Helfgot and Perlman Take Brooklyn by Storm

Israel-born American violinist Itzhak Perlman, performed tonight with Manhattan’s Cantor Yitzchak Meir Helfgot at Brooklyn’s Barclays Center. It was the new arena’s first Jewish event.

In November, 2006 we interviewed Helfgot for the Jewish Standard prior to his concert at the Metropolitan Opera House...

Internationally renowned Cantor Yitzchak Meir Helfgot will perform “Helfgot Sings Cantorial Classics,” the first solo cantorial concert at the New York Metropolitan Opera on Sunday, December 3. At press time the event has nearly sold out the 4400 seating capacity of the Opera House. Dr. Mordechai Sobol arranged the music for the orchestra and choir. The orchestra will include members of the New York Philharmonic conducted by Matthew Lazar with Cantor Daniel Gildar on the piano. The choir will be coordinated by Cantor Azi Schwartz. The invocation prior to the concert will be offered by the chief rabbi of Israel, Yisrael Meir Lau.

Cantor Helfgot is 37 years old, married and the father of six children, ages 3-16. He is a Chasidic Jew born in Tel Aviv and from the Gur or Ger Hasidic community, one of the largest Hasidic groups in the world.  Gerrer Hasidim are active in Israeli politics and supportive of the State.

The Jewish Standard interviewed Cantor Helfgot at Lincoln Center. He has just returned from a concert tour of Australia. Helfgot was dressed in a dark suit with his pants tucked into the trademark-tall-socks that Hasidim of Ger call "hoyzn-zokn". He has a thin beard and prefers to speak in Hebrew or Yiddish over English. Most of this interview was conducted in Hebrew.

JS: Is this the first time a cantor will perform at the Met?

Not exactly. The cantors Richard Tucker and Jan Pierce performed many times at the Met. But they sang opera. So this is the first time that a cantor will perform cantorial music at the Met. We are fortunate that the Met has permitted us to use this great opera house for this concert.

JS: Will you be using a microphone for the concert?

Good question. We have not yet decided. The Met has wonderful acoustics so it is not essential that we amplify the music. On the other hand our audience is accustomed to the use of microphones and amplifiers. So we have a dilemma and have not yet decided.

JS: Why has cantorial singing fallen out of favor in many shuls?

In Europe every shtetl has a chazzan. Sometimes he also served multiple professional roles as a shochet and a mohel too. In America this type of community does not exist.

People think a cantor’s singing makes the service longer. That does not have to be the case.

JS: What can we do to help bring back the cantor?

People need to accept the cantor as an essential part of the synagogue. He is the shaliach tzibbur -- the appointed representative of the community for leading the service. The cantor has to work together with his congregation to make certain that he makes the singing in the service last as long as the congregation wants. He needs to know when they want to finish Musaf on Shabbat -- 12:00, 12:30? The congregation needs to know that the cantor represents their needs. Those steps will help bring the cantor back into a greater role in the synagogue.

JS: Do you think there is any competition between rabbis and cantors? Do yeshivas tend to frown upon cantors?

I have always had good relations with the rabbis in the synagogues that I have served. We understand each others’ roles and have mutual respect. It is true that there is such a thing as a yeshivishe davenin which does not feature cantorial singing. But there is no essential conflict between the cantor and the yeshiva.

JS: Tell us about an inspirational part of your work?

Sometimes, actually frequently, secular Jews come up to me after I sing and tell me that they were alienated from Judaism but that chazanut has inspired them to return. They say they now plan to attend synagogue and get more involved. That inspires me and fulfills me.

JS: What is your view of women cantors?

I am a Hasidic Jew so I have never heard a chazanit lead the service. I have no problem with women cantors. I can see that people would appreciate the drama and emotion of a soprano chazanit and that it could be inspiring and contribute to the aesthetic of a service.

JS: Have you ever wanted to sing opera?

I have listened at times to opera to hear the voices and the melodies. But I have never aspired to sing opera.

JS: Do non-Jews attend your concerts? Do you think they could appreciate your music?

I don’t know how many non-Jews attend. I expect that anyone could be moved emotionally by our music whether or not it was sacred to them – whether or not they understood the words.

JS: Will you be using the Met’s facility for electronic titles to provide the translation for this concert?

No, the Met is protective of their systems. We will provide texts and translations in the printed programs. We wish to build up our relationship with the Met, to show them the stature of our music and of our audience. That way, in the future, we hope to establish this wonderful hall as a regular venue for cantorial concerts of Jewish music.

JS: Why choose the Met? How did you manage to get the Met?

I am not originally and American so I did not fully appreciate the importance of this location. Our organizers want to have this concert here to make a statement. This is the best place and our music and heritage is good enough. We can perform it in the greatest of opera houses. This will make people proud and will be a great Kiddush Hashem – a sanctification.

As to how our sponsors managed to obtain the right to have this concert there -- that is nothing short of a miracle.

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Was Rashi the Greatest Bible Exegete?

Indeed, many scholars believe that Rashi was the greatest Bible exegete.

