Wholeness (Malkhut/Shechinah)

Sometimes I do not feel like my whole self. When I begin to get depleted I can feel disconnected, fragmented, cut off from some of my parts, from some of my selves. It can feel as though they are hiding from me, or perhaps we are hiding from each other. 

One of the signposts I have learned to notice that tells me that this disconnection might be happening is that I find myself seeking out distractions - often in the form of bad television, word games, and spatial logic puzzles. Social media was a very easy place to find this kind of distraction until I made a clean break from all of those platforms a year ago. 

But deleting social media and removing game apps from my phone does not address the root problem. Of course, the apps that are designed to capture my attention and bury me in an avalanche of distraction do not help with my feelings of fragmentation and disconnection. They actively prey on those feelings and they certainly exacerbate the depletion of my energy, but they are not the cause. The cause is something deeper, so the solution must be as well. 

When I find myself seeking out distraction it is usually because I know that there are feelings that I do not want to sit with. I know what sitting with grief and fear and rage feels like. I know the pain that welcoming those emotions in can bring. I know the energy that releasing them requires. And when my capacity is low I do not trust that I can handle that kind of emotional outpouring. So in those moments of depletion, when I begin to feel those emotions start bubbling up, when I begin to feel the discordance and the discomfort, I choose distraction, I choose compartmentalization. 

But I do not stay there. I have learned that these strategies of avoidance can be effective in the short term but they come with an expiration date. If I don’t tend to the root issue, if I don’t sit with the grief, confront the fear, release the rage, then they will start to consume me, the fragmentation and disconnection will grow deeper, and the discord I feel in my body will get louder until I have to address it head on or disassociate from it completely. 

My hope is that the distractions can buy me some time to rest, to defuse the intensity of the feelings, and to set up the conditions in which I can do a full confrontation. 

These full confrontations with myself and my emotions often take the shape of a ritual. I light candles, I give myself journaling and meditation prompts, I play music to invite movement into my body, and I make sure to go outside, touch a plant, and look up at the sky. These connection points with my senses pull me out of my head, out of the panic-inducing thought spirals, and allow me to connect with my body, with my breath, with the wider world around me. 

And in those connections I begin making my way back to wholeness. And in my wholeness I begin to feel at one with myself, my communities, and the larger ecosystems that my life is bound up in. And then my breath flows with ease.

Core Values (Yesod)

I have been spending a lot of time recently thinking about values, specifically values as the pillars that we build our life upon, as the lenses that we look at the world through, and as the engines that we want to have drive our actions. 

About ten years ago I started drawing a picture of a person holding a kite. The person was a stick figure who lived on the bottom left corner of the page and the kite would be flying up near the top right. On the edges of the kite I would write out the core values that I wanted to center in my life. On the string holding the kite and the ribbons flying off of it I would write out other values that I wanted to remember, values that would help me live up to those core values on the kite. I’m not sure why I chose the imagery of the kite, perhaps I wanted to represent reaching and pulling at the same time. Whatever the reason, the imagery stuck and this stick figure holding a kite became the visual representation of my core values. It aslo became something I would repeatedly draw in all my various notebooks, a doodle, something to do with my hands while sitting through a meeting. 

Eventually I noticed that the values I wrote along the drawing would change. Sometimes a value moved its position, other times a value would be replaced. I noticed that each time I sat down to draw this image I was honing my list of values, and I was developing a deeper understanding of them, of how they operated in me, of how they related to each other. 

Spending time reflecting on and discovering what it is that we want to center ourselves in, that we want to be dirven by, that we want expressed in the ways we show up to the world, is one of the ways that I believe we can become better at knowing ourselves. And I believe that the more we know ourselves, the more we can actually be ourselves, and the more we can be ourselves, the more ease we will find in navigating this world. 

So what are values and how do we know what ours are? 

One way I think about discovering my values is to ask what it is that sits at the core of the core of my being? If I strip away all of the habits, all of the context, all of the conditioning, what am I left with? What is my essence made of? 

