Times: Mindful Meditation Makes You three times more Compassionate

In a truly remarkable article the Times explains that science has demonstrated that mindful meditation makes a person more compassionate.

I wrote about the mindfulness of Jewish blessings and the compassion of the grace after meals in my 2011 book, "God's Favorite Prayers."

Ever since I studied and practiced meditation in the early nineties, I knew the connection between meditation and compassion was the basic premise of the practice. Yet I did not expect that science would "prove" the causal link.

The Times describes one breathtaking study - where the incredible conclusion is that mindful meditators are three times more compassionate than non-meditators.

Here is the article.

The Morality of Meditation
By DAVID DeSTENO
MEDITATION is fast becoming a fashionable tool for improving your mind. With mounting scientific evidence that the practice can enhance creativity, memory and scores on standardized intelligence tests, interest in its practical benefits is growing. A number of “mindfulness” training programs, like that developed by the engineer Chade-Meng Tan at Google, and conferences like Wisdom 2.0 for business and tech leaders, promise attendees insight into how meditation can be used to augment individual performance, leadership and productivity.

This is all well and good, but if you stop to think about it, there’s a bit of a disconnect between the (perfectly commendable) pursuit of these benefits and the purpose for which meditation was originally intended. Gaining competitive advantage on exams and increasing creativity in business weren’t of the utmost concern to Buddha and other early meditation teachers. As Buddha himself said, “I teach one thing and one only: that is, suffering and the end of suffering.” For Buddha, as for many modern spiritual leaders, the goal of meditation was as simple as that. The heightened control of the mind that meditation offers was supposed to help its practitioners see the world in a new and more compassionate way, allowing them to break free from the categorizations (us/them, self/other) that commonly divide people from one another.

But does meditation work as promised? Is its originally intended effect — the reduction of suffering — empirically demonstrable?

To put the question to the test, my lab, led in this work by the psychologist Paul Condon, joined with the neuroscientist Gaëlle Desbordes and the Buddhist lama Willa Miller to conduct an experiment whose publication is forthcoming in the journal Psychological Science. We recruited 39 people from the Boston area who were willing to take part in an eight-week course on meditation (and who had never taken any such course before). We then randomly assigned 20 of them to take part in weekly meditation classes, which also required them to practice at home using guided recordings. The remaining 19 were told that they had been placed on a waiting list for a future course.

After the eight-week period of instruction, we invited the participants to the lab for an experiment that purported to examine their memory, attention and related cognitive abilities. But as you might anticipate, what actually interested us was whether those who had been meditating would exhibit greater compassion in the face of suffering. To find out, we staged a situation designed to test the participants’ behavior before they were aware that the experiment had begun.

WHEN a participant entered the waiting area for our lab, he (or she) found three chairs, two of which were already occupied. Naturally, he sat in the remaining chair. As he waited, a fourth person, using crutches and wearing a boot for a broken foot, entered the room and audibly sighed in pain as she leaned uncomfortably against a wall. The other two people in the room — who, like the woman on crutches, secretly worked for us — ignored the woman, thus confronting the participant with a moral quandary. Would he act compassionately, giving up his chair for her, or selfishly ignore her plight?

The results were striking. Although only 16 percent of the nonmeditators gave up their seats — an admittedly disheartening fact — the proportion rose to 50 percent among those who had meditated. This increase is impressive not solely because it occurred after only eight weeks of meditation, but also because it did so within the context of a situation known to inhibit considerate behavior: witnessing others ignoring a person in distress — what psychologists call the bystander effect — reduces the odds that any single individual will help. Nonetheless, the meditation increased the compassionate response threefold.

Although we don’t yet know why meditation has this effect, one of two explanations seems likely. The first rests on meditation’s documented ability to enhance attention, which might in turn increase the odds of noticing someone in pain (as opposed to being lost in one’s own thoughts). My favored explanation, though, derives from a different aspect of meditation: its ability to foster a view that all beings are interconnected. The psychologist Piercarlo Valdesolo and I have found that any marker of affiliation between two people, even something as subtle as tapping their hands together in synchrony, causes them to feel more compassion for each other when distressed. The increased compassion of meditators, then, might stem directly from meditation’s ability to dissolve the artificial social distinctions — ethnicity, religion, ideology and the like — that divide us.

