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"Kavannah for Living"Unit 2Waking Up(If you miss a study unit along the way, you can access the materials in the Kavannah for Living Archive: archive.) B’rucheem haba’im, chevrah. Welcome to the conversation!Prelude: Today there are two great myths of the morning. The first, most often perpetuated by cereal commercials, is the most romantic. You find yourself lounging in a wicker chair, watching the sunrise over a hillside as you leisurely enjoy your bowl of wholesome goodness. You slowly crunch as you look lovingly toward your endearing partner. The second morning myth, the invigorating jolt, is its polar opposite – the shampoo that rocks you into overdrive, causing you to charge out of your house and turn heads as you strut into your glass and steel office tower. Both of these myths attempt to gloss over the reality that our mornings, far removed from natural cycles, have become the most dreaded time of the day. We are shaken out of sleep, and we bounce in and out of the bathroom, the kitchen, and the bedroom. And if you are like most folks, mornings are a flurry of last minute preparations—deciding what to wear, planning parts of the day, gathering things together, all in a mad dash. Perhaps on a precious weekend morning you might actually sink yourself into the morning to cuddle up in bed, or enjoy breakfast, take a walk, read, or pray. But the working week’s mornings are rather Hobbesian—nasty, brutish, and short. It is easy to forget that our ancestors lived by the rotation of the earth. Then dawn beckoned the day, and the morning prayers were recited in the minutes between darkness and light. While our time is limited, the ability we have to raise our awareness of the spiritual implications of waking up can be sparked in a moment. From the first moment we drift out of sleep and into awareness, there are moments to create the attitude with which you will face the day. In the rituals below, the words and meditations that have been used to greet the morning for over forty generations are used to re-frame the contemporary morning routine.
THE RITUAL: Modeh Ani l’fanecha…. Before getting out of bed or beginning any conversation:
When taking a look out the window and seeing the sunlight filter in:
Before washing your hands: Take a moment to reflect on what your hands are going to do today. What work will they do? Who will they touch?
Waking Up: What gives you that boost of energy? Taking an invigorating shower, sipping the first cup of coffee, walking out the door for a breath of fresh air. As you wake up, you might reflect on the following blessings:
While deciding what to wear or putting on your clothing:
Stretching:
Other needs--brushing teeth, flossing, taking medication, putting on deodorant… :
Eliminating waste:
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Commentary by Reb Zalman: My practice isn’t necessarily what I can recommend. I do some Chi-kung and some stretches each morning, and in the room where the bath is I go through birchot hashachar in my head while I’m doing it. Zokef kefufim, rokah ha’aretz al ha’mayim when I feel it. Malbeesh arumin when I get dressed. I seldom say them in the shul. There are times when I look out the window and see the sunrise, I’m not waiting for a yistabach or a yotzer or! It comes to my lips already because I see the sunrise, and sometimes I go all the way to yotzer ha’morot, because it’s chatimah echad, one piece. Shower is an interesting thing. You know there is a sense that if you don’t have a mikveh, you take tisha kavim. You wash with nine kavim of water. A chevra kadisha uses tisha kavim. They used to bring a corpse into the mikveh – there used to be two mikvehs like in Sefat at the mikveh of the Ari ha’kodesh. There you have two: the one in the back was for the live people, the one in the front for the corpses. There is a masora that Reb Shneur Zalman dipped the head of the Maggid of Mezeritch at the time of his tahara. In the shower there is a sense of honoring every body part—saying how wonderful to have an arm, to have a leg, the inner organs…even though I’m not saying the asher yatzar until afterwards, it’s a great thing to think about. It’s a strange thing – we are not supposed to think about holy things when we are sitting on the john. I remember in the yeshivah we had columns of numbers on the wall in the john for us to add up, so we wouldn’t think of Torah. Arithmetic, that you could do. But it doesn’t feel like that to me--that it is a no-no to think of Torah on the john. M’lo kol ha-aretz k’vodo - The whole earth is filled with God’s glory, so a turd is as Divine as eating the challah on Shabbos! It dosen’t feel like this on our level of observation, but what difference does it make on the upper level? There is an attitude thing that you do in front of the mirror. A mirror is supposed to tell you the truth; for me, as an older person, it is always remarkable when I look at that face when it does not have the dentures in, with the bags under the eyes, and I look at that person, but on the inside I don’t feel like that person. I feel younger. But looking at that person is a very important encounter. And then there is this gradual thing where you comb your hair, brush your beard, put on your glasses, put in your shinayim, and you see the transformation that happens, preparing to meet the world. This has an aspect of musar. To what extent do I want to disguise what I am like? Because there are certain infirmities that are my truth—and that is the work of the mirror. I had a teacher, a non-Jew, a very special person, and he, in the manner of older folks would wake up at 4am and do his meditation, and it was very beautiful. By the time that he came to the breakfast table, he had written out a note for everyone who he was going to have breakfast with that morning -- sort of a love note. "What a pleasure…" he would write. I learned from him to do this on Friday night. To have Shabbos letters -- you have to have some time for this mushy stuff. Breakfast—my life today is about which supplements, which drops--and it is not always pleasant. I do a shehakol on the water or juice, and then take them. Shehakol--a story-- Reb Herschele Riminover, a Chasidic rebbe, as he was dying said, "Al kulam im amar shehakol nehiyeh bdvaro yatza, Baruch atah Hashem Elohaynu melech haolam shehakol neheyeh b’dvaro," and he died. How would I translate this? Everything that is became what it is by His word. The All came into being by His word.
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