About six months ago, I was speaking with a writer-friend who lives in DC, and she mentioned to me that she needed to finish a revision of her book before she flew out to Los Angeles, because then she wouldn’t be able to work on it. Why not, I asked. “It’s a week-long silent retreat,” she said. “You don’t speak, you don’t read, you don’t write.”
That sounded as about as far from my comfort zone as one could get, but it intrigued me. “What do you do all day?” I asked, knowing virtually nothing about the “mindfulness world.” “I could tell you,” she said, “but go on the website—it’ll give you a much better idea.”
So I did. And though this was a world about which I knew nothing and which was unlike anything I’d ever done, I was curious—and looking for new tools to calm a life that had been upended by the war and the catastrophe into which Israel had sunk. So I signed up for the week-long retreat in Israel.
My family, who can’t really imagine me doing anything that doesn’t involve reading, talking or writing (plus some biking here and there), could scarcely contain their surprise that I would want to do something like this. One of my brothers suggested that he was going to start a family pool: how many days of no speaking or reading until he just gets up and leaves? My wife suggested an emendation to the pool: how many days until he gets thrown out?
But I didn’t get thrown out, and I didn’t leave. I had what was, without question, one of the most powerful, personal, religious, spiritual and Jewish experiences of my entire life, an experience that I have tried to take with me in the the months that have followed.
Before this retreat, I’d known nothing about the world of Jewish meditation, about the world that blends eastern wisdom with Jewish practice and text. And I found it more compelling than I would ever have imagined.
So I asked Rabbi Dr. James Jacobson-Maisels, the scholar and personality at the core of this movement and who founded Or HaLev, to speak with his about his work, his organization and the dream for Jewish life that lies behind everything that he does.
You can read more about Or Halev here.
Rabbi Dr. James Jacobson-Maisels has a doctorate in Jewish Studies from the University of Chicago and he has been studying and teaching meditation and Jewish spirituality for over twenty five years.
He was the founding Rosh Yeshiva of Romemu Yeshiva and has taught and innovated programs in Jewish thought, mysticism, spiritual practices and meditation at the Pardes Institute of Jewish Studies, Haifa University, Yeshivat Hadar and in a variety of settings around the world.
He strives to integrate his study with his practice, and to help teach and live Judaism as a spiritual discipline.
The link at the top of this posting will take you to the full recording of our conversation; below you will find a transcript for those who prefer to read, prepared for our paid subscribers.
I’m going to start today’s conversation in a slightly unusual way, which is with a personal story. Sarah Hurwitz, who has a book now on the New York Times’ Best seller list. I was on the podcast not all that long ago. In fact, speaking about her new book called As a Jew. She’s the author also of a book that came out a few years earlier called Here All Along, which is also a phenomenal book. But she and I are friends. And I was actually reading a rough draft of her book that just came out, I don’t know, in, I guess, November, December of last year. And she said to me, We got to finish this in the next couple of days because I have to fly out to California to the Brandeis Bardeen Center, where I actually had spent many, many summers with my wife and kids when I was teaching at BCI, the Brandeis Bardeen Institute. And I said, Oh, wow, what are you going to Brandeis Bardeen for? I actually hadn’t heard that name in a long time. And she goes, I’m going to a meditation retreat. And I said, Well, tell me about it. How long is it? Whatever. She said, It’s a silent retreat for seven days. So I said, You, Sarah Horowitz, are the woman of words. You sit there for seven days and you don’t talk? She She goes, You don’t talk, you don’t read, you don’t write. I said, Well, what do you do all day? And she said, You know what? I could tell you, but it’ll be much better if you just go on this organization’s website. It’s called ‘Or Halev’, that means in Hebrew, the light of the heart, and go on the website and look at it. And I did. And for those people who know me a little bit, they probably know how far this is from my comfort zone. But I looked at this and it was so far from my comfort zone that I said to myself, I’m going to do this. This is just the next step for me, trying to figure out what this next chapter of my life is going to be about and so forth.
