Jewish Meditation and Torah on Generosity   

The following is a meditation and torah written by longtime TIKKUN member and chapter leader, Hayyim Feldman. Instructions for delivering this orally are included.

Shalom - Salaam,

We can advocate from the greatest depth for the explicit political agenda of Generosity Sunday not by fixing our gaze solely on that agenda (Global Marshall Plan, etc.), but by first rooting ourselves in our own emotional-moral-relational-spiritual experience of generosity. Toward that end I prepared the following meditation and torah (spiritual teaching) for opening up a discussion of generosity. (The relevance of the meditation is not apparent until the torah is shared.) In writing them up after the fact, I've expanded a bit, trying to make up in greater clarity whatever is lost in lived experience (and brevity) as a result of committing it to static text. As a spiritual consciousness-arousing movement, we seek to bring to the forefront spiritual needs and longings that we are confident are already present within each person, and to actualize (that is, to put at the center of how we act) in our personal, political, social, and economic relations the Oneness that we know already connects us spiritually at the deepest level with each other and with all Being. That is the context for what follows.
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I. The meditation (pause for several breaths after each line):
*Sit facing forward, upright and relaxed...close your eyes.....and notice that you are breathing.
*Notice also that you were already breathing before you turned your attention to your breath.
*Notice how (unless perhaps you are a very spiritually advanced being) bringing your attention to your breath changed the rhythm or depth of its flow.
*As we continue to breathe, sit for awhile with this question - don't try to answer; just sit with it.....
*Is breathing something you do, or does it happen to you?
*Feel yourself breathe
*Feel yourself breathed
(longer pause)
*Continuing to breathe, feel your weight on the seat...hear the sounds in the room...and when you're ready, open your eyes.

II. The torah:

There is a Hebrew word, Tzedakah, that literally means an act of righteousness, or of abundant justice. An act not of strict justice, but of generous justice - the justice that rolls like an ever-lasting stream.

In common usage, tzedakah means something like "righteous giving"; what we would call, in English, charity.

Note that while tzedakah refers to justice, charity comes from the Latin: caritas, meaning love.
Some say that charity is to be given freely, motivated by fellow-feeling, while tzedakah is given as a matter of duty, regardless of one's feelings.

I say each of these is half right.

Tzedakah is a mitzvah. Mitzvah means "commandment," and comes from a root meaning "to join together." To say that tzedakah is a mitzvah means that one is obligated by one's loving connection with G!d to give freely.

Here is the sequence of Hebew letters (along with the corresponding English/Latin letters) that combine, from right to left, to make up G!d's holy Name - the Name that is not to be pronounced (if your email software or browser doesn't display them, do a google image search for "yhwh"):

(H) ה (W) ו (H) ה (Y) י

The holy Name is understood, in Jewish tradition, to consist of two syllables (or even two separate Divine names that we unite, in love and awe, to form the one Name).

But notice that not only are there no vowels; there are also no solid consonants - no meeting of lips, tongue, or teeth. If you imagine how it would sound to try to pronounce this sequence of letters, it all comes out very breathy.

Some of us think the reason we don't pronounce the name is because it actually has no pronunciation; it cannot be vocalized as a word, but only as a breath.

The Sufi master Hazrat Inayat Khan says "the only sin is to take a breath without remembering G!d."

Breath, like the Name, also has two syllables.

Breathe the sound of the holy Name, with the first syllable (Y-H) as an inhalation (through the nose), and the second (W-H) as an exhalation (through the mouth). (Demonstrate.)

So the holy Name of G!d is breath, and every breath is (or can be, if you let it) the holy Name - a receiving and a giving back, united into one breath.

Is breathing something we do freely, or is it something that happens of itself by some predetermined process?

(Is life something we do, or something that happens to us?)

Like tzedakah, breath is both free and obligatory.

One way: It is a free gift to us, but one without which we cannot live. It is also a free gift from us, without which the trees and grasses cannot live.

Another way: The flow of breath persists without our conscious participation, guided only by law - the laws of nature. But of all our involuntary bodily functions, it is the one we are most readily able to also exercise voluntarily, to breathe when and as we choose.

Yet if we try to take complete control, subjecting it fully and permanently to the governance of our will, we soon find that we are unreliable regulators of our own breathing.

