2024 Substack Blog for this week's Torah portion (Original archival  posting follows):

B'Chukotai/As a Driven Leaf

This week's concluding Torah portion to the book of Leviticus/Vayikra offers a powerful metaphor for a question that haunts me every day and that we will explore in our upcoming Zoom series (details below).

In the context of the story, B'chukotai refers to what happens when we walk or don't walk in the way of how humans are meant to encounter life in this world. The particular passage that catches me in this writing describes what happens when humans are separated from even the possibility of connection to ourselves, to each other and all life form:

The sound of a driven leaf shall put them to flight. Fleeing as though from the sword, they shall fall though none pursues.

Lev. 26:36

The passage expresses the state of fear and anxiety that so many of us live in these days. Yes, real danger lurks everywhere in a world where humanity is not yet freed from the stage of killing and humiliating each other in tragic attempts to mediate our pain and meet basic needs. Yes, our world overflows with danger from guns, bombs, hatred, aggression, all the violent and deadly manifestations of how we dehumanize each other.

And still, Torah warns, when you cut yourself off from recognizing that there is always another possibility, that all humans are made in the same image, from the same creative force, you will see only violence and hatred. You will not recognize the goodness and possibilities for living in harmony with each other that also are all around us. You will sink into hopelessness and despair.

I hear this as a survival warning. We need to create experiences for ourselves that nourish and nurture our capacity to connect to each other’s humanity. If I hear every disagreement, every differing narrative, anything that makes me feel uncomfortable,  as a threat, as an insurmountable obstacle to connection, I will always be running away. I will never even glimpse the possibilities beyond war and separation that are always present. I will never experience being heard and understood by people who are different from me. I will be stuck in isolation, separated from any possibility of finding a way for us to survive as a species on this planet.

Torah is calling us to pay attention to how the meaning we make of other people's actions and speech feed either connection to or separation from our shared humanity.  Torah’s strong language warns us to move toward taking greater responsibility for what our meaning making and our actions feed. How do we listen to and express words and actions in ways that reveal each other’s inner fears and vulnerability? That remind us and bring us into shared experiencing of life?

I was born into the community of Jewish Americans. When I hear people assuming that this means I support what they understand to be genocide against Palestinians or that there is something in the nature of Jews that is less than human, it hurts. It scares me for myself and future generations. And when I hear and interpret Jewish and other people's expressions as dehumanizing Palestinians it’s scary and it hurts. In both cases it’s often so painful I just want to dismiss the others and walk away. Or lash out. And I know people from every ethnic, religious and cultural identity are living with these same fears and responses.

When I recover from these moments, I try to remember, what can I turn and return to, to resource myself enough to open to other choices?  How can I hear scary and uncomfortable messages when I am caught in fear that my suffering, my humanity, doesn't matter?  So that I am not living in a state of fear and anxiety from being chased and haunted by falling leaves?

Since October 7 I have taken refuge in many communities in person and on line where we gather to share our suffering. I find over and over that listening to others with curiosity and without judgment, beyond agreeing or disagreeing with what they say, and being listened to in the same way, opens space inside of me to shift out of hopeless aloneness. Being together in this way helps free me to hold my pain and fear in a way that keeps me connected and engaged with others.

I draw on skills from Nonviolent Communication and Mindfulness to create connection in myself to the other person's pain. This can help generate trust between us that I care about their experience and pain, so that space unfolds for me to risk the vulnerability of  expressing my pain.

I think often about a Tibetan Buddhist teaching that says, we can't cover the whole world with leather so that our walking on it is like a caress. So instead, we cover our feet with leather. How can I cover my feet with a caress so that I can walk on the Earth in a way that keeps alive the spark that energizes me to sit at the table together, to stay in the room together , to stay in connection when it's scary and vulnerable?

These are some of the questions and possibilities we want to explore in our upcoming series with the NVC Academy on how to talk about anti-Semitism and Islamophobia in this time of horrible violence. I hope you join us and find sustenance in heart to heart connection.

Here is a link with information and registration:

Upcoming Zoom Course: Responding to Anti-Semitism and Islamophobia in the Context of the Crisis in Israel and Palestine
with Nadya Mahmud Giol and Roberta Wall, Certified Trainers with the Center for Nonviolent Communication

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Previous

This week's concluding Torah portion to the book of Leviticus/Vayikra offers a powerful metaphor for a question that haunts me every day and that we will explore in our upcoming Zoom series (details below).