One of the things that was actually very confusing about this in the weeks that followed was when I told my various family members that I was going to do this. My brother immediately said that he was going to start a family pool and people could bet on when I packed my bags and fled because I can’t go seven days without talking, reading or whatever. And my wife suggested an emendation, and she said, No, the bet should not be on when he leaves. The bet should be on when he gets thrown out. But the long and the short of it is, is that I did not leave, I did not get thrown out. And I’m not being hyperbolic when I say that I had a life-transforming experience and one of the most powerful weeks of my life in ways that I didn’t expect. I’m not sure really what I did expect, but it really changed my understanding of what mindfulness is all about, of what meditation is all about. I asked the person who is the founder and head of the organization, Or Halev, that runs this and many, many other programs that we’re going to hear about, rabbi Dr. James Jacobson-Maisels, to come on today and to tell us about himself, about the work, what’s the vision for Jewish life behind this organization, what’s perhaps maybe even the vision for Israeli society and Jewish communities abroad, because it does work internationally in the US, in the UK and so forth, to hear about a part of Jewish life in Israel and beyond that I think most of our listeners probably have no idea even exists.
So James, thank you very much for taking time. I’ve been looking forward to this conversation for a really long time, and I’m delighted that so many people are going to get to learn about you and about the work that you’re doing as a result. So thanks again.
Thank you so much for having me here, Daniel. Really excited to be here and talking together.
So let’s just start with you. How does a nice Jewish boy from the Midwest, if I’m not mistaken, end up in Israel with a rabbinic degree, with a PhD, and doing the work that you’re doing? Most people with PhDs go ahead and do either academia or other things. You’re very much outside the usual norm of what people do. How did this all come to percolate for you in your own life?
In brief, I grew up in a pretty engaged Jewish household, but not in an extensive Jewish community. We were very involved in Jewish community, but I grew up in rural Pennsylvania, and then we moved to Detroit. Where I grew up, I was the only Jewish kid in my school. So not a lot of Jews right around us, but a family who was very engaged and very committed, and so had a rich, beautiful, and very joyous Jewish upbringing. Kept that with me. Then really what happened in terms of this whole progression was that in college, I hit a point where I was just suffering a lot. I was suffering a lot. I had what I came to realize, but didn’t realize at the beginning, depression, clinical depression, anxiety, disorder, and a whole series of physical pains in my body, some of which left me fairly disabled for about 10 years in terms of the arm pain I was experiencing. I’d already been engaged in Judaism at that point. I had to come to Israel for a year before I went to college on your end to your course. I had a beautiful experience there in college and opening to some more spiritual dimensions and being interested in just hearing on the side things about Kabbalah and Hasidism. At the same time, there was this tremendous suffering happening. I had a physical therapist of mine who was working with me on the physical pain. I recommend meditation as a way to deal with the suffering and the sleeplessness, mostly. For those of you who remember them, I went out and bought cassette tapes, green cassette tapes, and put them in my cassette player, which I had, and started meditating then, just five minutes a night. I just started with five minutes a night before I went to bed, which was extremely difficult for me. There was just so much challenge, so much fear, so much pain in the system. It was extremely challenging, but also quite immediately transformative. And probably the most transformative thing was just the simple fact of understanding for the first time and doing the switch of turning towards with love and compassion rather than running away from my experience. I didn’t even know I was running away from my experience. I didn’t even have the language to describe it as that, but that’s what I was doing. And all of a sudden, I had this tool to turn towards my experience and really take it in. That’s how I started on that path. That was in 1996. I’ve been meditating basically every day since then. Quite quickly, my practice grew, week by week, month by month, adding time, time, time, till I had a pretty stable, committed practice, going on retreats, et cetera. At the same time, in parallel, my Jewish life was still transforming and growing. The mystical elements of Jewish life, Hassidism, kabala, I started to delve into more. I went to do a master’s in England and Oxford and started to explore those texts in the original first. Then I came to learn in Yeshiva in Israel in 1999, and that’s really where I started to dive into the primary texts for the first time in a serious way. They were just gorgeous for me. They were beautiful, they were inspiring, they were a notion of divinity that I’d never encountered before and spoke to me in a deep way in a way that even though I had a rich and beautiful Jewish life, actually the notions of divinity that I’d been raised with were not ones that really spoke to me. That was incredibly rich. Along the way, as part of that process of growth and exploration, I went and did smichad, a rabbinical ordination with Roc Daniel Landis, which was a beautiful experience of learning with him and at Pardes.
He was actually the rabbi of our synagogue, and we lived in LA. So we go way back. He’s an incredible person.