Supporting this view, recent findings by the neuroscientists Helen Weng, Richard Davidson and colleagues confirm that even relatively brief training in meditative techniques can alter neural functioning in brain areas associated with empathic understanding of others’ distress — areas whose responsiveness is also modulated by a person’s degree of felt associations with others.

So take heart. The next time you meditate, know that you’re not just benefiting yourself, you’re also benefiting your neighbors, community members and as-yet-unknown strangers by increasing the odds that you’ll feel their pain when the time comes, and act to lessen it as well.

David DeSteno is a professor of psychology at Northeastern University, where he directs the Social Emotions Group. He is the author of the forthcoming book “The Truth About Trust: How It Determines Success in Life, Love, Learning, and More.”

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jStandard: My Dear Rabbi Column of July 5, 2013

My July "Dear Rabbi" column.

Dear Rabbi,

I grew up in a religious home and attend synagogue all my life and kept a kosher home, observed all the holidays and mitzvot. I'm 55 years old now and I realize that I do not believe in God. I've have told just a few people about my loss of faith. One friend with whom I have discussed this insists that it is hypocritical for me to attend synagogue and recite the prayers. At this age I do not want to disrupt my life style. What should I do?

Perplexed,

Paramus, NJ

Dear Perplexed,

Your mid-life crisis of belief is not uncommon, and yet, it has no easy solution. You know how thick with activities a religious life can be. It is hard to walk away from your accustomed life, one which is filled with tasks and obligations and appointments in your home and your community and on your calendar.

Admittedly, there is an element of hypocrisy if you practice without belief, if you go through the motions of the prayers when you don't believe in God. However there are many dimensions to collective worship. The synagogue provides for a means of social expression and of interactions which are important to a vibrant life. Participation with family and friends within a community promotes general health and well-being.

Though hypocrisy is no virtue, it also is not a sin. It is a fact of life. And for you, it may be best to keep your doubts a private matter. You seem to have already decided on that course of action, and I agree. It is better not to broadcast your non-belief to the world.

You may know that some seem to disagree with the approach of remaining discreet about the lack of belief. Writing recently in the Times, T. M. Luhrmann, a professor at Stanford, argued aloud that belief is overrated as a main feature of religion in America ("Belief Is the Least Part of Faith," May 29, 2013). She says that, "you can argue that religious belief as we now conceptualize it is an entirely modern phenomenon."

Luhrmann describes what she learned in her studies of evangelical Christians, "I saw that people went to church to experience joy and to learn how to have more of it. These days I find that it is more helpful to think about faith as the questions people choose to focus on, rather than the propositions observers think they must hold."

Now, based on my years of shul-going, I am tempted to say (jokingly) that I saw that people go to synagogue to experience "oy" (rather than "joy"). But I do agree with Luhrmann that we should not get hung up on questions of "belief." With or without active credence, great positive value derives from participating together with your peers in your worship community.

Dear Rabbi:

I don't see the point of reciting blessings before eating at every meal. I understand that it is a mitzvah and a form of thanksgiving. But, this kind of constant practice feels rote and repetitive to me. Can you provide me with any insight or new motivation?

Bless me,

Englewood, NJ

Dear Bless Me,

Your question has a pragmatic flavor to it. Curiously, there's an anecdote about one of America's founding fathers asking a related question.

Benjamin Franklin described a boyhood memory of the barrel of salted meat that sat in a corner beside their family dinner table. When the family took their meat for their daily meals from the barrel, Franklin recalled, his father prayed at every occasion: "Thank Thee, Father, for the meat Thou has laid before us."

One day young Benjamin openly suggested that the family could save some time, "Father, why not say one prayer over the whole barrel, and then we don't have to thank the Lord at every meal for every piece of meat we eat." His father was displeased with that suggestion and he scolded Franklin for his ingratitude.

I won't scold you. I will offer you a somewhat novel motivation for the myriads of food blessings that we Jews are accustomed to recite.

Simply put, reciting blessings can help us foster a more thoughtful awareness of our eating. Blessings can serve as triggers for us and can tell us to put aside our distractions, to be mindful of our actions, to be meditative of what type of food we hold in our hands, how that food ought to be regarded and classified, and to recall what its prescribed berakhah is.

