Rabbi ARI Lev fornari: With every bone in my body
Yom Kippur 5784
September 25, 2023
View the video here.
I will never forget the first time I tried to meditate.
It was the summer of 2002.
I was 19 years old and living in Berkeley, CA for the summer with my two best friends.
One morning,
I begged them to come with me to the San Francisco Zen Center to sit zazen.
When we arrived, we were guided into the meditation hall which had several dozen cushions on the floor.
And each cushion had a person, sitting in silence, facing a wall.
We were dispersed among the empty cushions and given the instruction to face the wall, sit “comfortably”, lower our gaze and not think.
As a young Jew from New York,
this in and of itself was a laughable instruction.
Then they explained that any time we needed to move,
even the slightest movement,
We should first cup our hands together in a prayer position and offer a slight bow.
That part seemed doable.
I closed my eyes and sat down.
After a few seconds I realized I needed to adjust my posture so I bowed and moved.
A few seconds later I had an itch on my face, so I bowed and scratched my cheek.
A few seconds later…you get the idea.
Until I started to just bow incessantly.
The combination of discomfort, shame and incompetence led me to break out into hysterical uncontrollable laughter and I actually got up and ran out of the room through the emergency exit.
My friend, who had no desire to meditate in the first place, followed me out to the street.
I don’t know how fast we were moving, but in my memory,
we ran away. Cracking up until we were crying.
Taking cover in a quiet alley where no one would find us.
But what were we running from?
I had after all voluntarily shown up to meditate…
I had a handful of experiences like this in my 20’s.
Repeated failed attempts to try to sit still.
It took me the better part of 10 years to learn to meditate.
And another 10 years to understand that I was running from the physical experience of being in my own body.
Each bow was like a wake up call, telling me that I was so uncomfortable. So uncomfortable that I couldn’t stand it. Or in this case, sit in it.
Most people who know that I meditate have questions about the silence. But for me, the silence is a gift.
I experience the silence as a protective cloak that keeps me from causing and experiencing the pain of misplaced words and pronouns.
The hardest part for me has always been the experience of being present in my body.
As a kid, I was known, affectionately, as “the difficult child.”
Many of my earliest memories are of myself, mid-tantrum, feeling stuck and alone, huddled in the corner of my room, crouching between my dresser and the wall.
From a very young age I felt uncomfortable in my own skin.
Most often this manifested as an inability to get dressed.
This includes the year I didn’t attend my own birthday party because I couldn’t decide what to wear.
It is a right of passage to sit around my family’s shabbat table and have them tell you “the story of the purple shorts.”
So the story goes, for 2 years of my childhood I wore the same purple shorts every single day.
Despite my mom taking me to every single store she could think of that sold shorts, I insisted that this one pair was the only one I could wear.
And so every night, while I slept, my father would lovingly wash, dry and fold them so they would be ready for the next day.
From a young age, it was very hard for me to feel at home in my body.
And so I left my body.
Perhaps you too have a story or can remember when you stopped trying to live in your body?
For most of my childhood,
the epithet of “the difficult child” followed me around and shaped how I viewed myself.
Until recently, it felt like a matter of fact about myself.
But over the last few years, I have felt like a hermit crab in need of a new shell to call home.
A person wanting to shed a very old story I tell about myself,
but unsure how.
And while I had many dreams for my recent sabbatical,
My honest number one priority was to get back inside of my body.
I had this vague sense that my emotional stuckness was actually caused by a larger disconnect I was feeling from my body.
The pandemic had been a kind of 3-year hiatus from living in relationship to my body.
I stopped exercising. I spent endless hours on Zoom, barely getting up to eat or drink, and therefore rarely even using the bathroom.
I was not one of those people who took long walks in the woodlands.
I was one of those people who put on a nice shirt and wore my pajamas on the bottom and hunkered down in a windowless basement “office” my kids referred to as “Tiny Kol Tzedek.”
I stored the relentless anxiety, fear, and grief of these Covid years in my body, in my muscles and bones,
without allowing myself to recognize them or release them physically.
I felt like I was slowly decaying,
losing touch with my own felt sense of my body.
By this time last year, I felt estranged from my body.
My lower back ached. My neck needed perpetual cracking.
I wasn’t sleeping well. My gut was angry.
I remember thinking on Yom Kippur,
“I have a lot of atoning to do with my body.”
When I told my meditation teacher about my upcoming sabbatical, she suggested I learn a martial art. I had never considered this before. But a sabbatical seemed like the perfect time to become a beginner at something.
So come January 2023, the first thing I did was spend an entire week learning about every kind of martial art that I could. I braved the awkwardness of being new in a few different spaces, until I found a place that felt just right.
Maybe that is how some of you feel today, you who are new to Kol Tzedek or West Philly, or Judaism, searching for new routines and a sense of belonging. I really feel you!
This winter I began a new routine. I started strength training from 9 to 10 am, every morning, after I took my kids to school.
Now the fact that I chose to join a martial art studio is actually tangential to the main thing I want you to understand from this story. What’s important about this story was that I was looking for a way to reconnect with my body. It could have been gardening or ukulele lessons or painting. There are a myriad of pathways to the body.
