[Music] Rabbi Sheila Peltz Weinberg: More and more to me, it seems like, if we can feel beloved, and then realize that our capacity to feel beloved simply needs to be extended to everybody and everything, all beings. But it can't be just pushed out. It has to be received in. [Music] Rabbi Deborah Waxman: I'm Rabbi Deborah Waxman, and I'm so happy to welcome you to Hashivenu, a podcast about Jewish Teachings on Resilience. Rabbi Deborah W: My guest today is my teacher, and my friend, Rabbi Sheila Peltz Weinberg. Sheila had a rich and interesting career before she entered the rabbinate, and then she was a congregational rabbi for many years, and she since then has been very, very involved with the Institute for Jewish Spirituality. She's a beautiful writer who's published widely on topics such as feminism, and spiritual direction, parenting, and social justice, and mindfulness from a Jewish perspective. Some of her poetry that's in the Reconstructionist prayer book, Kol Haneshamah, is among the most beloved entries there. I am so happy to welcome Sheila today. Rabbi Deborah W: Hi. Rabbi Sheila PW: Hi. Pleasure to be here. Rabbi Deborah W: It's great to have you. I wondered if you'd start by telling us, sharing with us, how you moved from being a congregational rabbi, who was a powerful and transformative leader of your communities in Philadelphia and in Western Massachusetts. And I know that both within that setting and then beyond, you got very deeply involved in what might be termed the spirituality field. I'd love it if you could share a little bit about that journey. Rabbi Sheila PW: Well, let's see, where do we even begin? I suppose -- I was very much a student when I was in Philadelphia studying at the Rabbinical College, but also I studied with Zalman Schachter-Shalomi. Art Green was a teacher of mine, and I was also part of the early feminist, the Jewish feminist movement, Judith Plaskow, deep influences on me. Rabbi Sheila PW: I guess I was always a seeker of some sort. That drew me to the college, drew me to the rabbinate, and when I did get to Amherst in 1989, the man who was the head of the search committee -- this is such an amazing story, because he was the head of the search committee, and he was also on the board of Insight Meditation Society. He said to me, "You know, Amherst is a great place for you rabbi. It's midway between one of the most outstanding Buddhist medtation centers that we have now in this country, and Kripalu, the great yoga retreat center. You're midway. You're only an hour, less than an hour from each of them." Rabbi Sheila PW: Now, you would not necessarily say this to the average rabbi, and it might not necessarily be appealing, but to me, it was extremely appealing, extremely interesting. It took me about a year or two until I actually went on retreat at Insight Meditation Society, which was part of the movement of non-monastic Buddhism into a secular venue in this country, in the West, let's say, which was actually stimulated by a lot of Jews. Rabbi Sheila PW: In any case, I went on my first retreat, which was a 10 day retreat, silent retreat. I was pretty much -- it was very, very difficult, extremely difficult. And extremely different than anything I've ever experienced. Rabbi Deborah W: All that silence. I mean, the first time I went on a silent, a 10 day retreat, I remember coming back and someone saying, "Were you blissed out?" Rabbi Deborah W: And I said, "Uh-uh. I was almost always walking through mud, and sometimes it was up to my knees, and sometimes it was up to my hips, and sometimes it was up to my chin." Rabbi Deborah W: It's really different. Rabbi Sheila PW: [Laughs] Right, right. It was very, very difficult. And, at the very same time, I knew there was some value to it. I experienced it as something enormously valuable that didn't exist anywhere else, and I said to myself at the time, this could be taught to Jews in a Jewish idiom. Rabbi Deborah W: Oh immediately. You knew it and you could see it. Rabbi Sheila PW: I knew it immediately, instinctively. One thing led to the next, and eventually I met Sylvia Boorstein, who was the only one of those Jews who was one of the pioneers in bringing the Buddhist stuff to America, who actually had a positive Jewish identity. Rabbi Deborah W: She completely integrated and embraced, rather than just, born Jewish but left it behind. Rabbi Sheila PW: Right, exactly. And we fell in love. I was very fortunate to work with her, and we were also very fortunate that we had Rachel Cowan, Rabbi Rachel Cowan, aleha shalom [of blessed memory], who's no longer alive, who was at that time working for the Nathan Cummings Foundation. They were looking for creative Jewish projects, and they thought, well, this might be an interesting thing. Rabbi Sheila PW: So originally when we started doing it, I was the rabbi, and Sylvia was the meditation teacher. But then we started kind of floating, you know, mixing and matching our jobs. So that really was the beginning of it all. Rabbi Deborah W: And for you, yoga has been important. I know it's an important part of your practice. Has it also been a part of your teaching? Have you tried to do the harmonization