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Mindfulness, Torah, and Redemption – By Rabbi Pinchas Winston
ON A RECENT trip to the United States a book cover caught my eye in an airport store. The paperback had a white cover with only “mindfulness” written on it in block letters. It was simple but elegant, and I picked it up for a quick glance because I had thought of doing something similar with a future book of my own.
I decided to buy it, however, because the topic of mindfulness has interested me for some time now. I’m always curious about ways to expand mental capacity and improve the quality of life. From the cover, it seemed to be something that could help with this.
I began reading the book on the plane, but was quickly disappointed to find that there wasn’t much new for me. After pointing out that “mindfulness” is a buzzword today, the author explained in detail how it has been used to greatly increase productivity in the workplace and life in general. Much of the information I already knew or just found obvious, so after skimming through the rest of the book, I put it away.
Then it occurred to me: the reason so much of the material was familiar was because my life was already based on mindfulness. It’s built into me from the moment I wake up in the morning, start each day with “Modeh ani lefanecha…,” and go to sleep at the end of the day after Krias Shema al HaMittah.
Then there are the myriad mitzvos that I get to perform in between those two times. I’ll doven three times a day and make a brochah after using the bathroom several times. I’ll have three meals and a few snacks, and they all will require blessings before and after.
All those mitzvos take place against a backdrop of the six constant mitzvos—including love and fear of God—which are incumbent on all Jews every waking moment of their lives. The mitzvos are supposed to inspire me to act my godliest at every moment, to make sure that when I do mitzvos, I am MINDFUL of them and what they need from me to do their job.
Of course there is always the danger of performing mitzvos mindLESSly, what is called “by rote.” People know they have an obligation, and they wouldn’t consider not performing it. They just don’t think about what they are doing while doing it, but are rather on autopilot instead.
The number one problem? Distraction. We’re ea-sily distracted, and life is very distracting. There’s always something going on around people to pull their attention away from the mitzvah at hand, especially at the last minute. Dovid HaMelech died only because he became distracted from his learning just long enough to fall and fatally hurt himself.
In fact Amalek’s chief method of attacking a Jew is with distraction. When we left Egypt, Amalek attacked us as a nation. Since then its reality has attacked us in many different ways, but always with the same purpose—to stop Jews from living a meaningful and mindful Torah life.
Hence Amalek was the first nation to attack the Jewish people, right before they arrived at Mt. Sinai to receive the Torah. Why? Because its existence depends on a weak connection between Jews and Torah. Thus its first attack was at Refidim, which means “weak in the hands.” Amalek was able to attack the Jewish people because Torah was weak in the hands of our nation.
Therefore, if the Torah were given to the Jewish people to promote mindFULness, then it is Amalek’s sole purpose to promote just the opposite, mindLESSness. It could be something as simple—but terribly wasteful—as people losing their focus at precisely the time they need to have intention for a mitzvah, or something as far more profoundly damaging as subscribing to a mistaken idea. Either way, people will miss out on moments of reality.
Because that is what it is all about, being IN the moment—with ALL OF YOU. Life is a VERY long string of moments, each with its own potential to impart additional life to its user. The minutes move so fast that we barely even notice them, unless something happens to make us take note. Before we know it, a lifetime has passed and we can hardly remember most of it.
What we do remember most easily and quickly are the events that demanded the most from us. Whether a traumatic experience or one that we wished would never end, we invested in it. We were intellectually AND emotionally there, and that seemed to engrave the experience deeper into our memory.
This is why so many people are prepared to take tremendous risks just to have fun, or spend so much money to do something like parachuting. The more exciting something is, the more of us it pulls into the moment. The more mindful we are, the more ALIVE we feel.
Movie producers know this and take full advantage of it to get people to pay good money to watch their films. This is what makes “good” entertainment so, well, entertaining. It has the ability to draw our intellect and emotions in, leaving us with a sense of the life we want to experience, even for only two hours at a time.
When it comes to Torah, few people think about it as being entertaining. On the contrary, Torah for many is very unentertaining. Some even have a difficult time paying just a small fee to access it, feeling that it should be free since they are making the su-preme sacrifice of looking at it.
Others, albeit a small minority, know differently. They know that Torah is the MOST entertaining of all, not in the secular sense of the term, but in its ULTIMATE sense. They are not only drawn to Torah but have a very difficult time parting from it.
Hence the Torah says:
I have set before you life and death, the blessing and the curse. Choose life, so that you and your offspring will live… (Devarim 30:19)
Choose life? Would healthy people choose anything else? Yes, if they did not fully understand what living means. Yes, if they thought that it is better to give in to the body and sleep than listen to the soul and get up on time for minyan. Yes, if they thought that it is more enjoyable to be spaced out while praying rather than working hard to concentrate and FEEL the prayers.
Funny how when it comes to making money or becoming famous, people accept working hard. They make great sacrifices and focus intensely on what they are doing. Their success requires it, and if they want one, they know that they have to accept the other, as well as the many rituals that come with it.
But not when it comes to religion, and especially the 613 mitzvos of Torah. They don’t buy what the rabbis have written:
The Tablets are the handiwork of God, and the script was God’s script charus–engraved on the Tablets. Do not read charus, but rather cheirus–freedom. For no person is more free than one who engages in Torah study. (Pirkei Avos 6:2)
People who don’t accept this do not understand TRUE freedom. There is freedom and then there is freedom. There is the freedom to do whatever you feel like doing, which is usually a yetzer-hara thing. Then there is the freedom to be the very best you can be, a yetzer-tov thing, which is what the Torah speaks to.
In short, Torah focuses people on the greatest part of being human, and provides the most effective path to achieve it. It demands that people be mindful of their time and opportunities in life. It defines what is good and what is bad, so that people will know what is worthy of their attention and what should be ignored. In short, Torah encourages and inspires people to live up to their full potential. Can there be anything more liberating than this?
