Sermons and Divrei Torah
Spiritual Fitness
by Rabbi Elyse Goldstein
(Sermon - Rosh Hashanah 5761)
A couple of weeks ago I was sitting around a beach with a bunch
of women my age. One of them said, “I’m writing an article on
‘40 and fit.’ What does everybody do for working out? Around the
circle we went. “I go swimming twice a week.” “I wake up at 5:30
a.m. to get to the gym.” “I do aerobics three nights a week.”
“I’m into pilates.” Then it got to me. “I do absolutely nothing.”
Alright- not really. I walk up and down two flights of stairs
chasing three kids most evenings and mornings.
How many people here this morning have a regular physical work-out
routine at least once a week: exercise bike, treadmill, swimming,
power-walking, jogging? Twice a week? Three times a week? O.K.,
now, how many people here have a regular spiritual work-out routine
at least once a week: daily prayer, blessings before or after
a meal, Torah study? Twice a week? Three times a week?
We are obsessed with our bodies, body image, body culture. We
are definitely not obsessed with our souls. We get up at 5:30
a.m. to jog, but what jogs our Jewish memory? What spiritual exercises
would we be willing to rise before the sun to do?
We know already the dangers of over-obsession with body image
at least for women: anorexia, bulemia; the statistics are shattering.
And do not for one minute think this does not affect Jewish women.
It does. Jewish women of every denomination, every economic level,
every family configuration, including the Orthodox and ultra-Orthodox,
are among the 8 million women suffering from eating disorders.
One Hasidic woman who suffers from anorexia was quoted in a recent
Jerusalem report article as saying, “I want to be thin and beautiful
just like the next woman. I see posters, I see pictures of models
all around. I might not love like them, but I can’t help feeling
less satisfied with myself when I see them.” Another ultra-Orthodox
woman spoke of the pressure of getting a “shidduch”- a marriage
match- for herself once she turned 25. Her older age was seen
as a disadvantage, so she was told to try and be as pretty and
thin as possible to “compensate.”
So even in communities traditionally understood to be offering
high spiritual values and higher moral standards, the culture
of body obsession has leaked through.
We are a society of physical fitness, with no spiritual fitness.
We mistakenly believe that if we feel good outside, we’ll feel
good inside. I know the rush of endorphines that follows physical
exercise gives a nice little high, so we feel really good after
a work-out. I’m not saying that exercise doesn’t help a person
feel good about themselves. It definitely does. But does exercise
give our lives the meaning we strive for?
Now, there’s nothing in Judaism that devalues the body. Shmirat
haguf- protecting the body and its sanctity- is one of the mitzvot
in Judaism. There are rules against hurting the body in any way
that must be kept not only in life but in death as well, including
the rules of kavod ha-met, respect for the body of a dead person.
The Psalms say, “The soul is Yours, oh God, and the body is your
handiwork.” The body is valued precisely because it is a vessel
of our spirituality, evidence of a higher purpose, not because
it makes us more shapely or more muscular and that is what our
society is into theses days. There is a midrash in Leviticus Rabbah
about the sage Hillel. One day he was accompanying some pupils
home, then took his leave. “Master, where are you going?” they
inquired. “To perform a religious duty” he answered. “Which one?”
“To bathe in the bathhouse.” “Is that a religious duty?’ they
wondered. “If someone is appointed to scrape and clean the statues
of the king that stand in theatres and circuses, is paid for the
work, and even associates with the nobility as result,” he answered,
“how much more so should I, who am created in the image of God,
take care of my body.”
But the body does not give our lives the meaning we strive for.
In the beginning of the morning service we recite the prayer asher
yatzar which praises G-d for the intricate workings of our bodies.
But that prayer is not enough. Immediately following it is the
prayer elohai neshama, which praises G-d for the purity of our
souls. Body and soul, soul and body. Though we feel great after
a physical worksout, we are really only half alive.
What amazes and perplexes me is that we seem willing to spend
hours in disciplining our bodies through gruelling exercise, but
then we want a quick fix of spirituality that will neatly fit
into our schedules: an hour, maybe a day, maybe even a weekend
if the speaker is good enough. We don’t want services to be too
long. We can’t find time to take a weekly class. We’re willing
to bicycle for a an hour and not go anywhere, we’re willing to
run in place, but we’re not willing to go round and round the
same text unless it “goes somewhere.” We’re not willing to pray
if it doesn’t “give us something.” I recently got a new book for
my Jewish Spirituality class, called The Ten Minute Spiritual
Workout. Hey, ten minutes a day, I could do that. Think about
it: all the spirituality you need in just ten minutes a day. It
should be on the cover of Women’s World or Chatelaine: “Great
abs in just ten minutes a day! Great souls in just another ten!”