Incredible teacher. I feel very, very grateful that I was able to be with him in that program. Then I went to do a PhD at the University of Chicago. But I really went to do a PhD. I remember the thought process I had. I was sitting and learning, particularly the study text, which is from the maggid of mezeritch, and I just thought, I just want to keep learning this the rest of my life. I was like, I can’t do that sitting in Yeshiva because I have to learn Gamara most of the time, which was also lovely, but not actually where my passion was. How do I do that? How do I get somebody to pay me to do that? Basically, a doctor It was the way to do that, to be able to keep doing that and get the expertise I wanted to get. I went off to do that. My work already in the doctorate and then also in the work that started after that was very much about, sometimes I try and call it spiritual archeology of Jewish spiritual practice because there are these deep practices in our tradition to a great extent that haven’t been passed down, the lineages that got cut off because of modernity, because of the Holocaust, because of all different reasons. We didn’t have access to the lived experience of those traditions. Through my work with mindfulness, through my deep practice in the Buddhist tradition, and then interaction with these texts which talked about these practices and describe the states they produced, et cetera, there was a way that I could understand and have access to those states and those texts and those practices in a way that I think most people couldn’t. That really then took off. When I brought those things together, it felt, first of all, just deeply meaningful to me. That’s where I was, and that’s what I needed. Now that I started teaching that, really primarily not with any big vision, just like this was meaningful to me, and I thought it might speak to other people, there was an immediate connection. Whether I started teaching a class which integrated text and practice together, started teaching our first retreat. The response was so overwhelming and so powerful from the people who came on retreat that we wanted to do it again. That’s really how oral love was born. Again, not some huge planning process or some big vision. It was like, Oh, this is really powerful. We can see how transformative it is. We want to do more, and we need to create some structure that’s going to really allow that to continue to happen.
What does Israel fit into this whole thing?
I I’ve been in Israel basically since 1999. For a few years, I was back when I was doing my doctorate. Other than that, I’ve been in Israel. This is where I live. That’s the first place where it fits in. This is just where I am, and this is where kids have grown up and have all experienced being here. But it also fits in, I think in a few ways, say things about Israel and the Jewish world in general, and then some more specifics about the Israeli experience. I think there’s a broad experience which is shared, I think, across the Jewish world, which is an experience of deep spiritual yearning. Yearning for healing, for clarity, for well-being, and yet not always experiencing that as being provided through our Jewish experience and tradition. One powerful experience for me was somebody who’s deeply connected to Judaism, was praying every day, et cetera. Judaism was a great bond for me, but it wasn’t a way out of myself. It was prayer and tfilah. It was a hug for me. It was supportive, but it wasn’t a cure, it wasn’t a transformation. I think that’s the first piece is, how do we bring these spiritual technologies from other traditions, from the scientific tradition and from our own tradition, and make them accessible in a Jewish way to a Jewish population so that we can live Jewish life in a way that is deeply transformative, just in a personal way, in my own internal experience, my relationship with my family, my community, but also out to the nation and politically and every level of that experience. That’s, I think, one piece of it, which is very important. Another piece of it, which at a certain point was more unique to Israel, is still unique to Israel, but I think, unfortunately, is now more present in the rest of the Jewish world, is really the Israeli experience of trauma. Obviously, in the last two years, that has hit a new and unprecedented level. We’re talking about a new experience of that in Israel and across the Jewish world. I think all over the Jewish world, we’ve all been carrying intergenerational trauma to whatever extent that’s showed up in our own personal life and experience and wherever we’ve lived. But in Israel, even before October 7th, I lived here through the second intifada, multiple as we know, operations, attacks.
And the second Lebanon war, you were here then.