All forms of mindfulness heighten a person's experiences and elevate ordinary events from a background of passive awareness to a foreground of active thinking. A blessing can act as a cue to us to more mindfully savor the taste and texture of our foods.

Meir, a rabbi in the Talmud in the second century, spoke of his expectation for every Jew a life punctuated daily by one-hundred blessings. He expected a Jew to experience each day one-hundred triggers of mindfulness, via blessings, not just over foods that we eat, but in our prayers and in the performance of all our ritual acts.

To be a bit more theological, 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 can accomplish something we conventionally describe as the sanctification of the acts that the reciter performs after each blessing. By our actions of reciting a blessing and then eating, for instance, a blessing-reciter fulfills a commandment and performs a sacred act.

A mindful-berakhah-eater knows to associate the correct blessing that applies to each food category and to each specific food. The eater 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 his or her mouth and eating it. A mindful eater must be culturally analytical, a bit botanical or culinary or scientific, and religiously cognizant—all before he or she recites the blessing.

As I see it, blessings trigger a frequent flow of meditative mindfulness. And I have found that for me a more thoughtful and mindful life throughout the day is a more sacred life.

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Summer Sale -- We Reduced Prices on Our Talmudic Books

Summer Sale. Wow. Our Talmudic Kindle Book Prices are Reduced!

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Kosher Talmud: Hullin $.99

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God's Favorite Prayers $2.99

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Define Judaism: Ten Seminars $2.99

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God Bless You: The Origins of Jewish Prayers and Blessings $2.99

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Eleazar: Rabbi, Priest, Patriarch $2.99

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Kosher Prayers: Talmud Yerushalmi Berakhot $2.99

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Rashi: The Greatest Exegete $.99

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Six People You Meet in Synagogue $.99

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Whence and Wherefore $2.99

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Discover Mindful Jewish Meditation

The benefits of Jewish meditation are accessible to every type of Jew through acts of Jewish piety.

People tend to think that the Orthodox and Hasidic Jews are really pious, the Conservative Jews less so, and the Reform and Reconstructionist even less.

Not so. Piety is individual. You decide how pious you wish to be. Some may argue that the Liberal Jew who makes a decision to engage in piety every day is more pious than the Orthodox Jew who rarely pauses to decide for himself what endows his structured life with meaning.

If you want it to, piety can fill your life as a Jew and endow it with transcendent meaning. Piety can overshadow faith at the central defining core of your Judaism. You can bring it into your daily, weekly and annual routines, and life cycle events.

"Mindful" is a term made popular by meditation guru, Jon Kabat-Zinn and others through their writings and teachings. They brought the concept into Western life from its origins within Eastern cultures. These teachers instruct us to meditate on the here-and-now. As if this was some new idea to us in the West. Done properly, religious practice affords us this mindfulness constantly in any number of ways.

We describe some elements of the religion of the Talmudic rabbis. If this is a form of Judaism that fulfills your needs, go with it! If not, we suggest you discover and then extract the major concepts of classical Judaic practice and apply them to your circumstances. In that way you will develop mindful piety for yourself, for your community and your calendar.

The Judaic Roots of Mindful Piety

Long ago rabbis prescribed, for example, that each Jew recite one hundred blessings each day. The recitation of a blessing prior to the performance of many basic rituals helped make a Jew mindful of his every action.

R. Meir used to say, "There is no man in Israel who does not perform one hundred commandments each day [and recite over them one hundred blessings] . . . And there is no man in Israel who is not surrounded by [reminders of the] commandments. [Every person wears] phylacteries on his head, phylacteries on his arm, has a mezuzah on his door post and four fringes on his garment around him . . . [Tosefta Berakhot 6:24-25]."

From the first stirring every morning, the mindful Jew began his day with acts of religious significance.

Waking up: Washing hands upon arising took on a special meaning. The individual conducted the washing according to a simple but prescribed practice. Water had to be poured on the fingers of each hand up to the joint as specified by the masters.

Bodily functions like elimination are not ordinarily considered in the realm of religious ritual. Yet the rabbis of old said that one had to recite a blessing after that normally profane physical process as thanks for continued health.

And speaking words of wisdom, Praying. In rabbinic Judaism morning prayers were literally clothed in piety. Often they took place in a special spot. And of course, they were repeated regularly.