In the context of the story, B'chukotai refers to what happens when we walk or don't walk in the way of how humans are meant to encounter life in this world. The particular passage that catches me in this writing describes what happens when humans are separated from even the possibility of connection to ourselves, to each other and all life form:

The sound of a driven leaf shall put them to flight. Fleeing as though from the sword, they shall fall though none pursues.

Lev. 26:36

The first lines of this week's Torah portion:

אִם־בְּחֻקֹּתַי תֵּלֵכוּ וְאֶת־מִצְוֺתַי תִּשְׁמְרוּ וַעֲשִׂיתֶם אֹתָם׃

וְנָתַתִּי גִשְׁמֵיכֶם בְּעִתָּם וְנָתְנָה הָאָרֶץ יְבוּלָהּ וְעֵץ הַשָּׂדֶה יִתֵּן פִּרְיוֹ׃ 

If you embody (engrave)  and observe my ways of connecting I will grant your rains in their season, so that the earth shall yield its produce and the trees of the field their fruit.

Leviticus 26:3-4

The closing lines of this week's Torah portion and the Book of Leviticus/Vayikra:

אֵלֶּה הַמִּצְוֺת אֲשֶׁר צִוָּה יְהוָה אֶת־מֹשֶׁה אֶל־בְּנֵי יִשְׂרָאֵל בְּהַר סִינָי׃ 

These are the mitzvot, the bringing-closer acts,  that Presence transmitted to Moses for the children of Israel on Mount Sinai.

Leviticus 27:34

 

The book of Vayikra/Leviticus begins and ends with the Great Animating Spirit calling out to us: Do this, so I can animate and sustain all life. Stay close to me, so my vitality animates earth and the heavens to support life.

Throughout this book of Torah, Eternally Present cries out, transmits, exhorts, reminds, calls, speaks: Listen, observe, attend to, be affected by the cries of heaven and earth. Pay attention to the interconnection and interdependence of all life. There is a pattern for you to discern and embody in our daily individual and collective living so that we learn to live in harmony with all life.

This is for the generations to come, each one to be affected by what it sees and learns, and to carry forward.

B'chukotai is an exhortation to engrave this pattern on our hearts. Don't just hear this and walk away. Don't just come on a retreat and then go home to your life as it was before the retreat. Don't just consume information. Be affected. Arrange your lives, your hearts, around the insights of interdependence and interconnection, around the daily and seasonal rituals that will hold you together in love with each other and with the seasons and the rains and the creation.

Engrave the experiences of interconnectedness on your heart so you can embody them in how you live. When the heart knows and leads with reverence for all life, as Charles Eisenstein writes, we participate in bringing about the more beautiful world our hearts know is possible.

We are living in a time of devastating disconnection and polarization  from each other and from a healthy relationship to our planet.  Healing ourselves so we can live in harmony and love with each other is crucial to fixing our relationship with  Earth. Here is a story of how I practice with Buddhism and Nonviolent Communication to heal and open my heart so my choices are affected by other people's needs and experiences.

Three Days of Beginning Anew

I learned this practice many years ago from Thich Nhat Hanh (called "Thay," teacher) at Deer Park Monastery in Southern California. About 40 students and 100 nuns and monks were together for a three-month retreat.

This was Thich Nhat Hanh s first and only three-month retreat in the U.S. Members of the Order of Interbeing were invited to join. I didn't want to miss the opportunity to be with my teacher and taste the depth of the practice that the nuns and monks lived every day. The timing seemed to work for me. I had resigned from my job, my younger daughter was away at college and my older daughter was launched into her working life.

This was, however, before the age of ubiquitous cell phones.

There was a communal payphone shared by a hundred or so people at the monastery. When I called my daughter during one of the limited periods when we weren't in silence or group practice, I heard anger and pain in her voice.

At the next question and answer session, I asked Thay, "What do I do when my daughter is mad at me?" He answered by giving a practice to the entire sangha. He called the practice “Three Days of Beginning Anew,” a three-day practice over the New Year’s weekend that was coming up.

Day One

• • Go to a quiet place, perhaps up the mountain above the monastery. Sit with the situation and write a letter to the other person.  Pour out what is in your heart. (As you will see in a moment, this first letter is for you, not to send.)
  • Meditate on how the disconnect feels for you and how your story about it is affecting how you feel. This is engraving, embodying in your heart, what the experience of disconnection is about for you.
  • From an NVC and Buddhism perspective, we are making inner and outer space to feel the feelings. You are getting proximate and intimate with how this is living in you and through you.

Day Two

• • Go up the mountain, contemplate and write a new letter, sharing what you have discovered about how you feel, how this is affecting you. This letter also is just for you, not to send.

