This is what I learned this week about blessing from parsha Vayechi. The teaching comes first from Reb Simcha Bunim and then is further interpreted by my teacher Rabbi Jonathan Slater. And then expanded once again cy through the Torah of life unfolding.
s.v., o yomar ki haberakha ba-ah
Reb Simcha Bunim’s interpretetion of this text: "And he blessed Joseph" (Gen. 48:15). Blessings emerge from a righteous person when the flow of love, desire and good will fills it beyond the heart's capacity to hold it except by extending desire and love to another person. This is how we should understand our verse: "He blessed Joseph" - he was expanded (nitvaseph) through him.
From Jonathan Slater: Blessing and sanctity exist through God's word and intention. We cannot generate it. But, we can serve as conduits for blessing. When we open our hearts fully to the flow of divine blessing - love, desire and the intention for good - we experience blessing. When we allow that awareness to fill us, it extends throughout our bodies and consciousness. When filled, we no longer have a sense of "I am receiving blessing", only of love and desire, only of blessing. There is no longer any room in us to take in blessing, no longer any part of us that is not blessing, love and desire. It is then that we overflow with this blessing, and it extends to others.
My words:
I understand this to mean that when we practice yoga and meditation with deep attentiveness we cultivate this sense of expansiveness (nitvaseph), opening up our awareness to the abundance of Divine blessing (shefa) that flows through us. As we physically stretch our bodies we become more keenly aware that we are living vessels not only filled with pulsing blood and continuous breath, but as Jonathan said, our bodies are also conduits…blessing is not contained by us but expressed through us…When we pay attention we open the channel of blessing…
Ok…so here I want to interject some real life experience of Divine overflow. As I was keying the sentence above this one into my computer….”when we pay attention we open the channel of blessing”…I heard a strange bubbling sound coming from the bathroom…and then a trickling that increased to the sound of water flowing…OUR septic system was backing up and sludgy water was bubbling up in our bath tub and over the edge of our toilet!...So let me back up a and just say that this overflow came at the tail (we hope) of a stream of other recent crises in our family…I won’t go into too many details here…but suffice it to say that Gordon and I were feeling the fullness of the word dayenu…an left wondering…where’s the blessing in one crazy thing after the other after the other? And this is what I’m realizing. I have to release my desire for some BIG blessing to come our way…because in my lived experience, most blessings are really small and pretty mundane... yet, they are blessings nonetheless. This, I believe is what we must be open to. The continuous flow of small blessings that sustain us and flow through us to the people we love. Even being able to say: “thank God it’s not worse than this” feels like an authentic blessing some days.
Our lives as individuals are much smaller than we often imagine when compared to the vastness of the universe...yet sometimes the events that fill our daily lives grow enormously out of proportion and our perception of a situation becomes amplified. A moment drags on to feel like an hour. A day under the microscope of crisis can feel like a week...perhaps there is blessing in this magnified focus too...it is certainly an opportunity to experience what it means to be fully present to the moment…we miss nothing of the immediate situation in our hyper aware state. But of course (and thank God) this is temporary. Once the emergency is over and things calm down we are back to inventing what could go wrong (when everything is actually ok) or imagining what our lives would be like "if only____________was different in some way". That’s when it’s hard to recognize the blessings. So what I am learning is that if I can step away from the microscope and walk over to the telescope…I can really alter my relationship with how I see the blessings in my life.
One blessing I was witness to this past week happened on an eventful day in a hospital ER. It was Belin’s 15th birthday (she had spent it at home alone while the rest of us were at the first ER of the day in NH…We were now sitting in the second ER. We sat in that small little room at Children’s hospital in Boston while waiting for more test results and to find out if Rosie would be admitted. Rosie was feeling uncomfortable…all of us were worried not knowing what was going on and Belin opened her presents. And there we all were together, our little family, celebrating Belin’s birthday despite the unpleasant location. And after she opened her gifts…she took one of the books and started reading it aloud as Rosie rested on the gurney. I could feel the compassion in her voice…this was shefa…Divine blessing overflowing between two sisters who love each other deeply.
Rosie’s fine…it all turned out to be viral, she just needed the flow of IV fluids to help her feel better…the septic system just had a clog and needed to be cleared.
Little blessings.
Lets do some cleansing of our own here and begin with the breath.