Dressing for prayer: The man put on the tallith (prayer shawl) and tefillin (phylacteries) while reciting the respective blessings. Each pious male obtained and maintained these prized and essential objects of piety in accord with the prescriptions of the rabbis and scribes. The man wore these objects to show compliance with the prescriptions of the verses of the Torah recited in the shema (Deut. 6:4-9, 11:13-21 and especially Num. 15:37-41). Each knot on the four fringes of the tallith garment was tied in accord with age-old tradition.

The tefillin were crafted of select leather, made into cubical containers to hold the small parchments of biblical paragraphs written by trained scribes. The head-tefillin had to rest on the worshiper between the eyes on the forehead, neither too high on the head, nor too low on the face. The leather strap that held it in place had to be tied in accord with known custom. The wearer understood that the knot of leather that sat at the base of his skull was a representation of the letter yod, the third letter of Shaddai, one of the divine names.

On the leather box of the arm-tefillin was inscribed the letter shin. The wearer knew that the knot that held it fast on his left biceps--opposite his heart--was a form of the letter dalet. Thus as he recited prayer, the Jew was bound head and heart to God, Shaddai. He wore these appurtenances each weekday from the time he reached 13, the age of maturity, the age of Bar Mitzvah. Obtaining a pair of tefillin from the scribe was the most significant overt sign of achieving adult membership in the rabbinic community.

The standard practice was to wear the tallith and tefillin during the morning prayers and then remove them. To show extreme piety some few virtuoso rabbis wore them all day as they sat immersed in the study of Torah.

Congregating for prayer: An ordinary Jewish man could recite his prayers in a designated synagogue or study hall, in private, at home, or in any orderly place. For optimal piety he went to the synagogue to pray with the minyan, the prayer quorum of ten adult Jews. The formalization of the synagogue as a standard communal institution took place over a span from the first century through the middle ages. The emphasis in Jewish custom and law was always on prayer in a public gathering of ten or more men, not on prayer in a specified building or designated place for gathering. This aspect of rabbinic piety was thus defined mainly in terms of a societal association with a community of other Jews. The rabbis placed little emphasis on the need for sacred bricks and mortar to fulfill the spiritual needs of prayer.

Repeating the process: Rabbinic piety centered on stability and repetition. On weekdays Jews gathered for the morning, afternoon and evening prayers. Major elements of prayer were repeated with small variations at the three services. A person said the shema in the morning and evening services; the amidah (standing prayer of eighteen blessings) in the morning afternoon and evening services; the alenu (a sublime prayer proclaiming God king) to conclude all three.

To these they added a morning Torah service to the public prayer on Monday and Thursday and on any festival or fast day. For this part of the service they read the first section of the seven of the Torah weekly portion that was going to be read during the Sabbath morning service at the end of the workweek. This focused attention on the coming Sabbath celebration and gave the men gathered during the week an added opportunity to hear the inspiration of the words of Torah.

During the week a fourth service, the additional prayers, called musaf, were added to celebrate special days. On New moons, celebrants added several paragraphs to the regular services and read an appropriate passage from the Torah. They concluded the morning prayers with the recitation of the amidah the standing prayer of eighteen blessings -- of the additional service. Likewise on holidays, modifications were made in the regular prayers and the additional musaf amidah was appended.

Evening prayers consisted of the shema, amidah and alenu. A widespread custom was to recite the shema once more at bedtime. Many believed this added evocation of piety would also protect the person who recited it from harm during the night.

The Mindful Challenge

Simply put the challenge is how do we take these traditions and making them over into a template for our own lives? Rabbis often tell us their answer. However, deep Piety, especially mindful piety, cannot come from the outside.

How do we find meaning through study and reflection and make all this into our own piety? No one should presume to tell us that, though many will. But that must be our own - our most personal task. (Repost)

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Is Bob Dylan Jewish?

Yes, Bob Dylan is a Jew. He may also be a Christian. He is one strange and famous musician whose personal views on things have always been hard to figure out.

Dylan turned 72 on his birthday, May 24, 2013.