You all offered me the incredible opportunity to take a sabbatical. Thank you!
And today I want to offer you an insight this time gifted me.
In addition to strength training, another highlight of my sabbatical was the opportunity to coach little league.
Now mind you, despite playing team sports my entire childhood,
I have never actually played baseball.
Everything I know and love about baseball, I have learned from my kids.
This Spring, after 7 years of spending Shabbat mornings in shul,
I spent Saturday mornings in the inner sanctum of a dugout, coaching a gaggle of 7 and 8 year olds.
It was only fitting given that the game of baseball is my children’s primary spiritual practice.
For those of you who were here on Erev Rosh Hashanah, this next story may sound familiar.
One crisp spring night I was leading a circle of 7 year olds in some simple stretches.
I invited them to reach for the sky,
and all their hands went flying up.
And now reach for the ground,
And they all bent over to touch the grass.
And as I said that, I reached down and to my great surprise,
I actually touched my toes.
I was so shocked that I actually laughed out loud.
I couldn't believe it.
I had never before bent over and touched the ground.
I hung there mid stretch and felt a bit like crying.
My hamstrings were like, for 40 years we've been holding it together here.
We can finally let go.
As this insight arose in my body, a lightbulb went off:
Flexibility is not the result of stretching, it's the result of strengthening.
We don’t need to contort our hearts and minds, in order to change.
We don’t need to extend our reach.
To make change, we need to build power, slowly and steadily over time.
In our own bodies first.
And so too in our collective body, our communities and our movements for justice.
In his book, My Grandmother's Hands, Resmaa Menakem (min-a-kem) explains, “Our bodies have a form of knowledge that is different from our cognitive brains…the body is where we fear, hope and react; where we constrict and release; and where we fight, flight, or freeze.”
If we want to change, if we want to do Teshuvah, if we want to upend white supremacy, Menakem is clear. “We must begin with our bodies “ (5).
Now lest you think the point of this story is that I became more flexible. It’s not.
What matters is that I came to understand something about myself, about my life, about my own spiritual and emotional growth, from my body directly.
This is risky to share, knowing how different all our bodies are.
And how complex our relationships to our bodies are. I am not suggesting that you need to meditate, or go to the gym 5 days a week, or coach little league to get in touch with your body.
But I am suggesting it is worthwhile for each of us to deepen our awareness and our connection to our bodies, as they are.
Not as we might wish them to be.
This may be hard to hear, and even harder to act on.
People who talk about embodiment often make it sound like great fun, but in reality many of us have an ambivalent or negative relationship with our bodies for very real reasons.
Very few people I know look in the mirror and see their bodies as a reflection of the Divine.
Talking about our bodies is uncomfortable for many reasons.
It is uncomfortable because bodies are uncomfortable.
The experience of being in a body can be bitter.
The body is a site of pain, disability, dysphoria, trauma, oppression, aging, illness and disappointment. Many of us experience the body as having failed us, or perhaps failing us right now.
Yet, I know the healing power of bitter herbs.
Horseradish and romaine. Black radish and dandelion root.
And I am suggesting it is both worthwhile and necessary to be with this bitter truth and approach the body as a source of teshuvah.
I am ever inspired by the teachings of Rabbi Julia Watts Belser, whose new book about disability wisdom invites every one of us to love our own bones and know ourselves as whole.
When I talk about bodies, I am not talking only about able-bodied, white, cis, normative bodies. I am striving to recognize and celebrate all of us.
Which leads me to another reason these ideas may be deeply uncomfortable.
Throughout history, many of us have been taught not to take pride in our Jewish bodies. We've been told that we are weak, we are hairy. We’re too big, or not big enough. We’re too loud, or too fey.
Across generations and diasporas, many of us have inherited trauma that spans millennia and have stored it in our DNA.
It has wrought havoc on our nervous and digestive systems.
For these reasons and more, we may relate to our minds as a refuge from the discomforts of the body.
We have, afterall, learned to collectively define ourselves as the people of the book. We are word nerds.
We are intellectually engaged, critical thinkers.
This has been an important Jewish survival strategy.
I am not suggesting we stop reading and writing and debating.
But I am suggesting that there is another aspect of Jewish spiritual practice that has been underappreciated and oftentimes neglected.
Which is at least in part why we are.
Yom Kippur on the one hand is about who we are as people. In our hearts and souls.
We do heshbon hanefesh, we take an account of ourselves.
We say the viddui, acknowledging and articulating in words the ways we have missed the mark.
On the other hand, Yom Kippur is a very embodied spiritual practice.
Our observance is marked by our collective refraining from work that is prohibited on Shabbat, plus five additional prohibitions.
We fast from food and water.
We abstain from bathing.
We abstain from sexual conduct.
We refrain from anointing ourselves with oil. We're not supposed to smell good.
We don’t wear leather, or adorn the body in comfort or beauty.
As it turns out, these 5 rabbinic prohibitions all relate to the body directly.
These instructions seem to suggest that Yom Kippur is first and foremost about the body.