I’d like to start with some really big sighs…inhaling deeply…exhaling with an audible sigh. 3xs
s.v., o yomar ki haberakha ba-ah
Reb Simcha Bunim’s interpretetion of this text: "And he blessed Joseph" (Gen. 48:15). Blessings emerge from a righteous person when the flow of love, desire and good will fills it beyond the heart's capacity to hold it except by extending desire and love to another person. This is how we should understand our verse: "He blessed Joseph" - he was expanded (nitvaseph) through him.
From Jonathan Slater: Blessing and sanctity exist through God's word and intention. We cannot generate it. But, we can serve as conduits for blessing. When we open our hearts fully to the flow of divine blessing - love, desire and the intention for good - we experience blessing. When we allow that awareness to fill us, it extends throughout our bodies and consciousness. When filled, we no longer have a sense of "I am receiving blessing", only of love and desire, only of blessing. There is no longer any room in us to take in blessing, no longer any part of us that is not blessing, love and desire. It is then that we overflow with this blessing, and it extends to others.
My words:
I understand this to mean that when we practice yoga and meditation with deep attentiveness we cultivate this sense of expansiveness (nitvaseph), opening up our awareness to the abundance of Divine blessing (shefa) that flows through us. As we physically stretch our bodies we become more keenly aware that we are living vessels not only filled with pulsing blood and continuous breath, but as Jonathan said, our bodies are also conduits…blessing is not contained by us but expressed through us…When we pay attention we open the channel of blessing…
Ok…so here I want to interject some real life experience of Divine overflow. As I was keying the sentence above this one into my computer….”when we pay attention we open the channel of blessing”…I heard a strange bubbling sound coming from the bathroom…and then a trickling that increased to the sound of water flowing…OUR septic system was backing up and sludgy water was bubbling up in our bath tub and over the edge of our toilet!...So let me back up a and just say that this overflow came at the tail (we hope) of a stream of other recent crises in our family…I won’t go into too many details here…but suffice it to say that Gordon and I were feeling the fullness of the word dayenu…an left wondering…where’s the blessing in one crazy thing after the other after the other? And this is what I’m realizing. I have to release my desire for some BIG blessing to come our way…because in my lived experience, most blessings are really small and pretty mundane... yet, they are blessings nonetheless. This, I believe is what we must be open to. The continuous flow of small blessings that sustain us and flow through us to the people we love. Even being able to say: “thank God it’s not worse than this” feels like an authentic blessing some days.
Our lives as individuals are much smaller than we often imagine when compared to the vastness of the universe...yet sometimes the events that fill our daily lives grow enormously out of proportion and our perception of a situation becomes amplified. A moment drags on to feel like an hour. A day under the microscope of crisis can feel like a week...perhaps there is blessing in this magnified focus too...it is certainly an opportunity to experience what it means to be fully present to the moment…we miss nothing of the immediate situation in our hyper aware state. But of course (and thank God) this is temporary. Once the emergency is over and things calm down we are back to inventing what could go wrong (when everything is actually ok) or imagining what our lives would be like "if only____________was different in some way". That’s when it’s hard to recognize the blessings. So what I am learning is that if I can step away from the microscope and walk over to the telescope…I can really alter my relationship with how I see the blessings in my life.
One blessing I was witness to this past week happened on an eventful day in a hospital ER. It was Belin’s 15th birthday (she had spent it at home alone while the rest of us were at the first ER of the day in NH…We were now sitting in the second ER. We sat in that small little room at Children’s hospital in Boston while waiting for more test results and to find out if Rosie would be admitted. Rosie was feeling uncomfortable…all of us were worried not knowing what was going on and Belin opened her presents. And there we all were together, our little family, celebrating Belin’s birthday despite the unpleasant location. And after she opened her gifts…she took one of the books and started reading it aloud as Rosie rested on the gurney. I could feel the compassion in her voice…this was shefa…Divine blessing overflowing between two sisters who love each other deeply.
Rosie’s fine…it all turned out to be viral, she just needed the flow of IV fluids to help her feel better…the septic system just had a clog and needed to be cleared.
Little blessings.
Lets do some cleansing of our own here and begin with the breath.
I’d like to start with some really big sighs…inhaling deeply…exhaling with an audible sigh. 3xs
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