fuming with love

I just got back from a week-long meditation retreat. It has been a core practice and refuge for me for 15 years and it was incredibly nourishing to return to silence after nearly two years. For most people, including my children and my mother, the idea of being silent for an extended period of time is shocking and even overwhelming. My kids have asked me some hilariously practical questions, like, "How do you get food if you can't talk?" In truth, the silence is the easiest part. The hardest part is being with everything that arises in the mind and in the body when all other distractions and variables are removed.

The lineage of meditation that I practice comes from Burma and the Thai Forest traditions. It is very methodical and didactic, and includes several different meditation techniques. One of the core practices is called Metta, which is a Pali word meaning lovingkindness that very closely maps onto the Hebrew word Hesed. Metta is a practice that cultivates lovingkindness in the heart through a series of phrases that can be addressed towards oneself or another and ultimately towards all beings.

May you be happy.
May you be protected from harm.
May you live with ease and well being.
May you awaken and be free.

The recitation of these phrases, which are in many ways aspirational wishes, nurtures a loving heart for the one who says them, regardless of whom they are directed towards. Metta is the quality that allows us to stay connected to love in the face of so much uncertainty and suffering.

Each afternoon of the retreat, following a period of metta practice, there was time for question and answer with the teachers.

Twice during one of the Q&A sessions, the question was asked: "What is the difference between sending metta and prayer? Are these phrases prayers?"

To which the teacher responded, "I don't know, I don't pray."

The teacher then (very unconventionally) asked the student, "When you pray, who or what are you praying to?"

And the student responded, "I don't know, I don't pray either." The room silently chuckled.

You can imagine how hard it was for me to hold back. My mind was saying, "Pick me, pick me!"

If not for a vow of noble silence I would have interjected myself into this conversation. But instead I just noticed my own answers and my desire to respond and teach.

The confusion amidst this room full of meditators was palpable. What is prayer? To whom or what are we praying? And I know this confusion extends well beyond that room, through our community, probably in some way to all of us. These are questions I have explored in countless classes at Kol Tzedek and continue to return to personally.

I think some of the confusion arises from our own ancient terminology for prayer itself. In Hebrew, we refer to prayer as tefilah, from the root פלל, meaning to intercede, petition, or intervene. Because of the ineffable and polymorphous nature of the Divine, it often appears like this intercession is externally focused. As though when praying we are asking some external source to intercede and make a change on our behalf. We pray for healing; we express gratitude; we express longing; we pray for wholeness and peace.

But prayer, in my understanding, is actually not externally focused. Prayer, like meditation, is a concentration and purification practice. Just flip through the pages of the Honeybees Companion to see this truth reflected and refracted.

In the words of Indigenous Poet Laureate Joy Harjo,

"To pray you open your whole self
To sky, to earth, to sun, to moon
To one whole voice that is you."

Or in the words of Mary Oliver, Praying,

"...​​just pay attention, then patch
a few words together and don't try
to make them elaborate, this isn't
a contest but the doorway
into thanks, and a silence in which
another voice may speak."

And Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel,

"Prayer is meaningless unless it is subversive, unless it seeks to overthrow and to ruin the pyramids of callousness, hatred, opportunism, and falsehood."

Prayer is meant to open the heart. And one way to do that is by expressing our most genuine expressions of care for other human beings.

We see this longing for caring connecting unfolding in the journeys of our ancestors throughout the book of Genesis. This week we read from the final Parsha. But before we end the book, I want to take us back to the early chapters in parashat Vayera when Abraham calls out to the Holy One on behalf of Sodom and Gomorrah. This is surely a moment of holy chutzpah, as Abraham rebukes the harsh intentions of the Holy One to destroy entire cities.

Many people cite this as a moment of spiritual protest, as Abraham learns to call in the Divine. And while that may be true, I think folks miss a larger teaching here. The profound impact of this heated argument between Abraham and the Divine is not on the Divine. After all, the Holy One destroys the cities regardless. The power of these prayers is on Abraham, whose heart opens to a town full of strangers - and realizes that it's worth saving for even 50, 10, 5, even 1 person. How much more compassionate is Abraham for having realized the value of a single life.

As we have been journeying through the last third of each parsha in this triennial year, we have read aloud the burial of almost every ancestor. Never before have I realized that Genesis takes so much care to narrate the way each of our ancestors leaves this world.

This week we read Parashat Vayechi, the concluding stories in the book of Genesis. This parsha narrates the death of Jacob and then finally of Joseph. These final chapters of their lives and of Genesis are in many ways one long expression of metta, prayers, wishes, expressions of Jacob's deepest hopes for his children and grandchildren.

And in the process we experience a very tender Jacob, quoting,

וַיֹּ֤אמֶר יִשְׂרָאֵל֙ אֶל־יוֹסֵ֔ף רְאֹ֥ה פָנֶ֖יךָ לֹ֣א פִלָּ֑לְתִּי וְהִנֵּ֨ה הֶרְאָ֥ה אֹתִ֛י אֱלֹהִ֖ים גַּ֥ם אֶת־זַרְעֶֽךָ׃
"And Israel said to Joseph, 'I never expected to see you again, and here God has let me see your children as well'" (Genesis 48:11).

Both death and prayer have this effect on us. They soften us.

Call them prayers. Call them blessings, aspirational wishes, expressions of care. Jacob concludes his life with what I now understand to be a metta meditation. Extending his care first towards Joseph and his sons, and then ultimately to his entire lineage before drawing his final breath and being gathered to his people.

הַמַּלְאָךְ֩ הַגֹּאֵ֨ל אֹתִ֜י מִכׇּל־רָ֗ע
יְבָרֵךְ֮ אֶת־הַנְּעָרִים֒
וְיִקָּרֵ֤א בָהֶם֙ שְׁמִ֔י וְשֵׁ֥ם אֲבֹתַ֖י אַבְרָהָ֣ם וְיִצְחָ֑ק
וְיִדְגּ֥וּ לָרֹ֖ב בְּקֶ֥רֶב הָאָֽרֶץ׃

The Angel who has redeemed me from all harm--
Bless the lads.
In them may my name be recalled,
And the names of my fathers Abraham and Isaac,
And may they be teeming multitudes upon the earth (Genesis 48:16).

These are profound expressions of care which we need not wait until the end of our lives to articulate. And yet are so hard to access amidst the callouses we grow to buffer our hearts in this hurting world.

To quote the venerable poet Rabbi Mónica Gomery, in one of her poems, "What I love about death is the way everything else falls away...fuming with love."

Know that while on retreat I called to mind the ever-widening circle of connection at Kol Tzedek and held you all in my heart and offered you metta.

May you be happy.
May you be protected from harm.
May you live with ease and well being.
May you awaken and be free.

Together may we remember the profound kindness of our ancestors (zocher hasdei avot) and have the courage to draw on every poem, every prayer, every breath in our bodies to live lives that fume with love.

Shabbat shalom!
Rabbi Ari Lev