between Judaism and yoga as well? Rabbi Sheila PW: A little bit. A little bit. I spend a lot of time doing yoga and studied to be a yoga teacher. I did do that. And I taught yoga at the Institute for Jewish Spirituality, and from time to time I'll teach it. Say I get a rabbi in residence kind of weekend, maybe I'll do it for the kids or the adults, but it's not my primary teaching. I'm more of a yoga practitioner than a yoga teacher. Rabbi Deborah W: That's for me too. I mean, you and I have been in class together sometimes, and for me, I've actually, as a rabbi I love ... when I'm in yoga I'm so clearly the student. I feel like it totally complements and grounds my Jewish life, but part of it is that I am not in the front of the room, I am in the middle of the room in a way that I- Rabbi Sheila PW: Exactly. Exactly. Me too. Exactly the same. It's marvelous. [laughs] Rabbi Deborah W: Yes, it's a real gift. It's a real gift. So, I mean, what you just described, I watched a lot of it unfold, and I benefited from a lot of it, and I know that it's just a blessing to have you as a teacher and to learn from you, whether it's in person or through your writing. And I know that this kind of ... this is always a work in progress. Rabbi Deborah W: So at this moment in time, what's the Torah you are currently teaching in the space where you stand? Rabbi Sheila PW: Well I think in my history with teaching meditation there has been a ... you know, we can apply our striving energy towards anything, including spirituality. The Striver is very alive in the mind, and in the body, and in the culture, the Striver. The Striver, the Judger, one who judges, the one who separates out, and I would say the development of my teaching and my practice, and my own growth as a human, the greatest challenge and the most significant thing has been a place of softening, of actually stilling, quieting, I, saying love truly, to feel beloved. Not to feel I need to be ... you know, people always come and say, "I'm not a good meditator, I can't meditate." Rabbi Sheila PW: There's such harsh standards, and yet really, it's only about ... more and more to me, it seems like, if we can feel beloved, and then realize that our capacity to feel beloved simply needs to be extended to everybody and everything, all beings. But it can't be just pushed out. It has to be received in. Rabbi Deborah W: Okay, so let's just pause, because I know that the Striver is very, very alive in me, and so not ... to just take in what you're saying and not just leap to the next question. Personally that moves me very deeply, and rabbinically I think that's really deeply true. Rabbi Deborah W: So where would you point in Jewish sources toward that understanding, and toward resources to help in that, both reception and the extending outward? Rabbi Sheila PW: Well certainly we could point to Torah, which talks about love quite a bit. It talks about loving the reyah, the neighbor, or the other. Loving yourself. Love your neighbor as yourself, which implies that to be sent, that one is able to love oneself, one is able to love the neighbor. Of course, loving the stranger, which is really, really powerful, and what does that mean, and what does that mean in our time? And how again, there's no separation between the inner work and the outer work. And that the stranger is the one who frightens us, and why do we love the stranger? Because we were strangers from our own experience. It's our experience. It's really being with our experience allows us to see the other, which is amazing. Rabbi Sheila PW: Loving God, and I must say, if you go back to what does that mean, but I really got a wonderful take on that. First of all, it's the center of our prayers. It's the center of the prayer book. The morning prayer service and the evening prayer service is, "You are loved by a great love, Ahavah Rabbah -- Ahavat Olam, eternal love. You are loved by a great love." Rabbi Sheila PW: And we move into the Shema, which means listen to unity. Listen to the wonders, the interconnection of all and everything. There is no separation between receiving and extending, ultimately. There is, on an ultimate level, there's no separation. Can you hear unity? Can you hear unification? Rabbi Sheila PW: And then we move to V'ahavta, "You shall love." Now it says, "You shall love the Lord your God. V'ahavta et Adonai\," but this is an interesting take on it. "You shall love et," could also mean, it can mean, "You shall love the Lord." Or it could also mean, "You shall love with God." Rabbi Deborah W: Oh yes. Rabbi Sheila PW: If God is the energy of love, and you know, I beg to differ, the Christians got the idea that love was Christian and Jews didn't have love, but that was a Christian idea. It was never a Jewish idea. Rabbi Akiva said, "The whole Song of Songs is worth everything else in the Bible." Rabbi Sheila PW: The song of love. Human and divine love. So you can love with that energy. Just feel, experience the energy, and then you extend it. Who do you extend to? You extend it to everybody. You send it, and in what positions, in what postures you use to extend it? You extend it, in every posture. And will you