The paradigmatic master of medieval rabbinic commentary was Rashi (Rabbi Solomon b. Isaac, 1040-1105) a scholar from the north of France. While he is often credited with the move to “literal commentary” in medieval times, even a cursory study of his commentaries reveals how indebted he was to the rabbinic exegesis of the earlier classical compilations. With Rashi we witness the mature development of a new paradigm of interpretation. He delicately balances his interpretations between gloss and exposition. He picks at and edits the earlier Midrash materials and weaves together with them into his commentary the results of new discoveries, such as philology and grammar. His main proposition is hardly radical within rabbinism. He accepts that there is one whole Torah of Moses consisting of the oral and written traditions and texts. In his commentaries he accomplished the nearly seamless integration of the basics of both bodies of tradition.

You can purchase this book at Amazon by Maurice Liber, Rashi: The Greatest Exegete and read about Rashi and his work. We added a Foreword. Price: $0.99

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Dov Hikind's Purim Blackface Draws Outrage

We don't see anything wrong with wearing an afro wig on Purim. In fact we did it this year (with a kippah clipped to it) and walked around giving generous "peace" signs and got no criticism.

Hardly any mention of an afro wig in the New Yorker or in the other media that is critical of Brooklyn Assemblyman Dov Hikind.

Mostly it's the blackface part of his Purim costume that raised people's hackles.

...The revelation that Dov Hikind, a state assemblyman from Brooklyn, had hosted a Purim party while wearing a costume intended to represent an African-American basketball player was first made by the New York Observer, which published a photograph of Hikind wearing an orange jersey, a nimbus of black wig, and sunglasses, with his face darkened with cosmetics. The image first appeared on the Facebook page of Hikind’s son, Yoni...Read more.

Hey Dov, give us a call. We'll explain all this to you. What you aren't calling? OK here is what you need to say, "I get it; I am sorry; I did a stupid insensitive thing; I won't do it again."

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Is Movie Violence Kosher?

We had a short discussion with our son on Purim about whether the animated film "Wreck-It Ralph" had too much violence for the kids. Our son was worried that if the kids see violence on film that will cause them to act more violently towards each other. We argued that violence in film can be an outlet for the kids that may lessen their physical hitting of each other, as Kubrick put it, “a catharsis rather than a model."

In the book of Esther there is violence: the hanging of Haman and his sons and more, "...in Shushan the palace the Jews slew and destroyed five hundred men (Esther 9:6)," not to mention the implied violence in the Biblical statement by God that we read in the synagogue the day before to wit, "...that I will utterly blot out the memory of Amalek from under heaven."

Back to our question: Who is right? Is film violence kosher? Can our kids safely consume it?

The case can be made on both sides of this issue. In January 2013, the Atlantic ran a piece on the subject which collects the opinions of ten film directors, "'There's Violence in the Bible': Famous Directors on Violence in Film." The context of the article was set like this:

The Internet has been abuzz recently about Quentin Tarantino's explosive interview with a British journalist for Channel 4, in which the director snapped after being asked why he didn't think film violence and real violence were connected. "Don't ask me questions like that. I'm not biting. I refuse your question," he retorted. "I'm not your slave and you're not my master. You can't make me dance to your tune. I'm not your monkey." Though he goes somewhat off the handle, Tarantino is right about one thing—he has been asked about violence quite a bit. And so have many other directors that use it in their films. Below, I've collected a few of their answers, which range from quippy to sincere, to get a better view of how violent Hollywood views itself.

See the article here. The bible comparison in the essay's title appears in an interview with Stanley Kubrick that started out, "There has always been violence in art. There is violence in the Bible, violence in Homer, violence in Shakespeare, and many psychiatrists believe that it serves as a catharsis rather than a model."

We find Kubrick's opinions to be eloquent. The excerpt from him concludes:

The simplistic notion that films and TV can transform an otherwise innocent and good person into a criminal has strong overtones of the Salem witch trials. This notion is further encouraged by the criminals and their lawyers who hope for mitigation through this excuse. I am also surprised at the extremely illogical distinction that is so often drawn between harmful violence and the so-called harmless violence of, say, Tom and Jerry cartoons or James Bond movies, where often sadistic violence is presented as unadulterated fun. I hasten to say, I don’t think that they contribute to violence either. Films and TV are also convenient whipping boys for politicians because they allow them to look away from the social and economic causes of crime, about which they are either unwilling or unable to do anything.”

The full Kubrick interview (c. 1982) is here.

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Is air kosher?

No, according to rabbis in Israel and Brooklyn, air is no longer kosher.

Air contains microscopic organisms that neither chew the cud nor have split hooves.

Kosher true Jews are now required to wear rabbinical approved gas masks when they wish to breathe.

Happy Purim.

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New York Times Merges With Tzvee's Talmudic Blog

The New York Times announced that it has merged with Tzvee's Talmudic Blog to form "The New York Times Talmudic Blog."

The Times was already known as a premier Jewish newspaper in the city with high visibility Jewish editorial writers like Tom Friedman, Roger Cohen and Paul Krugman and Israeli news bureau chief Jodi Rudroren.