Dylan was born a Jew named Robert Allen Zimmerman (Hebrew - Shabtai Zisel (or Zushe) ben Avraham) in 1941 in Duluth, Minnesota, and raised there and in Hibbing, Minnesota. His paternal grandparents, Zigman and Anna Zimmerman, emigrated from Odessa, Russia around 1905. His mother's grandparents, Benjamin and Lybba Edelstein, were Lithuanian Jews who arrived in America in 1902. His paternal grandmother's maiden name was Kyrgyz and her family originated from Istanbul.

Dylan’s parents were Abram Zimmerman and Beatrice "Beatty" Stone. When Dylan was six, his father was stricken with polio. The family returned to Hibbing, where Zimmerman grew up.

Now we read that Dylan is recording a Christmas album. Ryan McDuff, from the blog Bully! Pulpit reports:

LOS ANGELES, Calif -- Bob Dylan is recording his first Christmas album, Bullypulpit.com has exclusively learned and has been quietly compiling a collection that includes both Christmas carols and modern songs. At least four songs have reportedly been recorded for the album including, “Must Be Santa,” “Here Comes Santa Claus,” “I’ll Be Home For Christmas" and “O Little Town of Bethlehem.”

The recording sessions have been taking place at fellow recording artist Jackson Browne's Groove Master’s Studios in Santa Monica, California, where Browne produced his album, "I’m Alive."

Prominent media expert and best-selling author Michael Levine said the move by Dylan was "completely consistent with his longstanding tradition of doing the unexpected. Concerning Bob Dylan literally nothing would surprise me which of course is part of his lasting appeal. He confounds like no other pop artist ever."

The inclusion of “O Little Town of Bethlehem," written by an Episcopal priest named Phillips Brooks in 1867 after a pilgrimage to the Holy Land, is likely to fuel speculation about Dylan's religious beliefs that have swirled ever since he publicly converted to Christianity in 1979, recorded explicitly religious material on three subsequent albums and for a time refused to play his old songs. Religious references on subsequent recordings became less overt after 1981's "Shot of Love."

The other three songs, “Must Be Santa” by Hal Moore and Bill Fredricks, “Here Comes Santa Claus” by Gene Autry and Oakley Haldeman and “I’ll Be Home for Christmas” by Buck Ram, Kim Gannon and Walter Kent were all written between 1943 and 1960.

"A Christmas album by Bob Dylan in the pipeline doesn't really shock me," said Scott Marshall, author of a forthcoming book on the singer, "God and Bob Dylan: A Spiritual Life". "At first glance it may sound bizarre, but I don't think Dylan cares much about what his detractors might make of it. Dylan still sings songs from "Slow Train Coming" to this day and he's both never renounced being Jewish or renounced his experience with Jesus some three decades ago. He remains enigmatic and this will probably be talked about for years to come."

We suppose that Dylan's spiritual pendulum has swung back to Christianity. Less than two years ago in 2007 Dylan went to Chabad Lubavitch for Yom Kippur, where he got an aliyah to the Torah. JTA Reported back then:

Bob Dylan's religious odyssey took a turn home on Yom Kippur.

The folk legend attended services at the Chabad-Lubavitch of Atlanta... Dylan was born Jewish but has dabbled in several faiths.

He arrived at morning services wearing a ski cap and a tallit, and stayed for the duration, the Web site said. Dylan was called to the Torah for an aliyah by his Hebrew name, Zushe ben Avraham, according to the Chabad outpost's rabbi, Yossi Lew.

Dylan was in Atlanta for a concert following the holiday.

As always be sure to see our friend Larry Yudelson's Tangled Up In Jews site for more background on the Jews and Jewishness connected with Bob Dylan.

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Is the author and spiritual seeker Paulo Coelho Jewish?

No Paulo Coelho is not a Jew. He was brought up Catholic and attended a Jesuit school in Brazil. Coelho is not a big fan of any organized religion. He speaks with lyrical disdain and disparagement in his books about the wisdom and ritual of religions.