When I think about these question for myself, the answer I always come to is love. What else is there? Love of people, love of experience, love of all that is possible in the world. 

And when I trace love through my life I see that it has always been a driving force in obvious and also in not so obvious ways. When I look at my adolescent self and reflect on the anger that drove me into activism, and the fire that drove me to put so much energy into creating revolutionary spaces in the world, one of the primary things I see underneath that fire and anger was how deeply heartbroken I was about the world. 

I believe we all experience this heartbreak. The world that we are born into is not the world that we would want. Perhaps it never was, perhaps we are born dreamers, perhaps it is our lot to be aspirational, to be utopian in our imagination. Children at their core are full of love, they want to be loved, they demand to be loved. They tell you what they want and need, they instruct you as to how you might fulfill those needs for them. 

Thinking of children also makes me think of curiosity, of asking questions and doing the work of putting the world together. I suspect curiosity might be another one of my core values, another piece of my essence, but there’s something about it that feels a degree off. As much as I love and have always loved learning I am not a traditional learner. I do not devour information the way many of my most curious friends do. There have been and continue to be times in my life that I struggle with the fact that my form of learning is not primarily through reading books and gathering information, but is more through paying attention to my emotions and experiences. 

When I think about how curiosity lives in me it is a curiosity that isn’t about knowledge and answers, it is about possibility and questions. It’s almost as though as soon as something can be known it is no longer interesting to me. Perhaps a better word than curiosity for me is wonder. Wonder is expansive, wonder is interested not in an answer but in the question, in the possibility of what might be. Wonder embraces uncertainty, it leaves room for that which we cannot understand, it is incapable of wrapping itself up in a neat bow. Wonder is what drives me to look at the moon, know that I cannot completely wrap my head around it, and smile at the mystery. 

Wonder and Love make for great foundational partners, and feel quite true to my essence. But there is something else there. When I first did this exercise, I found myself feeling slightly dissatisfied with leaving it just at that. And I came to understand a truth about myself that I had known for some time and that made me a little uncomfortable. The third element of my essence is dissatisfaction itself. Along with that understanding came the realization that the way my dissatisfaction showed up was causing me quite a bit of suffering. It was keeping me chasing a set of moving goal posts. It was compelling me to value my losses more than my wins. And it was punishing me for never being enough. 

And this raises for me a question about core values: what do I do when there is something core to my being that I’m not sure I want to build my foundation upon, that I’m not sure I want to see the world through the prism of, that I’m not sure I want driving my actions? 

The truth is, all of our values contain a shadow side. They can sometimes show up in ways that are not great for us, that are not representative of the ways that we aspire to be. When my heart is broken love can send me into fits of rage and anger. When I am sad wonder can lead me into negative thought spirals. Likewise, dissatisfaction, which can lead with its shadow, has also shown up in ways help me reach the version of myself that I aspire towards. 

In the right light, my dissatisfaction shows up as rigor, it propels me into action, pushes me into the world even when I want to retreat from it.  Dissatisfaction can be the catalyst that drives me to take on hard things and not give up when at first they don’t work out.

With all of that being said, dissatisfaction does not show up on my kite. I do not reject it because it is a part of me, and I have learned to see the ways it is a helpful part of me - a part of me that I can embrace. But that doesn’t mean I want to center it in my life, in the image that I look towards. It is a core part of me but I have decided to not have it live as one of my core values. 

And that brings us back to my practice of drawing and redrawing the kite. When we take time to sit with the attributes that are core to our beings, to reflect of which parts of them we do and do not want to call into our lives, to decide on the values that we want to call ourselves towards, we get to bring our own agency into the creation of the person we are and the person we aspire to continue growing towards. 

This practice of naming and describing and regularly mulling over and reconsidering our values, I believe, is one way that we can do the work of becoming the person we would most like to see ourselves as.

Acceptance (Hod)

God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.