"We lacked Talmudic depth of analysis," said Arthur Sulzberger Jr., Chairman & Publisher of the Times. "This merger with the Talmudic blog will fill in that lacuna in our content."

Tzvee Zahavy, Chairman & Publisher of the Talmudic Blog said, "Contrary to some popular opinion in the Talmud blogosphere, we always liked the Times' Jewish stories and its coverage of Israeli politics." In Talmudic style he added, "Sometimes we vehemently objected to the Times and everything that it stands for. This merger will advance the ability of the Times' Jewish writers to seek out new modes of conflicted Jewish identity."

In other Jewish media merger news, the three major Jewish comedy publications announced that they will join together, "The Jewish Press," "The Onion" and "The Borowitz Report." The new entity will be called, "The Everything Bagel."

In worldwide Purim news, our old friend the peripatetic master journalist Yori Yanover reports on major developments from Israel and Cleveland:

• First White Power Talmudic Yeshiva Opened in Ohio
• Defying Boycotts, Jagger, Stones, to Honor Israel’s 65th Birthday

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Guardian: Pope Benedict retired after inquiry into 'Vatican gay officials'

"A potentially explosive report has linked the resignation of Pope Benedict XVI to the discovery of a network of gay prelates in the Vatican, some of whom – the report said – were being blackmailed by outsiders.

"The pope's spokesman declined to confirm or deny the report, which was carried by the Guardian and La Repubblica."

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Love Me or Drop Dead: A Psycho-Talmudic Inquiry into Calderon's Choice of her Knesset Talmudic Passage

Somewhere on the road between quirky and bizarre, Ruth Calderon chose a passage from the Talmud to present in her inaugural address as a member of the Knesset in Israel. The passage talks about the consequences to men who fail in their obligation to have sex frequently enough with their wives. See our previous post for the video of the speech and see the transcript of it here.

The immediate context of the passage she chose from Ketubot 62b is this:

Sages ruled: Students may go away to study Torah without the permission [of their wives even for] two or three years. Raba stated: The Rabbis relied on R. Adda b. Ahabah (according to whose statement the Sages permitted students to leave their homes for long periods) and act accordingly at the risk of [losing] their lives (they die before their time as a penalty for the neglect of their wives).

The Talmud thus allows students of the Talmud to neglect their wives for long periods of time so that they can study in a Yeshiva.

Calderone recited in her speech this passage, first in Aramaic, and then she explained it in Hebrew:

Thus R. Rehumi who was frequenting [the school] of Raba at Mahuza (a town on the Tigris, noted for its commerce and its large Jewish population) used to return home on the Eve of every Day of Atonement. On one occasion he was so attracted by his subject [that he forgot to return home]. His wife was expecting [him every moment, saying.] ‘He is coming soon, he is coming soon.’

As he did not arrive she became so depressed that tears began to flow from her eyes. He was [at that moment] sitting on a roof. The roof collapsed under him and he was killed (lit., ‘his soul rested’, i.e., came to its eternal rest).

On the surface, this folkloric passage proclaims the power of a neglected wife's tears to mystically kill at a distance her husband, by causing a yeshiva building to collapse.

The lesson for Calderone briefly is, "One who forgets he is sitting on another's shoulders will fall." Well, that's a stretch. The actual lesson is to watch out. If you forget and do not have sex with the woman you are married to, she can kill you with her tears even if you are far away.

Calderone provides a more imaginative interpretation:

Now we must imagine a split screen: on one side is a close-up of a female character, a woman with one tear running down her cheek. On the other side, sitting on a rooftop in Mechoza, is Rabbi Rechumei, dressed entirely in white and feeling holy. You know, after several hours without food we feel very exalted. He studies Torah on the roof, under the stars, and feels so close to the heavens. He sat on the roof, and as the tear falls from the woman’s eye, the roof caves in under him and he falls to the ground and dies.

Calderone goes on to tie this strange tale to her political agenda:

What can I learn about this place and my work here from Rabbi Rechumei and his wife? First, I learn that one who forgets that he is sitting on another’s shoulders – will fall. I agree with what you said earlier, MK Bennett. I learn that righteousness is not adherence to the Torah at the expense of sensitivity to human beings. I learn that often, in a dispute, both sides are right, and until I understand that both my disputant and I, both the woman and Rabbi Rechumei, feel that they are doing the right thing and are responsible for the home. Sometimes we feel like the woman, waiting, serving in the army, doing all the work while others sit on the roof and study Torah; sometimes those others feel that they bear the entire weight of tradition, Torah, and our culture while we go to the beach and have a blast. Both I and my disputant feel solely responsible for the home. Until I understand this, I will not perceive the problem properly and will not be able to find a solution. I invite all of us to years of action rooted in thought and dispute rooted in mutual respect and understanding.

Calderone extends her political message in a burst of flowery rhetoric:

I aspire to bring about a situation in which Torah study is the heritage of all Israel, in which the Torah is accessible to all who wish to study it, in which all young citizens of Israel take part in Torah study as well as military and civil service. Together we will build this home and avoid disappointment.