His current publication, Manuscript Found in Accra, is set in Jerusalem before a battle. The people in the book gather to ask about life so that they can learn enough to save "the soul of Jerusalem." The publisher tells us:

July 14, 1099. Jerusalem awaits the invasion of the crusaders who have surrounded the city’s gates. There, inside the ancient city’s walls, men and women of every age and every faith have gathered to hear the wise words of a mysterious man known only as the Copt. He has summoned the townspeople to address their fears with truth:

“Tomorrow, harmony will become discord. Joy will be replaced by grief. Peace will give way to war. . . . None of us can know what tomorrow will hold, because each day has its good and its bad moments. So, when you ask your questions, forget about the troops outside and the fear inside. Our task is not to leave a record of what happened on this date for those who will inherit the Earth; history will take care of that. Therefore, we will speak about our daily lives, about the difficulties we have had to face.”

The people begin with questions about defeat, struggle, and the nature of their enemies; they contemplate the will to change and the virtues of loyalty and solitude; and they ultimately turn to questions of beauty, love, wisdom, sex, elegance, and what the future holds. “What is success?” poses the Copt. “It is being able to go to bed each night with your soul at peace.” ...

Now, these many centuries later, the wise man’s answers are a record of the human values that have endured throughout time. And, in Paulo Coelho’s hands, The Manuscript Found in Accra reveals that who we are, what we fear, and what we hope for the future come from the knowledge and belief that can be found within us, and not from the adversity that surrounds us.

This book is new age in every respect that we can think of especially in the way that it wanders through spiritual landscapes and themes without a care for a conventional framework of organization or presentation.

One passage struck us because it sounded like the utter opposite of the philosophy of life and values that we heard espoused at Yeshiva University by our teacher the Rav, Rabbi Soloveitchik and by his followers.

We will cite Coelho's passage and leave it without explanation; and we wish that understanding will flow to those who understand:

Beauty is present in all creation, but the dangerous fact is that, because we human beings are often cut off from the Divine Energy, we allow ourselves to be influenced by what other people think... And we become ugly and embittered.

At that moment, we can draw comfort from so-called wisdom, an accumulation of ideas put together by people wishing to define the world instead of respecting the mystery of life. This "wisdom" consists of all the unnecessary rules, regulation, and measurements intended to establish a standard of behavior. 

According to that false wisdom, we should not be concerned about beauty because it is superficial and ephemeral. 

That isn't true. All the beings created under the sun, from birds to mountains, from flowers to rivers, reflect the miracle of creation. 

If we resist the temptation to allow other people to define who we are, then we will gradually be able to let the sun inside our own soul shine forth... (pp. 60-61)

Back in 2011 we wrote about his previous book Aleph saying that the book... will greatly entertain the spiritual seeker. By that we mean if you are open to the concepts of past lives and the mystical energies of the universe, this book will speak to you. But even if you are such a seeker, you may feel, as we do, that at times the book overdoes some of its themes.

Within the story Coelho provides some gems of writing. We identified with his metaphor of the Chinese bamboo plant since we had spent several years putting down the roots of our latest book. And now, that book (God's Favorite Prayers) has sprouted up boldly after its publication.

Coelho explains that the Chinese Bamboo first, “...spends 5 years as a little shoot, using that time to develop its complex root system. And then from one moment to the next, it puts on a spurt and grows up to 25 meters high.”

Within the narrative Coelho casts in what can be wonderful observations, if they resonate for you. On the life-value of mistakes he tells us, “...only mediocrity is sure of itself, so take risk and do what you really want to do. Seek out people who aren’t afraid of making mistakes and who, therefore, do make mistakes. Because of that, their work often isn’t recognized, but they are precisely the kind of people who change the world and, after many mistakes, do something that will transform their own community completely”.

He does get this inspiring exhortation partly right. We'd say to seek out people who are afraid to make mistakes -- that is a human trait -- but who nevertheless go ahead and make them. And he does need to differentiate and specify what he means by "mistakes". He surely means the worthy and meaty and bold and creative mistakes, not the foolish ones. And then of course, we all need to know some definition of the notion of "transform" -- but we never do get that from most of those who throw out the idea. We just know that they mean that transformation is something good and different and fresh and original.

It's all in a narrative that is highly intuitive and new age. And we get it and we like it. We also like the title.

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Understand how to have compassion on yourself via an essay by Tzvee Zahavy, "A Pragmatic Study of Kol Nidre: Law and Compassion"

Just in time for Yom Kippur....Wait. It's not Yom Kippur. It's springtime.

We don't believe that you need to wait until the autumn to atone, repent, turn over a new leaf or clean up your act.

Call it what you may, April is a good month for cleaning out the garage of your soul.