~Reinhold Niebuhr 

In my early adolescence I remember coming to an understanding that the world I had been born into was deeply not okay, and asking myself how I could be okay living that world: How could I be okay living in a world where innocent children were killed by the police because of the color of their skin? How could I be okay living in a world where wars were fought for control over natural resources or animals were factory farmed for mass consumption? How could I be okay living in a world whose entire system was designed to benefit a very few while exploiting so many? 

I struggled for a long time with how I could accept living in such a world and concluded that I could not. I could not accept this world as it was. I could not just go about my life and pay attention in school. I could not pretend that the little bubble of safety that surrounded me was real, permanent, or in any way deserved. But when I looked around at my peers and my teachers, it seemed to me like they had all accepted it, like they were okay with it. They all seemed to just be going along with the program, unperturbed by these larger questions, and certainly uninterested in my discontent at the state of things. 

It was this version of acceptance that I saw around me that made me bump up against the serenity prayer the first time I came across it. Accept the things I cannot change… But that was all I saw around me: an acceptance of things as they are; a deep belief - almost to the point of an ideology -in throwing one's hands up at the larger problems of the world; an almost rabid commitment to the maintenance of the status quo. So, accept the things I cannot change… Thank you, but no. I will continue spending my energy fighting against all the things… whether I have the ability to change them or not. 

I was living in a paradigm where acceptance was synonymous with defeat, with weakness, with appeasement, with rolling over and letting the powers that be march across your chest while they spit on your face. I didn’t want to accept, I wanted to fight, I wanted to win, and if I wasn’t going to win, I wanted to die trying. Either way, I  was certainly not going to embrace defeat, and I had no interest in meeting acceptance with any modicum of serenity. If I knew anything, I knew that I was not okay with things as they were and the very notion of acceptance felt like a betrayal of that knowing, felt like it required condoning all of those things that I knew were wrong.

But this was before my first experience of burnout. This was before I did nearly die trying. I was not, to my knowledge, near a physical death but I was certainly on the brink of a spiritual one. My refusal to accept the limits of my own capacity, or the things in the world that were beyond my scope of influence had me entrenched in a fight, not with the powers that be, not with any oppressive force, but with reality itself. My refusal to accept things as they are brought the fight I was so poised to have to the only place it could exist… myself. Because reality cannot be different than it is, my refusal to accept it could only manifest in anxiety or depression, physical and existential pain I would exert upon my own body and being. It was this internal wear and tear as much as any external over exertion that led directly to my burnout. Eventually, in order to come out of it, to begin my healing and recovery, I would have to accept the reality I was living in, I would have to accept the limitations of my own capacity, and I would have to accept that failing to achieve something that I so badly wanted did not, in fact, have to be the end of my life. 

This experience of burnout would not be the last time I caught myself fighting reality, nor was it the first. In my early twenties, during the summer between my first and second year teaching, my father was diagnosed with cancer. It was so unexpected that it took a few times hearing the news before it registered, and even then I didn’t get anywhere near understanding, let alone accepting it.  Over the course of the 13 months between his diagnosis and his death I mostly lived inside of a delusion. It was a delusion comprised mainly of denial, rationalization, and a good amount of disassociation. I knew he was sick, I knew he could die, I just didn’t think he would. 

And then he did. And the delusion broke. Reality set it very quickly: the reality that I would never see him again, the reality that there was nothing I could do, and nothing I could have done. The choice for me then became: to fight this reality or to accept it, to live inside the delusion that no longer had any legs to stand on or to face the hard truth that my life would never be the same - that my world would never be the same. I was tempted to keep fighting: to stay in bed, to live in the world of my dreams where he was still alive, where this whole experience with cancer never happened. In my dreams I could rewrite the story of the previous year. And I did many times. But I kept on waking up, and with each return to consciousness came the agony of my grief. Reality is not kind, but it is undefeated. So I chose acceptance.

This, however, is where I still disagree with Niebuhr. I do not think acceptance comes through serenity, but through struggle. In my experience there is nothing peaceful in the process of coming to accept a reality that I do not like, rather it is an internally violent process of facing my pain, of learning to sit with my grief, of letting the emotions manifest in physical form and move out of my body - through crying, and shaking, and wailing, and punching my pillow while screaming into it until I collapse. 

