new beginnings – Page 12 – New beginnings: A blog about spirituality, chaplaincy and renewal

Prayer before Prayer

Every so often, it is important to come back to certain basics of spiritual growth as a means of reflection. Perhaps, even more than that, it is important to habituate ourselves in practices that enhance our spirituality while at the same time finding ways to make the habits into something that continues to feel new. One of those is the opening words of the Amidah,

ה’ שפתי תפתח ופי יגיד תהילתך

Gd, open up my lips and my mouth will share Your praises.

While we could offer the same thoughts on the entire prayer piece, the Amidah, at least as it pertains to the opening 3 and closing 3 blessings, this line in particular is quite special and meaningful.

First, if we consider the structure of the prayer service as a whole, much of what we have already done before getting to the Amidah is praise of Gd. Second, if the point is that this prayer is like a gateway prayer to further prayer, why here, why now? Third, if we are really in this place of struggle, how can we even presume to open our mouth with a prayer to be able to pray?

As I find myself focused on this line, I would offer that a prayer before prayer is the most profound and important of prayers and that it being in the midst of prayer, not at the very beginning of each service is also of crucial importance. If you are like me, by the time you reach the Amidah, you are of two minds. There is the anticipation of having opportunity built in for more personal reflection while at the same time much energy has hopefully been exuded to reach this place. As such, I would offer that the line introducing the Amidah is the chance to regroup and recharge. It is a chance to remember and reflect on how we can only say these prayers because Gd has granted us the ability to speak these words.

I found the inspiration for this in thinking about something from last week’s Torah portion. As Moses is arguing with Gd about not wanting the job of leading the Israelites from Egypt, he tries one last argument (Exodus 4:10-12):

וַיֹּ֨אמֶר מֹשֶׁ֣ה אֶל־יְהֹוָה֮ בִּ֣י אֲדֹנָי֒ לֹא֩ אִ֨ישׁ דְּבָרִ֜ים אָנֹ֗כִי גַּ֤ם מִתְּמוֹל֙ גַּ֣ם מִשִּׁלְשֹׁ֔ם גַּ֛ם מֵאָ֥ז דַּבֶּרְךָ֖ אֶל־עַבְדֶּ֑ךָ כִּ֧י כְבַד־פֶּ֛ה וּכְבַ֥ד לָשׁ֖וֹן אָנֹֽכִי׃

But Moses said to יהוה, “Please, O my lord, I have never been a man of words, either in times past or now that You have spoken to Your servant; I am slow of speech and slow of tongue.”

וַיֹּ֨אמֶר יְהֹוָ֜ה אֵלָ֗יו מִ֣י שָׂ֣ם פֶּה֮ לָֽאָדָם֒ א֚וֹ מִֽי־יָשׂ֣וּם אִלֵּ֔ם א֣וֹ חֵרֵ֔שׁ א֥וֹ פִקֵּ֖חַ א֣וֹ עִוֵּ֑ר הֲלֹ֥א אָנֹכִ֖י יְהֹוָֽה׃

And יהוה said to him, “Who gives humans speech? Who makes them dumb or deaf, seeing or blind? Is it not I, יהוה ?

וְעַתָּ֖ה לֵ֑ךְ וְאָנֹכִי֙ אֶֽהְיֶ֣ה עִם־פִּ֔יךָ וְהוֹרֵיתִ֖יךָ אֲשֶׁ֥ר תְּדַבֵּֽר׃

Now go, and I will be with you as you speak and will instruct you what to say.”

In addition to the irony of Moses using this as a final argument after seemingly having many words for excuses, what is most interesting is the point that it is not Moses who is able to speech on his own but Moses who is able to speak and argue because Gd allows him to argue.

In other words, we may be praying, expressing praises and wishes to Gd, but it is important to be regroup and ground ourselves time and again in the midst of prayer with the notion that Gd gives us the ability to pray and offer these words. Each prayer service is a journey, and on a journey it is important to take stock and recognize where you have come from, where you are and where you are going.

As we work on spiritual growth as it pertains to our prayerful lives, may we recognize the importance of knowing from Whom our prayers come and to Whom we direct our prayers.

Are you working on enhancing your prayer life and are not sure how best to go about it? Contact New Beginnings Spiritual Coaching and Consulting LLC at 732-314-6758 ext. 100 or via email at newbeginningsspiritualcoach@gmail.com

Audio – Lessons in Tanya 25

Chapter 14. We continue to explore the uniqueness of the Beinoni. This individual would be someone who recognizes that while they can never be a tzaddik in the soul sense of the term, they should always be striving to reach a level similar enough to the righteous person that they can connect to a truly righteous soul. This chapter lays the groundwork for the connection between a rebbe and follower, in that the Rebbe is the role of the tzaddik and the followers are all the people struggling and striving forward. We also discuss the work needed to avoid evil and do good, including contemplating the loathsomeness of evil. I end with a short piece highlighting why some of the Tanya begins to sound repetitive and why that is an important part of this work.