It’s a constant experience and aspect of Israeli society. There’s both simply the sense of how do we provide a way of being Jewish that actually speaks to our real deep everyday needs, which includes that healing. If we’re going to provide a way of being Jewish, I think in this century, which isn’t speaking to the fact of our trauma and suffering and fear and uncertainty, then we’re missing something. We’re not doing our job as Jewish leaders and teachers if we’re not bringing that to people because that’s the reality of people’s experience. If you’re growing up in Israel, the Jewish state, having Jewish experiences, and the full spectrum of that, that may be super religious, they may be secular, reform, conservative, whatever that looks like for you, there’s a real thirst for a way of encountering and being with our tradition that’s going to provide that healing and transformation. Then I’ll say one other piece about that, which is that it’s also, I think, essential. There’s the personal piece, which is people just want healing. Of course they do, and that’s so important. But I think there’s another level to that for the Jewish world in general, and especially in Israeli society, which is that when we’re trapped in trauma and trauma responses and trauma ways of thinking, we’re not going to be creative. We’re not going to find new ways of being, new flexibility. I don’t know how we get ourselves out of this situation, boy. I wish I had the answer. I don’t have the answer, but what I don’t do know is being stuck in the same ways and patterns of response and thinking is not going to get us out. Responding in the same way is not going to provide the solutions we need. As we practice We develop an openness and flexibility to listening to others, to listening to ourselves, to discerning what’s actually going on, to not be caught in our automatic reactivity. That’s so important just on the level of my relationship with my partner, my kids, whatever that looks like. But also on the level of my relationship with my nation and politically and other people and how I respond to that. So part of what I hope is the vision of the work we do is that there’s also a really deep aspect of social healing in that. Therefore, an aspect which allows a creativity and experimentation that can create new futures that may not seem available to us at the moment, that may not seem realizable to us at the moment.
Well, that was indeed my experience. We were, I don’t know, 40-ish people at this retreat, I guess. We literally didn’t talk. So you’re with people literally almost all day long, every day for a week. You don’t even know their names at the end because you haven’t exchanged. You just know, Hi, my name is, because there’s no point knowing the name because you can’t talk to them. And it also, I think, preserves a certain amount of anonymity, which is important for people there. But we in Israel, we’re very good at walking down the sidewalk and sizing people up about who they are politically by looking at their clothes, by looking at the kippah that they’re wearing, by looking at all kinds of other things. And there were some people at the retreat, let’s just say, who if I had sized them up on the sidewalk, I would say that is not a person that I would have much to talk about. Or maybe even worse, maybe that’s a person who I actually think is part of the opposition in terms of what I’m trying to create by virtue of living in this country. And we might still disagree politically. I have no idea because we didn’t exchange anything. But what I did experience, and is exactly what you’re talking about, after being in this tent with them for a week, watching them clearly be deeply moved by the same things that were moving me deeply, watching them experiment with new kinds of religious expression that they probably don’t do on a regular basis, just as I was, watching them experience the mountains and the other people in the same way. It was a reminder and a very humbling reminder to me that we have so much more in common and where our searches are so overlapping than the contemporary scene in Israel allows us to experience in many ways. I want to come back to this whole issue of diversity and inclusiveness and a social vision that maybe lies at the heart of Or Halev, and you can talk to us about it in a second. But before we do that, just tell us a little bit more about Or Halev. What does it actually do? We’ve mentioned these retreats and so forth, but it does a lot of different things. So just give our listeners who don’t know about it a sense of what’s the stuff that you have.
So we have, first of all, Jewish meditation retreats, mindfulness retreats that are happening in Israel, in North America, and in the UK. They vary from as short as day-long retreats to as long as eight day-long retreats. We’d love to see you on them. You can check them out and check on our website.
Some are online, right?
Exactly, including online retreats. That’s right. We just had an online retreat just before Yom Kippur, Preparing your hearts for Yom Kippur. We have a series of courses that happen on various kinds of topics, often tied into the Jewish calendar and the various holidays, but also tied into various spiritual topics or working with various kinds of suffering or just being able to open our hearts. Those are happening throughout the year in various languages. Sometimes in local communities as well. We’re starting now and have started more work in some local communities, so local sitting groups and ways for people to connect. We also run a teacher training program. For those of you who aren’t new to this and are really interested in expanding and deepening your practice, we have a three-year program of practice deepening and then eventually teacher training. We have a special program just since October 7th here in Israel, which does retreats and then ongoing programming for trauma therapists. We’re working with trauma therapists themselves. People are working with Nova survivors, et cetera, all the things that’s happening here in Israel, and providing them with the treat experience that you did, Daniel, and that ongoing programming around trauma trauma around meditation, around connecting them with their Jewish life and experience. Again, just like on our normal retreats, a real range of people come from all kinds of different backgrounds and places in Israeli society who are coming together to go through those programs.