But through this painful process to look reality straight in the eyes, face to face and come to acceptance, I have found a kind of serenity, an ability to walk in the world with a modicum of peace, with an ability to breath and to be, in the face of just how fucked everything is and has been for a very long time. Sitting with that reality, sitting in the discomfort of what truly is can be deeply unsettling, even disregulating. Staying in it, not slipping into delusion, not slipping into despair, takes a lot of practice, takes a lot of fortitude. I think it might take as much - if not more - courage to accept reality as it actually is than it does to change the things we can.

So in this or any moment when a reality we do not want and are not okay with starts settling in, the advice I would give my younger self, the advice I would hope that I could follow today would be: to look that reality directly in the eyes, face to face; to not slip into a delusion that it can be different than it is; to not become okay with it and to not fight it; to sit with the discomfort of it, with the grief, with the rage, with pain of that reality; to let those emotions manifest and release - to cry, and shake, and wail, and punch the pillow, and collapse. Then… to stand up; to breathe; to look at the beauty that is still here in the world and recognize that as reality as well; to call a friend; and find the courage to change something you can. Because once you’ve found the courage to see things as they actually are, the courage to change something that can be changed will not be hard to muster.

Hope (Netzach)

In the late fall of 2006 I sat down to read “The Audacity of Hope”, the book that was the unofficial launch of Barack Obama’s first presidential campaign. Like many people in my circles there was a lot that resonated with me in the framing and the vision that was being put forward. I liked his writing, I was excited about him as a national figure, I was even inspired by the notion that we could orient ourselves towards the future, that we could be audacious in our hope of what that future could look like. 

But even then, at the height of the “hope and change” fervor, despite the “got hope?” t-shirt that was on regular rotation in my wardrobe, there was something about the notion of hope and the way that people spoke about it that didn’t quite sit right with me. This hope, I would come to realize, did not question the fundamental inequities in the power structure of our society but was in fact rooted in a belief in those structures, in their ability to reform themselves, in the possibility that the people in power would suddenly act against their interest and stop the consolidation of that power to become motivated by the common good. It was, in my estimation, a hope that lived inside of a delusion, the delusion that things in this world, in this society, are better than they actually are. 

It is this delusion that colors my experience of hope when I see it enacted in what I understand to be irresponsible ways. It is this delusion that turns hope into magical thinking, that makes hope feel like an abdication of responsibility, like an act of throwing up one's hand and relinquishing agency. It is this delusional belief that the system that we live inside of is inherently just and simply needs to be tweaked in order to achieve all of the dreams of our “democratic” society that makes hope feel false to me, that makes it feel like it is not based in reality. 

Delusional hope looks at this political moment, at the rise of fascism in the place we call the United States and says: "this is not who we are, so maybe all these people who are supporting the wannabe dictator and his fascist party, who I just don't understand, will wake up, or come to their senses”. This hope is delusional about the present because it is rooted in a delusional story and framing about the past. "This is not who we are" is a delusional statement when talking about a racist and anti-democratic movement in the place we call the United States. The “we” who has made up the empowered citizenship of the United States has a long history of racist and anti-democratic tendencies. It is a core component of the power structures here, not some kind of bug or defect. It is the operating system. Any hope that does not root itself in that starting point is delusional and will inevitably lead people towards disappointment and confusion as to “how things got to this point”. 

So what would a hope that is rooted in reality look like? 

The hope I have is rooted in my belief in people, not systems. I understand that all of our actions are driven by the ways we have internalized these systems. My hope is not that the systems will save us. My hope is not that any person or group of people will save us. My hope has nothing to do with being saved at all. My hope is not utopian. It is not about suddenly solving or fixing all of the ills in our world. It is a hope that is not outcome dependent.

My hope has more humility than that. My belief in people is not that we will suddenly “be better” but that we have the ability to heal, to repair, to try and keep trying. My hope is that I believe in the future - not that in the future things will be better, not that suffering will end or conflict will cease to exist, but that the future will come and we, as people who are here, will continue to meet it, sometimes at our best, and sometimes not. 

