Rabbi Deborah Waxman:    

Hi, I'm Rabbi Deborah Waxman. I wanted to let you know that the next episode of Hashivenu will be a special episode. In the middle of November more than 700 people will be gathering in Philadelphia for the Reconstructionist convention, "Rooted and Relevant: Reconstructing Judaism in 2018", and we're going to do a live broadcast of Hashivenu from the convention. I'm going to speak with Susan Levine, who is my friend and also a member of the board of Reconstructing Judaism. Susan survived a catastrophic accident in which she lost one of her legs and one of her arms. We're going to talk about how Jewish community and Jewish practice have helped her to rebuild her life. We'll be doing a live stream of this episode on Thursday, November 16th at 4:30 p.m. East Coast time via the Reconstructing Judaism Facebook page. We'll also record the episode and release an edited version of it as a regular podcast before the end of November. I hope you'll listen in one way or the other.

In the meantime, in the aftermath of the shooting in Pittsburgh of the tragic deaths at The Tree of Life campus, I wanted to reach out prior to Convention with some thoughts and a practice that I hope might help cultivate resilience among people listening to this podcast.

I started working on Hashivenu shortly after the 2016 election. It was clear to me that I personally needed to focus on resilience, and I wanted to help others cultivate it as well. I've said many times over the course of this podcast and in other forums that I really believe that Judaism writ large is oriented towards resilience, and that this is one of the reasons why the Jewish people and the Jewish civilization have survived for so long. I feel like resilience is hardwired into it. This is certainly true in the biggest possible way when we look across the sweep of Jewish history and we see that there has been repeated and extensive collective trauma, and again and again there have been strategies and metaphors and practices that allow the Jewish people to transcend this trauma and to breathe new life into our lives.

This is certainly true on the biggest possible scale, and I think it's also true, powerfully true, through a whole host of individual practices that orient us in this direction. That's what most of the episodes of Hashivenu have been about: exploring different practices in ways that I hope will open up Jewish teachings, Jewish living for different folks. Part of a Reconstructionist approach is a commitment to diversity, and we understand, we celebrate, that there are different pathways, different practices for all peoples.

So, in the wake of the devastation on The Tree of Life campus, which was home to The Tree of Life congregation, the New Light congregation, and Dor Hadash, which is part of our Reconstructionist family, I wanted to share with you one of the practices that I do that really sustains me. If you've listened to other episodes, you may have heard me mention it previously. I thought I would take some time to unpack it now. It's my daily gratitude practice. This practice sits at the intersection of traditional Jewish teaching and contemporary psychology, and what I'm going to offer is also supported by modern technology.

What I want to offer up to you is a way to engage with Modeh Ani/Modah Ani (The first, "modeh", is the masculine, the second, "modah", the feminine.) This is according to Jewish teaching the first blessing we say. For some people they say it upon waking. The aspiration is that's the very first words on a person's lips when they wake up. When the prayer book was created about 1,000 years ago, it was embedded into the early part of the Shakharit, of the morning liturgy, and it's a gratitude blessing. I'll translate it in a second, but the idea is that it's something that you say no matter what is going on, even in the most dire times.

That's where contemporary psychology comes in. Research shows that for most of us gratitude doesn't come naturally -- it's not the thing that we automatically wake up with in the morning -- and that we can cultivate it. We can orient ourselves toward gratitude. If we do so, there are really concrete and powerful results. The folks who have an attitude of gratitude, according to studies, tend to be physically healthier, we have -- I like to put myself in this group -- greater access to optimism, in general we feel better about our lives, there tends to be a greater tendency to be more alert, more energetic, and more likely to accomplish personal goals.

For me, this has definitely been something that I have had to cultivate and orient myself toward. I have been really tremendously supported by technology because there is an app that I want to steer you to, I know I've mentioned it in other episodes, called Flavors of Gratefulness that has been created by Rabbi Shefa Gold. It's an app you have to pay for -- but it's last I saw, $4.99, it's at an affordable price point -- that has 49 different melodies to this line of liturgy. Each and every day I wake up and I, one of the first things I do is I open the app and I press the start button and a different melody comes in. It's the same words, but a different melody. It both reinforces the practice and it keeps me from getting bored.

 I heard just over the weekend that Shefa is planning on expanding the number of melodies, so it may be that it will be more than 49. Here's an example of one of Shefa's chants. It's number four on the list of 49.