Day Three

• • Go up the mountain and continue contemplating and writing until you see the whole story differently. Until you have a new understanding of the situation and a new strategy. A new understanding that includes the other person's experience and how you are affected by their experience.
  • This is what Thich Nhat Hanh was teaching us. Feel your own feelings and disappointments and anger. Let it touch you deeply. Let yourself be affected by it.
  • Keep going with that until you fill yourself with empathy for whatever arises within you. Until your self-empathy cup overflows.
  • Let the overflowing transform into curiosity for the other person's experience. Let this arise organically, out of your new embodied experience.
  • Let yourself touch the other person's experience. How close can you come to seeing the situation through their eyes?
  • Now move to what you can take responsibility for changing.
  • Write a new letter to let the other person know what you have realized and what you are going to do about it.

You are ready to share the letter, Thay told us, when you know and write what you are offering to do differently.

This also is the capping point to the NVC process. How have you been affected by a new understanding and connection to both your longings, dreams and needs and the other person's?

What specific doable steps come out of your new understanding? A strategy, a request to yourself, that comes from deep connection to both of your needs?

Returning to Interconnection

Over the days of this process, I walked up the mountain and sat. I realized that I felt scared, really scared, that this most precious relationship of mine would be weakened by my spiritual practice instead of deepened. I had chosen this path to deepen my connection to love and loved ones. Now I feared that my beloved daughter would have the experience of withdrawal of mother-love. That was a deep wounding from my own life that lived in me as a trauma.

Self Empathy

I gave myself empathy by connecting to my feelings of fear and hurt. Instead of reacting to my daughter out of my own wounding, I gave myself  the understanding and care that I wanted. I held myself as a wounded child, noting how stressed I felt to find a pay phone and time from the retreat schedule to call and connect with my daughter. I felt how open and tender my heart was from days of meditation and heart-searching. I was in a process of healing from my own wounding. I realized that self connection and connection with other friends on retreat would give me the healing I needed and the space to be with my daughter's feelings and needs. I sat with all of this, giving myself empathy for my fears and pain and yearnings.

I was just beginning my Nonviolent Communication practice, and it helped me realize that going to my daughter for empathy was not a strategy that would meet my deepest needs for care, connection and love. I wanted a choice of action to flow from my heart that would bring love and care to my daughter. My deepest yearning was for a door to opening my heart to my daughter and her needs. I wanted to resource this in myself, to heal the ancestral wounding that I was carrying.

The NVC distinction between the need for love, understanding and compassion, and the strategies for meeting those needs — a choice between going to my daughter or sourcing it within myself (or with other practitioner-friends) — helped me focus on my own need for healing. This filled and stirred my heart so I could open to her heart and how she was experiencing what was going on.

I began to feel space and capacity to see what I could do to change the situation. I realized she already had told me what she wanted. Before my own process of self empathy I hadn't taken in that she wanted to be able to contact me when she chose to.

I remembered the word “mutuality“ on the NVC Needs inventory list. She was yearning for mutuality between us. That led me to a deeper connection to what she yearned for. Power sharing, choice, would give her access to self-care, connection, love and empowerment. The means and resources for her to meet needs for the presence and comfort of mother love.

Empowerment and choice is core for all of us and especially for young people and others who have less access to power and resources in relationships and society. Young people want to step out into the world and still know that their parent, or trusted adult, will be readily available. Not just when it's convenient for us or when we want connection with them.

I meditated on all this on the mountain above the Monastery. And felt my heart overflowing with love and yearning to connect from a softer place.

Finally writing the letter!

On day three I realized that my niece who also was on retreat with us had a cell phone! I approached her during one of the socializing times in the schedule and told her the situation. We devised a plan where my daughter could call her cell phone and my niece would let me know she wanted to talk to me.

Now I was ready to write a letter to her. I decided to call her from the cell phone and tell her that I had meditated on the situation, heard her, been affected by her experience, what I proposed to do to change the situation.

She began to cry. “Really,” she said, “really, you'd do that, call me whenever I want to talk to you, while you are there on retreat?”

“Yes,” I said, unhesitatingly, “yes, I wanted to. Is there anything else you'd like me to hear?”

"Yes," she said, "for whatever reason. I want to call you "just because." I don't want to have a reason."

My heart broke open when I heard her say that. I heard her need for connection, love and presence. I felt the energy of healing arising. We all share the same needs.

Healing Processes

These practices from Torah, NVC and Buddhist mindfulness, aren't mere procedures. They are transformative processes. When we intentionally engrave the experience of connection into our hearts, and let our hearts be affected, we transform generational trauma, ourselves, and our relationships.