I long for the day when the state’s resources are distributed fairly and equally to every Torah scholar, man or woman, based on the quality of their study, not their communal affiliation, when secular and pluralistic yeshivot, batei midrash, and organizations win fair and equal support in comparison to Orthodox and Haredi batei midrash. Through scholarly envy and healthy competition, the Torah will be magnified and glorified.

We see in the Talmud passage these elements: Wife, husband, sex, Yeshiva, Yom Kippur, tears, roof, murder at a distance.

Calderone extends those as her analogy to these elements: Sensitivity, beach, a blast, state's resources, Torah scholar, man or woman, secular and pluralistic yeshivot, Haredi batei midrash.

This extension definitely doesn't work for us. We think she chose the wrong passage to make her political points. Simply put again: The wife in the story in the Talmud is sad because she does not get sex and so she kills her husband at a distance with her tears.

Now, she could do this distance killing because God determined that she was right and because God decreed that her tears would kill her far-away husband on Yom Kippur.

Calderone selected this passage to read as a parable to politics in Israel today. One psycho-Talmudic interpretation we come up with is that she thinks she is right in crying about how she is neglected by the men in the Yeshivas, and... that God will enable her tears to destroy the men in the Yeshivas who neglect her and destroy their institutions.

Or we can read from this story that Rabbi Rechumei's wife had a direct power to curse and kill her husband and destroy his Yeshiva.

We also can speculate about Calderone's self awareness in writing this speech. It may be that she did not consciously know why she picked this passage to send an implied threatening message to the rabbis.

Or it may be that she knew well how to send a very clever threat to tell the rabbis, "Love me (and my secular Yeshiva movement) or I will make sure that you will drop dead and your Yeshiva will collapse."

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SNL Video Parody: Djesus Uncrossed

SNL did a sendoff of the latest Quentin Tarantino film. If you have seen the last two Tarantino films, it's funny. If not, you won't get it.

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Video: Ruth Calderon talks Talmud to the Israeli Knesset

The Haredi Israeli periodical Kikar Hashabat reported on a speech by the new member of the Knesset Ruth Calderon: זה האיום הקיומי האמיתי: רות קלדרון לומדת גמרא -- complaining (oy) that the fact that Calderon learns and teaches Talmud is a real existential threat to Israel.

Here is Calderon's speech in Hebrew on video with English subtitles.



We thought it was a good speech, remarkable because Talmud is not often considered to be relevant to the workings of a secular legislative body like the Knesset.

She teaches a story from Ketubot 62b about a rabbi who comes home from the Yeshiva once a year on the eve of Yom Kippur to see his wife. One year he doesn't come, she cries and he dies. It's nice that she cites the Talmud, even though we don't quite understand the connection between this story and Calderon's coming work in the Knesset.

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Is Warren Buffett Jewish?

No, Warren Buffett, the Oracle of Omaha, and (according to Forbes) the richest person in the world, is not a Jew.

Warren Buffett is an avowed agnostic.

He was raised as a Presbyterian. His father was a Presbyterian who served in Congress as a far-right Republican. Buffett attended Sunday School as a Presbyterian.

Warren does not subscribe to his family's religion.

In the 1950's Buffet was friendly with and played bridge with his Omaha neighbors, Rabbi Myer and Mrs. Kripke. Over the years Buffet has had many links to Jews and the Jewish community in Omaha.

In 2006 Buffet bought an 80 percent share in the Israeli metalworks conglomerate, Iscar, for $4 billion. /repost from 9/24/08/

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Avi Steinberg thinks Philip Roth gave Talmudic Advice to Julian Tepper

In New Yorker we learn that Avi Steinberg ("IS WRITING TORTURE?") thinks Philip Roth gave Talmudic Advice to Julian Tepper.

Steinberg describes a literary storm between Elizabeth Gilbert and Roth wherein Gilbert defends writing as a happy profession, contrary to Roth who allegedly did the following to Tepper:

Julian Tepper published a piece describing an encounter with Roth at an Upper West Side deli. Waiting on his hero’s table, Tepper tremulously presented Roth with “Balls,” his first novel. Roth warmly congratulated him, and then offered: “I would quit while you’re ahead. Really. It’s an awful field. Just torture. Awful. You write and you write, and you have to throw almost all of it away because it’s not any good. I would say just stop now. You don’t want to do this to yourself. That’s my advice to you.”

Steinberg thinks he knows that Roth really loves writing but was pushing away the young writer to test his dedication. This reminded Steinberg of the Talmud.

...[Roth's] newest message, we are told, is: “Don’t write. Get out while you can.” But what did he really mean by it? My guess is that he was joking. Which isn’t to say that he wasn’t serious. It was a serious joke. Roth’s cranky advice for the young writer is an old Jewish chestnut. The sages of the Talmud offered the same piece of advice to anyone who wanted to join the faith: don’t do it, it’s seriously not worth it, it’s just an objectively bad idea. The ancient rabbis suggest that you ask a potential convert, “Are you not aware that today the people of Israel are wretched, driven about, exiled and in constant suffering?” It’s a rhetorical question. But if the person replies that he or she indeed embraces wretchedness and constant suffering, you explain to him or her how taxing it is to practice the religion. You mention the gruesome punishments for breaking the Sabbath and other laws. You try very hard to dissuade any would-be applicants. You mess with them—and that is how you welcome them. Joining, in other words, happens through a process of opposition, irony, and dissent. If you’re going to join a messed-up club, you have to pass the messed-up entrance exam. You enter into the sect only when you push back, when you finally say, Listen, I don’t care what you tell me. I know it’s a bad idea, but I’m determined to do it, and I will do it.