Episode 25

Do you want to work on taking the actions of your life and find meaning in all you do and who you are? Are you struggling with your spiritual growth. Contact New Beginnings Spiritual Coaching and Consulting LLC at 732-314-6758 ext. 100 or via email at newbeginningsspiritualcoach@gmail.com

Audio – Lessons in Tanya 24

This podcast explores Chapter 13. Chapter 13 goes deeper into the beinoni’s struggles between the good and evil inclinations. We discuss how the beinoni will always be ruled by the divine soul even in the midst of the struggles internally between the two inclinations. We also answer one of the primary questions of the Tanya in discussing why a person should always view themselves as a “rasha,” for this perspective keeps people from getting complacent and falling into the wiles of the evil inclination. This is a great lesson for growth in general, always viewing oneself as needing to strive further.

Episode 24

Audio – Lessons in Tanya 23

Final section of chapter 12. We finish the initial discussion of the Beinoni as it relates to the righteous and wicked person. Much of the focus is on how the categories might be a case of mind over matter.

Episode 23

Audio – Lessons in Tanya 22

Continuation of chapter 12. Today’s short piece engages the question of why the Beinoni is not a Tzaddik. The focus is on what the person experiences when not in a prayer state of being. I use this is piece as a jumping off point to name a couple of similarities/differences between Tanya and another book of early 19th century Eastern Europe, Nefesh HaHayyim as a way of showing different approaches to connecting to Gd.

Episode 22

Audio – Lessons in Tanya 20

We explore chapter 11 of Tanya. This chapter describes the different categories of rasha, the “wicked” person. We discuss how the rasha seems to always have a means of turning things around, through having remorse and regret, except for the rare instance of the “rasha who only has evil,” which is the one whose divine soul no longer dwells within. We go a short tangent about the issue of suffering as penance from a spiritual care perspective as it relates to Tanya. I offer perspective on how the paradigms being established in Tanya are getting to core issues about overcoming tendencies in our lives.

Episode 20

Vulnerability

Part of spiritual growth is being able to confront one’s imperfections. This confrontation allows us to hone in on those areas of weakness that we wish to work on. While most often we work towards cultivating our strengths and reinvigorating the tools we have to overcome weakness, we don’t always allow the discomfort of admitting to the weakness to be a tool as well.

In a recent article exploring The Role of Vulnerability in Jewish Life, the author, Akiva Garner, shed light on a few points which stuck for me as it relates to a spiritual/religious approach to the concept of being vulnerable.

Here are few highlights (I recommend reading the whole piece as it provides a thorough approach to this important topic).

In defining vulnerability, Akiva suggests the following thesis:

Vulnerability is not tantamount to one oversharing all their difficulties to the world; rather, it is more directly a person’s willingness to present themselves to others as someone aware of, and comfortable with, the fact that attempts to succeed are often inseparable from failures to get there.

Vulnerability is the ability to be honest about being human and being imperfect. From this premise, we can confront many aspects of religious/spiritual life. As an example, he offers the following reflection on prayer:

Prayer is a meditation on humanity’s dependence on God, an admission of the petitioner’s weakness. It is, in some sense, about realizing that what we have comes from God and that what we hope to obtain is possible with the help of God. Expressions of this approach span the wide sea of Jewish thought, from the Kabbalists^[2] to Rambam’s Moreh Nevukhim.^[3] By the same token, many modern figures have emphasized the importance of this notion in one’s encounter with God. Rabbi Aharon Lichtenstein was fond of quoting Friedrich Schleiermacher, who understood the essence of piety as identifying “the consciousness of our absolute dependence… of our relation to God.”^[4]

A third passage, one better known in the Orthodox Jewish community, as it relates to our imperfections, is a famous letter from R. Yitzchak Hutner to a student struggling against the weight of the great sages of our tradition:

Rabbi Isaac Hutner understood the importance of this very tension, and he depicted his attitude toward it strongly in a celebrated letter to one of his students:

It is a terrible problem that when we discuss the greatness of our Torah giants (gedolim), we actually deal only with the end of their stories. We tell about their perfection, but we omit any mention of the inner battles which raged in their souls. The impression one gets is that they were created with their full stature. For example, everyone is impressed by the purity of Hofetz Hayyim’s speech. However, who knows about all the wars, the battles, the impediments, the downfalls, and the retreats that Hofetz Hayyim experienced in his fight with the evil inclination?! As a result, when a young man who is imbued with a [holy] spirit and with ambition experiences impediments and downfalls, he believes that he is not planted in the house of Hashem.^[8]

In responding to a student distressed by his spiritual shortcomings, Rabbi Hutner does not guarantee that if the student simply works harder things will turn out well, nor does he merely encourage the student to keep trying. Rather, R. Hutner instills within him the comfort that his trial and error will be worthwhile. He ensures the student that his struggles are normal and that authentic achievement does not come without failure along the way. In such an instance, vulnerability is thus not only the modality of being a struggling person but also the courage to expose oneself to others as being as such, allowing oneself to be seen as imperfect in an effort to affirm the normalcy of life’s difficulties and comfort those around us.

