home in the darkness and to learn from its gifts. 

Rebbe Nachman of Breslov, the great Hasidic sage of the late 18th century, teaches that the medicine for this season is a practice of sighing. He quotes the famous verse from Zekhariah (4:6), from the Haftarah we read on the Shabbat of Chanukah -“Not by might and not by power, ki im be’ruchi – but only by My ruach (spirit/ wind/ breath)”. The repair for what is lacking cannot be found through force or fighting. Instead, we consciously, gently, engage with ruach. 

Rebbe Nachman explains that because everything that exists has come into being through Divine ruach, vital lifebreath, and because the secret of renewal lives in that same enlivening ruach, when there is lack, it is because there is a lack of ruach. Healing, therefore, needs an infusion of flowing, vitalizing ruach. While the winter earth becomes dormant and many animals hibernate, drawing their ruach inward until they are renewed in the spring, we humans, teaches Rebbe Nachman, can meet the lack or depletion of ruach within us with a conscious and soft flow of breath.

He teaches:

“See how precious is the sigh and groan {the krekhtz } of a Jewish person. It provides wholeness [in place] of the lack…And sighing is the extension of the breath. It corresponds to erekh apayim (patience)—i.e., extended ruach. Therefore, when a person sighs over the lack and extends their ruach, they draw ruach-of-life to that which they are lacking… Therefore, through the sigh, the lack is made whole” (Likutei Moharan, Torah 8:1).

We might think that the practice that is called for in response to the lack of light and lows of this season would be to generate strong and powerful breath, bracing against the cold, or quick and activating breath to overcome the darkness and our impulses to collapse under the covers. But the quality of ruach that we nurture in the month of Kislev, preparing for Chanukah, needs to be distinct – different from the fresh aliveness of spring or the luscious vitality of summer. For this time of year, Rebbe Nachman prescribes long, extended ruach-of-life breaths that share the qualities of the darkness outside – slow, heavy, spilling and spacious with soft and blurred boundaries. Between the poles of fighting and collapsing, we access this clear and gentle ruach-aliveness. 

Let yourself sigh a few times. Notice what the release feels like in your body. Feel how air tumbles out of your body, uncontrolled, unmeasured. The chest softens and falls, in and down. With the palms of your hands resting heavily against your chest, a sigh can partner with gravity to move stagnant ruach out of your body. Sighing is assisted by an open mouth and open throat so the fluff and flow of breath can pour out, unhindered. 

And of course, each sigh is fed by the inhalation that fills the body before and after it. The deeper and fuller the inhalation, the more fluid and restorative the sigh can become. Instead of pulling the next breath in, you can allow your belly to expand softly, patiently, allowing fresh air to fill and expand your lungs, to widen your ribcage, to let your mouth fall open, expanding from the inside out, becoming more available to release the next sigh. As you continue this sighing practice (and as some yawning might unfurl with the same qualities of soft expansion, quieting and release), you might notice a gentle increase of energy that is restful and warm but not sleepy or forced. 

You can let your vocal cords vibrate so that some sound rides on the flow of breath, just enough to give voice to what is felt within – sadness or ache, relief or pleasure. Rather than opening into big emotional catharsis, this is a practice of permission and presence so that feeling can move through us, supported and comforted by the movement of air through our whole bodies. With each holy sigh, ruach and emotion roll from the dark cave within to the darkness that surrounds. And from the darkness outside, enlivening ruach expands and fills the dark and wondrous galaxies within. Tehom el tehom koreh – Deep calls to deep (Psalm 42:8).  

Just as the small, flickering Chanukah candles enable us to be present with the stretch of night outside our windows, the practice of sighing embodies spiritual wisdom gleaned from the darkness. It doesn’t alter the weather or the slant of the sun but it fosters a sense of wholeness within us, breath by divine breath, so that we are increasingly at home in the darkness, lacking nothing.

Extracting the Hidden Light

Extracting the Hidden Light

Dec 10, 2024 | Blog, by Rabbi Marc Margolius, Vice President of Faculty and Program, Institute for Jewish Spirituality

As we enter the darkest season of the year, Jewish tradition teaches of the or haganuz, a hidden light revealed through presence and righteous acts. Legend says 36 hidden righteous ones—the Lamed Vavnikim—sustain the world. This Hanukkah, as we light 36 candles, we’re called to embody their spirit, revealing the light within ourselves and the world.