That’s the kind of a person it takes to be a writer: someone who’s zealous and ready to argue, someone who has Philip Roth tell him, “It’s torture, don’t do it,” and replies, “You had me at ‘torture.’ ” You don’t enter into it because it’s a great lifestyle decision—it isn’t—you do it because, for whatever reason, you believe in it, and you believe in it because, for whatever reason, you need to believe in it. Roth was messing with Tepper; he was testing his faith and strengthening it. He wanted the guy to earn the title: author of the novel “Balls.”

My guess is that Tepper was heartened to discover that even the great Roth, it turns out, hates his life. For struggling writers, wretches that they are, that is inspiring.

If Steinberg is right then Gilbert was wrong about Roth when she, "launched an earnest defense of the scribbling life, declaring that writing is a “fucking great” job. This is a classified piece of information, she claims, kept secret by vain, jealous older writers."

Turning the question back on the rabbis, is it true that the conversion to Judaism must always be preceded by a Rothian "messed-up entrance exam"? If the answer to that question is always yes, we are sad. Surely there must be some rabbis who (like Gilbert does for writing) are willing to tell people that Judaism is a “fucking great” religion.

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Five Free Kindle Books -Our Purim Promotion February 10

Make some noise about this, you can get these Free Amazon Kindle Books in Honor of Purim - on Sunday, February 10.

By Tzvee Zahavy 

• God's Favorite Prayers - Our Hot Best Seller
• God Bless You: The Origins of Jewish Prayers and Blessings
• Eleazar: Rabbi, Priest, Patriarch
• Define Judaism: Ten Seminars

And by Zev Zahavy

• Whence and Wherefore

Also on Kindle with a foreword by Tzvee Zahavy

• Rashi: The Greatest Exegete ($.99)

And get your copies of the Talmud in English - 36 volumes @ $.99 each!

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Requested Book Excerpt: The Mindful Meditation of Berkahot Blessings

Here is the much-requested excerpt from my book "God's Favorite Prayers"  ("The Meditator," pages 111-120) wherein I define just how the berakhot (blessings) of rabbinic Judaism constitute a complete system of mindful meditations.

Deborah sits in the synagogue visibly engaged in her prayers. She closes her eyes at times. She sways as she prays, rhythmically and persistently, but slowly, gently and with deliberation.You cannot tell just from these external cues that Deborah is a meditator. To know that, I need to probe and ask her about her innermost thoughts during her time in the synagogue and at many other times when she is out and about throughout the day. During her prayers, you need to know, is Deborah attentively introspective of her own needs and desires and those of her friends and loved ones? Does she see her dreams fulfilled? Is she accepting of her personal and spiritual shortcomings and failures? Is she aware of her own breathing and heartbeat and the air that swirls around her, the heft of her Siddur and the humming of her fellow daveners?Does Deborah recite one-hundred daily blessings with mindful recognition? Does she reach a state of compassion as she says the grace over her meals? 

I might describe the activity of meditation as “study or thinking intently and at length, as for spiritual purposes,” or as “contemplation of spiritual matters.”

But the ancient rabbis did not have a term to describe meditation, so they called the meditative dimension of prayer, “the service of the heart.” To them, that indicated an inner intellectual and emotional activity, which they located in the heart, since they could detect that as the organ which beats slower or faster depending on one’s state of mind. Ancient rabbis had no ideas of brain activity and surely had no devices to monitor it or methods to speak about it.

Today, there are indeed multiple ways that we use the term meditate to describe a person who practices meditation through a variety of activities that we may call meditative. It’s enough to make your head spin. Before I get to what goes on in and around the synagogue, consider for instance those meditators from the 1960s or 70s, who practiced a popular form of Transcendental Meditation (TM), Zen or other related types of meditation. Far outside of establishment places of worship—separate from synagogues and churches—they sought a regimen that would help them achieve a sensation that they could transcend or go beyond themselves. They sought to bend their consciousness by a variety of methods, such as by finding their mantra or via deliberation on gnomic Zen sayings, called koans.

The rapid spread in popularity of TM back then frightened organized religion. Some rabbis specifically declared it to be a forbidden form of idolatry. In 1978, the Lubavitcher Rebbe railed against the threats of meditative cults on the one hand, while on the other hand he called for Jewish doctors to develop a kosher form of therapeutic meditation. By that, he meant they should come up with an independent new course of meditative exercises within Jewish practice and based on Jewish principles or contents.