It is not a hope without pain. It is not a hope that always leaves me feeling better. It is a hope that requires a clear and honest look at the world around me. It is a hope that requires a deep and honest look at myself. It is a hope that believes that this act of clear reflection and confrontation with the hard things will ultimately make for a more joyful and fulfilling life. 

My hope holds the truth that the world is beautiful, and that life is a miracle, while also not shying away from the truth that the world contains tragedy, that people are not always at our best, and that the systems that we’ve built often divide us and bring out the worst of us.

Mine is a hope that can hold both sides of that truth and continue to believe in life. My hope comes with the requirement that I show up to life with an understanding of my sacred responsibility to dedicate myself to the betterment of my communities and the world. It is a hope that manifests in the practice of paradox, in the centering of relationships, and in the insistence on experiencing the full range of human emotion in response to the full range of human experience. 

Stillness (Tiferet)

Stillness is a deep breath. The air comes into my body and fills my chest. The oxygen awakens my senses and quiets my mind, inviting me to pay deeper attention to the physical sensations and let go of the thoughts grasping for airtime. The weight of the day lifts, freeing me from the tension I hold, allowing my body to release the shape it has formed around. Stillness invites me to be firm and flexible, not confined to a single shape but not entirely without form. Stillness invites me to hold it all loosely. 

Stillness is a mountain, rising over a forest and reflecting itself in the lake below. Stillness is the air, crisp and clean, open and vast, yet not overwhelming. 

Stillness invites thought and the absence of thought. It holds everything together, making space for anything to happen, and also for no thing to happen. 

Stillness can be scary - alone with my thoughts, alone with myself. And yet, to sink into stillness is the surest, fastest, and cleanest way we can crack ourselves open. 

When my mind and my life and my emotional landscape get too busy, I know that stillness is always there, waiting for me, ready to help bring me back to myself, to my center. Whether I will seek that stillness out, whether I will let it find me… that is the question. 

Today my answer was yes. Today stillness found me on a lake, and up a mountain, and in the breath that I let myself notice. 

Portal (Gevurah)

A Sukkah is a temporary structure that is traditionally built leading up to the holiday of Sukkot - the ancient Jewish festival of harvest and ingathering that has come to represent our people’s history as both agricultural and nomadic people. The Sukkah - like many ritual objects - has a set of parameters it must meet in order to be considered kosher (read: legitimate or “up to snuff”). Amongst other things the Sukkah cannot be a permanent structure, must have at least three walls, and a roof that is made of branches and leaves that allow enough space for the sky to be visible through it. The Sukkah is meant to be decorated with nature's bounty: flowers, gords, and fruit; as well as human (preferable children) made decorations including paper ringlets and other arts & craft projects that can hang from the roof. 

Once constructed the Sukkah becomes the center of our activity for the week. We eat our meals in it, we sleep in it, and we perform rituals in it. But there is more. It is not simply a structure, a semi-outdoor room, a temporary dwelling. It is a portal. 

The Sukkah is a place with transformational properties. Its porous nature blurs the boundaries of space as well as time. The Sukkah is neither indoors nor outdoors, enclosed nor open, not quite a public space yet not entirely private. The Sukkah’s temporary nature creates defined space where at other times the space it occupies is undefined, leaving the spiritual outline of a container long past the time in which it actually stands. 

Like any portal, the Sukkah transports us out of the mundanity of our regular lives and into moments where more and, perhaps most importantly, different things are possible. In the Sukkah a regular meal amongst family and friends can turn into an opportunity to speak about loved ones who have passed by inviting them to join us in our ritual meal. In the Sukkah we can take turns breathing in the fragrance of seasonal fruits and plants while attuning ourselves to the entirety of the world we stand on, all under the loving gaze of our community without the kind of self-consciousness that sort of thing would normally evoke. In the Sukkah we can find ourselves discussing the great mysteries of life and the vastness of the unknowns without the impulse to flee from such discomfort into the numbing allure of our phones. In the Sukkah we can change our relationship with time, drop fully into our bodies, and experience the fullness of the present moment… even if only for a moment. 

