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Judaism

Finding a Jewish path to mindfulness

Chasidic masters such as Rabbi Kalonymus Kalmish Shapira in 20th-century Poland developed their own meditative techniques - and now a number of rabbis are teaching them

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The practice of mindfulness is widely advocated as a way to improve our mental wellbeing. Derived from Buddhist meditation, it can be often taught as a secular technique.

But similar practices have long existed in Judaism, says one rabbi who has made it his work to revive them. Rabbi James Jacobson-Maisels is the founder of the Or HaLev Centre for Jewish Spirituality and Meditation — its name means “Light of the Heart”— which runs retreats and courses in the USA, Israel and now in the UK. 

Over the bank holiday weekend, he helped to lead a retreat here for Hamakom, the charity founded by a British rabbi, Danny Newman, and gave a talk in London before returning to his kibbutz in Israel.

He calls himself a “spiritual archaeologist”, uncovering Jewish traditions of mindfulness in sources that may have been overlooked. Partly, because since the Enlightenment of the 18th century, Judaism was influenced by the rationalist, analytic culture of the Enlightenment West and eschewed spiritual ideas associated with mysticism. But also because the centres of mysticism in Europe were all but wiped out in the Holocaust.

According to the NHS, mindfulness can help us gain more control over our lives. It “allows us to become more aware of the stream of thoughts and feelings that we experience and to see how we can become entangled in that stream in ways that are not helpful,” its website explains, quoting Professor Mark Williams, former director of the Oxford Centre for Mindfulness. “Most of us,” he says, “have issues that we find hard to let go and mindfulness can help us deal with them more productively”.

Some may turn to it to cope with anxiety or stress, others to improve the capacity to concentrate in a world full of high-tech distraction, others out of a broader yearning for inner peace.

In his London class, Rabbi Jacobson-Meisels introduced his audience to one mindfulness practice — trying to follow the path of their breath as they inhaled and exhaled.

But while he acknowledges learning from other traditions himself, he teaches mindfulness within a Jewish context. A basic ritual such as a brachah can be viewed as a type of mindful practice — pausing from the rush of the world and making us more aware of something we might otherwise take for granted —  though it may not be taught as such in a typical school or cheder setting. Learning to step back for a moment from the course of our daily lives can be a “small Shabbat”.
 

For Or HaLev, Jewish education should be about “transformation, not just information”. While “mitzvot” is commonly translated as “commandments”, the talmudic sages linked the Hebrew word to tzavta,  “connection,” he says — “doing these things as a way to connect to ourselves and to others”. The Zohar refers not to “613 commandments” but “613 ittim”, Aramaic for practices or “pieces of advice to transform your life”.

Mindful practices were often handed down orally within the Chasidic milieu of Eastern Europe, he observes, hence they were not recorded. But some how-to guidance survives from the man he refers to as his own “Rebbe”, Rabbi Kalonymus Kalmish Shapira, who was murdered by the Nazis in 1943 aged 54.

An innovative educator, Rabbi Shapira is best known for his work, Esh Kodesh (“Sacred Fire”), a collection of his teachings hidden before the destruction of the Warsaw Ghetto which was published posthumously: his attempts to preserve Jewish life within the terrible conditions in the ghetto is seen now as a heroic act of spiritual resistance.

His legacy includes a “whole form of Jewish mindfulness,” Rabbi Jacobson-Maisels says. “But though he talks about the practice many times in his written works, nowhere does he describe step by step what to do.  Luckily, for us, one of his students fled the Nazis across Russia and ended up in Kobe, Japan. Feeling lonely in Japan, he wrote himself a letter describing the practice as he learned from the Rebbe.” After the War, the student came to Boston.

The Rebbe sought a path to happiness that was “not dependent on our experience of external events”, Rabbi Jacobson-Maisels explains. But that did not take the form of stoic indifference to the world or attempting to suppress emotion; it involved the ability to return to a point of equanimity without being “trampled by the events and ideas of the world”.

While some practices of personal transformation can become “very self-centred”, integrating them within a spiritual tradition such as Judaism can avoid that, Rabbi Jacobson-Maisels says. 

Jewish mindfulness is about developing an openness towards others. It means acting in light of the saying in Psalms, olam chesed yibaneh, “the world will be built on kindness”.

For more information, see www.orhalev.org, www.hamakom.org.uk

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