The rebbe’s suggestion about meditation has not much to do with what we are talking about. I have come here with you now—to the synagogue service—to present to you Deborah the meditator so you can get to know her. As I have learned in my own travels and quests, for Deborah, there is no reason to exit the synagogue or to abandon standard Jewish practices in order to discover ways to meditate. Deborah practices meaningful meditation at the core of her regular standard Jewish prayer and in her daily life through the ordinary texts and actions of her Jewish living.

Now, it is true that the rich meditative qualities of regular Jewish practice were not at all self-evident to me or to Deborah, at first. No Jewish teacher instructed her about them. She reached her understanding and practices through a journey of discovery, all her own and in several stages.

Deborah, at one time, went through a stressful period in her life. She sought ways and means to deal with her overwhelming, swirling anxieties that carried her through flights of manic euphoria to bouts of dark depression. She tried many techniques to take back control of her runaway consciousness. Fortunately, among them, Deborah trained in a course of mindfulness meditation, a derivative of Buddhist practices that seeks to foster clear awareness for an individual of the sensations of their present physical and mental state as it unfolds in the present moment.

As a mindful meditator, Deborah learned to observe more vividly the place she was in—the tones, shades, gradations and nuances of her present, her immediate exterior reality and the flowing progression of her inner thoughts and emotions.

She discovered, in the course of her training, one of the best-selling and most perceptive books on mindful meditation, a volume by Jon Kabat-Zinn, one of its leading proponents in the U.S. That book was Wherever You Go, There You Are. Now, although Kabat-Zinn is a Jew, he has no identifiable connections to Judaism. His insights are derived in the main from Eastern religions and practices. Deborah had to make all the connections back to her practices of Judaism on her own.

Over time, wherever Deborah went, including the synagogue, she became an accomplished mindful meditator. Deborah was able to moderate her own thoughts; to stand outside of them and observe the flow of her consciousness going by, much like a naturalist might observe the currents of a river.

When she came into the synagogue after training as a mindful meditator, Deborah started to find analogues to that style of meditation in the existing practices of her established Jewish rituals.

Accordingly, let’s see how Deborah embodies them as our synagogue archetype—the meditator—the practitioner of mindful blessings and intercessions of compassion.

On entering the synagogue as a meditator, Deborah realized that she was a practitioner of the meditations that we call blessings or, in Hebrew, berakhot. Deborah breathtakingly discovered new dimensions of her old prayers.

She found that a blessing is more than a formula of Hebrew words that have simple knowable meanings. In the past, she had thought that the fixed opening phrase of a berakhah, “Blessed art thou O Lord, our God, King of the Universe,” semantically expressed the speaker’s intention to bestow good wishes upon God or to exalt God, who is referred to in the formula by three names. Deborah learned this formula when she was two or three years old and hardly pondered the theological meaning or even the simple semantics of this phrase each time she recited it as an older child or as an adult.

So what new purpose or function of the berakhah formula did Deborah discover when she came back to reexamine it as a mature meditator? She saw that these recitations served for her as the known cues for many instances of her daily, periodic, repetitive or occasional mini-mindful meditations. These provided for Deborah meaningful guidance to the rush of her thoughts and to the meanderings of the awareness of her waking life.

Deborah the meditator recited her individual blessings when she ate her foods, performed her bodily functions, witnessed meteorological events, saw flowers, or heard good and bad news. She also recited blessings when she suspended the routines that maintained her daily subsistence and when she broke off from the flow of her living in the external world, that is, when she went off into the synagogue to engage in her hours of prayer. 

Here is a tabular summary of a small sample of many of the actions and occasions for which Deborah recited her mini-meditations, the blessings in her daily activities:

Blessed are You…	Purpose	Meditation
Who creates the fruit of the tree	Before eating a fruit	Mindful eating
Who creates the produce of the ground	Before eating a vegetable	Mindful eating
Who gives pleasant fragrance to fruits	Upon smelling fruits	Mindful sensing of nature
Who has withheld nothing from nature and has created in it beautiful creatures and trees for the enjoyment of human beings	Upon seeing flowering trees in their first seasonal bloom	Mindful sensing of the special beauty of nature
Who creates the fruit of the vine	Before drinking wine	Mindful drinking
Who brings forth bread from the earth	Before eating bread—a full meal	Mindful dining, for a full meal
Who commanded us to light the Sabbath/ holiday candles	After lighting the candles	Purposeful ritual, mindful of the passage of time
Who heals all flesh and performs wonders	After bathroom visits	Mindful of one’s body and health
Whose power and might fill the world	Upon witnessing thunder or a hurricane	Mindful of disruptive events of nature
Who is good and does good	For good news	Mindful of elevating emotions
Who is the true judge	For bad news	Mindful of  emotional trauma
Blessings in the synagogue	Opening or concluding paragraphs of liturgy	Mindful of the markers of the elements of prayer

There are three generally mentioned classical categories for sorting out all the blessings: (1) blessings of performance of a mitzvah (ritual acts), (2) blessings of bodily satisfaction (intake of foods, drinks, etc.) and (3) blessings of praise (liturgy).

