Shabbat Experiment Week 5 -- The Spirituality of the Everyday

This week's Torah portion moves from the extraordinary story of the akedah--the binding of Isaac to the ordinary life of a family. There is the arranging of a burial place for Sarah and a wife for Isaac. There are stories about aging and about falling in love. The teaching of this parsha/section of the Torah is that life is lived in ordinary moments. Spirituality is not just to be found standing before the Grand Canyon or at the moment of birth of a child. Spirituality is to be found in the ordinary moments of our lives.

Be-khol derakhekha da-ehu--In all your paths, in everything you do-- know God. (Proverbs 3:6)

This is a profound teaching of Hasidism. We are "spiritual" not just when we pray or study Torah or do mitzvot. Every moment has the challenge and opportunity to be present.

There are two aspects to this. Francis Cook writes: "It is wonderful to learn to do one thing at a time. When we do formal zazen, we just sit; this means we do not add to the sitting any judgments such as how wonderful it is to do zazen, or how badly we are doing at it. We just sit.

When we wash the dishes, we just wash dishes; when we drive on the highway, we just drive. When pain comes, there is just pain, and when pleasure comes, there is just pleasure. A Buddha is someone who is totally at one with his experience at every moment."

Hasidism suggests another layer to the spirituality of the everyday. Since God is everywhere or holiness can be found anywhere, then any moment can be one where we are connected to our spiritual selves. When we remember that connection to the world around us, we can feel more present, more whole. We can respond to petty annoyances or challenges with wisdom and compassion. We discover gratitude for the ordinary blessings of life. We understand that miracles are not the dividing of the Red Sea, but rather such daily acts as breathing, smelling, touching, thinking, and loving.

Be-khol derakhekha da-ehu--Life is in the details of the ordinary.

Look and See

This morning, at waterside, a sparrow flew
to a water rock and landed, by error, on the back
of an eider duck; lightly it fluttered off, amused.
The duck, too, was not provoked, but, you might say, was
laughing.

This afternoon a gull sailing over
our house was casually scratching
its stomach of white feathers with one
pink foot as it flew.

Oh Lord, how shining and festive is your gift to us, if we
only look and see.

Mary Oliver from "Why I Wake Early"

EVERYDAY MIRACLES

The theme for this Shabbat is finding spirituality in the everyday. Below is an excerpt from the introduction to my book "A Book of Life" that explains this concept more fully. This Shabbat we will explore this theme through prayer, reading and songs. We will be joined by three musicians for our first music service of the year.

In this book, I attempt to delineate a different path--one that sees the point of religion as fostering the spiritual, that understands Judaism as a spiritual practice meant to awaken us to life's potential. Moreover, the practice of Judaism should encourage an engagement in the world rather than a withdrawal from it. It is in the ordinary, rather than in the extraordinary that we should seek holiness and meaning.

A precedent for this approach can be found in the religious movement known as Hasidism. Hasidism emerged in the eighteenth century as a form of Jewish mysticism that fired the imagination and captured the allegiance of most of Eastern European Jewry. While contemporary Hasidism is a direct physical descendant of eighteenth century Hasidism, spiritually it has retreated from most of the "radical" teachings mentioned in this book. One of these "radical" doctrines was avodah she-be-gashmiyut, "worship" or "service through the everyday." Hasidism diverged from earlier Jewish mystical movements that had often been ascetic in their approach to the world. Hasidism taught that God was everywhere, in everything: "there is no place where God is absent." Thus the potential to encounter the divine was present at every moment. For Hasidism, everything ordinary contained a spark of holiness. Eating, conversation, work--in fact all mundane activities--had the potential to be made holy. For Hasidism, the life task of the Jew was to make that potential actual. This was done not by saying special prayers or doing things in a special Jewish way, but by being acutely aware of the potential in every moment. Thus the term, avodah she-be-gashmiyut, meant serving God through the material world. Avodah or "service" is the same word used for prayer. In the Hasidic view, all acts become a form of prayer. That was what the philosopher, Abraham Joshua Heschel, had in mind when he explained why he joined civil rights demonstrations: while marching, he said, he was "praying with his feet."

Shabbat Shalom
-- Rabbi Michael Strassfeld