Shabbat Reflection: On Breath & Awareness

Here’s a story of meaning-making from this week. It comes in four acts.

One

On Tuesday morning, Erev Yom Kippur, as part of my morning practice, I happened on a 14-minute guided?meditation ?on the Insight Timer app by the late master teacher Thich Nhat Hanh. It was a simple practice, one of the Buddha’s very first teachings, about breath: To breathe with awareness as one breathes in and out. “Now I am breathing in, now I am breathing out.” As Thich Nhat Hanh shared, this is such a basic and profound teaching, because so many other things flow from it. If we’re aware of our breath, then we are mindful of our breath—and we can be mindful of our being. Breath is the easiest thing to take for granted, to overlook. When we fail to notice it, then we step off the path of awareness and into the world of mindlessness. (And I would add, as we teach often at IJS, that the moment of becoming aware that we’re no longer aware of our breath, and choosing to come back to it, is a basic action of?teshuva,?returning to our intentions.)

Two

Later that day, I hosted the?IJS Daily Meditation Sit , which was led by my colleague Rabbi Marc Margolius. This was the second of a two-day miniseries we held in conjunction with The Shomer Collective, a wonderful organization dedicated to promoting conversations and planning about end-of-life in the Jewish community. Marc’s practice focused on breath as well—as a rehearsal for our own deaths. To be aware of the way our breath leaves us and re-enters us can be a powerful form of experiencing the way we die and are reborn in every moment, sustained by the Holy One who breathes life into us anew. (It was Erev Yom Kippur—it was supposed to be heavy!)

Three

Before shul on Yom Kippur morning, I read several articles in the latest issue of the Jewish Review of Books. One of them was a?review ?of the new translation of the Bible by Koren Publishers. Of all the things the reviewer could have chosen to discuss, guess what he picked? Breath, specifically in the book of Kohelet (Ecclesiastes), which we read liturgically next week during the Shabbat of Sukkot. A keyword of Kohelet is the word?hevel,?which since the King James translation four centuries ago has most often been rendered as “vanity”: “Vanity of vanities, all is vanity.” More recently, the JPS translation offered it as “futility.” But Koren, following the recent translation of the literary scholar Robert Alter, translates?hevel?more literally as “breath.” Here is what Yosef Lindell, the reviewer, writes about it:

"The advantage, as Alter points out, is that?hevel?literally means “breath,” or “the flimsy vapor that is exhaled in breathing . . . immediately dissipating in the air.” Breath is a physical metaphor for insubstantiality rather than a kind of psychological paraphrase like futility and, thus, more faithful to the way Hebrew metaphor tends to work. Also, breath emphasizes the temporal aspect of the narrator’s quest. Since, for Kohelet, there is indeed a time for everything under the heavens, the problem with wisdom, riches, and pleasure is not so much that they are futile but that they are ephemeral.?Hevel?implies a temporary satisfaction that slips through one’s grasp as rapidly as breath is expelled from one’s lips."

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Four

With all this in the background, as I was davening at Ne'ilah my attention was pulled toward a line I have recited many times (it’s part of the daily morning liturgy as well):?umotar min ha-adam umin habehema ayin, ki hakol havel:?The difference between a person and an animal is nothing, for all is?havel,?breath. This line comes in a paragraph that, for pretty much my entire life up until this moment, I had understood as a lament: We are so full of ourselves, but really we should be more humble because we are but dust and ashes. Everything is futility, as King James’s Kohelet would say.?

I’ll admit, I think that’s probably still the best way to summarize what it’s saying. But interpretation is nothing without some poetic license, and here at Neilah I found myself trying out a new sensibility for this paragraph: It isn’t an act of chest-beating, but a gentle reminder. At the end of this day of simply being with the Holy One in the world, the awareness we might arrive it as that there really is no distinction between us and the rest of the world, the rest of the cosmos. It’s all breath,?no more and no less.?And in that awareness, there is such an ease, a liberation, an at-homeness in the universe we might experience. That return home in our awareness is our destination on Yom Kippur.?

Coda

I’m writing this morning looking out my window at our sukkah that is half-built. The walls are up, but the roof isn’t yet. The sukkah is an extension of this metaphor (or is it reality?), a physical expression of the thin membrane we erect to separate ourselves from the world, from our bodily experience. I’m looking forward to sitting out there beginning Sunday night, breathing with basic awareness of the gift of awareness itself.?

Shabbat shalom and chag saemach.