As part of her mindful practice, these blessings functioned to demand of Deborah a meditative awareness of her person, her body and her immediate external world. For a simple example, she took the blessing she recites upon smelling fragrant fruit, “Blessed are You, Lord our God, King of the Universe who gives pleasant fragrance to fruits” (Koren Siddur, p. 1000) as a cue to be highly aware of her surroundings. She took another case, the formula she spoke before eating an apple, “Blessed are You, Lord our God, King of the Universe who creates the fruit of the tree,” as a cue to mindfully savor the taste and texture of her foods. In both cases, aspects of loving-kindness and compassion accompanied the awareness of the physical food.

These blessings served as triggers for Deborah. They told her to stop, to be mindful of her actions, to be thoughtful of what type of food she held  in her hand, how that food was to be regarded and classified, whether she was smelling it or eating it, and to recall what is “its correct berakhah.”

All forms of mindfulness heighten the practitioner’s moments of experience and elevate ordinary events from a background of awareness to a foreground of thinking. For Deborah, mindful occasions of blessings helped her savor her conscious awareness—the consistency and flavor, the origins and essences of her living.

Meir, a rabbi in the Talmud in the second century, spoke of his expectation for every Jew to experience each day one-hundred triggers of mindful meditation—a life punctuated daily by one-hundred blessings.

To be clear, this mindful meditation through berakhot that we have described is not identical to that which Kabat-Zinn and others taught Deborah. She had to adapt her mindfulness to apply it to her Jewish context. In fact, Deborah realized that, through her blessings, she engaged in mindfulness to the second power, to mindfulness squared, that is to a heightened relationship to her multiple worlds, both personal and cultural. Let me explain.

Deborah understood that, when she held an apple in her hand and recited the blessing for it, she had to know which proper berakhah to make. That meant she had to relate first to that content from her cultural world, Jewish tradition, law or halakhah. Still holding that apple in her hand, she moved through that relationship to look then at the fruit, to feel its heft and taste its tartness as she bit into it.

Because she was mindful, Deborah’s interaction with daily life was not defined just by the torrents of her rushing thoughts. Her thinking was formed in a duplex relationship to that combination of both the cultural and personal contents that she mindfully activated in her conscious mind, under her watchful control. She steered her relationship to her own thoughts and actions by meeting up with them, by making note of them, and then by becoming disentangled from those twisting currents of distractions gushing around her life.

Deborah’s blessing-meditations turned the rush of her daily living into a series of discrete moments of experience, each savored fully with thanksgiving, gratitude and, perhaps, with compassion.

I hedge regarding compassion because it’s likely that Deborah learned more, at first, about the practice of compassion outside of the Judaic framework. True, the cultivation of loving-kindness and compassion is a part of Judaism. However, embracing those who are distressed and feeling the pain of others is more of a core doctrine of Buddhism and, along with it, a prominent part of its meditative practices.

That said, as we discuss below, the grace after meals stands out as a prominent example of a prayer and meditation of compassion, and it is squarely within the practice of Judaism.

What more do we understand about the meditation of the recitation of a blessing? By convention, because a blessing invokes three names of a divine entity (“Blessed are You, Lord our God, King of the Universe…”), classical Judaism says that it accomplishes something we conventionally describe as the sanctification of the acts that the meditator performs after each blessing. By her actions of reciting a blessing and then eating, for instance, Deborah fulfilled a commandment. Deborah knows and observes this added explanation of her practice. This is part of the external cultural baggage that she brings to bear on the other essential elements of her mindful actions.

Deborah’s Jewish application of mindful meditation stands somewhat apart from the mindfulness that derives from Buddhist sources and has wended its way into our American cultural setting. Let’s look at an illustration to clarify better how it differs.

Deborah has a friend Tara who practices mindful meditation anchored in a Buddhist tradition. For this demonstration, let’s imagine that both meditators pick up a raisin to eat, to demonstrate their ways of meditation.

This mindful raisin-eating exercise is actually practiced to instruct beginners in the goals and modes of Kabat-Zinn’s style of mindfulness. In the Kabat-Zinn mindful exercise, the leader hands each beginner a single raisin and asks the person to eat it. Most ordinary people will pop the raisin in their mouths, chew a few times and swallow it, largely unconsciously.

But Tara, the meditative eater, wants to perform a mindful raisin-eating. She begins by looking closely at the raisin, considering its shape, weight, color and texture. Next, she places the raisin in her mouth and focuses on how it feels on her tongue and how her mouth responds with salivation.

Then our mindful raisin-eater chews the raisin slowly and thoroughly, focusing on its taste and disintegration. Finally, she swallows the raisin and feels it (or imagines it) as it goes down her alimentary canal and into her stomach.

While eating, Tara may find her thoughts wander to picture the red Sun-Maid raisin box that she knows held the food, or to the supermarket where she last bought a box of raisins, or perhaps to the time she found an old box of dried raisins in the bottom of her purse. But, in each case, she let her thoughts come into her mind and allowed herself to make note of them and let them go, returning her focus to eating that single, present piece of food.

Now, let’s turn by comparison to consider our meditator Deborah, acting as our mindful berakhah raisin-eater. There’s no actual single meditative exercise that Deborah knows of in Judaism comparable to what we described for the mindful raisin-eater. When children learn about reciting blessings for foods, they learn to associate the blessing that applies to each food category and to each specific food.

