[music] Rabbi Jordan Bendat-Appell: I really am a strong believer that to have a Jewish mindfulness sensibility does not depend upon sitting in meditation, necessarily. I think the meditation's very helpful, but I think that anybody who, I think, thinks about this, learns about it, even just a little bit, can do it. [music] Rabbi Deborah Waxman: I'm Rabbi Deborah Waxman, and I'm so happy to welcome you to Hashivenu, a podcast about Jewish teachings on resilience. I'm so happy to welcome Rabbi Jordan Bendat-Appell today. Jordan is a program director at the Institute for Jewish Spirituality and a teacher of Jewish mindfulness. Welcome, Jordan. JBA: Thank you. Great to be with you. DW: It's so good that you're here. I want to ask you to begin at the beginning, and to reflect a little bit about "what is mindfulness?" JBA: Mindfulness is a general term that refers to, really, a way of relating to our experience. And so I think a great definition of it, a definition that many people find helpful, comes from Jon Kabat-Zinn; and he says, "Mindfulness means paying attention in a particular way, on purpose, in the present moment, and nonjudgmentally." So there are a number of different components to that definition, but you see that when you get to the core of it, it's about how you relate to your present moment. And it needs to have intention as part of it. So, obviously, we're always experiencing our present moment, whether we're aware of it or not. And mindfulness is bringing a kind of consciousness and intention into how you are relating to your present moment. JBA: I think it's also important to note that this idea -- Jon Kabat-Zinn is really a pioneer at bringing mindfulness from Buddhism into a secular, and in his case really a therapeutic, context. In its roots, in Buddhism, this word "mindfulness," interestingly when British scholars of Buddhism were first translating these ancient Buddhist texts mostly from the Sanskrit and Pali into English, they kept coming across a key term that was "smirti" or "sati," depending on Sanskrit or Pali. But it was this key term, that was the term that they translated as "mindfulness." Interestingly, and I think importantly, those words in their native languages actually have the meaning of "remembrance". It's really the verb "to remember," a form of the verb "to remember." So it produces this other side to how we understand mindfulness generally, which is that it's in a sense coming into a kind of remembrance that, "I want to be present in this moment in a certain kind of way." And this element of remembrance is in many ways a crux to the whole thing. Of course, we're going to be speaking about Jewish mindfulness and there's a really important connection on this level of mindfulness and remembrance in Judaism as well. DW: Well that said, I'd love to go there. It's so interesting because I read Jon Kabat-Zinn's book: "Wherever You Go There You Are," is that the name of it? JBA: Mm-hmm. DW: 15, 20 years ago now. So I've been familiar with it and it's so interesting to hear you speak about it and to hear different resonances, to learn new things about the general practice of mindfulness. I'd love to hear you reflect on what you think a particularly Jewish approach to mindfulness is. JBA: I think the first thing to say is that the Buddhists really pioneered this approach. But that doesn't mean that mindfulness is Buddhist. And for sure other people as well, including Jews who -- all people who have a mind and a body and a heart, people who are alive, come into this way of relating to our experience. I think that for a number of reasons, Buddhists were especially interested in exploring and deepening this realm of experience, human experience into spiritual life and religious life. But I really believe very strongly that mindfulness isn't Buddhist, it's not Hindu, it's not Jewish, it's not Christian, it's not Muslim, it's really human. And when you take a human faculty, a human capacity, and you locate it within a particular religious tradition, wisdom tradition, a calendar, etcetera. I'm thinking of a teaching of Reb Zalman's taken out of content, that it's kind of like tofu marinating. JBA: So the mindfulness, it becomes really informed by the sensibilities of whatever tradition it's located within, including... And he mentioned the ethical standards of that tradition. So what's Jewish mindfulness? First of all we could say that Jewish mindfulness is a form of working with one's lived experience, a practice for working with one's experience that Jews have been doing. So I think that's one level to the definition, but I find it really helpful in my own practice, in my own teaching, to think about Jewish mindfulness using just these two middot, these two qualities as a rubric. JBA: And those are Hesed and Emet. And so Hesed, which I like to think of as convenantal or committed love, and Emet, which means truth, or in this context, honest looking. I really see Jewish mindfulness practice as... It can be understood as a practice of training in keeping one's capacity for being loving and honest with one's lived experience, moment by moment. So let's start actually with Emet. And so Emet, again it means truth, but the way we're thinking about it here is, what's true seeing -- what is really going on? Like, a kind of a core of our mindfulness practice, certainly of our Jewish mindfulness practice, is training in being as honest about what's actually happening now. And doing it... DW: So, moving beyond reaction or viscerality to taking a more reflective understanding? JBA: Right, exactly. Reflective and I'd say trying to have a more comprehensive view in understanding, really a witnessing of what's happening in our experience. And to do it on as many levels of our lived experience as possible. And by that I mean, not just being aware of what I'm thinking about, but also being aware of what's going on in my physical body, moment by moment, as I move through this world, as I'm thinking of things, reacting to things, eating things, doing things, etcetera. What's happening in the physical body? That's a key part of this practice of Emet... What's true right now. DW: There's times where I know that I'm eating a meal and I'm multi-tasking, eating lunch over