Whenever this whole horrible situation that we’re in finally does die down, the trauma is going to remain, and the thousands and thousands and thousands of Israelis who are suffering from PTSD need to be treated. The people that are treating them also have their own needs. It seems like you’ve touched a niche here that, tragically, is going to be a very important niche, really, for as far as the eye can see, long after the guns go silent, as they say. Let’s talk a little bit about the faculty that you’ve brought. I have to say, and I mentioned this to you in a different context, but my career has more or less been helping to create and run educational settings. I know something about how every little detail that you get right, people just take for granted, and every little detail that you forgot to take care of or whatever people notice because it really does affect the experience. And I was literally, I was stunned by how unbelievably professional the whole experience was and how everything had been thought through. I mean, everything had been thought through. But I was also really very moved by the diversity of the faculty, by the Jewish richness of the faculty, even though not everyone, so it appeared, at least, was observant or had grown up religious or anything of the sort. They had a a real Jewish depth that doesn’t usually, in our simple thinking, get associated with the kinds of backgrounds that they necessarily had. Say something about how you find faculty, what you’re looking for, how you find people who maybe not think or up with it, who have such unbelievable Jewish depth, in addition to depth in this whole world of mindfulness and have read the literature and commonly quote the people that have influenced them. Thank you.
I I think the first thing to note is just what you said, the diversity, which is very important to us. It’s important to us in terms of participation. We have people from every Jewish background, every walk of life, different identities, the whole range, which we really try to hold in a big tent. Where everybody can participate in a way that makes sense for them. That’s been, since the beginning, a really beautiful, transformative part of the experience. I remember, I was telling you before, one of our first retreats, there was a Chabbad Hassid and a secular Israeli woman who sat next to each other on retreat. At the end of their retreat, they both shared in their closing circle, you remember, they both said they looked at the other person at the beginning of their retreat and they were like, That’s the enemy. That was basically their experience. That is the person I don’t want to be. And by the end of their treat, there was a real sense of not just respect, but also care for the other person. And I feel like, okay, there’s somebody out here who their soul is yearning for the same things that my soul is yearning for. And so we’re really trying to do that. We don’t have an agenda in terms of what you do Jewishly. We have an agenda that you do things Jewishly. We’re interested in that, and then you are staying engaged, and this is a meaningful part of your life, but you can do it in many, many different ways that are right for you. And it’s very important to us that our faculty reflects that, but that also So, and this is one of the challenges and one of the reasons we have a teacher training program, we bring faculty who are deeply, deeply experienced. These are people who have been practicing for years, for years, who have done many many long retreats. So nobody’s teaching for us who hasn’t already in their own experience has a very deep aspect of practice, and that they’re teaching from that practice themselves. So that’s one thing. You’re talking about people of deep practice, years of practice, daily practice, many retreats of practice. At the same time, we need people who are bringing that depths of Jewish wisdom and the discernment and the the wisdom to be able to understand the text through practice and practice through the text. There has to be a mutual engagement in that process. That’s challenging. We’re always open to more teachers. We’re doing a teacher training precisely because we have a challenge finding people who bring all those elements together. We have this whole year-long process of training people who, just to be clear, to come on and do that program, especially at the higher levels Because of that program, you have to have years of practice already. It’s not like we can take somebody who doesn’t have practice in. No. But having that background, then we can help shape you and hone you and give you the skills you need to do in an extraordinary way. I know on the treat you were on, I was teaching on it, who has ordination, a PhD. We have extraordinary secular Israeli woman teacher, Keren, who is teaching on that, amazing teacher, Danny Cohen, who is really holding both those worlds and holding deeply trauma, and officially has lots of learning, but doesn’t have any official titles in terms of the Jewish world. All those pieces really being held together in different ways. It’s the same with our teaching that happens in North America and the UK, people coming from many different backgrounds that’s important for us, but who are all holding depth in really both of those places. That’s what’s needed to really do the work we’re doing is to have that depth in both of those places.