And you can do that via compassion. There is nothing legal or magical about compassion. Release all those vows, those bad habits, bad emotions, bad relationships. So you did some stupid and mean things over the past six months. You are human. Let the bad vows go. Nullify them. Have compassion on yourself and then move on.

And so we're happy to announce the publication of Pragmatic Studies in Judaism with an essay by Tzvee Zahavy, "A Pragmatic Study of Kol Nidre: Law and Compassion".

This book is the first attempt to apply formal pragmatics to Judaic studies as a discipline as well as within the broader discipline of cultural studies.

This paper is a study of the Kol Nidre service using the methods of pragmatics. We show how that service uses legal texts to create liturgy that is designed to be an effective and powerful technology of the sacred for the creation and delivery of compassion.

We use pragmatics to examine the context of the liturgy and determine its meaning. We explain the status of the involved worshippers and overcome the ambiguity of the meaning of the prayer by paying special attention to the manner, time and place of its recitation.

The ambiguity in the case of the Kol Nidre is whether it is a legal utterance, a magical utterance or a pure liturgical utterance of compassion. We review several previous explanations of the prayer and conclude that with a pragmatic contextual elucidation of the Kol Nidre.

Download and read our paper here.

Talmudic Books
Kindle Talmud in English
Ponder the Questions of Whence and Wherefore
Experience God's Favorite Prayers

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Desperately Seeking the Soul

Some thoughts upon reading the Times > Opinionator > The Stone > Gary Gutting

"Mary and the Zombies: Can Science Explain Consciousness?"

...Also, few philosophers think these thought-experiments show that there are souls or some other sort of supernatural entities. Frank Jackson, who first proposed the Mary scenario, and David Chalmers, who gave the most influential formulation of the zombie example, remain philosophical naturalists. They maintain that there is no world beyond the natural one in which we live. Their claim is rather that this world contains a natural reality (consciousness) that escapes the scope of physical explanation. Chalmers, in particular, supports a “naturalistic dualism” that proposes to supplement physical science by postulating entities with irreducibly subjective (phenomenal) properties that would allow us to give a natural explanation of consciousness. Not surprisingly, however, some philosophers have seen Jackson’s and Chalmers’s arguments as supporting a traditional dualism of a natural body and a supernatural soul...

And in the follow up post, "Mary and the Zombies: Consciousness Revisited"

We need to examine much more carefully both the apparently obvious premises and the reasoning based on them. Along these lines, professional philosophers have uncovered a number of subtle and complex problems for both arguments. For anyone interested in pursuing the discussion further, I would recommend the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy articles “Qualia: The Knowledge Argument” (by Martine Nida-Rümelin) and “Zombies” (by Robert Kirk).

We opine, It’s interesting to see how the limited our language and concepts are in their ability to describe consciousness, And all of this is way more sophisticated than what we had in the Mishnah and the Talmud when they tried to define kavvanah - direction of thought - concentration - or any forms of meditation.

This suggests that there is a self-consciousness-limit to the ability of science and language to self describe what is going on in consciousness. The Mary and Zombie hypotheses are in essence metaphoric stories that posit the existence of straw creatures so that we can discuss among ourselves un-self-consciously, fome of the most crucial aspects of consciousness - namely its physicality or spirituality.

We need a new vocabulary that has more complexity than the physical v. spiritual. To me consciousness has characteristics that are:

(1) intangible (2) non-physical (3) transitory (4) vivid and real (5) dismissible (6) motivation (7) fearsome (8) fill in the blank - put in any other emotions.

How does one describe thoughts? We learn to slow them down and commit them to verbal or written expression, art or music, all of that flows from consciousness.

Sensory consciousness is the intake mechanism. Dreaming, imagining, creating, orating - etc - are the output means of consciousness.

We like one comment on the second article/post in the Times:

Judy Shimkus - Supposing consciousness results from a yet-unknown type of energy?

Actually we’d say it’s a given - we know the energy is there - we just have no granular enough science (chemistry, physics, psychology)  or modern language terminology - to describe consciousness in all its nuances.

There must be millions of operations that comprise human consciousness - and parsing and studying some parts of  them is surely possible given the super-computing power that we have now at our disposal.