A portal is porous. Its strength comes from having a boundary that is clear and yet a little open. It is the doorway not the wall. It holds the paradox of structure and movement. It allows us to stay in our own bodies while also connecting to the greater body, to be ourselves while also seeing each other. 

Forgiveness (Chesed)

It wasn’t a fight. In some ways Curtis and I had been fighting for weeks. It was a fairly typical feud between two not yet eleven-year-old boys who were adjusting to suddenly finding themselves in middle school: bickering, teasing each other, a snide comment here and there. A few times over the first weeks of the school year  there was a more direct confrontation, but the conflict had not yet gotten physical. 

On this particular day I’m pretty sure I was the one who started it. It was a rainy day in early October so we had indoor recess in our homerooms. The substitute teacher was passing out lunch calendars for the month and I made a stupid comment about our upcoming birthdays. I might have proclaimed that they were serving a better lunch on my birthday, I might have simply noted that I was a couple days older than him. Whatever I said, it got us going at each other again. 

The sub, not knowing either of us or the dynamic that had been brewing for the past month, was unable to settle either of us down and, as the period was ending, our verbal sparring turned into some shoving that resulted in lots of books and papers being knocked to the ground, and my nearly eleven-year-old body shaking and holding back tears - overcome by an emotional cocktail of rage, embarrassment, and adrenaline that was new and confusing. 

Half an hour later, in the middle of band class, I was still shaking to the point that I could barely hold the drumsticks steady in my hands when I was called into the Vice Principal’s office. He had heard about what happened from the sub and decided that we had gotten into a fight and therefore would each receive a two day suspension. Suddenly on the same side we tried to argue, it wasn’t a fight we both said, but there was no arguing to be had, no negotiation, no pleading of our case. The Vice Principal had made his ruling, it was a fight, and the sentence for a fight was suspension. 

It was a two day suspension but because of the quirks of the calendar and the Jewish holidays, it would be nearly a week before I could return to school. Generally a week off school is not something I would have been upset about, but this felt different - there was an injustice at play, and no matter how much I didn’t like school, I liked the idea of being subject to mandatory sentencing policies and authoritarian rule even less. 

But there was something else at play as well, something that lived underneath my mask of righteous indignation, justified as it was. I felt bad about the fight. Not the specific moment that the teacher and Vice Principal called a fight, but the entire conflict. I felt bad that I had been feuding with this other kid. I felt bad that I didn’t know why we were fighting, why we weren’t getting along. I didn’t like being in conflict, I didn’t like the fact that there was no opportunity to get to the bottom of the conflict, I didn’t like not being able to find resolution. 

Two days later, standing outside a Synagogue on Yom Kippur, the Jewish day of atonement, I suddenly got very upset. It took me a minute to understand what I was so upset about and I’m not sure I actually told anyone what I was feeling. 

Yom Kippur is the day in the Jewish Calendar when we are supposed to ask forgiveness from all the people we have wronged in the past year.  I was not going to be able to do that. My fight with Curtis from just a few days before was going to remain unresolved. I was going to enter the new year without having apologized for my part in the conflict we had been subsumed by. It was a devastating feeling. 

Recounting this story thirty-five years later, I want to hold that younger version of myself close. I admire his integrity. I admire the seriousness with which he took the idea of forgiveness, the idea that living up to his best self required reconciliation with those he had harmed. And I want to invite him to perhaps hold it all a little more loosely, to be a little less hard on himself, to give himself a little grace for the ways that he was unable to live up to that best self.

I hope, as I prepare to enter Yom Kippur this evening, that I have the courage to face the ways I have not lived up to my best self in this past year and ask forgiveness from the people I have harmed. I hope I have the grace to forgive the people who have harmed me. And I hope I have the wisdom to find forgiveness for all the ways that I continue not living up to that best version of myself.