A Quiet Mind (Chayei Sarah 5785)

A Quiet Mind (Chayei Sarah 5785)

Nov 21, 2024 | Blog, Rabbi Josh Feigelson, PhD, President & CEO, Institute for Jewish Spirituality

Many years ago, when my oldest son (now 21) was little, he asked for me to read him stories from a children’s bible on our shelf. It had belonged to my wife as a kid, and I was excited that Jonah wanted to hear these stories.
 
But of course it got complicated, because these stories are not, in fact, children’s stories for the most part. They talk about some pretty adult topics.
 
I particularly remember when we got to the Binding of Isaac. I was worried–talk about a story not made for children. How is he going to respond here? Do I need to do some on-the-fly editing? I read with some trepidation. And then I arrived at, “And Abraham took the knife and lifted up his hand,” and Jonah interrupted: “Whoa, whoa, whoa!”
 
“Here it is,” I thought. “I’m about to traumatize my child, and he’s picking up on it” (yes, I noted the irony). I stopped reading and turned to him.
 
“Yes?”
 
“Where did he get the knife?” (N.B. Evidently this wasn’t a straight translation, as the knife is mentioned in the Torah in verse 6.)
 
My mind had spun out a whole story about this interaction, a big set of assumptions. But it turned out that Jonah’s question wasn’t my question, and the problems he had weren’t my problems. Imagine that.
 
We find an incredible contrast like this in Parashat Chayei Sarah (Genesis 23:1-25:18). Abraham sends his servant to find a wife for Isaac–and we learn that the servant is a wordy fellow. A good deal of the Torah portion is taken up with recounting his private dialogue with God and then telling the story of his encounter with Rebecca–including all his concerns: How will I know she’s the one? What if she doesn’t want to come? What if I fail in this mission? Understandably, his mind seems rather unsettled right now.
 
And yet when the time comes and Rebecca’s family asks her, Do you want to completely change your life and go off to a foreign land and marry Isaac–who you’ve never even laid eyes on, she answers with a single word: Elekh, I’ll go (Gen. 24:58). Whatever her concerns may have been, the story conveys a sense that Rebecca’s mind, in contrast to Abraham’s servant, was calm. Her elekh is a kinetic translation of hineni–Here I am.
 
People often ask me, Do you think meditation is a countercultural thing in Jewish life? Honestly, yes. Why? Because we are such a wordy people. We love–and I mean love–language. We love studying through language, praying through language, playing with language. We even espouse the belief that the Creator brought the world into being through language: “And God said, ‘Let there be light.'” Jews are a people not only of the book, but of the word and the letter–of story, of law, of academic study and publication. Jews love words–and thank God for that!
 
Yet like so many things, this extraordinary feature of Jewish life can present a shadow side: we can become caught in our stories, trapped in our words, subsumed by our worries. We can develop an understanding that the primary or perhaps only way to respond to life is developing language around it–in our own heads, in conversation, in law or policy.
 
We know there are alternatives, though. There are other models of being in our minds–including the way of mindfulness meditation, an aim of which is to calm the discursive mind: that part of our mind that lives in language, that is always evaluating, judging, planning, worrying, spinning stories about the past or future. We seek to quiet it down, to practice hashkatah, quieting, as the Piacezner Rebbe put it. We try to cultivate another way of thinking, a different kind of thought–not spinning up or out, not constantly thinking new thoughts, but slower, calmer, more spacious. And that makes the kind of quiet and silence we practice in meditation still a rather counter cultural thing in Jewish life.
 
Yet the roots of this kind of approach to mind and language are deep in Jewish life. We can find them (irony, again) in our texts–“Better few words with intention than many without,” as the Shulchan Arukh says–and in our many practices and traditions that focus primarily not on words in the mind but actions of the body and feelings of the heart. And  we can find them in our knowledge of people–friends, family, neighbors, ancestors–who embody and exemplify a life of quiet presence and spacious wisdom.
 
Rebecca, with her simple elekh, “I’ll go,” is one of those ancestors–as is Isaac, who goes out, simply it would seem, to pray in the field (Gen. 24:63). And in a time when we are surrounded with a surfeit of language inside our heads and out, we might tap into the strength of the spiritual inheritance of quiet they leave us.