But the truth is, the 5 core prohibitions of Yom Kippur are not listed in the Torah anywhere.
The Torah actually only instructs us to do one thing:
It says in Leviticus,
Ta’anu et nafshoteichem.
You should afflict your soul.
You should feel a kind of Spiritual constriction, known as inui nefesh.
In the Torah, there is actually no mention of the body in relation to Yom Kippur.
But 2,000 years ago, much like today, the rabbis had the same question I have:
What does it mean to afflict my soul?
How do I do that?
The rabbis realized that the only way they could make sense of this instruction is to make it visceral. To make it about the body.
They say, “Tonu et nafshoteichem, that means 5 things:
Don't drink, don't eat, don’t bathe, don't have sex, don't anoint, and don't wear leather.”
Fast forward 2,000 years.
We should feel the full permission of our Reconstructionist Jewish inheritance; to reimagine our relationship to these instructions, which were themselves interpretations; to take notice of the habits of mind that are constricting you and fast from them.
We each have a very different relationship to our body and to the instructions to fast from food and water and pleasure.
We who are survivors of eating disorders, sexual abuse and sexual asssault.
We who are pregnant or nursing.
We who are diabetic or disabled or on medication that requires eating.
As someone who has known intimately the dangers of eating disorders, more than a fast for food or water, what I encourage is a fast from words or a fast from self judgment.
We are meant to feel constriction but not to cause ourselves harm. When any of these restrictions cause us harm, the rabbis actually forbid us to observe them.
Instead we are invited to be as spiritually brave as the rabbis, and to reinvent these 5 things, just like they did.
For years I have been taking the concrete embodied practices of Yom Kippur and encouraging members of our community to understand them as metaphors.
But this year I realized something new.
I realized these 5 prohibitions actually began as metaphor!
The rabbis took something metaphysical and made it physical.
They did this because they understood that spiritual transformation begins in the body.
However counterintuitive it may be, if we want to change our mental and emotional habits,
to participate in the work of teshuvah, we must return to the body itself.
This morning we sang the words of Nishmat Kol Chai.
We sing these words not just on Shabbat Shabbaton, but every single Shabbat of the year.
It is an ancient poem bringing our awareness to every aspect of our bodies, to every limb and sinew. To the pathway of the breath. To the fingers and the toes.
According to the mystics, we sing this piyyut for the explicit purpose of unifying the mind and the body so that we can bridge the gap between this world, olam hazeh, and the world to come, olam haba. [2]
Which is to say, increasing our body awareness actually brings olam haba to this world!
Quoting from the piyyut:
“The limbs that you gave us,
The spirit that you breathed into our nostrils,
And the tongue you placed in our mouths…
Every heart shall be awestruck;
Every organ within shall resonate to your name.
As the psalmist sings:
Kol atzmotai tomarna
All my bones shall say,
Adonai Mi Chamocha
Holy One, who is like you?
What does it mean to praise God with every bone in our bodies? [3]
What might it mean for us to develop this kind of body awareness?
…
Nishmat Kol Chai continues,
Barchi nafshi et Adonai
Let my whole life force bless The One
v’Chol k’ravai et shem kodhsi
And everything within me shall orient towards God’s holy name.”
These closing words point us to the realization that we might come to know God from the inside out.
As a trans person, this resonates deeply.
Everything I know to be true about myself,
I have learned from the inside out.
From learning to breathe and becoming aware of my body.
I think deep down, somewhere unconscious within me, I began to meditate all those years ago because I knew that in order to become myself, to know myself whole, I was going to have to learn how to live in a conscious relationship with my physical body.
As someone who has run away from this truth, literally and figuratively, I know how hard it is to begin this work, or to turn back to it over and over again. I know there is some amount of randomness that creates the necessary conditions to heal in this way. And I know there are some very practical things that can help.
When I reflect on it, the common thread between each of my core spiritual practices is that they help me connect with my body and my breath.
Learning to become aware of and allow for pain and discomfort in the body is how I am also learning to become aware of and allow for difficult emotions.
These spiritual practices gift me an insightful understanding of my own self;
They give me access to a kind of knowing that is inseparable from my being and my body.
A kind of wisdom that emerges, v’khol atzmotai tomarnu…
when our bones speak to us directly.
When faced with profound ambivalence about huge life decisions, my mind can turn to chaos.
I repeatedly return to prayer and meditation, to the body itself, to access clarity about what I need and want most.
Embodied practices have taught me the difference between knowing something and having insight.
When we know something, we feel a rush to write it down, lest we forget it.
But an insight arises with a kind of bone-deep clarity that can never be forgotten.
Perhaps this is why, upon receiving the Torah at Sinai, the Israelites responded, Na’aseh v’nishmah. [4] We will do these things, we will embody Torah, and only then will we understand it.
I think embodiment is a primary purpose of all spiritual practices, including prayer, which is why the words of Nishmat Kol Chai call us to connect to the body through prayer.
But this is not just about prayer, but mitzvot more generally.
If we allow ourselves to zoom out, we can see Jewish spiritual life is centered around the body.