This passage always gave me a sense of resolve that we must remember that to be great means to try and try again and always keep trying. It also means when we presume others have achieved perfection, it might be that we are seeing the perfection from the standpoint of hindsight and veneration, not the reality in front of us.

Of course, being vulnerable can also be fraught with certain challenges that we must recognize. Akiva suggests the following in his conclusion:

Firstly, one might be vulnerable simply with the hope that others should resolve his problems on his behalf―with the assumption that the pity he receives from others might exempt him from contributing to his own efforts to overcome his difficulty. This must be avoided for vulnerability to remain a healthy trait…

Furthermore, the argument that has been made here is not that we should be vulnerable in order that we become complacent with our difficulties and collectively give up on them. There lies a tremendous distinction between being comfortable failing and being satisfied with failure;…

Lastly, embracing vulnerability should be done with the value of tzniut in mind. Sharing personal, emotional experiences must be done in a context which is comfortable for all parties; artificially attempting to accelerate a relationship by leaping immediately to sensitive information can wind up doing more harm than good…

Much of my work with others is in confrontation our humanity, imperfections and all, exploring the possibilities for the road ahead, building off the successes and failures of our lives before the moment of wanting a new beginning. We would do well to work on bringing our vulnerable, imperfect selves into all we do, from a place of strength, for it is within the recognizing our humanity is a strength, not a weakness that we can grow and support others in growing spiritually and emotionally.

Don’t confront your vulnerability alone? Contact New Beginnings Spiritual Coaching and Consulting LLC at 732-314-6758 ext. 100 or via email at newbeginningsspiritualcoach@gmail.com

The Day after – What happens after we decide on a goal?

Yesterday, as I was sitting and scrolling through Facebook and Twitter, I was seeing reminders of the big Daf Yomi Siyum HaShas (completion of the daily study of one page of Talmud a day which takes 7.5 yrs to complete) event that took place Jan. 1 2020 at MetLife stadium and other venues around the world. In seeing these posts, I began to reflect on the drive to maintain daily disciplines, whether study, prayer, spiritual practice, new hobby, etc. What does it take to maintain these self-driven desires for improvement, for growth? How do we start a daily routine and keep it going without becoming self-absorbed in it to the detriment of those around us?

Here is an outline of how to best work towards true goal setting and change:

What do we want to change? Before getting into the muck of why and how we want to bring about change, we must first name the change, either in specific or in general terms. Name the thing we want to do different.
Why do I want to change? What is motivating the change? For some, it is the humdrum nature of the lives we are currently living. For others, there is a deep yearning of the soul for growth and connection to something far greater than ourselves. Maybe we feel stuck, lost, drained. And maybe we need to make a better change to foster better, healthier habits and choices. Regardless, in order to set goals and maintain change, the motivation for why needs to be clear and needs to be constantly reviewed so as to remember why we started down this path.
How do I bring about the change in behavior? Truth is, this might be the toughest category to reflect upon. Making a big change to establish a new routine and/or goal requires a multiplicity of smaller changes which can affect others. Do I need to change my sleep habits? Do I need to delete an app from my phone that I’m addicted to? How do I balance a new routine with the needs of my family? These questions and many others require time and discussion as we work on scheduling and establishing this new thing. As such, each of us needs to take a two prong approach. On the one hand, begin the journey. Don’t wait for everything to line up perfectly because it never will. On the other hand, make sure those around you support you as best they can. It can be hard for others to fit your change into their lives. For true spiritual growth, we need to be working toward finding a balance of our desires with the needs of those around us.
Don’t overthink – With those other three suggestions, remember to not overanalyze and overthink the journey. It is easy to get paralyzed in all the details of how to make it work instead of just Do It. Sometimes, the doing makes the rest fall into place. Sometimes it will be imperfect. Sometime it might even be going through the motions. But as you do and you build step by step, seeing how far you have come will help motivate on those days it is more difficult to get going.
Don’t get overwhelmed by the process. Going back to the Daf Yomi as an example, it is easy to feel like the task is too big. I know that studying a page a day can be very challenging, which is why I have failed at it more often than I remember (by fail I mean I fall off and stop). I am in the midst of trying again. This time, my motivations have changed and my focus is different. I hope to maintain the success and am proud of how I try each day, even when it is far from an ideal situation.

