Rabbi Rachel Gurevitz

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Category: judgment

#BlogElul: Writing the story of your life #takeaseatmakeafriend

September 3, 2013 /

One of the images found in the High Holyday liturgy is ‘The Book of Life’. The traditional language makes it sound like a kind of ledger, with accounts being recorded, added and subtracted. At the end of the accounting, God decides if we’ve enough credit in the bank to make it to the next year. If you grew up being taught it this way, as I was, you may be mightily put off by it all. All these invitations to engage more deeply in the High Holydays may be falling on resistant ears.

A number of years ago I arrived at the belief that if my experience of life and my way of understanding the world around me didn’t correlate with an ‘idea’ of God that I thought my tradition had conveyed through its liturgy and the philosophy of Rabbis from centuries past, it was the old ideas that had to go. They were, after all, only the putting into human language of a God too ‘other’ to truly grasp, and so carried with them the limitations of the humans who wrote them. To truly have a relationship with God, I had to be present to my experience and trust it.

And so, I could no longer believe in a God filling out a ledger, at least not in a literal sense. But I liked the image of the ‘Book of Life’ and the pages that were filled. But I am the only one holding the pen. Whether I like what has been written, and whether what is still to be written will be worth reading is up to me. Sometimes we can be harder on ourselves than the God we imagine is forgiving us and erasing the bad lines and paragraphs to give us the chance for a re-write. But when we recognize our agency in writing our own Book, it can be incredibly freeing and empowering. For sure, we do not get to write every twist and turn in the plot. There are many things that life brings to us that are not of our design or our asking. But we write the response. We are always able to write the response.

We cannot decide how the next chapter will go if we are not willing to read what we’ve written so far. Now is the time.

#BlogElul: Every person is my teacher #takeaseatmakeafriend

August 22, 2013 /

It’s easy to learn from the people we like. What about the people that we find more challenging? It is a spiritual practice to do as the quote above proposes to us. It is hard to do such a practice consistently. But sometimes I learn something about myself. Why are my buttons being pressed? Sometimes, if I open myself to listening with greater compassion and less judgment, I come to know something about a person that underlies the behaviors that I find challenging. My heart opens a little more.

There is a concept in Jewish thought – tikkun. You may be familiar with the phrase tikkun olam, which is often mistranslated as ‘social justice.’ Indeed, social justice is one way of acting in the world that brings about tikkun, but the word means much more. It is literally a ‘repair’ – to repair the world. To fix, or repair can happen on many levels. When I hear someone more deeply and a challenging relationship is turned into something more understanding and more loving, that is a tikkun.

When I think back to interactions in my life that have been transformed in this way, I recognize that these moments have contained within them some of the most profound teachings in my life.

#BlogElul 7: Shofar – the cry of compassion

August 25, 2012 /
One of the midrashim that seeks to explain the origins of the different calls on the Shofar that we sound out each Rosh Hashanah has had the most impact on my understanding of teshuvah and the call to action signified by the Shofar blasts.  It tells us that the shofar calls were modeled on the sound of Sisera’s mother, wailing while she waited at the window for his return from battle.

Who was Sisera and who was his mother?

In the story of Devorah, the Judge, Sisera is the enemy.  He is the General that Devorah and her army general, Barak, are out to defeat.  There is a poignant line toward the end of the story, when we are told that Sisera’s mother waits at her window for his return.  It is poignant because we, the reader, know that he has been defeated and has fled.  But his end is gruesome.  A woman, Yael, encourages him to rest in her tent.  She feeds him and gives him drink and, when he is asleep, she cuts off his head.

‘Hurrah! The enemy is defeated!’ might be our response.  But then we find a rabbinic midrash that suggests that the sounds of the Shofar, that most emblematic of sounds for the High Holydays, remind us of the cries of Sisera’s mother.

In the midst of our season of return, when we are seeking forgiveness, when we are asked to find it in our hearts to forgive others, we struggle with our desire for justice in our world and the world’s need for compassion.  That, after all, is the moral of the story of Jonah that we read on Yom Kippur.  If we are all Jonahs then cities will be destroyed and who could stand in judgment?  But if we are in the image of God, we respond with compassion, particularly when we see remorse in the words or actions of another.

The sound of the Shofar reminds us that even those that we regard as our enemies… even those who we regard as evil and have committed the worst atrocities – they have a mother.  And that mother cries out in sorrow when harm comes to them.

Framing our world in this way, I have found myself able to be less angry at wrong-doing in the world, and, instead, feel the emotions of deep sadness.  It doesn’t make me any less desiring to act in ways that might help make this world a little better.  But instead of running in with sword unleashed, angrily battling the world of injustice, the sound of the Shofar asks me to see the world with greater empathy.  It calls me to unleash a little more love and compassion in the ways that I seek to make a difference.

And I can thank Sisera’s mother for reminding me of these valuable lessons.
Rabbi Rachel Gurevitz

#BlogElul 3: The intentions of the ‘other’

August 20, 2012 /

If you’ve been following along since last week’s blog posting, you’ll know that I’m blogging throughout the Jewish month of Elul on daily themes created by my colleague, Rabbi Phyllis Sommer.  If you use Twitter, you’ll be able to see many posts by many bloggers on the daily theme by following #BlogElul.
Today’s theme is Intentions.