The sensuous foods of our people.
Babka and brisket. Biscochos and Bimuelos.
The annual tradition of building and dwelling in a sukkah.
The wrapping of tallitot and the laying of tefillin.
Regular immersions in the living waters of a mikveh.
The blessings that we say before and after we eat.
We even bless the experience of using the bathroom.
Not to mention the bathhouse!
In fact, the Talmud declared it forbidden for a scholar to reside in a city which did not contain a public bath. [5] Which is to say, we cannot live in a place where we cannot care for our bodies!
A story is told of Hillel the Elder, [6]
He had just finished teaching and was walking away.
His students followed after him, asking, “where are you going?”
“To fulfill a mitzvah!”, he replied.
Ever curious, his students kept after him.
“What mitzvah?” they asked.
Hillel replied, “To wash in a bathhouse!
“Just as there are people that scour and wash the statues of kings,” he said,
“so too we humans, created in the image of the Holy One, must care for and wash our bodies.”
To care for the body, to wash at the bathhouse, says Hillel, is a mitzvah!
Hillel’s students seem shocked.
Maybe you are too!
Nothing about our society reflects this truth.
The primary images we have of the body in society are fraught with judgment.
But during my sabbatical, I came to understand on a body level what it could mean for the body to be the altar.
Not in an idolatrous worship way. But in a sacred way.
For the last ten days, we have been blessed with so many different dreams that our community holds for the world to come. They are as varied as the rabbinic traditions of Olam Haba.
In some of their visions, we are body-less beings.
As the Talmud describes,
“The world-to-come is not at all like this world. In the world-to-come there is no eating, no drinking, no procreation, no commerce, no envy, no hatred, no rivalry; the righteous sit with their crowns on their heads and enjoy the radiance of the Shekhina. [7]
Yet in other visions, Olam Haba is described as a feast, a banquet hall, a deeply sensual and embodied eternal existence. [8]
Despite the varied rabbinic opinions about whether or not we have a body in the world to come, we undoubtedly have a body in this world. And it has a lot to teach us about the change and transformation we seek in our own lives. In our communities. And in our world.
We are called to make Teshuvah with every bone in our bodies. [3]
It may be hard, and you may encounter real inner resistance.
You may be thinking, there must be some other way.
Where is the emergency exit!?
But I am here to remind you,
“The wisdom of your own body is very close to you,
literally in your mouth and in your heart.
Lo b’shammayim hi. It is not in the heavens. You can do this!”
This is an invitation to make teshuva with ourselves,
to come home to our bodies.
To listen to them, learn from them, be less afraid of them.
To experience ourselves as whole.
To know with every bone,
that we don’t need to change or improve our bodies,
we need only connect with and honor our bodies.
To quote KT member one of my teachers, Tania Isaac, who is herself a mother, a dancer and a person living with chronic illness,
“Body journeys are so individual. And all valid for what they bring us to.”
I invite you to begin where you feel most called. [9]
To feel your fingers in the dirt as you garden.
To notice the weight of your belly as you bow in prayer.
The grip of your hand on a cane or a crutch.
To feel thirst and hunger and fullness.
To bless each drink of water and bite of food.
To appreciate the smooth texture of the keys of a piano.
Or the clink of mahjong tiles as you discard.
To savor the smell of fried garlic and olive oil.
I know how tender and personal this topic is.
For any ways I missed the mark in my words today, I ask your forgiveness.
If your journey is anything like mine,
it will include many false starts.
The irrepressible urge to run away.
And the ineffable call to return to the body, again and again.
May this be the year that we deepen our relationships to our physical bodies.
May this be the year we understand our bodies as a bridge between olam hazeh and olam haba.
May this be the year we have the courage to know ourselves whole.
Lshanah Tova
Footnotes:
[1] This sermon was written in deep conversation with Rabbis Mónica Gomery, Benay Lappe. And my writing coach Jon Argaman. With tremendous gratitude to my meditation teachers, specifically but not exclusively, Rebecca Bradshaw, Devin Berry, Bonnie Duran and Roxanne Dault. And to the lineage of their Burmese teachers for generously transmitting the Dharma and encouraging me to keep going.
[2] See the Master’s Thesis, “With every bone in my body: Nishmat Kol Chai as an act of embodied prayer to repair the world” by Rabbi Guy Austrian.
[3] Rabbi David Kimhi, affectionately known as the Radak, a medieval commentator, suggests that the inherent purpose of our body parts is to vibrate in gratitude.[4] Exodus 24:7
[5] B.T. Sanhedrin 17b
[6] Vayikra Rabbah 34:3
[7] B.T. Brachot 17b
[8] Mishneh Torah 8:4
[9] And as Ironic as it may be, I know for many of us, reading is an important part of beginning anything new. So I offer you a very short syllabus of books that have been important handholds for me in my own journey to live more fully in my body:
The Body Keeps The Score by Bessel van der Kolk
My Grandmother’s Hands by Resmaa Menakem
Between The World And Me by Ta-Nehesi Coates
And hot off the press, Loving Our Own Bones by Rabbi Julia Watts Belser
September 25, 2023
View the video here.
