Where does wisdom come from? In our morning prayers, we say Reshit chochma yirat Heshem – “The beginning of wisdom is the awe of God.” And to clarify, God is not a concept or reality outside ourselves, but a Living Presence that is infused in all of reality – that is all reality, whether or not we perceive it as such. With that direction, then I can understand “awe” as being present to the infinite depth of reality which I can only know through paying attention to my immediate experience. Since there is no place that God is not, then my moment to moment experience becomes the place where I can access this ultimate reality. And when I am present to that which I am not boxing in and defining through concepts and labels, then the experience of this infinitely deep reality can manifest as “awe.”
In Jewish tradition, Torah is the medium and access point for receiving wisdom, insight, clarity about the Divine Reality and how that manifests through our human experience. When we think of Torah, we usually think about a fixed text – whether the two tablets of the ten commandments or the scroll of the five books of Moses. Jewish tradition also defines Torah more expansively as the entire oral tradition that spanned through Moses, the prophetic, rabbinical, medieval and even modern periods. However we conceptualize Torah (which simply means “teaching”), our tradition frames it as something that we receive. And our willingness to receive and live Torah defines our covenant with God.
Our rabbis portray the upcoming holiday of Shavuot as a festival that is not only the biblical portrayal of the offering of our first fruits and the culmination of the seven weeks of counting the omer, but a time where we delve deeply into that experience of receiving Torah on Mount Sinai that is described in the Book of Exodus.
However, while the Sinai experience was the first time that the Israelites became a nation with a collective purpose through that revelation of Torah, Torah itself describes our ancestors who were present to the Infinite Divine Reality and drew wisdom from their experience. They had a relationship with God, with the depth of their own experience before there was the sacred text that was given at Sinai. In fact, the Midrash on the open lines of the creation story says that “God looked into the Torah and created the world.” Even before the beginning of the world, before any scrolls or texts, there was Torah. It’s almost as if this thing we call Torah was the blueprint that God used to manifest God’s self in creation
I had the great privilege of being on a five day meditation retreat this past week with Or HaLev, an organization dedicated to helping us live “a more whole, vibrant, and awakened life through mindfulness and innovative Jewish practice.” During one of our learning sessions, Rabbah Dr. Mira Niculescu shared some texts that demonstrate the rabbis’ expanded vision of where Torah comes from. In Midrash Bereshit Rabba 61:1, Rabbi Shimon asks where Abraham learned Torah from since his father didn’t teach him and he had no rabbi. He responds that the “Holy One made available his kidneys like two rabbis and they gushed and taught him Torah and wisdom…”
Abraham learned Torah from his experience of his body. And this is consistent with Moses’s famous teaching in the Book of Deuteronomy 30:11 that the Torah is “not in the heavens, that you should say, “Who among us can go up to the heavens and get it for us and impart it to us, that we may observe it. Neither is it beyond the sea, that you should say, Who among us can cross to the other side of the sea and get it for us and impart it to us, that we may observe it? No, the thing is very close to you, in your mouth and in your heart, to observe it.”
During this five day retreat, we sat and walked with our attention on the present moment which is always experienced through our bodies. I sat for days with attention on my breath, the tension in my back, the pull of gravity, and all the sensations that accompany sitting or walking in a body. As my attention settled and became absorbed in this physical experience, there were two primary directions my attention would go. Sometimes I would sink so deeply into the experience of my body that any sense of separation fell away and I was just part of an Infinite Presence. There was no sense of “I”, just everything that was arising – sensations, sounds, infinitely unfolding in exquisite beauty.
And sometimes, I would sit deeply with physical pain or tension and become aware of thoughts about the moment which resisted what was happening. “Why do they keep turning the heat up?” “Why didn’t the teachers tell us they were going to leave the room?” The more I felt into the physical tension and the flavor of the particular resistant thought, I became aware it had its roots in something deeper in my psyche that was not about the present moment at all. It connected to earlier experiences of not being seen or considered and the pain that was present in that.
In both cases, I was present to my experience in a way that revealed deeper about the nature of reality – my reality and The Reality. It was an experience of receiving Torah.
If wisdom comes from Torah and part of the experience of receiving Torah is an experience of awe that comes from a deeper experience of the present moment, then how do we pay attention to the present moment in a way that allows depth to be revealed? There are many qualities that are helpful to bring to the practice of meditation, but one of the most important is the quality of loving attention. If we want to delve deeply into any aspect of our experience, we need to embrace it fully.
It is true that most of us navigate life through the perspective of a judging mind. Judgement is how we evaluate where to put our attention, where not to, what choices we make. And while judging the world and our experience is a necessary part of being human, our judging filter is something that is deeply conditioned and unconscious. We are not always aware why we make the judgments and choices we do beyond the stories we tell ourselves. And much of the time, it’s this quality of judgment that alienates us from the unfolding reality within us.
When we bring an attitude of loving attention to every part of our experience as it unfolds in meditation, then we give permission, not only for our experience to be, but to come closer to it and understand its nature. We don’t let our labels or categories limit our experience of whatever might be arising, but instead, realizing it is a part of the Divine Depth, bring loving attention to receive what it has to teach us.
One does not need to be on a meditation retreat to learn Torah from our experience. We do need a willingness to pay attention to our moment to moment experience. We need an understanding that in every part of our experience, there is infinite depth. And the way we access that depth is to welcome all that arises within us with loving attention.