work. And I don't even know, I don't even taste what I'm tasting because I'm thinking about the next meeting I have to go to. Bringing the awareness to the physical experience that I'm actually having. JBA: Exactly, exactly. And we all do that, [chuckle] we all do that. And there's lots to say about why that's helpful. But I think a good start is really just to affirm that we run into trouble as human beings when we're never quite present with our lives, in the only moment in which we're actually alive, which is only this moment. And so if I'm spending all my time projecting to the future or really working over things that happened in the past, and yet I'm alive right now experiencing things, but I'm not actually all that much in contact with them. The big element of this Jewish mindfulness practice is training, again, in our capacity to just be with whatever's happening right now. DW: How do you cultivate that? How do you do that training? What are techniques? JBA: The primary technique is really meditation. In that meditation, in this Jewish mindfulness meditation, we really practice in a way that helps bring our attention into this present moment. And before I say that, just to finish. I think before I can say that, just to touch into this idea of Hasid, because it's a key component. Because I think we all know that when we're really being honest to ourselves, with ourselves, honest about what's happening around us, again within us, it's so easy to fall into a really highly critical place. And a way of... It's overly judgmental and harsh. And so what we find is that truth, really like truth-telling and bearing witness to the many layers of truth as it unfolds in our experience, it becomes really quite an unpleasant experience. Because we get pulled into this low place of judgment. And Jewish tradition -- and I think I'm especially inspired by the Hasidic tradition in this way -- really affirms that there's another element to our experience as human beings which is really about receiving love. JBA: Often traditional Hesed is receiving a kind of divine love, but also really developing a heart of love and training yourself, and again I'll get to that training in a moment, but training ourselves in climbing lovingly towards a lived experience. I can walk around my life and just fight everything. I can notice how things are always lacking and imperfect, broken. And, you know, it's not for no reason, because things are that way, on some level. And so this is a kind of corrective to that being... To that mind and heart of lack being the primary lens that we use to understand the world. We're really trying to incline our heart lovingly. And so we're training at having a non-antagonistic relationship to our experience. DW: It sounds like it's an orientation towards abundance, too, rather than... JBA: Yeah, absolutely right. And so, to answer your question. How do we train in this? And I think meditation in this context is really more and more...I look at my own practice as being an opportunity... Like my meditation practice as an opportunity to come into contact with my experience and work with it in a certain kind of way. And so I take certain periods of time which are sort of like... One may go to the gym and train in developing leg strength. You do that in a concentrated periods, but the idea is often not just to have strong legs in the gym, but then to be able take those strong legs out into the world. DW: Right. Like in yoga, we say, "Take the yoga off." When I go to my yoga class, that teacher will talk about taking the yoga off the mat and out into the wider world. JBA: Totally. And so we're taking concentrated periods of time to really work with our experience, and to see that I might relate to this breath, then the next breath, is an opportunity to train in developing certain qualities of being that I hope to bring out into the rest of my life. And so that... In a meditation, we have an opportunity to develop these capacities. That being said, I really am a strong believer that to have a Jewish mindfulness sensibility does not depend upon sitting in meditation necessarily. The meditation's very helpful but I think anybody who thinks about it, learns about it, even just a little bit, can do it, and can start to bring this kind of attention towards one's experience. DW: Sounds like you're talking about putting on a particular pair of glasses through which to see the world. JBA: Correct. Right. A particular pair of glasses and a particular feeling in one's heart. I think the glasses [inaudible] It's like, "How am I seeing this world? How am I seeing the fullness of my experience?" And then the question is, "How do I respond to that lovingly?" and "How do I orient myself lovingly towards that reality?" And I think we can train in that, and it's really helpful. We say you should build your ark before the flood because it's often the case that we don't realize that we need an ark until the floodwaters are rising up our legs. If that's the case, then we of course do the best we can. And there are all kinds of things that we can use to support ourselves in difficult circumstances, but I think it's also the case that our tradition is urging us, and I think it does this in a number of interesting ways, but suffice it to say, it's urging us to prepare, to work on ourselves so that...it's not our final day on earth that we come to act on what we know to be true deep in our hearts. Rather, today is an opportunity to try to grow as a human being, to grow as a Jew, grow as me, as a human being in this world. DW: It's so lovely. I have had over the years mixed experience with committing myself to daily practice. Where I've had stretches where I've been successful at one or multiple practices and other stretches where it just felt impossibly hard, and I haven't necessarily always brought an attitude of Hesed toward myself when I'm not practicing, and I will say this year, it felt like the floodwaters started to creep up. After the election, it felt like a hard time and I felt that I absolutely had to get my house in order to commit to practices because I just felt like an absolutely essential foundation on which I could build. If I could control nothing else that happened during the