Let us imagine, then, this example of the way that Deborah, the meditator, would practice a berakhah raisin-eating mindful exercise.

Deborah first takes the raisin and looks at its size. She wants to make sure that it big enough—more than the minimum quantity—to merit that she, the eater, recites a blessing. But she knows that she must recite a blessing before eating any quantity, according to most accepted practices. Still, she needs to think ahead about how much she must eat before she is obliged to recite a blessing after eating, the blessings of the grace after a meal.

Deborah the meditator also has to decide what species of food this is—where it came from, what category it falls into—and thereby to determine the proper berakhah to recite before putting it into her mouth and eating it. A raisin comes from a grape and a grape grows on a vine. She may think then that the blessing should be, “who creates the fruit of the vine,” but that blessing is reserved for wine, the ultimate and finest product of the grapevine.

A grape itself is the fruit of a tree—by its conventional classification. So, she concludes that its blessing is, “who creates the fruit of the tree.” Deborah reflects that this food is processed from grapes. It is dried, not fresh; does that affect its blessing? She ponders, does that change it and downgrade the blessing to the most generic formula, “for all was created at his word?”

You can see that Deborah, in the Jewish context, must supply more than Tara’s simple and present consideration of the physical nature of the food to her mindful-berakhah-raisin-eating simulation. It’s not just that she must be mindful, but it becomes clear that she needs to become mindful to a greater degree, to a mathematically higher power, to be culturally analytical, almost botanical or culinary or scientific, religiously cognizant—all before she recites the blessing and puts the raisin in her mouth.

During this exercise, Deborah may also consider the times she forgot to recite the blessing, the confusion she felt when she did not know a blessing for a food. She may think about whether the red Sun-Maid box has a kosher certification on it, whether foods of this sort need to be certified. But, as a mindful-berakhah meditator, she has to bring her consciousness back to the act of eating and the heightened mode of awareness that she brings to add to that biological ingestion.

For Deborah the meditator, this deep interaction between cultural mindfulness and personal physical mindfulness defines the dynamics of her berakhah meditations...

(The chapter next explains the more advanced meditations of compassion in the birkat hamazon, the grace after eating.)

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The Pitputim Blog Makes us a Wonderful Post

Thanks go out to the wonderful blog Pitputim for the promotions for our publications by Reuven Brauner et. al.. They said:

I am pleased to inform you that several new ETC publications by Reuven Brauner are NOW available on Rabbi Tzvee Zahavy’s wonderful Torah resource site http://www.halakhah.com (http://halakhah.com/index.html).

Newly uploaded are:

1. An updated and revised edition of 25 RULES FOR PERFORMING MITZVOHS derived from the famous Halachic compendium, the Chayei Odom. This is available at http://halakhah.com/rst/25rules.pdf.
2. A completely new translation with commentaries of SEFER MISHLEI (the Book of Proverbs). This you can find at http://halakhah.com/rst/mishlei.pdf.
3. The first volume (Bereishis) of Dr. Seligmann Baer’s (author of Siddur Avodas Yisroel) famous MASORETIC TEXT OF THE TANACH. This can be accessed at http://halakhah.com/rst/baer1.pdf. The remaining books of Tanach (except for Shemos through Devorim which were never produced) will be available, too, but due to their large size we are trying to figure out if it should be made available as zip files or on Drop Box or something like that.
4. Another volume in the Hadgashas Hane’emar series, SEFER YONA http://halakhah.com/rst/yona.pdf. Soon to be available on halakhah.com, please G-d, will be Sefer Esther (in time for Purim) and Sefer Ruth http://halakhah.com/rst/ruth.pdf. BTW, the entire Tanach has been formatted like this and, please G-d, will be made available in due time, as well. I think this format is an excellent study tool, particularly for young students, facilitating faster and better comprehension of the text.

Besides these items, halakhah.com hosts a number of other ETC monographs and works including the comprehensive Hebrew Verb Root thesaurus Shoroshim http://halakhah.com/rst/shoroshim.pdf, hundreds of non-esoteric passages from the Zohar http://halakhah.com/rst/kkz.pdf, an index to the usage of all verses and passages from Tanach in our liturgy, called Shimush Pesukim http://halakhah.com/rst/pesukim.pdf, a nice translation of Pirkei Avos with many unique and interesting lists http://halakhah.com/rst/pirkeiavos.pdf and lots more unique, fun and educational material.

On top of all this, you have the entire two-column, easy to read and download, REFORMATTED SONCINO TALMUD – the only complete, online, English language translation of the Talmud at http://halakhah.com/indexrst.html as well as the more traditional format of the Soncino, found scrolled-down lower on the same page. 

Rabbi Zahavy has made available some of his excellent works there, too, including access to an outstanding, world-class and highly-recommended philosophical exposition called Whence and Wherefore written by his late father, Rabbi Zev Zahavy, ztz”l. This book explores the most fundamental issues of the purpose and meaning of the creation, life and existence.

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