Food. Money. Sex. Tech.
a practice to see yourself more closely, from Rabbi Alan Lew
This is Life as a Sacred Text 🌱, an everybody-celebrating, justice-centered voyage into ancient stories that can illuminate our own lives. It‘s run on a nonprofit, so it’s 100% NAZI FREE. More about the project here, and to subscribe, go here:
First off, I want to just acknowledge the heartbreak and fury that so many of us are feeling about the news that six more Israeli hostages have been found dead, including Hersh Goldberg-Polin, whom many in the American Jewish community knew personally.
I want to hold it together with rage and pain about every human being who has been slaughtered over these last 11 months.
Every. Single. Life. Taken. Is. An. Entire. World.
Every. Single. One.
I want to name the false binary of "hostages vs. Palestinians" when the real binary has always been, "soaking the earth with more and more blood" or "find a political solution." We’ve been talking about this for months. Eg here, here.
May the memories of everyone killed over the last 11 months be a revolution towards collective liberation, safety, wholeness, and a true future for everyone in the region.
Now, today I'd like to offer you a bit of a personal practice.
The Jewish month of Elul, the month leading up to Rosh Hashana, begins tonight, Monday night.
It's a time to traditionally do a deep accounting of the soul, to understand who we are and to work to make repairs that must be made.
As probably most of you know, I've written a book on the work of tshuvah, on the work of accountability, transformation, repentance, and repair that is the hallmark of this season (and every season, I'd argue, but especially this one.)
Acknowledging that our choices– intended or not, conscious or not! have impacted other people, and hurt them. And that we need to take responsibility for that, to do what is in our power to make things right.
So we are going to make this the subject of our next 🌟 Zoom Salon🌟 for the Life is a Sacred Text House of Study
This coming Sunday, September 8th--
and we're going to be talking about messy, important, sometimes intimidating, deeply transformative work of healing our relationships-- and talking about applying those lessons more broadly.
As always, we'll do some paired text study and then discuss their application, with plenty of time to talk through some of the real issues weighing on our hearts and minds. (And don't worry if you're read On Repentance and Repair, we're doing deeper cuts 😉).
These gatherings are a chance to go deep in community with thoughtful, likeminded folks-- to pull insights about the messy, charged, crucial aspects of our lives, and to find our way, together.
Needless to say: This is the ideal time to join the Life is a Sacred Text House of Study so that you can join this conversation.
And, of course, when you join you also: ✨Get all the archives! ✨Get all the Thursday text studies, Ask The Rabbi posts, wild peeks behind the curtain, and more (in your inbox or online!) ✨ Support the labor that makes accessible learning happen! ✨ And as always, if you want in to the House of Study but paying isn't on the menu for you right now, hit support@lifeisasacredtext.com. And if you can subscribe at a higher tier, you subsidize these donated subscriptions.)
But today's focus is going to be a little bit differently internal, differently personal.
I want to offer an Elul practice from my rabbi, Rabbi Alan Lew, z'l.
I found Rabbi Lew not long after I finished college and moved to San Francisco. I had at that point figured out that I didn't hate Judaism enough to want to know where I'd go in case I ever wanted to attend services, and after quite the adventure in Bay Area shul (synagogue) shopping, stumbled into his little chapel all the way out in the boondocks of the Richmond District.
This former Buddhist-turned-rabbi with the deeply familiar Brooklyn accent had me hooked with the first sermon. Turns out sitting still and watching your breath for a couple of decades makes you pretty good at seeing nuggets of insight in Torah. Or maybe he was just good at it. But I wound up following him around for about five years– Friday night services at first, eventually Shabbat mornings, Torah study, meditation practice period, the whole shebang. I often say that it's his fault that I'm a rabbi, and it's true. He showed me how the tradition of my ancestry could be a transformative path into, through the Big Bigness and back around into the people and world that needed us. Everything else is commentary.
So yeah, he was a very important teacher in my life, and I'm incredibly grateful to him. [[1]] I last saw him right after Surprised By God had come out; I had sent him a copy, of course, since he's in it, and he appeared at a book talk that I had in SF. He was the same as always– laughing, sweet, adorably tickled that that 22 year-old with motorcycle boots and an attitude problem had somehow become a married, pregnant rabbi (with motorcycle boots) 11 years later. It was a beautiful encounter, and I'm especially grateful for it in retrospect, since he wound up passing quite suddenly several months afterwards.
Anyway, he's written a book that also gets a lot of play this time of year– deservedly– and another that doesn't get nearly as much play as it should. This teaching that I'm passing on– paraphrased in my own words, as I remember the core of the idea– is in fact written up in one of his books, but somehow I remember other parts of it as well? Which makes sense, given that it really was an annual teaching.
So here's another stab at it, dedicated to his memory. 💜
Rabbi Lew would suggest you spend a month paying close attention to one area of your life.
He would often to teach this around this time, as a way of helping people to wake up, to find a way to see their whole lives.
Because once we get clear on what's driving us– and what we're resisting, and afraid of, and reacting to, and can start to figure out why– in one area of our life, the whole picture becomes illuminated all at once, sometimes.
