The Jewish Practice of Mindfulness

There is no doubt that we Jews have a long history of borrowing from other cultures. In fact, the case could be made that adoption from outside is actually a Jewish tradition!

A good example is food. What is “Jewish food”? Well, it depends on which Jewish community you belong to. Moroccan Jews don’t eat matza balls and Yemeni matza is unlike what we Ashkenazi Jews know. Iraqi Jews don’t eat cholent; they have their own t’beet. I was once at a Shabbat lunch in Cochin, in south India, and when the distinctively Indian-inflected food was served, a young Israeli woman at the table burst into tears. “This is my grandmother’s food,” she cried.

We see this phenomenon playing out in our world right now. It’s almost impossible to attend a bar or bat mitzva or Jewish wedding and not be offered sushi. There is no disputing that sushi is Japanese food, but it can easily be made to conform to the rules of kashrut and it has been wholeheartedly adopted across the broad range of Jewish diversity.

Young Jews growing up today would be entitled to consider sushi to be “Jewish food,” considering that they run into it at every Jewish event they attend. I can just imagine two generations from now when someone will eat a California roll and reflect, “I miss my Bubie’s sushi. It was sogeshmak.”

The same thing is actually true of Jewish spirituality. The book Duties of the Heart [Chovot HaLevavot] is revered as the source-text for the entire Mussar tradition. The author, Rabbi Bahya ibn Paquda, writing in the 11^th century, was the first to address the question of how cultivating the inner life fits within the paradigms of Judaism. Yet many of the ideas – and even the stories – found in the book are known to have roots in the Islamic spiritual tradition of Sufism. Diana Lobel, Professor of Religion and Jewish Studies at Boston University, has published an entire book, called A Sufi-Jewish Dialogue, that traces the Sufi roots of the ideas in Duties of the Heart. It’s undeniable that ibn Paquda was drawing on Sufi sources in developing his Jewish thought.

That was common in his day. In fact, the famous geniza (sacred storage room) of the Ben Ezra Synagogue in Cairo that contained roughly 200,000 manuscripts that were deposited over nearly a thousand years preserved actual Muslim Sufi writings, copied in both Arabic script and Hebrew characters, indicating that some medieval Egyptian Jews were reading – and by the evidence, were influenced by – Sufi literature directly.

And not just in the Muslim world. Another classic Mussar book, Sefer Cheshbon HaNefesh (Book of Spiritual Accounting), was written by Rabbi Menachem Mendel Lefin of Satanov (1749–1826) and first published in Lviv in 1808. Lefin adapted his character development system from the writing of none other than Benjamin Franklin who describes his practice of composing a list of thirteen traits he wanted to improve, focusing on and tracking one per week. Lefin adopted that technique but transformed it into a thoroughly Jewish Mussar practice grounded in Torah, service of God, and refinement of the inner life.

So why do I think that the practice of mindfulness that has become very popular in the contemporary world and that has spilled into the Jewish world is not a valid adoption? I tend to deride the adoption of non-Jewish practices into Jewish circles and then offering them up as “Jewish spirituality.” I call it dressing up non-Jewish practices in tallis and tefillin – at heart they are still not Jewish, with no integration into the deep paradigms that connect all things Jewish to its central foundation. And I do know about mindfulness practice. Ask me about the 10 days I spent in silence on a mountainside in Sri Lanka.

To explain why, I’ll begin with a riff on Ecclesiastes: “There is a time to adopt and a time to refrain from adopting.”

In 11^th century Spain, as in Ukraine in the 19^th century, the Jewish community was religiously and spiritually intact and vibrant on Jewish terms. Adopting elements from non-Jewish sources meant absorbing them into a well-functioning and sound system. The system could eat and digest these bits from other places without becoming unsettled.

That is not the condition of Jewish life today.

The majority of Jews today are highly assimilated. We are orphaned from our spiritual traditions. We are highly intermarried. The overwhelming majority are not adept in Hebrew and so are handicapped in liturgy and literature. The commandments that have been the backbone of Jewish life are reinterpreted as “good deeds.” The rupture of the Holocaust is still unhealed.

The reality is that, on the whole, our Jewish community is not religiously and spiritually intact nor vibrant in Jewish terms. In our situation, rather than borrowing from others, what is needed is that we take on the harder task of digging down into our own soil to retrieve and reinvigorate ideas and practices that have deep Jewish roots, not because they are necessarily “the best,” but because they are integrated with and based upon many other fundamental aspects of Jewish life.

When you study Mussar, you learn Jewish values.

You also inevitably learn Talmud and midrash because the texts of the tradition are built on and frequently quote those sources.

When you pray from the siddur, you learn Hebrew.

When you make blessings, you burnish your relationship with the divine.

When you study Torah, you learn how to bring the heart into the study and not just the mind.

Yom Kippur teaches personal responsibility.

It seems to me that going up and down the aisles of modern life, picking and choosing whatever goods appeal to us, will not cause us to thrive as Jews, individually and collectively. What we need to do is shine light into our own dark storerooms of wisdom to tap into and draw out Jewish ways of living that are integrated into the fundamental paradigms of our peoplehood.

Does what I am saying mean that there is no place for mindfulness in Judaism? Of course not. Jewish practice actually stresses the importance of being mindful. But the Jewish way of cultivating mindfulness does not involve sitting on a cushion and watching your breath. Jewish mindfulness is the inevitable outcome of doing mitzvot. It develops when you sharpen your awareness of the needs of the sick, the elderly and the stranger. When you have a Shabbat practice, at every moment that you are paying attention to the do’s and don’ts that are unique to that holy day, you are sharpening your mindfulness. There is no area of Jewish life that does not depend on, and contribute to honing, mindfulness.

Is this a better path to mindfulness? I can’t say, but I can say that mindfulness developed in this way integrates with all the other spheres of Jewish life, present and past. It draws from them, it contributes to them, and that’s why I see this to be the way that leads to thriving, individually and collectively.

Does this resonate with you?

Alan