I will never forget the first time I tried to meditate.
It was the summer of 2002.
I was 19 years old and living in Berkeley, CA for the summer with my two best friends.
One morning,
I begged them to come with me to the San Francisco Zen Center to sit zazen.
When we arrived, we were guided into the meditation hall which had several dozen cushions on the floor.
And each cushion had a person, sitting in silence, facing a wall.
We were dispersed among the empty cushions and given the instruction to face the wall, sit “comfortably”, lower our gaze and not think.
As a young Jew from New York,
this in and of itself was a laughable instruction.
Then they explained that any time we needed to move,
even the slightest movement,
We should first cup our hands together in a prayer position and offer a slight bow.
That part seemed doable.
I closed my eyes and sat down.
After a few seconds I realized I needed to adjust my posture so I bowed and moved.
A few seconds later I had an itch on my face, so I bowed and scratched my cheek.
A few seconds later…you get the idea.
Until I started to just bow incessantly.
The combination of discomfort, shame and incompetence led me to break out into hysterical uncontrollable laughter and I actually got up and ran out of the room through the emergency exit.
My friend, who had no desire to meditate in the first place, followed me out to the street.
I don’t know how fast we were moving, but in my memory,
we ran away. Cracking up until we were crying.
Taking cover in a quiet alley where no one would find us.
But what were we running from?
I had after all voluntarily shown up to meditate…
I had a handful of experiences like this in my 20’s.
Repeated failed attempts to try to sit still.
It took me the better part of 10 years to learn to meditate.
And another 10 years to understand that I was running from the physical experience of being in my own body.
Each bow was like a wake up call, telling me that I was so uncomfortable. So uncomfortable that I couldn’t stand it. Or in this case, sit in it.
Most people who know that I meditate have questions about the silence. But for me, the silence is a gift.
I experience the silence as a protective cloak that keeps me from causing and experiencing the pain of misplaced words and pronouns.
The hardest part for me has always been the experience of being present in my body.
As a kid, I was known, affectionately, as “the difficult child.”
Many of my earliest memories are of myself, mid-tantrum, feeling stuck and alone, huddled in the corner of my room, crouching between my dresser and the wall.
From a very young age I felt uncomfortable in my own skin.
Most often this manifested as an inability to get dressed.
This includes the year I didn’t attend my own birthday party because I couldn’t decide what to wear.
It is a right of passage to sit around my family’s shabbat table and have them tell you “the story of the purple shorts.”
So the story goes, for 2 years of my childhood I wore the same purple shorts every single day.
Despite my mom taking me to every single store she could think of that sold shorts, I insisted that this one pair was the only one I could wear.
And so every night, while I slept, my father would lovingly wash, dry and fold them so they would be ready for the next day.
From a young age, it was very hard for me to feel at home in my body.
And so I left my body.
Perhaps you too have a story or can remember when you stopped trying to live in your body?
For most of my childhood,
the epithet of “the difficult child” followed me around and shaped how I viewed myself.
Until recently, it felt like a matter of fact about myself.
But over the last few years, I have felt like a hermit crab in need of a new shell to call home.
A person wanting to shed a very old story I tell about myself,
but unsure how.
And while I had many dreams for my recent sabbatical,
My honest number one priority was to get back inside of my body.
I had this vague sense that my emotional stuckness was actually caused by a larger disconnect I was feeling from my body.
The pandemic had been a kind of 3-year hiatus from living in relationship to my body.
I stopped exercising. I spent endless hours on Zoom, barely getting up to eat or drink, and therefore rarely even using the bathroom.
I was not one of those people who took long walks in the woodlands.
I was one of those people who put on a nice shirt and wore my pajamas on the bottom and hunkered down in a windowless basement “office” my kids referred to as “Tiny Kol Tzedek.”
I stored the relentless anxiety, fear, and grief of these Covid years in my body, in my muscles and bones,
without allowing myself to recognize them or release them physically.
I felt like I was slowly decaying,
losing touch with my own felt sense of my body.
By this time last year, I felt estranged from my body.
My lower back ached. My neck needed perpetual cracking.
I wasn’t sleeping well. My gut was angry.
I remember thinking on Yom Kippur,
“I have a lot of atoning to do with my body.”
When I told my meditation teacher about my upcoming sabbatical, she suggested I learn a martial art. I had never considered this before. But a sabbatical seemed like the perfect time to become a beginner at something.
So come January 2023, the first thing I did was spend an entire week learning about every kind of martial art that I could. I braved the awkwardness of being new in a few different spaces, until I found a place that felt just right.
Maybe that is how some of you feel today, you who are new to Kol Tzedek or West Philly, or Judaism, searching for new routines and a sense of belonging. I really feel you!
This winter I began a new routine. I started strength training from 9 to 10 am, every morning, after I took my kids to school.
Now the fact that I chose to join a martial art studio is actually tangential to the main thing I want you to understand from this story. What’s important about this story was that I was looking for a way to reconnect with my body. It could have been gardening or ukulele lessons or painting. There are a myriad of pathways to the body.
