Breathing Room

I grew up going to church with my mom and my brother. My dad knows a few Jewish jokes and the first half of the prayer that you say when you light the menorah (he trails off in the latter half with odd guttural noises that he tries to pass off as Hebrew. Very PC, my father.). My folks gave me the option of whether or not to get baptized when I was ten; and having almost no experience in any Jewish community or customs, I stuck with what I knew. But the other side of my heritage has always tugged at me – asking for attention and begging to be explored. It is a significant reason why I wanted to come to Israel. And being drawn to the more mystical sects of most religions anyway, I perked up at the opportunity to go to a class on Hasidic Judaism, taught by one of my organization’s seminar teachers. This blog post is about my experience and reflections on that class.

I almost didn’t go – it was New Year’s Eve, I would be at least a half an hour late, and no one was responding to my pleas for an address…which would only have been marginally helpful, anyway. The Nachlaot neighborhood is a veritable maze of tiny side streets occupied first by the poor and eventually by young families and hipsters (think of a Jewish West Asheville in an ancient labyrinth). Most cartographers gave up and just stamped “Nachlaot” in huge letters on their maps, leaving befuddled foreigners to fend for themselves by wandering the streets and asking equally befuddled locals for guidance. But I did finally go, and when I got to the end of my texted directions (which read “it is basically the first building”), I had only the option to trust that fate would lead me to the proper building, floor, and door. “Are you looking for Sha’ul?” asked a woman going up the stairs to her apartment. Another dazed-looking man emerged from the bowels of the neighborhood and, overhearing the woman’s query said, “Hey, me too. I think it’s here.” Sha’ul opened the door.

Sha’ul gave me a briefing on his classes: he explores the teachings of Rebbe Nachman of Breslov, a leading authority on the mystic sect of Hasidic Judaism. Rebbe Nachman opened the notion that Judaism can be subjective – that how people feel when they perform the many rituals of the faith can be just as significant as the rituals themselves. He was about as popular as Galileo was in his time.

Sha’ul translated a bit of the reading to explain that a sigh in acknowledgement of lack is actually a fulfillment of that lack. So, he explained, if you sigh when you’re tired or hungry, your sigh is actually fulfilling the need for rest or nourishment. Sha’ul asked us - How can that be? Was this guy saying that we can feel fulfilled by griping about our needs? Hardly. He compared this sigh to breathing into a tight spot during a yoga stretch – filling that space with conscious devotion through the breath. The word ruoch, meaning breath, also means spirit, which is indicative of a life force. In many religions, life started with the breath – with the spoken word. (And God said “let there be light.”) In English, the roots of the words respire, aspire, and inspire contain spire (as in the highest point of a church). All are rooted in the same word as “spirit”. Breath. Reaching. A divinely bequeathed vision. Breath, as Rebbe Nachman suggests, is a spiritual CPR if you will – resuscitating our needs through a reconnection with the spirit. So “oye!” is not just an exasperated exclamation; it’s also a fulfillment of need through connecting with the spirit.

This was one paragraph of one text that examines the Torah from one viewpoint. I can see how people devote their lives to this study. But this lesson hit me extra hard that evening. I thought of it with respect to the gaps that I sometimes feel here – the ones I don’t write about. I share the adventures, the explorations, the awesome projects I’m a part of. But what the blogs and the photos on Facebook don’t capture are the spaces filled with loneliness, frustration, doubt. There are nights when I sit at my little kitchen table, scrolling through mind-numbing social media in an empty search for human connection. When I stare out the window at work waiting for the bureaucratic dominoes to finally fall into my inbox and give structure and purpose to my day. When I sit down on a park bench and have to move because watching a group of friends picnic together is, while delightful, simply too painful in my present frame of mind.

Like a mother whose body erases the pain of childbirth, I’d forgotten the reserves of courage I would need to accommodate the silence and isolation that ebb and flow through the adventure. Perhaps my body keeps erasing this pain because it is something I still have yet to learn – how to breathe into the lack. To embrace the emptiness and feel fulfilled fully in my own created space. To feel rejuvenated by simply sitting in still seclusion from the familiar, and acknowledge the rise and fall of my own breath. It is one of the hardest questions – especially for my generation; and especially when you’re on what everyone around you is calling a grand adventure – how to be comfortable with ourselves and patient with the doldrums. We all have this lack, I guess it just depends on how we choose to see the sigh that fills it.