(Rabbi Shefa Gold, singing)

What I want to do in addition to just raising this up for you is, if it's necessary for you, help to make it a little bit more accessible, rather than just saying here is some traditional language, go, do it. Because for some people traditional prayer language, or traditional theology, is a total barrier. It shuts people down. "I don't want to pray. I don't believe in that God. I don't know what it means. These are not words that I can believe." I want to offer up a pathway for you maybe to recover this practice.

It may be that the problem is purely about the language. I had a conversation last week with a trans person who really struggled with the gendered nature of Hebrew. Where I chant it in a feminine version, the traditional liturgy is in the masculine version. Both of those are problematic for this person. They couldn't come up with language and we discussed different options. For other people it's the God language. One of the things that I feel really great about, both as a Reconstructionist and as a rabbi, is that I feel a lot of freedom to come up with a translation and interpretation of the text in a manner that works for me. That's a long standing Reconstructionist commitment to empower people, to educate people, so that all Jews feel that kind of freedom and that kind of pleasure I think.

So I want to offer up a couple of pathways into the traditional language. I want to share with you the interpretive translation that I use in the hopes that it is liberating for you. I'll parse the traditional language, and then I'll offer up some strategies. Then I'll end with a question.

The traditional language is "modeh ani l'fanekha", which would be literally translated as "I gratefully thank you." "Melekh chai ve-kayam", "living and eternal king". "Shehekhezarta bee nishmati be'khemlah", "for you have returned my soul within me with compassion". "Raba emunatecha", "abundant is your faithfulness". There are a lot of different ways that you can translate it, but that's one literal -- you can quibble with this word or that word, but that's a literal translation.

Shefa Gold, on the app that I mentioned, makes a move that is really essential to me and that I carry through to a lot of my liturgy. She swaps out for "melekh", "king", "ruakh", spirit. For me, that's a huge theological shift moving away from a sovereign, moving away from a person, moving away from an authoritarian ruler, into this image of spirit, of animating energy, ruakh. For me, I am really sustained and empowered by a Reconstructionist approach to god as the source of the universe, as the ground of being. As Mordecai Kaplan, the founding thinker of Reconstructionist Judaism said, "God is the power that makes for salvation." A Reconstructionist approach is an effort to harmonize rationalism and religion.

Reconstructionist Jews choose to believe even as we embrace rationalism. We choose to believe in some version of the divine, and in some vision of the Jewish people because belief affirms a beneficent universe even as we witness horrors. Belief fuels optimism even as we struggle in the trenches. We believe our ancestors experienced the divine at Sinai and recorded what they experienced in the Torah. We believe that recording was tempered by their human limitations and heavily shaped by their social context. We also believe that revelation is continuous, and it's our work to discern revelation and to enact the covenant between God and the Jewish people in ways that are meaningful for today's world. We do this work always remembering our own personal and social limitations.

My wife and I started doing this practice, as I said, in a really regular way about two years ago. One day she asked me what I meant when we chanted this prayer every morning. She knew the words I was saying, she knew a translation, but she wanted to know what was the personal meaning I invested in them. It took me about two days to come up with an answer for her. What I did was parse each phrase in the verse theologically. I'm going to share that parsing with you now and then I'll wrap up with my more composed and compact interpretation.

I just parsed it for you phrase by phrase with the traditional translation. Here is my interpretation. I'll layer them side by side. "Modeh ani L'fanekha", so literally "I gratefully thank you". For me, I think gratitude creates expansiveness. "Ruakh chai v'kayam", literally "a living and eternal king", or here, "spirit". In my interpretation, there is an abiding spirit that undergirds and animates the universe. "Shehekhezarta bee nishmati bekhemlah", literally "you have returned my soul within me with compassion". For me, what I mean is that every morning I wake up is a gift. "Raba emunatekha", "how abundant, how great is your faithfulness". For me, what I am saying is that the reality that the universe is greater than we can possibly understand, whether or not we acknowledge it, orients us toward abundance.

Putting this theological excavation together, what I would say liturgically, how I put together my gratitude practice, what I mean when I chant these traditional words every morning, is "I am grateful, Source of Life, for another day and for the possibility of abundance." I wonder if there is some translation of this blessing that might work for you where you could adopt this as a gratitude practice, supported by Shefa's wonderful app. If this really doesn't work for you, if you can't recover the liturgy, is there language, either from the Jewish tradition or in your own words, that helps you to formulate a gratitude practice?

Whatever the path forward, I hope that we may all find ways to cultivate resilience. May we all find ways to act in the world in the ways we need to act. May we find much support from each other. May we find meaning and connection.

 Thanks so much for listening.