You all offered me the incredible opportunity to take a sabbatical. Thank you!
And today I want to offer you an insight this time gifted me.
In addition to strength training, another highlight of my sabbatical was the opportunity to coach little league.
Now mind you, despite playing team sports my entire childhood,
I have never actually played baseball.
Everything I know and love about baseball, I have learned from my kids.
This Spring, after 7 years of spending Shabbat mornings in shul,
I spent Saturday mornings in the inner sanctum of a dugout, coaching a gaggle of 7 and 8 year olds.
It was only fitting given that the game of baseball is my children’s primary spiritual practice.
For those of you who were here on Erev Rosh Hashanah, this next story may sound familiar.
One crisp spring night I was leading a circle of 7 year olds in some simple stretches.
I invited them to reach for the sky,
and all their hands went flying up.
And now reach for the ground,
And they all bent over to touch the grass.
And as I said that, I reached down and to my great surprise,
I actually touched my toes.
I was so shocked that I actually laughed out loud.
I couldn't believe it.
I had never before bent over and touched the ground.
I hung there mid stretch and felt a bit like crying.
My hamstrings were like, for 40 years we've been holding it together here.
We can finally let go.
As this insight arose in my body, a lightbulb went off:
Flexibility is not the result of stretching, it's the result of strengthening.
We don’t need to contort our hearts and minds, in order to change.
We don’t need to extend our reach.
To make change, we need to build power, slowly and steadily over time.
In our own bodies first.
And so too in our collective body, our communities and our movements for justice.
In his book, My Grandmother's Hands, Resmaa Menakem (min-a-kem) explains, “Our bodies have a form of knowledge that is different from our cognitive brains…the body is where we fear, hope and react; where we constrict and release; and where we fight, flight, or freeze.”
If we want to change, if we want to do Teshuvah, if we want to upend white supremacy, Menakem is clear. “We must begin with our bodies “ (5).
Now lest you think the point of this story is that I became more flexible. It’s not.
What matters is that I came to understand something about myself, about my life, about my own spiritual and emotional growth, from my body directly.
This is risky to share, knowing how different all our bodies are.
And how complex our relationships to our bodies are. I am not suggesting that you need to meditate, or go to the gym 5 days a week, or coach little league to get in touch with your body.
But I am suggesting it is worthwhile for each of us to deepen our awareness and our connection to our bodies, as they are.
Not as we might wish them to be.
This may be hard to hear, and even harder to act on.
People who talk about embodiment often make it sound like great fun, but in reality many of us have an ambivalent or negative relationship with our bodies for very real reasons.
Very few people I know look in the mirror and see their bodies as a reflection of the Divine.
Talking about our bodies is uncomfortable for many reasons.
It is uncomfortable because bodies are uncomfortable.
The experience of being in a body can be bitter.
The body is a site of pain, disability, dysphoria, trauma, oppression, aging, illness and disappointment. Many of us experience the body as having failed us, or perhaps failing us right now.
Yet, I know the healing power of bitter herbs.
Horseradish and romaine. Black radish and dandelion root.
And I am suggesting it is both worthwhile and necessary to be with this bitter truth and approach the body as a source of teshuvah.
I am ever inspired by the teachings of Rabbi Julia Watts Belser, whose new book about disability wisdom invites every one of us to love our own bones and know ourselves as whole.
When I talk about bodies, I am not talking only about able-bodied, white, cis, normative bodies. I am striving to recognize and celebrate all of us.
Which leads me to another reason these ideas may be deeply uncomfortable.
Throughout history, many of us have been taught not to take pride in our Jewish bodies. We've been told that we are weak, we are hairy. We’re too big, or not big enough. We’re too loud, or too fey.
Across generations and diasporas, many of us have inherited trauma that spans millennia and have stored it in our DNA.
It has wrought havoc on our nervous and digestive systems.
For these reasons and more, we may relate to our minds as a refuge from the discomforts of the body.
We have, afterall, learned to collectively define ourselves as the people of the book. We are word nerds.
We are intellectually engaged, critical thinkers.
This has been an important Jewish survival strategy.
I am not suggesting we stop reading and writing and debating.
But I am suggesting that there is another aspect of Jewish spiritual practice that has been underappreciated and oftentimes neglected.
Which is at least in part why we are.
Yom Kippur on the one hand is about who we are as people. In our hearts and souls.
We do heshbon hanefesh, we take an account of ourselves.
We say the viddui, acknowledging and articulating in words the ways we have missed the mark.
On the other hand, Yom Kippur is a very embodied spiritual practice.
Our observance is marked by our collective refraining from work that is prohibited on Shabbat, plus five additional prohibitions.
We fast from food and water.
We abstain from bathing.
We abstain from sexual conduct.
We refrain from anointing ourselves with oil. We're not supposed to smell good.
We don’t wear leather, or adorn the body in comfort or beauty.
As it turns out, these 5 rabbinic prohibitions all relate to the body directly.
These instructions seem to suggest that Yom Kippur is first and foremost about the body.