* * *
I had bought the book on Mindfulness at the airport in Atlanta while on my way to New York. There I had dinner with my brother-in-law, a retired executive from a premier insurance company and super-bright Torah Jew. Since I enjoy sharing my ideas with him, I told him about the book and my Torah take on the topic.
His eyes lit up. Long before I bought the book, he had worked on similar material and put together his own presentation for employees at his company. We concurred on a number of points, and I picked up some direction from what he had already thought through. It was quite extensive.
Two days later, about to leave for the airport to return to Israel, my brother-in-law spoke to me about an exciting idea. It occurred to him that perhaps we could collaborate on a book. He was only interested in getting his ideas out there where they could help people. Not wanting to write the book himself, he asked me to use his material, edit it as I saw fit, and finally publish it.
I shared his excitement because the idea had occurred to me as well, though I didn’t yet have enough nerve to suggest it. My plan was to write something, send it to him for feedback, and then draw him into the project if I could. I was pleasantly surprised to hear that he was, on his own, on board.
What follows is that collaboration. The first seven chapters of this book are based largely on his material. I just created the storyline as a way of presenting the ideas in a mindful and attention-keeping manner. We hope that it will help the writer relate to the material even more personally.
Prelude
MAJESTIC, ISN’T IT, how water rises from the surface of the sea and in a short time becomes a spark-ling, glass-like wave. It begins small, but can grow quite large and become breathtaking in its own right. And though it remains dependent on the sea beneath for existence, it can give the impression of being quite ind ependent.
But only for a short while. The gradual whiteness forming at its peak is a sign that the wave is slowing down, losing momentum. Soon it will fall back to the surface of the sea from which it came and become a thunderous “breaking” wave. Full of sound and fury, it will crash and charge the shore, creating whiteness and foam all around.
Each breaking wave seems to be an autonomous entity, striving for glory and power. For a time it seems to exist somewhat apart from its source, drawing attention only to itself, smashing anything in its path. Yet in a few minutes its momentum and strength will diminish, slightly at first but then rapidly. Its coherence gone, it is quieted, and its whiteness decomposes into thousands of tiny bubbles, each going its own way, struggling in vain to survive.
Finally the breaking wave meekly turns back, as it is pulled from the shore once again into the sea. Sheepishly it returns to its source, underneath the next approaching breaking wave that is now stealing the stage and which will also soon suffer the same fate.
It is easy to think that all that matters are the roaring waves, one after the other, with their noise and tumult, despite their pathetically short life span. After all, they ceremoniously proclaim their presence and dramatically grab our attention. But it is not true that the waves are all that matter, because they are only temporary, while the sea—which gives rise to the waves—is still there. The sea may be quiet, but it always endures and is the source of each loud wave.
To really see the sea we need to look beyond the crashing waves. But how does one avoid being captivated by the breaking waves, and connect instead to the sea that is profoundly greater?
There is a way. Sometimes a wave can rise and move toward the shore without leaving its basic state. It can roll in until the very last minute and then gently touch the shoreline, with no noise, no pounding, no destruction, no whiteness, no decomposition into dissipating bubbles. Waves like this may seem to lack the power of breaking waves, but they have something else that the largest, noisiest, attention-grabbing waves can never have: a continuous bond with the sea.
An Analogy for Life
The sea-wave scenario has something to say about life as well. It is a good analogy to help us better understand our time in this world and the people living in it. In fact the sea can be said to be analogous to the universal consciousness of God from which all souls come and to which all souls remain connected, even after they enter bodies and live in this world.
Each individual soul, a portion of divine light, is like a majestically rising wave. It is part of the sea and at the same time a thing of beauty and majesty in its own right. Yet once in this world, it does not seem able to sustain its existence solely in its pure, pristine state. This is evident by how many souls seem to make so much noise and cause so much damage while here.
We are clearly capable of other states of mind that seem to have a nature entirely different from our pure soul. And the babble of thoughts they generate are so often like breaking waves: self-centered and all consuming, oblivious of the transcendence and the miracle that gave birth to them. They can walk over anything in their path, and seem opposed to any sense of connection to something larger than themselves.
But just like a breaking wave, the stream of individual, destructive, incoherent thoughts that for one moment seem so tenacious and relentless will eventually dissolve and disintegrate into nothingness. And so will the second wave of such thinking, and the third, and so on.
Unfortunately though, for many people the repetitive and endless stream of random, self-centered thoughts end up defining how they experience life. Their way of thinking suppresses any connection to something larger than the individual thoughts themselves, as temporal and insubstantial as they are.
A Different Way of Thinking
It is important to know, however, that there is a type of thinking that is not ego-driven and desirous of glory, that can change all this. It is a thinking that is connected, empathetic, creative, receptive, caring. It is a way of thinking that doesn’t sever its ties to the essential mind nor to the soul from which it came.
This kind of thinking is quiet and does not draw attention to itself. It doesn’t make the same immediate impression as louder, more self-centered thinking seems to do. But it is the source of our greatest insights, our most richly lived moments, and our greatest connection to others.
Because this way of thinking doesn’t lose its connection to the soul, it reflects who we TRULY are. It is the experience of such thinking that allows us to see more clearly the constant truth—that we are much more than our noisy thoughts. We are conscious souls connected to God, Who gave us the wondrous ability to think.
If we maintain a constant connection to this truth, then our thoughts as well will come to take on a different character. They will become more coherent, richer, caring, and less ego-focused. Like the wave that remains pristine throughout its journey to the shore, our thoughts will themselves better reflect the inherent nature of their source: our pure and godly soul.
