Find God By Not-Finding | Jewish Meditation On Yitro

Hashkiveinu Adonai Eloheinu B'Shalom,

B'Shalom If you search for yourself,

You can look everywhere and never find yourself.

Because,

Of course,

It's yourself that's doing the looking.

And when you do find yourself as the one who is looking,

Meaning,

When you find out that you are the awareness that looks,

There is a tremendous relief and letting go.

In this episode of the Torah of Awakening Jewish Meditation podcast,

You'll get a taste of this inner freedom when we examine the Aseret HaDibrot,

The Ten Commandments in Parshat Yitro,

Followed by a guided meditation based on the Hebrew letter Reish.

I'm Rabbi Brian Yosef Schachter-Brooks.

Enjoy.

Okay,

Here is the verse we are looking at.

Vayadaber Elohim et kol ha'davarim ha'elei leimor God spoke all of these words saying,

Anokhi Adonai Elohecha,

I am Hashem,

Your God,

Asher hotseitikha me'eretz mitzrayim mibeit avadim who brought you out of the land of Egypt,

Out of the house of bondage.

Okay,

So there's a story that the Hasidic Rebbe Yaakov Yitzhak Rabinowitz of Peshishka,

Also known as the Yehudi,

Was asked to examine the 13-year-old Chanokh in the Talmud.

Chanokh later became the Rabbi of Alexander when he grew up.

It took the boy an hour to think over the passage which had been assigned to him before he could expound it.

Once he had done so,

The Tzaddik spoke,

When I was 13,

I plumbed passages more difficult than this one in no time at all.

And when I was 18,

I had the reputation of being a great Torah scholar.

But one day it dawned on me that a person cannot attain to perfection through learning alone.

I understood what is told of our father Abraham,

That he explored the sun,

The moon,

And the stars,

And he did not find God.

Yet,

In this very not finding,

The presence of God was revealed to him.

It was in the not finding that the presence of God was revealed to him.

For three months I mulled over this realization.

What does this mean?

Then I explored and I explored until I too reached the truth of not finding.

The function of the mind is to find.

That's what the activity or mind is constantly trying to do.

We're trying to find the solution posed by our thoughts,

Moment to moment.

We're trying to navigate through the outer world by creating an inner world through which we can conceptualize who and where we are,

What we're doing,

And why.

And this is,

Of course,

Essential.

But it also creates a side effect.

It creates the side effect of seeing reality through the screen of the inner map,

Through the screen of the mind.

The mind sees the surface of things,

A collection of separate parts,

And feels itself to be separate from what it sees.

And it was that as the sound of the shofar moved with great power Moses spoke and God answered him with a voice.

But there comes a time when that inner map breaks down and we are confronted by the naked present in all of its mystery.

When we are shaken from the continuity of mind-created context and the familiar disappears we step out of the mitzrayim of the known,

Out of our conditioned mental patterns of separateness.

This wilderness can be terrifying,

And yet in the unknown there is the possibility of receiving reality in a very direct way,

A way that knows being as a whole.

I am Hashem who brought you out of the land of Egypt.

According to our tradition,

This divine declaration of identity is the first of the asereta dibrot,

The ten sayings,

Otherwise known as the ten commandments.

But what exactly is the commandment?

Right?

Hashem is saying I am Hashem,

So what is the commandment exactly?

According to Maimonides in his work Sefer HaMitzvot,

This first commandment is simply to believe in God.

But if we look at the second part of the verse,

Who brought you out of the land of Egypt,

There is a deeper message that is not about mere belief,

Not about events of the past,

But rather is about this moment in which we now find ourselves,

This moment through which we too may be brought out of mitzrayim.

Anokhi Hashem means that the anokhi,

The I,

Anokhi means I,

The I is actually Hashem,

The I is divine,

Meaning our own inner identity and in fact the inner identity of all things is the ultimate living presence of existence.

That is what the divine name actually means.

But they are extra beloved that it is made known to them that they are created as images for the divine.

Sh'ne'emar as it is said in Genesis 9.

6,

For in the image of the divine humans were made.

And that's from Pirkei Avot 3.

18 In the story,

The Israelites are shaken by the terrible awesomeness of the natural world around them and in that heightened state,

The inner identity of nature reveals itself as their own inner identity.

It's not about believing in the idea of a divine entity.

It's not about adding another concept to our thoughts about reality.

It is about subtracting the conditional sense of the ordinary imposed by our minds and recognizing existence itself,

Recognizing that which the mind cannot map.

This knowing through not finding,

That is the cessation of mapping with the mind is itself liberation.

Liberation from the burden of time and conditioned identity represented by that going out from Egypt.

Ve'chol ha'am ro'im et ha'kolot And all the people saw the voices.

All the people saw the voices.

That's what it says.

It doesn't say that they heard the voices.

It says they saw the voices.

In other words,

They perceived everything in a completely new way.

It's really a kind of awakening.

Physicist Neil deGrasse Tyson talks about how we can imagine our cosmic address.

He says the first step is to notice that we are here on planet Earth.

Next,

We can expand our perspective to see that Earth is part of our solar system.

Then we expand farther to see that our sun is one of hundreds of billions of stars in the Milky Way galaxy.