But the truth is, the 5 core prohibitions of Yom Kippur are not listed in the Torah anywhere.
The Torah actually only instructs us to do one thing:
It says in Leviticus,
Ta’anu et nafshoteichem.
You should afflict your soul.
You should feel a kind of Spiritual constriction, known as inui nefesh.
In the Torah, there is actually no mention of the body in relation to Yom Kippur.
But 2,000 years ago, much like today, the rabbis had the same question I have:
What does it mean to afflict my soul?
How do I do that?
The rabbis realized that the only way they could make sense of this instruction is to make it visceral. To make it about the body.
They say, “Tonu et nafshoteichem, that means 5 things:
Don't drink, don't eat, don’t bathe, don't have sex, don't anoint, and don't wear leather.”
Fast forward 2,000 years.
We should feel the full permission of our Reconstructionist Jewish inheritance; to reimagine our relationship to these instructions, which were themselves interpretations; to take notice of the habits of mind that are constricting you and fast from them.
We each have a very different relationship to our body and to the instructions to fast from food and water and pleasure.
We who are survivors of eating disorders, sexual abuse and sexual asssault.
We who are pregnant or nursing.
We who are diabetic or disabled or on medication that requires eating.
As someone who has known intimately the dangers of eating disorders, more than a fast for food or water, what I encourage is a fast from words or a fast from self judgment.
We are meant to feel constriction but not to cause ourselves harm. When any of these restrictions cause us harm, the rabbis actually forbid us to observe them.
Instead we are invited to be as spiritually brave as the rabbis, and to reinvent these 5 things, just like they did.
For years I have been taking the concrete embodied practices of Yom Kippur and encouraging members of our community to understand them as metaphors.
But this year I realized something new.
I realized these 5 prohibitions actually began as metaphor!
The rabbis took something metaphysical and made it physical.
They did this because they understood that spiritual transformation begins in the body.
However counterintuitive it may be, if we want to change our mental and emotional habits,
to participate in the work of teshuvah, we must return to the body itself.
This morning we sang the words of Nishmat Kol Chai.
We sing these words not just on Shabbat Shabbaton, but every single Shabbat of the year.
It is an ancient poem bringing our awareness to every aspect of our bodies, to every limb and sinew. To the pathway of the breath. To the fingers and the toes.
According to the mystics, we sing this piyyut for the explicit purpose of unifying the mind and the body so that we can bridge the gap between this world, olam hazeh, and the world to come, olam haba. [2]
Which is to say, increasing our body awareness actually brings olam haba to this world!
Quoting from the piyyut:
“The limbs that you gave us,
The spirit that you breathed into our nostrils,
And the tongue you placed in our mouths…
Every heart shall be awestruck;
Every organ within shall resonate to your name.
As the psalmist sings:
Kol atzmotai tomarna
All my bones shall say,
Adonai Mi Chamocha
Holy One, who is like you?
What does it mean to praise God with every bone in our bodies? [3]
What might it mean for us to develop this kind of body awareness?
…
Nishmat Kol Chai continues,
Barchi nafshi et Adonai
Let my whole life force bless The One
v’Chol k’ravai et shem kodhsi
And everything within me shall orient towards God’s holy name.”
These closing words point us to the realization that we might come to know God from the inside out.
As a trans person, this resonates deeply.
Everything I know to be true about myself,
I have learned from the inside out.
From learning to breathe and becoming aware of my body.
I think deep down, somewhere unconscious within me, I began to meditate all those years ago because I knew that in order to become myself, to know myself whole, I was going to have to learn how to live in a conscious relationship with my physical body.
As someone who has run away from this truth, literally and figuratively, I know how hard it is to begin this work, or to turn back to it over and over again. I know there is some amount of randomness that creates the necessary conditions to heal in this way. And I know there are some very practical things that can help.
When I reflect on it, the common thread between each of my core spiritual practices is that they help me connect with my body and my breath.
Learning to become aware of and allow for pain and discomfort in the body is how I am also learning to become aware of and allow for difficult emotions.
These spiritual practices gift me an insightful understanding of my own self;
They give me access to a kind of knowing that is inseparable from my being and my body.
A kind of wisdom that emerges, v’khol atzmotai tomarnu…
when our bones speak to us directly.
When faced with profound ambivalence about huge life decisions, my mind can turn to chaos.
I repeatedly return to prayer and meditation, to the body itself, to access clarity about what I need and want most.
Embodied practices have taught me the difference between knowing something and having insight.
When we know something, we feel a rush to write it down, lest we forget it.
But an insight arises with a kind of bone-deep clarity that can never be forgotten.
Perhaps this is why, upon receiving the Torah at Sinai, the Israelites responded, Na’aseh v’nishmah. [4] We will do these things, we will embody Torah, and only then will we understand it.
I think embodiment is a primary purpose of all spiritual practices, including prayer, which is why the words of Nishmat Kol Chai call us to connect to the body through prayer.
But this is not just about prayer, but mitzvot more generally.
If we allow ourselves to zoom out, we can see Jewish spiritual life is centered around the body.
The sensuous foods of our people.