Yesterday’s post was about inventories.  As I reflected on taking stock of our own character trait inventories, I used judgment as an example. I’m aware that this is a character trait that I’ve worked on over a period of years.  While I am always going to be ‘a work in progress’, I know that I’ve been able to adjust how this particular trait plays out in my own life.  Today’s theme – Intentions – has a lot to do with how I’ve been able to make some progress in this area.

In any given day, we experience effects caused by the words and actions of many other people. If we are able to be truly mindful about what is happening, we might be able to clearly identify the act.  We might also be able to clearly identify how we are feeling.  But, for most of us, we rarely possess such clarity.  Rather, somebody does or says something, it invokes a feeling in us, and we then construct a whole story about it.  And this is what gets us into trouble.

Let me provide an example.  Someone ignores you when you are waiting for attention in a store.  Or cuts in front of you in a line or on the highway.  Our judgmental voice – the one that rings out with a righteous sense of right and wrong, fair and unfair, steps in. Our ego is bruised.  ‘Why do they think they are more important than me that they need to go first and ignore my needs?’ ‘What a selfish person to think that they don’t need to wait patiently like the rest of us.’  ‘Doesn’t that driver realize the enormous harm they could cause if I hadn’t noticed them and put my foot on the brake – how reckless and irresponsible!’

But the truth is, while we may have been unfortunate enough to interact with an individual who thinks and behaves in these ways, there are many other possible stories we could tell.  ‘That shop attendant needs me to gently turn their attention my way; they are lost in thought because they are worried about their ailing mother in the hospital.’  ‘That driver just received a call that their kid got hit by the ball in lacrosse and was taken to the emergency room – they are getting there as quickly as they can.’

Notice how these completely different stories transform your emotional response to the very same set of circumstances.  In mindfulness practice, being aware of what is real and what is the story we tell ourselves about our experience of that reality is one of the gifts we can receive from meditation.  In Buddhist meditation, ‘Suffering’ is understood as a psycho-spiritual condition we often inflict upon ourselves by remaining attached to stories that may or may not be accurate, and serve no useful purpose as we try to live our best lives.

So learning that I cannot assume the intentions of the other can release me from a lot of the hurt that I might be feeling.  If I have a difficult interaction with someone, finding a way to enquire about their intentions can be the opening to a conversation.  Perhaps I will just listen and gain a new insight into the essence of another.  Or perhaps I will feel a need to explain to them that, while they may have intended one thing, I experienced it in another way.  It may be important that they gain some awareness of my responses to certain things.  We come to better know each other and, perhaps, to act with more consciousness and sensitivity to each other’s needs.  And, as I come to realize that the intentions of the ‘other’ may not be what I first assumed to be so, I may gain greater awareness of the ways in which my own intentions can be misunderstood or misinterpreted by others.  Learning this about ourselves and about others can help us to lessen the voice of judgment and strengthen the voice of compassion within us.
Rabbi Rachel Gurevitz

#BlogElul 2: Soul Trait Inventories

August 20, 2012 /
http://www.superiorwarehousing.com/images/inventory-picture.jpg

In the last few years, the Jewish spiritual practice of Musar has made something of a resurgence among  Jews from many different walks of life.  Perhaps Alan Morinis can be most identified with making what was once primarily under the purview of observant, Jewish males into something accessible that speaks to a much wider audience.  But others, such as Ira Stone, also have written extensively on Musar and, similarly to Morinis, offer online courses and communities of practice for those who wish to engage more deeply.

The link above provides a more detailed explanation of the history and practice of Musar.  But one key element is the identification of separate (although often inter-dependent) character traits that one can examine over time, through study with others, and with self-observation and journaling as one takes a designated period of time (usually at least a month) to become aware of how this particular characteristic reveals itself in your own life.  You might be looking at the trait of judgment.  Or trust.  Or, perhaps, compassion.

In Musar, there is a recognition that there is not one right way to exercise each of these traits.  The practice is one of paying attention to how it manifests in your own life now in comparison to how you might believe it should manifest if you were able to raise your spiritual life to a higher level.  As part of the practice, one of the most important elements of one’s self-awareness is to recognize the ‘Bechirah’ – the choosing points when examining how a particular trait exhibits itself in your life.

So, for example, there may be many kinds of interactions where I feel good about my ability to be non-judgmental.  But that is not where I need to do my deepest spiritual work.  It is the kinds of interactions where I hear the judgmental voice in me rising sharply… if I can notice what specifically flips that switch in me, I can then begin to really examine and understand where my judgment comes from.  The goal is not to arrive at a completely relativist world where I never judge anyone or anything.  But perhaps I realize that I can sometimes be harsh.  Or sometimes I rule out people or options too quickly when they deserved deeper consideration.  And so, over time, I can choose to work on rebalancing this particular soul trait in my own life.  And how that looks for me, may be different to how it looks to you.  You may be someone who seldom judges.  And this may manifest in ways that sometimes has people taking advantage of you and manipulating you.  Your soul trait work on this trait may see you rebalancing in a different direction, and becoming a little more judgmental in certain contexts.

When we talk of Elul as a month to take stock, to turn, to reflect…. its not just about counting up ‘sins’ and telling ourselves that we’ll try and do better next year.  There are many spiritual practices and tools that we can draw upon from the well of Jewish wisdom.  They can guide us in a deeper way so that, when we return to Rosh Hashanah a year from now, we may notice that we’ve not just circled a year, but that we’ve spiraled a year, and we’ve ended up a little higher along the path than the year before.
Rabbi Rachel Gurevitz

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