Sometimes the spirituality of the 90’s seems to me like all gain
with no pain. In our culture, spirituality has become religion
LITE; the “fun” without the bothersome rules or expectations on
life-style or behaviour. Rabbi Dow Marmur has called it “the thrills
without the discipline.” Spirituality is for sale from every great
religion and even some I’ve never heard of, from self-appointed
masters both dead and alive, on the bookstore shelves and little
pocket calendars and portable angels you can wear pinned to your
lapel. It’s a new magazine full of quick and easy answers to life’s
existential crisises that this guru or that can teach you with
a couple of paperbacks or tapes or even a weekend in a hotel if
he or she happens to have Toronto on their tour schedule. We want
wisdom in small sound bites on internet sites. Is spirituality
another “thing” we can buy? Is it a warm fuzzy feeling, a sort
of undefined oneness with people and the universe, or is it something
you can practice and touch and feel and hold?
“I”m not religious but I’m very spiritual” people say to me. I
frankly don’t get it. Religion seems to me to be the container
into which we put our spirituality in. How do you manifest your
spirituality when you’re not viewing sunsets from the top of mountains,
which I agree, is an extremely spiritual moment? But just how
often do you find yourself on the top of a mountain at the end
of a day? More often than not we are on the 401 at the end of
a day; now how do we take our spirituality there without a daily
practice that speaks to the way we drive, or use money, or have
sex, or work, or the way we speak to our neighbors and coworkers
and parents and kids? How do you experience a daily spirituality
without a framework? The workout is religion. Spirituality is
the buzz after the workout. How can you have the buzz without
the workout?
I want to challenge us today to think about this new search for
spirituality in the 90’s. As all the hype of the “new millenium”
escalates- and by the way, it is NOT the new millenium to Jews
who do not count the calendar from year one of Jesus’ birth- but
surely this year spirituality will become more and more commercialized.
I don’t want Jewish spirituality to be no more than lazy religion.
E.M. Forster in his book A Passage to India describes one of his
characters as “...approving of religion as long as it endorsed
the National Anthem, but opposing it when it attempted to influence
his life.” Let’s be perfectly honest. We can be “90’s spiritual”
without changing our lives one iota. Rabbi Jonathan Omer-Man,
a respected contemporary spokesman for a modern Jewish mysticism
once described those who want spirituality without religion as
wanting “ the cream without the milk.” Spirituality, he suggests,
is service to a goal bigger than yourself, a community dedicated
to changing the world together, a daily regimen of exercises that
take us closer to self-reflection and the action required to change
a person’s bad habits and sagging spirits. Omer-Man speaks of
“systems of spirituality” and says, “If it makes you work, there’s
a chance it might be a good one. If not, it’s just another commodity
for consumers. It’s a gimmick.”
But the gimmicks of spirituality are now, and will continue for
the next few years to be big business, another commodity, an expensive
hobby. We do skiing and lunch and then we do spirituality. Rabbi
Dow Marmur writes, “Real spirituality, as opposed to the popular
ersatz, is the antithesis of narcissism. It’s not to please me,
but to turn to the other. That’s why, for example, visiting the
the sick and feeding the hungry are more authentically Jewish
than private contemplation. Torah study isn’t contemplation. It’s
an activity, a way of finding out what God wants us to do...Judaism
seeks to integrate service and study, action and reflection.”
To be sure, Judaism is filled with meditative, reflective components.
It’s got its own mysticism and meditation and amulets and esoteric
pratices. Many of us do not know those practices because they
are often hidden or not readily available to those without a solid
background in mainstream Judaism and fluent Hebrew. Judaism’s
mystical elements are tied to Judaism, and they don’t exist like
a head without a body. The “zen of Judaism” if you will, is there
for the taking- but you can’t get it without the Jewish container
they come in. If you’re looking for deep spirituality, I know
Judaism can offer it to you. But those of you who mediate know
it takes practice and patience, and in the first few tries you
usually get nothing out of it, or else you fall asleep. And those
of you who do physical exercise know the beginning is difficult,
and your muscles hurt, and you need warm-up time, and it gets
easier the more you do it. Spiritual fitness takes time and effort
and practice and patience and discipline and study and reflection
and self-sacrifice and all those other things that simply aren’t
easy or LITE.
Now I myself practice any number of what would be called “New
Age” type rituals, some of which we’ll do in these services-but
don’t get nervous, you won’t have to hug anyone you don’t know
or reveal your deepest darkest secrets in front of the room. I
favour the kind of new rituals which connect people to each other,
and help us sense that we are larger than just ourselves and thus
responsible to each other and to the community. But so many of
the rituals of the self-centred spirituality of our age are just
that: self-centred. They are about me, my needs and my own goodness
and godliness. They offer an all-loving G-d who does just what
you want , just when you want it, manifesting only goodness and
joy, and making all wishes come true. These kind of rituals and
ceremonies and practices do not include self-sacrifice, self-control,
or rigour, and I am highly suspicious of them.
This year, I invite you to join a health club for the soul, complete
with a daily workout of the spiritual muscles.Here then, is the
Goldstein program of spiritual fitness, offered today at an introductory
low price of your High Holiday ticket, good for the whole year
and renewable with no initiation fee after the first year. I want
us to be in good shape spiritually, because as far as I can see,
we are a pretty flabby bunch in that department.:
Step 1: Practice gratefulness by giving tzedakah each day. Put aside
a “pushke”, can or jar or bowl that, at the end of the day, you
throw your pennies or loose change into. As you do that, concentrate
on the fact that you do not vitally need that change, but someone
else does. Take the change at the end of every several months
and decide where you’ll send it, maybe by theme. For Sukkot, festival
of the harvest, you can give to a food bank or Mazon or other
food related charities. For Pesach, festival of freedom, you can
give to organizations working toward freedom or civil rights.