Here is another way to understand the Holy Name:

In Jewish tradition, letters are also used to represent numbers. Every letter has a numeric equivalent. The first letter of the Name, yod, is the tenth letter of the aleph-bet, and so has the numeric value of ten. The second letter of the Name, heh, is fifth in the aleph-bet and has the value of five. The third letter of the Name, vav, is sixth in the aleph-bet, but its numeric value will not concern us here. Finally, another heh, five.

The yod is the smallest Hebrew letter, essentially just a point, a small dot on the page.

What else is small and dot-like and has a value of 10?

Now hold your right hand in front of you, palm facing you, thumb extending to the side and fingers together pointing down. Hold it so you can see the letter heh on the screen alongside it. See the similarity in shape? The five of the heh for the five fingers.

So the first syllable of the Name - the inbreath, the taking in - is a hand with a coin.

The third letter of the Name, the vav, often serves as a prefix meaning "and", at which time it is called the "vav of connection." See how the vav is very similar in form to the yod, but with a line extending out from it. (In Jewish spiritual symbology, down can be taken for outward, and up for inward.) While the yod resembles a mere point, a self-contained singularity with no dimension, the vav by contrast has reach, enabling it to connect one with another.

The hand with the coin reaches out, to . . . the final heh, another hand.

The second syllable of the Name - the outbreath - is a reaching out to a hand that receives.

Our spiritual traditions teach us, in many different ways, that by consciously inhabiting the self-regulating flow of our breath - by bringing our steady attention to bear on it, but with no effort to control - we can experience more fully and directly the unity of self and other, of our own acting in the world and the cosmos acting upon us, bringing about a closer alignment of our own will with G!d's.

So it is with the flow of spiritual and material Abundance. From the moment of our conception, Life energy flows into us, feeds us, forms us, without asking whether we want it, through the love of others who nurture us, a love that our survival requires. When things are right with the world, our caregiver experiences our movement in the womb, and later our simple smile, our eye contact, as the greatest return for her (or his) love.

We are, willy nilly, bound up in this dance from our first moments, dependent on it, however limited our awareness of it. Later, more aware of ourselves, we can make our own deliberate choices about giving and receiving - or about taking, withholding, and imposing. What is the effect on the stream of Divine abundance when we strategize, when we imagine ourselves at the center, as though what we receive were our due and what we give were ours to control? How, in your experience, does this universal flow move differently if we choose instead simply to remain gratefully attentive and aware, with no effort to direct it, as when we watch our breath in meditation?

When spiritual wisdom traditions teach us to "be compassionate because G!d is compassionate," they ask for more than imitation. They call us to consciously root our personal practice of caring and generosity in a sustained open presence to G!d's generous, loving justice - allowing it to enliven us, to connect us, and thus to find its proper course. That is when our love is truly "because of" G!d's love, truly an expression of G!d's love moving freely in and through us.

And so the Name of G!d - the Name that cannot be pronounced, but only vocalized by the two "syllables" of a taking-in-and-letting-out breath - that holy Name itself contains both the sound and the image of tzedakah, of the eternal exchange of giving and receiving, necessary and free, that we all are.

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P.S. For some years, because of the teaching (which I did not originate) of the holy Name as a depiction of the act of tzedakah, I've made it a point to carry a batch of dollar coins in my pocket so I can always give one or two when I encounter someone in need. Perhaps because they are somewhat rare in daily use, they are usually received with some enthusiasm, and often help to open up a bit of a personal connection. They also help me to remain conscious of what is really happening, which is not about me nor all the judgments I might otherwise be busy making.

It occurred to me to bring a stash of those coins with me to the post office, each with a bit of ribbon around it to clearly mark it as a free gift, and give one to each person who takes a Generosity Weekend postcard, for them to pass on to (or keep as) someone in need.

Love and blessings,
-Hayyim
617-623-5232

Hayyim Feldman, Organizer
Boston Tikkun Community / Network of Spiritual Progressives
http://www.tikkun.org / http://www.spiritualprogressives.org
hayyim@tikkun.org / 617-623-5232

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For a New Bottom Line of love, awe, and joy.
___Shalom - Salaam,

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