The recording of all human thoughts - wow that would be not just a stream - but one cosmic sea of consciousness. The capture of every human dream... another vast sea. And then top have Google make all of that searchable as it expands second by second - billions of thoughts of billions of people.

And the meta-processing of all that would raise the billions to exponential powers. Are we not approaching the infinite?

We’d like to mention the notion of “soul dust”  here - in another application of the imagery. The components of consciousness are as numerous (in each individual) as the grains of sands of the sea.

Why assume that we need to dilute down consciousness to a few principles and elements? In fact we need to ramp up science and language and mathematics and statistics and create a rich symbology or consciousness that has the ability to express every derivative of the principal blocks of the c-world.

The financial world develops symbology to express the derivative instruments of each underlying equity or base instrument. The c-symbology will be way more complex by orders of magnitude.

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Free at Last from Friday through Sunday: Six People You Meet in Synagogue

For the Passover holidays, the Talmudic Blog and Talmudic Books is giving away a new book:  Six People You Meet in Synagogue.

In this book, the author, Tzvee Zahavy, presents six ideal personalities of Jewish prayer and their respective prayers.

This is a condensed version of the author's previous work, God's Favorite Prayers (Talmudic Books, 2011) where he first developed the notion of the six distinct prayer archetypes: the performer, the mystic, the scribe, the priest, the meditator and the celebrity.

Six People You Meet in Synagogue
For Kindle from Amazon: FREE for Passover -- from Friday through Sunday, March 29-31.

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Why do we say when we pray, "Let my soul be like dust to everyone"?

At the conclusion of the Amidah prayer, three times a day, we say the concluding prayer of Mar the son of Ravina as found "with monor variations (Steinsalz)" in b. Berakhot 17a.

Rabbi Yissocher Frand comments on this:

Tosfos [Brochos 17a] comments on the prayer recited at the end of the Shmoneh Esrei: "My G-d, guard my tongue from evil and my lips from speaking deceitfully. To those who curse me, let my soul be silent; and let my soul be like dust to everyone." What is the meaning of the term "let my soul be like dust to everyone?" Tosfos suggests the very idea introduced by the Medrash above: Just like dust (afar) is never destroyed and always remains, we pray that our descendants should always remain and not be destroyed.

This prayer is speaking about people who are not our friends, people who curse us and abuse us. We pray that to those who curse us, we remain silent and we pray that our soul will remain like dust vis-à-vis our enemies. What is the intention when we pray that we should be like dust? It expresses a desire to be among those "who are insulted by others but do not respond in kind, who hear themselves being shamed, but do not respond" [Shabbos 88b]. Such people are the ones who eventually come out on top. We express this aspiration with the words "may my soul be like dust to everyone." ....

We are not satisfied with this explanation for several reasons, one of which is that our wish that our soul be "like dust to everyone" is followed in the next line of our prayers by our wish, "May my soul pursue your mitzvot."

Now that is one versatile soul. One second it is like dust, the next second it is pursuing religious acts.

Just one minute. If the soul is like dust, then wait, we say daily in the preliminary psalms (Ps 30:9), "What gain is there in my destruction, in my going down into the pit? Will the dust praise you? Will it proclaim your faithfulness?"

So here we have the makings of a complicated puzzle. We want to protect our souls and yet we want our souls to purse the commandments. We want to protect them perhaps because we ask a lot of our souls. Or perhaps there are other ways to look at the soul and dust comparison. Perhaps we need to know more about the soul... and about the dust comparison. Perhaps we need to write a book about the soul, with a chapter on the dust comparison.

Our thinking and searching about this topic and those words led us to an amazing book by Nicolas Humphrey, Soul Dust: The Magic of Consciousness.

Humphrey posits that, "Consciousness... is nothing less than a magical-mystery show that we stage for ourselves inside our own heads. This self-made show lights up the world for us and makes us feel special and transcendent. Thus consciousness paves the way for spirituality, and allows us, as human beings, to reap the rewards, and anxieties, of living in what Humphrey calls the 'soul niche'."

We've written several articles and chapters about the ideas of consciousness in the Talmud. And we've written a bunch of stuff about prayer. Accordingly all that's how we decided that we do need to write a theological-humanological book about the soul and dust and the magical-mystery show of our Jewish consciousness in our prayer.

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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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