For Shavuot, festival of learning, you can give to schools or
organizations dedicated to teaching and study.
Step 2: Torah study. There is a tale of a man who brings his son to
the rabbi to study. “Why do you want him to learn Torah” the rabbi
asks. “So that he can teach his son Torah” was the reply. “Better
you should come to study Torah, so that when your son sees you
study, he will want to also.” So many Jews think Judaism is for
children, because they last Judaism they practised was as children.
If you have studied anything as an adult, you know how profoundly
serious and deep Judaism is; it is not pediatric, although we
have forced it to be “for de kinder.” Rabbi Eric Yoffie uses the
analogy of an oxygen mask in an airplane: if you need oxygen,
you are always instructed to place your own mask on first, and
then place one on your children. Torah is an adult’s oxygen mask.
Adult Jewish study is not cutesy, fluffy stuff. Rebbi Lievi Yitzchak
was once asked why all the pages of the tractates of Talmud start
with page “2”- there are no page “1”s in the Talmud. He replied,
“However much you study, you should always remember you haven’t
even gotten to the first page yet.” At Kolel, we make our students
“reach up” without being judgmental about where they may be reaching
from. We won’t do 45 minutes of Maimonides for a quick $5; spirituality
on sign-boards up and down Bathurst; easy answers for difficult
questions. So maybe we won’t be the local “Souls ‘R Us.” That’s
o.k. Come study with us this year.
Step 3: Conscious Eating: Perhaps the hardest discipline is to control
what, when and how we eat. Judaism elevates the very banal and
somewhat animal act of eating by offering a regime that includes
a special diet, a propensity toward vegetarianism, and the offering
of blessings of gratefulness both before and after eating. I know
personally how crucial this is to spirituality. I grew up in New
York, and I have no idea how tomatoes grow, or whether olives
grow on trees or vines or bushes. Its a constant challenge for
me as an urban Jew to relate to the farmers who produced my food.
But when I sit down to a meal and make a blessing, I have to figure
out what I’m eating and how it got there and what category it
is. It’s a daily reminder that the grocery store is not the ultimate
source of my nourishment.
Step 4: Prayer: What would it mean to begin and end your day with prayer?
What would it mean to get up in the morning and say “modeh ani’:
I am so grateful this morning to be alive, and to have another
chance, a new start? What would it mean to end the day with a
quiet inventory of events and a moment t of self-reflection. Did
I act today with integrity? Where did I fail? How can tomorrow
be better? “Shema Yisrael”: I acknowledge my connection to the
Jewish people and the unity and oneness of the universe as I drift
into sleep.
Step 5: Shabbat. Now we are ready for the cool down. Rabbi Moshe Leib
of Sasov said, “A human being who does not have a single hour
for his or her own every day is not much of a human being.” We
instictively know that already. We are so exhausted by Friday.
Can you imagine 24 hours without your cell phone, without e-mail,
without the phone ringing, just for the peace and quiet? Its almost
frightening. What would we do with all that extra time? Shabbay
forces us to take a moment, an hour, a day for ourselves and refresh
and renew. If we are more than our bodies, than certainly we are
more than our jobs. On Thursday we prepare, make a menu, buy challah
and wine. On Friday we clean, ourselves and the house; Friday
night no more eating yogurt and peanut butter in front of an open
fridge, no more microwave dinners, no catch-as-catch-can. With
candlelight and wine we feel like a mentsch again. The soul gets
to breathe, and the body gets to rest.
That’s my five-point program, with a slow build-up, an intense
middle, and a cool down at the end.
A personal story, which I have told before, but is worth telling
again in this context to conclude. I remember when I went for
a weekend to Kripalu, an ashram in Massachusetts, I met countless
Jews who had chosen eastern spirituality. Kripalu was their new
home, and Danny had become Vishna and Ellen was Pishnu and they
were chanting Sanskrit and eating brown rice ands tofu all weekend.
On Saturday evening after a candle ceremony that looked just like
havdala, I asked some of the Jews, now clad all in white with
turbans, why they had left Judaism. “This is such a spiritual
way to live” they said. “We have a special diet, special clothes,
special rules about sex, daily special chanting in a special language,
our whole day and week are focused on the spirit.” What a minute:
special diet, special clothes, special rules about sex, daily
special chanting in a special language? Excuse me, but it sounds
a little like another religion I know, the one previously rejected
for its lack of a daily spiritual regime.
This year, I invite you to reject the shallow, popular spirituality
LITE, and to invest in a program of serious soul exercise in a
Jewish framework. It’s no coincidence that this service is in
a gym. Take it as a sign.
Shana Tova.
Sermons and Divrei Torah
Additional Resources
Elul: Period of Preparation
Yamim Noraim: Days of Awe
Rosh Hashanah: Introduction
Shofar Symbolism
The Custom of Tashlich
Yom Kippur: Introduction
G'mar Chatima Tova...