forget? Yes, of course you will forget, which is why we have reminders and we have mezuzahs, and we have all the other things, because naturally we forget. We go back into striving and fear based. And then the whole point of practice, whatever it is, virtual practice, is to remember that there's more possibility for love, self and other. Rabbi Deborah W: So let me ask you this is, and this comes very much out of my personal experience, you were just talking about love being central to our prayers and embedded at the heart of our morning and our evening services, and I think sometimes about the collective nature of our liturgy. That at most Jewish prayer, the Psalms are written in individual voices, but the liturgy, so there's a lot of "I." Not a lot, but "I" appears frequently in the Psalms, and in the liturgy it's all "We." It's all Ahavah rabbah ahavtanu. "WE are loved by a great love." Rabbi Deborah W: Or, again and again, it comes up a lot on High Holidays of for the sins WE have committed, rather than the individual. And I have, at a moment of great despair in my life, someone was teaching about love, and I remember thinking, "Okay, I can connect to it on the collective, but I don't know ... what would it feel like if I, personally, in my individuality, actually believed that I was worthy of this, and that I participated in this, and that this was due to me." Rabbi Deborah W: I was both aware of how far away that was for me, and also of how transformative it might be. I think I was talking with a Christian colleague who said, "I've always felt secure in God's love." Rabbi Deborah W: And I remember thinking, "What must that feel like?" Rabbi Deborah W: So, any thoughts about how to find it for ourselves within the collective? Rabbi Sheila PW: Yes, yes. That's great. That's a great question. Well, there's a lot of different things. I mean, Jews became very head, head oriented, post Enlightenment and all of that. We have a very intense intellectual tradition, and you know, values that. Although, if you think about Hasidism, what is the Hasidic? What does Hasidic mean? I heard a translation once, "Hasidus means the science of love." Rabbi Sheila PW: It's all that love. It really is. You know- Rabbi Deborah W: Because Hasid is from Hesed, which is, and there a lot of different ways to translate Hesed, but one them is love. Rabbi Sheila PW: Is love. And so is the Zohar, the mystical treatise in the 13th century. It's all about love. It really is, and the people who are in the Zohar are constantly embracing each other. They're constantly kissing each other and loving each other. It's really ... So there's a very profound Jewish mystical strand. That's number one. Rabbi Sheila PW: Number two, oppression and trauma really manifest in us. We were hated. We were hated. Jews were hated. How can we feel that God loves us after what happened to us? To us. It wasn't us, personally, but it was close enough. This whole epigenetic trauma and all of this, that the trauma that happened to your generation happened to you. So, that's a piece of resistance as well, I think. And the sort of libel that the Christians put up, that again, Jews were about [judgement], the head. We're [Christians are] about the heart. Rabbi Deborah W: Jews are also about the law. Rabbi Sheila PW: The law, the law, right. [crosstalk 00:15:51]The law. "We're rejecting the law for the heart." Rabbi Sheila PW: I think in our day and age this is really significant, and we have to ... it's practice. It's practice. I mean, I was teaching practices now that are literally about not an abstraction, even, of God loves us, but remembering a time when we felt loved. Just can be a moment. It can be an experience, where we knew we were seen for our absolute worth. And to feel that, and to receive that into our bodies, do a lot of meditations like, that are actually very powerful. They don't work once and for all. Like every practice, you got to keep working it. Rabbi Sheila PW: But, no, to actu ... because we are given a lot of instructions of how to remember the judgements. I remember the one red mark on the page, but not a lot of instructions in this life about how to remember the moment when some person was kind to us. Yesterday I went into the store, the eyeglass store, and I didn't have my prescription, and I said, "You know, I'm not sure these glasses are ..." Rabbi Sheila PW: She says, "Do you want me to clean them for you?" Rabbi Deborah W: Yes, what a kindness. What a- Rabbi Sheila PW: Yes I know! So I said, "Really? Okay, sure." Rabbi Sheila PW: And she took them, and she cleaned them, and she gave them back to me, and she said, "There might be a few scratches on them, but I did the best I could." Rabbi Sheila PW: I said, "Do I owe you anything?" Rabbi Sheila PW: She said, "No. We just do that." Rabbi Sheila PW: I accepted that as a great kindness. I paused enough. It's to train the mind to pause and receive the moments of kindness. We don't. We are focused on the moments of rejection, of critique, of criticism- Rabbi Deborah W: I used to say about myself, that I nurtured a garden of hurts and resentment. And that it was so clear, that in my family I was famous for, I