He would suggest that you pick one of the following three:
Food, money, or sex.
given that things are– how they are now– I might suggest the following addition of a fourth contender for potential scrutiny. That is, I propose that we broaden the list to:
Food, money, sex, OR tech.
Pick one of them. Not all of them. One of those four things, and your relationship with it.
And spend the next month paying really, really close attention.
Notice when you reach for it. When you resist it. What's going on in your head and heart: what are you covering up? What are you rushing through? What are you shoving down?
You'll find the universe of your life illuminated in this single grain of sand.
For example:
When you go to eat– How are you feeling? What mood are you in? How aware are you of your hunger, your body? How do you feel in your body? How much are you going to eat because you're upset, or bored? What choices to you make? When do those choices feel like they're nourishing you? When do you make choices that take you away from feeling nourished? What's going on with you in the moments that you make less nourishing choices? Look compassionately, curiously.
You're not bad. You're not wrong. You're a human person, doing the best you can, often repeating patterns you've been taught. It's OK.
You're not failing any tests.
You're just getting information you probably haven't had in hand, or wanted to look at so closely, and information is useful.
Please regard yourself with the loving eye of someone who just wants to better understand themselves.
Not with the harsh eye of shame. Be gentle with the parts of yourself that aren't making the choices that other parts of you might wish. Ask them what they need.
And keep watching: When you eat are you gulping down food, or chewing slowly? Do you let yourself experience the pleasure of the food, the tastes? What is the narrative in your head when you make choices about whether to eat, what to eat, and while you're eating?
Or with tech–
When do you reach for your phone? What's happening in that moment in real life? How are you feeling 30 seconds before you make that choice? What does the tech [whatever that might be for you – your phone, your video games, etc.] bring? How do you feel during? After? What are you using tech to avoid? Why? What would happen if you made different choices? Or what do you fear might happen?
Or sex–
What's happening inside you moments before you make a choice? When and how do you communicate your desires, needs, wants? How are you feeling in your body before, during, after? In your mind? How are you connecting–or not–to the other person? To yourself? When do your actions and your desires align, and when might they not?
Money:
When does your spending feel aligned with what you need? With what you want? What is happening, externally, just before you make an impulsive choice? How do you feel before, during, and after you make such a choice? Or just before you tell yourself "no," to something? On what matters are you careful? On what matters are you careless? What happens if you pull up your bank statement? What do you see about your spending habits– and how do they differ from the story that you tell yourself? As you pull on these threads, you might be able to see deeper questions: What messages about scarcity or abundance, generosity or stinginess, about indulgence and restraint did you grow up with? Is money tied to your ideas about worthiness or love?
If you pay close attention to one area of your life and try to unpack the dysfunctions– and moments where you feel in sync– you can learn an unnerving amount of information.
It's not comfortable, always, per se.
But it can be ENORMOUSLY informative.
All of our lives are interconnected, and our mishegas – our, uh, stuff, our baggage— is manifest in everything we do, whether or not we're conscious of it.
Try not to judge yourself, or shame yourself.
Just look with compassionate curiosity, like a bystander who wants to understand a person in pain so they can help. OK?
With any/all of them (sex/food/tech/money):
What are the feelings that you're giving yourself space to feel?
What feelings aren't you giving yourself space or permission to feel?
What is the fear driving some of your choices?
What's that fear trying to tell you?
"Transformation goes on all the time. We are transforming beings. Transformation is a divine imperative. It’s always introduced that way in the Torah — not as something we undergo as a kind of leisure activity, which I think is how many in this country regard spiritual activity, you know, something we do on weekends, but really essential to our meaning as human beings."
Rabbi Alan Lew
Hodesh tov, y'all. May it be a sweet month for you, whatever this month means for you personally, religiously, or in any other way. ❤️ 🌱
🌱🌱🌱🌱🌱🌱🌱🌱🌱🌱🌱🌱🌱🌱🌱🌱🌱🌱🌱🌱🌱🌱🌱🌱🌱
A note on the subscription model:
I want my work to be as accessible to as many people as possible, in as many ways as possible. That's why the Monday essays are free, and why we donate subscriptions to anyone for whom paying is a barrier to the House of Study posts.
I also believe people should be paid fairly for their work. Needless to say, these two values sometimes seem to be in conflict, but I do what I can to find a fair balance. I offer many resources for free, and charge for others. When you donate generously or pay at the top of our scale, that helps support the work I do, provides access for those who have fewer resources, pays for the infrastructure and the technical and practical support that it takes to do this, and helps us keep the work sustainable. ❤️ 🌱
FOOTNOTE
[[1]]: Does this mean that we should put our spiritual teachers on pedestals? No, no we should not. We’ve had it out over Kiddush, the post-service snax, about his sermon, more than once. He periodically missed important things about gender, as many of even the best-intentioned men of his generation did. And so on. He was as human a person as any human person is. But he was also a damn fine spiritual teacher– and knew about things like "boundaries" and "caring for his students appropriately" as well as all the stuff people usually think of.