Even further we can see the family of galaxies to which the Milky Way belongs called the Local Group.

Then even further we expand to see the Local Group as part of a larger cluster of galaxy families called the Virgo Supercluster.

And even further the Virgo Supercluster is one of the many clusters that make up the observable universe.

But what comes after that?

We have come to the limits of our map beyond which is simply mystery.

Perhaps,

Tyson says,

Our whole universe is merely a single bubble in an infinite ocean of bubbles.

Each one a complete universe.

Now consider where would that ocean of universes be?

The imagination reaches out toward infinity and comes to stillness.

כל ימי גדלתי בין החכמים All my days I grew up among the sages ולא מצאתי לגוף טוב אל השתיקה And I have found nothing better for a person than silence.

ולא המדרש הוא העיקר Study is not the point,

אלא המעשה But practice.

וכל המרבה דברים מביכית And whoever indulges in too many words brings about great error.

Ultimately,

We don't and can't know where or what or why any of this is.

And yet we do know הנה Here it is.

Here we are.

In this moment.

In this mystery.

In this supreme divine gift of being.

This practice of finding the limits of our thought beyond which is this simple mystery of being is the path of resh.

Of awe.

Of wonder.

So we can awaken these qualities of the letter resh with this simple covenant,

This affirmation.

You can also take a pose for the letter resh as you can maybe see in the shape of it how it's like a person bowing.

And so bringing hands to the heart and bowing however is comfortable for you.

Chanting I am beholding.

I am in awe.

I am wonder.

Chanting.

Great in your body.

Resting in the sound of the vibrations.

And our chant for the letter resh from Psalm 111 The beginning of wisdom is this awe.

This recognition of the limits of our own thoughts.

Good intelligence to all who practice this.

Its praise endures forever.

Which we could also read as we are praising the eternal.

That which transcends form.

Which transcends time.

That which is always underneath at the bottom.

Of all that is.

Singing together.

Singing together.

And preparing for meditation.

Letting your body be in a comfortable alert position.

Bringing some attention to your posture.

Letting your back be relatively straight.

Your spine aligned.

Your head as if pulled up by a string into the heavens.

Releasing any excess tension.

Moving from the activity of learning together to the activity of simply being.

And taking an attitude of generously offering your attention to the fullness of whatever is appearing now to you of what is felt.

What is seen.

What is heard on all levels.

Bringing your right hand to your heart and offering your attention with Lecha.

And a long out breath.

Deep breath in.

Lecha.

And bringing left hand to your belly.

Feeling awareness dropping down into your belly permeating your organs.

Letting that consciousness flow down from your belly down through your legs to your feet and toes.

And down from there into the earth.

Tension rising up from your belly.

Chest,

Upper back,

Shoulders and neck.

Flowing down.

Arms and hands and fingers connecting back with your heart and belly.

Bringing your attention more deeply into the feeling of the flow of your breathing.

Letting breathing become a little more deep,

A little more slow.

Tension rising up.

Face,

Facial muscles,

Brain and nervous system.

Bringing a little smile to your lips.

Being the loving,

Benevolent,

Indwelling presence.

Life in the body.

And affirming.

Deep breath in.

And bringing your right hand up from your heart to lightly touch your forehead.

As awareness filling your body shines out from the body into the space around you.

Resting on the sounds vibrating in the air.

Touching the objects.

The walls.

Whatever is there in your environment.

Awareness like light shining out into the space.

Recognizing that the outer world as it appears to you right now is actually appearing in the field of awareness.

Just like the inner world of thoughts and feelings.

They're all appearing both in and out.

Inner and outer are appearing in this one field.

This one field of consciousness.

Beyond your thoughts.

Beyond your feelings.

Beyond personality.

Beyond all of it.

You are this field.

You are this openness.

Vast,

Spacious and free.

And affirming.

Deep breath in.

The name.

And kissing your fingers.

Relaxing your hands.

Please bless us in our practice today.

Help us to meditate deeply and powerfully.

To remember moment to moment.

To simply be the open space of awareness.

Aware of thoughts as they arise.

Aware of feelings,

Of mood,

Of sounds.

Aware of distractions,

Whatever it is that arises.

Just being the consciousness of those things.

Resting the thinking mind in the tefilah.

In the prayer.

Atahu.

You who are not separate from anything we encounter.

You who are not separate from this awareness that we are.

Atahu.

You are Hashem.

Bringing the chant on the inside.

Letting the mind rest in the silent repetition.

Atahu.

Thoughts will come.

Let them come.

Not resist them.

Not push them away.

But also not get involved.

If you notice yourself getting involved with thinking,

It's okay.

As soon as you notice it,

You just bring yourself back.

Atahu.

Atahu.

As we come into silent meditation.

And bringing some movement back into your body.

Taking a nice stretch.

As we prepare to come back into our other activities.

May we be imbued with this awareness of what is behind everything that we are doing.

Not be so absorbed in the details of our momentary agendas.

But to be conscious of and in awe of heaven and hell.

Of reverence.

Of that devotional sense.

That opening of the heart to the source from which this miracle of being is constantly being given to us.

Shalom.

I hope you've enjoyed this Torah of Awakening.

I'm Rabbi Brian Yosef Schachter-Brooks.

Until next time,

All blessings.