could remember ... I have a very good memory. I don't ... not as good as it used to be, but I don't try. I just remember things. But the things that I could remember in crystalline detail were the hurts, and the wounds, and then frankly, once I met my wife, both because I entered into this transformative relationship, and because Christina's whole orientation is about positive behavioral support, and she teaches me all the time, what you put your attention on grows. So do you want to put it on the love? Or do you want to put it on the hurts? I don't, that's not the garden I nurture anymore. Rabbi Deborah W: The irony is that my memory is not as good, and my family is confounded by it. When I say I really just truly, I don't remember it from a long time ago, I don't remember it from a couple of weeks ago, and they're, there's a loss for them on it. For me, it's only good. It is only good, because I think it's, I think my heart is bigger. Rabbi Sheila PW: Right. Right. You feel better. And you have more energy to offer out. More energy to offer out. It's less constricted. I mean, in a way, with the mediation, with every practice, the resilience practice you can talk about, it's about move from constriction, the narrow place mitzrayim. I'm sure other people have talked about this, but from the mitzrayim, the narrow, Egypt place, to an expansion, expanded place. How to support that, and how to support that both through our own internal, spiritual practices, but also systemically. How to advocate. Justice is that too. I mean, justice is advocating for more space. For more tolerance. For more opportunity. For more equality. For more equitable distribution. It's all about expansion. Rabbi Deborah W: So I want to turn to a question about inner work and outer work in a second, but before then, I want to tease something out. I think I've been presuming this, but I don't know that I've ever really spelled it out. I think what part of what you're putting forward, Sheila, is that practice is ... a lot of times when I think about meditation, I'm thinking about stilling my mind, and I'm thinking about moving out of that place of striving, and into a more, I guess a place that kind of points toward unity. Rabbi Deborah W: Yesterday I was in a room where they asked, "How many people have ever felt a sense of," I think it was like, "union with the universe beyond yourself?" Rabbi Deborah W: And I was one of the ones who out my hands up, and that was significantly through some mediation work. Other modalities, being in nature, [have] sometimes gotten me there. Part of what I think you're saying is, that by engaging in practice, we can also cultivate and even enact our values. That the practices are means towards orienting ourselves toward what is most important. Rabbi Sheila PW: Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. Because it, we have more freedom, and we also can see what is more wholesome and unwholesome. What's more connecting, what's more in alignment with who we are and what we care about. And it's, you know, it's constant. It's a constant, but if we can see before we do the reactive thing, part of it is to be less reactive, and to be more responsive. That's almost a cliché at this point, but it's true, and we can act out of freedom. We can make choices. Rabbi Sheila PW: So yes, all the qualities are all expanded qualities. All the qualities we want to inhabit, middot in the Jewish sense. You know, patience, a generosity, loving kindness, they're all, friendliness, they're all expansion of the small, constricted, frightened self. Rabbi Deborah W: Yes, yes. Wow. So let's talk a little bit about, you made the leap to justice, and other times I've heard you talk about the inner work and the outer work. So let's have that be our last chunk of conversation. We'll talk about the kind of, the way that you're trying to overcome that kind of disconnection. Rabbi Sheila PW: Well I have to say, this is funny, I recently rediscovered an essay I wrote when I decided I, was thinking about becoming a rabbi, and this was in like, 1976. In it, I wrote, I quoted Martin Buber, I don't know if he said this or not, but at some point I thought he did, that the East breathes in, and the West breathes out, and the job of the Jew is to unify the breath. The inhale and the exhale. I quoted Martin Buber. I put that in my essay. Rabbi Sheila PW: Lately my most, I mean I've done a lot of work, but the image of the stranger, and the book I wrote, "God Loves the Stranger" feels like that unification for me. I started thinking about using that term, God loves the stranger, came up with that, I mean, it does say that in the Torah, but ... when the Syrian refugee crisis, not even the most recent refugee crisis, and what does that mean to see the other as fully human? And how do we go about treating the other? That's justice. I would call that justice. Advocating for justice. Rabbi Sheila PW: And how do we see ... because we have so many negative presumptions about who the other is. And then the stranger. It also relates to seeing the stranger within, because we also see ourselves with all kinds of labels, and limitations, and negativities. So the work