Babka and brisket. Biscochos and Bimuelos.
The annual tradition of building and dwelling in a sukkah.
The wrapping of tallitot and the laying of tefillin.
Regular immersions in the living waters of a mikveh.
The blessings that we say before and after we eat.
We even bless the experience of using the bathroom.
Not to mention the bathhouse!
In fact, the Talmud declared it forbidden for a scholar to reside in a city which did not contain a public bath. [5] Which is to say, we cannot live in a place where we cannot care for our bodies!
A story is told of Hillel the Elder, [6]
He had just finished teaching and was walking away.
His students followed after him, asking, “where are you going?”
“To fulfill a mitzvah!”, he replied.
Ever curious, his students kept after him.
“What mitzvah?” they asked.
Hillel replied, “To wash in a bathhouse!
“Just as there are people that scour and wash the statues of kings,” he said,
“so too we humans, created in the image of the Holy One, must care for and wash our bodies.”
To care for the body, to wash at the bathhouse, says Hillel, is a mitzvah!
Hillel’s students seem shocked.
Maybe you are too!
Nothing about our society reflects this truth.
The primary images we have of the body in society are fraught with judgment.
But during my sabbatical, I came to understand on a body level what it could mean for the body to be the altar.
Not in an idolatrous worship way. But in a sacred way.
For the last ten days, we have been blessed with so many different dreams that our community holds for the world to come. They are as varied as the rabbinic traditions of Olam Haba.
In some of their visions, we are body-less beings.
As the Talmud describes,
“The world-to-come is not at all like this world. In the world-to-come there is no eating, no drinking, no procreation, no commerce, no envy, no hatred, no rivalry; the righteous sit with their crowns on their heads and enjoy the radiance of the Shekhina. [7]
Yet in other visions, Olam Haba is described as a feast, a banquet hall, a deeply sensual and embodied eternal existence. [8]
Despite the varied rabbinic opinions about whether or not we have a body in the world to come, we undoubtedly have a body in this world. And it has a lot to teach us about the change and transformation we seek in our own lives. In our communities. And in our world.
We are called to make Teshuvah with every bone in our bodies. [3]
It may be hard, and you may encounter real inner resistance.
You may be thinking, there must be some other way.
Where is the emergency exit!?
But I am here to remind you,
“The wisdom of your own body is very close to you,
literally in your mouth and in your heart.
Lo b’shammayim hi. It is not in the heavens. You can do this!”
This is an invitation to make teshuva with ourselves,
to come home to our bodies.
To listen to them, learn from them, be less afraid of them.
To experience ourselves as whole.
To know with every bone,
that we don’t need to change or improve our bodies,
we need only connect with and honor our bodies.
To quote KT member one of my teachers, Tania Isaac, who is herself a mother, a dancer and a person living with chronic illness,
“Body journeys are so individual. And all valid for what they bring us to.”
I invite you to begin where you feel most called. [9]
To feel your fingers in the dirt as you garden.
To notice the weight of your belly as you bow in prayer.
The grip of your hand on a cane or a crutch.
To feel thirst and hunger and fullness.
To bless each drink of water and bite of food.
To appreciate the smooth texture of the keys of a piano.
Or the clink of mahjong tiles as you discard.
To savor the smell of fried garlic and olive oil.
I know how tender and personal this topic is.
For any ways I missed the mark in my words today, I ask your forgiveness.
If your journey is anything like mine,
it will include many false starts.
The irrepressible urge to run away.
And the ineffable call to return to the body, again and again.
May this be the year that we deepen our relationships to our physical bodies.
May this be the year we understand our bodies as a bridge between olam hazeh and olam haba.
May this be the year we have the courage to know ourselves whole.
Lshanah Tova
Footnotes:
[1] This sermon was written in deep conversation with Rabbis Mónica Gomery, Benay Lappe. And my writing coach Jon Argaman. With tremendous gratitude to my meditation teachers, specifically but not exclusively, Rebecca Bradshaw, Devin Berry, Bonnie Duran and Roxanne Dault. And to the lineage of their Burmese teachers for generously transmitting the Dharma and encouraging me to keep going.
[2] See the Master’s Thesis, “With every bone in my body: Nishmat Kol Chai as an act of embodied prayer to repair the world” by Rabbi Guy Austrian.
[3] Rabbi David Kimhi, affectionately known as the Radak, a medieval commentator, suggests that the inherent purpose of our body parts is to vibrate in gratitude.[4] Exodus 24:7
[5] B.T. Sanhedrin 17b
[6] Vayikra Rabbah 34:3
[7] B.T. Brachot 17b
[8] Mishneh Torah 8:4
[9] And as Ironic as it may be, I know for many of us, reading is an important part of beginning anything new. So I offer you a very short syllabus of books that have been important handholds for me in my own journey to live more fully in my body:
The Body Keeps The Score by Bessel van der Kolk
My Grandmother’s Hands by Resmaa Menakem
Between The World And Me by Ta-Nehesi Coates
And hot off the press, Loving Our Own Bones by Rabbi Julia Watts Belser