I have to say it really, you should know, I’m sure you do know, but it actually works. When I signed up for this retreat and I looked to see who the faculty were and I checked everybody’s bios, I saw you, rabbi, PhD. I was like, Okay, that’s my guy. I guess it’s just that’s my comfort zone. I thought the other people I’m sure are going to be excellent, but James is going to be my guy. And as I’ve told you in other settings, you’re an unbelievably outstanding teacher. I mean, just unbelievably outstanding. And without taking anything away from that, they are also unbelievably outstanding people and teachers. I learned Torah from, I didn’t expect to come up with a lot of Torah. I got to say, I thought I’d learn mindfulness, I thought I’d learn et cetera. I thought I was going to test my capacity for vegan food far beyond the extent of which I’ve ever done it before. I actually did test that capacity, but managed to survive. But I learned Torah. You mentioned them by name, so I’ll do the same. I learned Torah from Keren and from Danny. I mean, Torah, Torah, like Torah.
That I have quoted to other people around the Shabbat table. I remember still Danny taught something about the kruvim in the Holy of Holies, facing each other from opposite sides. Keren taught stuff, which I won’t go into, but it was really unbelievably powerful. On the depth of Jewish learning, even among people that you might think that’s not where the Jewish depth is going to come from. That’s where maybe the traditional mindfulness stuff is going to come from. Whatever was really very, to me, to come home and have gotten Jewish depth from three such very different kinds of people, was also in its own way a very profound both reminder and learning experience. I think we also tend to close ourselves. We imagine that certain people are the enemy, as you said before, which we have to unlearn very fast. But we also assume that there’s a a certain part of the bandwidth where my Jewish inspiration and learning is going to come from. And that bandwidth can be dramatically expanded when you’re in a setting where all kinds of assumptions are dropped at the door when you walk in, along with your phones, I should say, which was a very powerful experience.
You guys mentioned at some point during the retreat, either at the very beginning or at the very end, That part of what makes the work that you do possible is that you actually have supporters all over the world. You have supporters in Israel and you have supporters in the States. You have supporters, I assume, in the UK and so forth. And I’m assuming that the people who support it are moved by the social vision of what you’re trying to do. I would imagine it’s not this, that they want X number of hundreds of people per year to have an opportunity to do mindfulness, which is very important and transformative for those people. But there’s a larger vision, I’m assuming, for them. And I’m assuming that there’s a larger vision for you. So I’ll ask you a future-oriented question. Or Halev is what, about 15 years old? A little bit old, about 15-ish years old. And God willing, you have many more trips around the sun to make. And let’s just say we’re talking 30 years from now, in 2055, when God willing, you’ll still be doing your teaching strongly. I will not be here to witness it, but that’s okay. You will have influenced and touched many of my trips around the sun, nonetheless. What’s your hope, not only for Or Halev, which I’m happy to hear about, but if you could describe your wish for looking back for those 30 years or 45 years it will have been by then on what this did for and to Israeli society and for and to the Jewish people. What’s the vision?
Thank you. The first part of that vision, I think, really is about transforming the Jewish world. There are a few different aspects to that. One aspect is really the sense of what would it be like to have people live out their Jewish lives in a way that was profoundly meaningful and transformative and relevant to their day-to-day life? It’s not something I just do on Shabbat or I just do on a holiday, but rather day by day as I interact in my life and I think about the basic questions I have in my life, which is, how can I be a more balanced, loving person? How do I get on better with my colleagues at work? How do I show up in my community? How do I relate better to my child or to my parents? Whatever that is, questions we all have and we’re all working with, and especially at this time of the year, as we’re reflecting on tappin and tchuva and slicha, and we’re all engaged in that process. How do I actually do that? I think sometimes, it’s only my experience, I would say, growing up as a kid in some of my Jewish education, we’re superb at talking about it, but we weren’t always superb at actually giving us concrete technologies and tools to actually enable us to do that, to have that transformation, and therefore to have our Judaism speaking directly to our experience and having a new element and range of power in that way. I’ll share one just piece of that. I remember talking to some people about work they were doing with college students and trying to have more talk about mental health and well-being. So great, I’m so supportive of that. Training hillel professionals about how to refer people to social workers, et cetera, when they need help, which is fantastic, and I’m all on board. But my thought immediately came up was, That’s so great. But in some ways, what you’re telling them is, When life is challenging, turn somewhere else other than your tradition. It’s like, go farm it out to some other person who’s there going to help you with that challenge. Of course, we’re a thousands-year-old tradition who have dealt through many, many, many challenges and sufferings and difficulties, and There’s tremendous richness here and technologies for how we can meet that ourselves. That’s one piece. Can we actually make that vibrant and accessible part of the Jewish experience? Maybe not everybody wants to do that. That’s fine. That’s no problem. But can everybody know that it’s available and that these tools and this really holy work is accessible to everybody, and they can take it on when they want to take it on, and that’s the Jews in their living.