of freeing up our own self image, and loving ourselves, it comes back to that, it is the same work as loving the stranger. It is that work. It's mutually reinforcing. I mean this is an idea. I think now, come more and more current, although we also see such abuse, such abuse, but the abuse tends- Rabbi Deborah W: And polarization, yes. Rabbi Sheila PW: But the abuse of other is not self aware. It's not self accepting. It doesn't come from self love. Rabbi Deborah W: It comes from maybe self preservation or something. There's- Rabbi Sheila PW: Right, right, a very primitive urge. Fear. Unmitigated fear. And the spiritual work is being with the fear- Rabbi Deborah W: Yes, that's exactly- Rabbi Sheila PW: And allowing it to transform. Rabbi Deborah W: That's exactly right. And it's so interesting, because we live in this, many of us are fortunate enough to be really protected from the elements, and you know, where our ancestors ... I think about it all the time, what it must have been like when you had to create your own light, and create your own warmth. Like, we're winding down a pretty cold winter, and we suffer from that, but we suffer from that, many of us get to go inside and turn on the heat, and sit in front of the fire. So to ... but to realize how much the primitive, self preserving impulses continue to guide. They're still with us. They're- Rabbi Sheila PW: Yes, they need to be. At some level. They just don't have to run the ship. That's when we talk about transformation, and evolution. Evolution of human consciousness. We haven't gotten very far. Rabbi Deborah W: No, no, which is why practice is always ... We got to practice at it. So, I think we're going to, we're going to wind up. Is there anything you want to add before we take our leave? Rabbi Sheila PW: Just that this is lovely to have a conversation with you. Totally lovely. Thank you so much. Rabbi Deborah W: For me too. My great pleasure. Rabbi Sheila PW: It's fun to talk about these things. Rabbi Deborah W: It is. Rabbi Sheila PW: I manage to do it a lot. Rabbi Deborah W: It's wonderful. And we will post on the website that supports the episode, a link to your website, which talks about your publications. We'll also post one or two of the guided meditations that you offer up to people, so that people have a chance to make that leap from the theory into the practice with you. Rabbi Sheila PW: I'm going to put in a plug for one thing, which is spiritual direction. Rabbi Deborah W: Oh yes. Rabbi Sheila PW: That has been a very, very important practice for me to participate in. I've been doing it almost 20 years, and that various people have brought it into the Jewish world. I now offer spiritual direction, which is such a great gift. It is a very profound experience to be both the receiver and the giver of spiritual direction. So I just really want to advocate for that. Rabbi Deborah W: Sure, and would you, just in a word, will you, I mean, I can offer up my definition or explanation, but I would imagine for some of our listeners, they don't know what spiritual direction is. Rabbi Sheila PW: It's sitting with someone who's been trained, for usually an hour a month, and really sitting and listening to what is deepest in your heart. And where mystery, where the divine, however we understand that, spirit, the heart, the deepest heart is guiding. And listening together. Attending and listening together. And it's quite miraculous what happens. Rabbi Deborah W: It's true. I mean- Rabbi Sheila PW: No agendas. No agendas. Rabbi Deborah W: No, I know. But some if it is the ... I think the stillness, and the discernment, and it's the text of one person's life and heart, rather than the text of a liturgy. There really, I think the director and directee make a space together to create this container for really extraordinary things to happen. Rabbi Sheila PW: Yes. It's a blessing. Rabbi Deborah W: Yes. So yes, for sure, some of what we can share online are practices that people can access via their iPhones or iPads at any time. Spiritual direction, I mean even as it can be done remotely, it is, it's a panim-el-panim, It's a face to face and heart to heart encounter, I think. Rabbi Sheila PW: Yes. Yes. Yes. Rabbi Deborah W: It is only synchronous. It doesn't work on ... Rabbi Sheila PW: Right, right, right, right. Rabbi Deborah W: But happy to share that plug, and I know that you are a powerful and transformative spiritual director. And if there are folks who are looking for directors, we actually help to create a training program, and help to create this field in the Jewish sector at Reconstructing Judaism, so you can be in touch and we can possibly help to connect you with folks. Rabbi Deborah W: So, I want to thank my guest, Rabbi Sheila Peltz Weinberg for our wonderful conversation on love, and on unification, and on practice and spiritual direction. And then as I said, you can find more information at Hashivenu.fireside.fm. Rabbi Deborah W: Also on reconstructingjudaism.org. Rabbi Deborah W: And you may find some resources as well on ritualwell.org. Rabbi Deborah W: I am Rabbi Deborah Waxman, and you've been listening to Hashivenu, Jewish Teachings on Resilience.