These 5 ideas are how I work on setting my goals and how I work with others to set and maintain their spiritual growth and work.

May each of us find the motivation and focus to succeed along the path we wish to set before us in our spiritual and emotional growth.

Set goals for this year and looking to uncover and solidify the why and how of making the goals stick? Contact New Beginnings Spiritual Coaching and Consulting LLC at 732-314-6758 ext. 100 or via email at newbeginningsspiritualcoach@gmail.com

Hanukkah and Spiritual Growth

We are in the midst of Hanukkah. This is a time of celebration, joy and lots of fun activities and food (especially those who love fried foods like latkes and donuts). It is also, and perhaps moreso, a time of reflecting on how we are to have faith in things working out even in the seemingly impossible situations of life. By reflecting on the liturgy of the 8 day festival, which speaks about the overcoming of overwhelming military odds and the lighting of candles, going from 1 candle on the first night to 8 candles on the last night, one added every night, as a reminder of the story told of finding enough oil to only last one day which then lasted eight days, we have an opportunity to take stock and reflect.

In my work with people as a Spiritual Life Coach, we work to take the little jug of oil a person has uncovered, the desire to foster a change in life, and step by step craft the desired goals into a New Beginning. This is true for those dealing with grief and loss, with transitions in life and those just searching for a renewed sense of meaning. Fostering lasting change is miraculous in that it is often difficult to sustain the step by step growth. Too many of us struggle because we want to reach the end quickly and without fail, not realizing that the goal can only be reached one step at a time. This attitude can lead to failed opportunities and missed celebrations for milestones we reach along the way. Time and again, we each can find the ways to support and care for ourselves so that we may find the new lights we are trying to light in our lives.

As we light for the last time tonight, filling all 8 spots on the menorah, we should take a moment to reflect on the night by night process of how we got here. Some of us have felt rushed during the holiday, maybe not being home for every night, yet, we have continued to do in some way shape or form. It wasn’t a straight and perfect ride, yet we have arrived at the culmination point. I think this is true of our work of change as well. The process of change is not perfect. It has bumps and ditches along the way. Yet, when we reach a milestone moment, when we have a breakthrough that gives us the push forward to the next part of the growth journey, we should take the time to celebrate the imperfect, bumpy path we have taken to this point.

May we be blessed to appreciate the bumps along the way and the arrival to points along the path. May we remember to celebrate the incomplete as much as we come to enjoy the complete.

Working on setting new goals and needing a process for maintaining your goals. Contact New Beginnings Spiritual Coaching and Consulting LLC at 732-314-6758 ext. 100 or via email at newbeginningsspiritualcoach@gmail.com

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I’m here – Hineni

“I am here.”

I have always been taken by this simple word/phrase. It is one of deepest and most powerful of all calls to action. Are we willing to truly acknowledge our presence in a crucial moment?

Below you will find an anecdote which I often turn back to about the power of being present.

It is told of one of my teachers, the late Milton H. Erickson, who was perhaps the greatest therapist of our era, that a patient, having heard of his healing prowess, traveled halfway around the world to see him. Entering Milton’s somewhat shabby office, he was shocked as he took in its well-worn furniture, overused chairs, and ramshackle bookshelves – rather humble surroundings for such a great man. Erickson noticed him looking around in disbelieve, fixed his intense gaze upon him, and said, “I know it’s not much, but I’M HERE!”

I’M HERE! We can have no better motto. Each of us is more than enough. Each of us is all we’ve got. Each of us and all of us are blessed. We need to know and be assured that our blessedness is not in the doing; it is in the being. We are blessed through no choice of our own. Our being blessed is God’s irrevocable gift. So when the going gets tough, and assuredly it will, each of us can do no better than to respond, “Hineni, I’m Here,” words that have reverberated down the ages. Each of us is more than enough. Each of us is a blessing.
Jewish Relational Care A-Z: We are Our Brother’s Keeper – P.219

I believe this message is one that resonates for all of us. Can we be comfortable in the uncomfortable situations knowing that our showing up is more than enough? Can we accept that sometimes the best thing to do is sit in silence when another is in pain, not worrying about fixing, but just being available to the person? Can we do this for ourselves as well, being compassionate and non-judgmental when we ourselves are struggling?

Part of what drives me in my work as a chaplain and now a spiritual life coach is this presence, this being. How many of us are just looking for someone who can sit and reflect with us during times of transition, times of difficulty, times of grief. I find it powerful in the moments of sitting with someone, just sitting. Yes, to coach and to chaplain requires more than sitting. Yet it requires the ability to know when sitting and being is the best approach.

I’m Here. If you or someone you know is in journeying along the waves of life, allow me to join you along the road to discovery. Contact New Beginnings Spiritual Coaching and Consulting LLC at 732-314-6758 ext. 100 or via email at newbeginningsspiritualcoach@gmail.com