That’s one piece. That, of course, translates into what does Judaism mean for people? How does it show up in their life? How does it show up in their families? If that’s the way you’re living it, it’s, I think, a radically different experience in that way. A second piece is really, as I talked about at the beginning, that aspect of really healing and transformation of our reactivity on the individual level, on the communal level, on the national level, on the political level, on the Jewish level in general. How do we live in a world where being aware of trauma and threats are real. We all know these aren’t just fantasies. We shouldn’t pretend they’re not there. At the same time, how are we not trapped in these responses which are maybe not serving wisdom best at this moment? It’s not serving the again, on a very personal level, the way I relate to my family, but also on a global level, the way I’m being active in society, the way I’m voting, the way I’m thinking about how to relate to broader issues that are out there. And if we stay trapped in our narrow ways of thinking and reacting, and in ways that have been encoded in us from fear and reactivity, and again, no blame.
All of us just doing the best we can, the best we can, to deal with these extremely, extremely difficult circumstances. I’ll speak about myself as I spoke, I’m sure at the retreat, October 7th gave a blow to my practice. I’ve continued to practice, but I could feel the way it just threw me back. It’s like there was some regression there. That was the reality. I was extremely grateful for my practice and the centering it did give me and the healing it did give me. There was this very clear experience of, Oh, yeah, not independent of conditions. There are new conditions, and I have felt that. Somebody has been practicing for a long time. That was clearly felt and experienced in my body, in my heart, in my entire experience. If we can train people in this way of being Jewish and in these practices, then we can open up, we ways of relating to ourselves, the Jewish world, the broader world, families, communities, politically, at every level of it, which are going to be more creative, which are going to be more dynamic, which are going to be more healing, which are not just going to be caught in repetitive trauma patterns, And so we’re just acting out of trauma rather than seeing trauma clearly, which we need to do, and then acting out of wisdom and clarity and love and care.
Yeah, that’s beautifully said. Well, two things about the war. One of them is that you spoke about the war one night at the retreat. I think it was actually Thursday night. I don’t know why I remember that, but I do. And you started out by saying, You’re going to talk about the war. And my visceral reaction was, that is so what I don’t want to hear about. I came Sunday, and it took a while to learn how to do this, and I feel like I’m in my flow, and I’m really having a very powerful. The last thing that I want to hear about is this aura. Now, we were hearing planes over us nonstop. We were near an Air Force base, and we were near an artillery base. So the ground was shaking all day long, and the planes were making everything vibrate. But we didn’t have phones or watches, or connected watches, whatever. So we didn’t really know what was going on. And you get used to it. You don’t even think about it after a certain point. And when you said, I want to talk about the war, my visceral reaction was, oh, my God, really, that’s the one thing I don’t want to hear about. But you spoke about the war in such a different way. It wasn’t about geopolitics, and it wasn’t about any of the things that we commonly talk about. It was a way about how to spiritually center ourselves in light of the questions that the war had raised that I found unbelievably powerful. And while I hope and pray that this is either behind us or almost behind us, it’s lessons that I’ll take me for a very long time. And I’ve thought since then, by the way, as Jewish life in the diaspora has gotten so much more complex and so much more painful, frightening, and fraught, that I know a lot of kids of our friends, so these are people in their 20s and their 30s who are not necessarily terribly engaged in the ritual side of Jewish life, who are really struggling because Israel was always their anchor, and now Israel is very complicated for them. They’re struggling about Israel’s conduct of the war and all sorts of other issues. And I’ve thought many times that the work that you and your colleagues do is actually a huge way for these people to access Jewish tradition in a way that doesn’t require them to be, quote, unquote, religious, observant, et cetera. Which doesn’t require them to have any standing of any different sort on Israel, and still allows it not to be nambi pambi, but to very deeply, deeply, authentically and rigorously Jewishly rooted. So it feels to me that there’s a need for the work that you and your colleagues are doing in this specific Torah that you guys are bringing, combination of Jewishness and the whole meditation, the mindfulness tradition, which is so rich and wide, that I think we, Israelis, need in one way, and diaspora Jews probably need in a different way. But We all need it much more than we did two, two and a half years ago. So I think that those visions and those images are real. Those dreams are incredibly important and very moving. So let’s just wrap up by asking if there’s anything you want to leave our listeners with, either about the times in which we’re living or the work that you’re doing or ways to become involved or anything of the sort.