day, at least I could control whether or not I chanted everyday and whether or not I meditated everyday. And so this year has been the most sustained year of practice for me and it has been an incredibly important touchstone for me. So it seems to me that what you're talking about is... I think you're right that we never know any day... We wake up thinking we're going to have one day and then the world can happen to us, catastrophe can descend or even something less severe, but just a disruption, and for many of us it feels like we're in a season of constraint, an extended season of constraint. This approach in these practices just feel so essential to me at this moment in time. JBA: Yeah. Yeah, that really resonates. Yeah, I've often in the past months, just found myself really relying upon my spiritual practice, specifically the Jewish mindfulness practice, because I feel like it helped me to stay connected to a quality of experience in which... It's not dependent upon everything being a certain way. And so, it helps me access a calm and a peace and kind of reservoir of vital energy that doesn't depend upon the world making sense or me succeeding in whatever it is I'm hoping to succeed in or things in the world to go the direction that I think they should go, and I think this is critical. JBA: This is a practice that -- it helps me do that and it just links me continually to a real awareness and responsiveness to the other, and I think this is a key. Our spiritual practices are tools and like any kind of tool, you could do a lot of different things with it. And I could take a hammer and build something beautiful and I could take that same hammer and break something, hurt somebody. And so, I could use my meditation practice as an escape from the world and just stay there. I could also use my meditation practice to help me connect to that, as I said, that sort of well spring of life force, if I let energy connect it to a kind of spaciousness and calm so that I can then re-enter the world and engage in the world from a place that's more steady, that's more resilien,t in which I'm not just acting out of fear or anger, which often as we all know can lead to all kinds of problems, unintended usually. JBA: And so, it's both something that has kept me connected to joy even in a time that's pretty dark, amidst the darkness. Being connected to that light while at the same being renewed in my energies to engage in this world, to say nothing about... All the energy needed to be in relationships, to be a parent, be a partner, etcetera. We all are pulled in so many directions. I think it behooves us to make sure that we are cultivating this balanced and more full approach towards being a human being in difficult times, which I think is another way of saying being a human being at any time. DW: [chuckle] Exactly. Exactly. But I think that you raised up this really essential point to make. I know that, at least for some people, the first time I went on a meditation retreat my father said, "Oh, you're disappearing from the world," and to say this is in the service of being in the world. It's not a repudiation, it's not a rejection. As you said, it's a tool, it's a pathway toward bringing my best self forward. JBA: Yeah, absolutely. A common misconception about meditation, but in some ways for good reason, because I think people tend and have used spiritual practices, religious practices, religious life of really of all kinds as a way of shirking our responsibilities for others. I remember a story that has really stayed with me. A number of years ago, I worked for the US Forest Service and a friend who I worked with there, when I told her that after I was going to be at the Forest Service I was going to spend a time doing extended retreat at this Zen monastery in California and when she heard that, she was like, "Ugh... " And I said, "What do you mean? What do you mean? Why did you react like that?" And she said, "Listen, my last boyfriend was a serious meditator. Whenever we would get in an argument at some point, once things would start heating up he would raise his hands and he would say, 'I need to go meditate.' And he would go in his room and he would close the door and he wouldn't come out for hours." JBA: And so to my friend, in her experience in relationship, she experienced meditation being used in a way... in many ways it denied her reality and it was a way of escaping the messy work of relationship, and I actually think that this is one of the reasons why a Jewish mindfulness practice makes so much sense to me because Jewish spiritual life, with very few exceptions, has always been about practice in the world. It hasn't been the idea that "where does religious life dwell? Only in the synagogue or only in the study hall or only with the clergy." But we all can say blessings, we all can pray, we all can learn Torah, we all can do mitzvot, engage in the ritual life of Jewish living. And I think this is really in that spirit because when you practice in the world you have to be able to make your practice manifest in working with the messiness of the world. And so I think when we start to look at Jewish mindfulness, in this wonderful Jewish tradition of engaged spiritual life, worldly spiritual life, I think it's just so beautiful because our sources, our wisdom traditions, they really speak to a Jewish mindfulness approach that has the potential to really enlighten our lives and help stay connected to a kind of sense of ongoing renewal and stay connected to a kind of spiritual core. Which supports our capacity for dealing with dark, messy places. DW: And to shine some light onto them as well. JBA: Yeah. DW: It's wonderful. Oh Jordan, thank you so much. I've learned a lot and I feel kind of bolstered in my own practice and I'm so grateful to talk with you. Thank you. JBA: Yeah, my pleasure. DW: I want to thank my guest Rabbi Jordan Bendat-Appell for our wonderful conversation on mindfulness in general and on a Jewish approach to mindfulness. We will share information about some of the sources and some of the practices that we've discussed on jewishrecon.org and on ritualwell.org. JBA: I'm Rabbi Deborah Waxman and you've been listening to Hashivenu. Jewish teachings on resilience. [music]