Yeah, we’ll just say something about what you just shared and then to that entire conversation. When the war happened, we were teaching them retreats again at a certain point, and it’s very clear what Israeli society needed. I think it wasn’t as clear to us as at the beginning what, let’s say, North American society needed. I went to teach my first retreat there, and it was so clear from the first day of that retreat that the fear, the uncertainty, the feeling of the ground being pulled out from under us was such a shared Jewish experience. That’s, I think, one of the great questions of our time. How do we live in a time where the ground has been pulled out from under us? That’s the nature of our experience. In Jewish ways, but also in other ways, in environmental ways, there are so many ways that that’s happened in the world, and there’s so much deep sense of uncertainty and instability. How do we live in the midst of that instability in a way that is clear and compassionate and powerful and transformative and deeply Jewishly connected and rooted in our tradition. There’s a sense of rooting, but also knowing that that rooting is in the midst of an unstable ground, a ground that’s shifting all the time. We all need that work so deeply. Of course, young people in North America need that, and we see that on a mental health level, on a well-being level, on a Jewish level, at every level. How can we provide that help? We need it so deeply here in Israel, whether it’s the people we’re touching directly or the trauma therapists we’re working with who then are going out and working with people who have, in an even deeper way, have had that ground pulled out from one of that. It just cracked. They need to work with these people to provide some grounding again, some basis of being able to support it. That’s our work. Our work is really how to find stability and clarity and even joy and openness and connection and love in the midst of that instability. Because what isn’t going to happen is that we’re about to solve that I wish that were the case. If that were the case, I’d say, go for it. But that’s not what’s about to happen. It’s not about to happen because of our circumstances right now and because of the nature of human life. The nature of human life works like that. The question is rather, what does it look like to show up as our full human self, our full embodied divine self, even in the midst of that unstability and uncertainty. We’d love to have you join us. If that speaks to you, if you know somebody who that might speak to, We’d love to have you join us in a class on retreat, online, in person, a million ways you can do that. If you want to support the work we’re doing of working with trauma, of working with healing, of trying to create a different Jewish world in Israeli society, we’d be so grateful for that support. And most importantly, we hope you’ll take on these practices if they can be beneficial for you. That’s what we’re here doing. And we’re just thrilled for anybody who wants to come and join us in that.
I’ll just end maybe with this thought that So much of what has transpired in the last couple of years has, for all sorts of very understandable, sad but understandable reasons, pulled many Israeli Jews and many, let’s say, just right now, North American Jews very far apart from each other. It’s partly politics, but it’s not only. We’re dealing with different kinds of traumas. And what one group has to do to feel less traumatized is actually heightening the trauma of the other. And it’s just very, very complicated. It’s very I had, but it’s very complicated. And as I listen to you and I think about the experience that I had, you and Or Halev actually offer a way of each of us dealing with our own traumas, which are deep with the ground, as you say, having been pulled out from under us, but in a way that’s actually going to bring us to each other. It doesn’t matter what we think about the war, and it doesn’t matter what we think about this political issue or that political issue. They matter, but not in this conversation. We can all, through the work that you’re doing, actually find our way back to Jewish life and find our way back to each other. That, to me, was really one of the very powerful things that I experienced then, and I think now we’re talking about it on a global level, but I think it’s just as true. So, rabbi, James Jacobson Maisels, for the work that you do and for who you are and what you’ve brought to the Jewish world and for taking the time to tell us about the work that you do today. Thank you very much. I hope and pray that the next time you and I see each other, because you live in the Galil and I live in Jerusalem, so we don’t bump into each other every day. But I hope that the next time we bump into each other or see each other, we’ll be able to say that at least in this neck of the woods, things have gotten somewhat better, and we can hope and pray that greater, brighter days lie.
Amen. Amen. Thank you so much for having me. It’s such a delight to have this conversation. And just echoing that wish and that prayer that the next time we talk, there’s some more peace and connection in the world.
Amen, thanks again.
