MORNING PRACTICE 5783
I received a request to give some details about my morning practice.
Here is the summary of what I do. Then I will explain it in much more detail. All of what I write here is meant as a suggestion to stimulate your own feeling into developing a morning practice.
WHAT I DO
· Morning blessings
· Invoke and ask for the presence of the divine using a variety of traditional names of the divine
· Invoke and ask for the presence of six directions (cardinal directions, up and down)
· Request that everyone hear my prayer and that any merit from the prayer extend beyond me to all beings who need healing.
· Sit and have a conversation that includes expressing gratitude and my prayers about death (see previous post on death prayers under “Philosophical Reflections”
· Do a silent 10 minute meditation counting breaths.
DETAILS AND EXPLANATIONS
I do four morning blessings.
Modeh Ani (Shefa Gold)
Mah Tovu (Danny Masang)
Asher Yatzar (Debbie Friedman)
Elohai (Craig Taubman)
The four blessings express gratitude for my life, for my community, for my body and for my soul. There’s no particular reason I don’t do what a prayerbook calls the morning blessings. This would be a chance to express gratitude and some congregations make this an audience participation moment with people calling out what they are grateful for. I probably don’t do it simply because I don’t know the traditional blessings by heart and the tune isn’t as appealing.
I invoke and ask for the presence of the divine. My specific formula for divine names goes like this “Great mysterious, sacred power, who goes by the name of Yah, Asherah, Shekhinah, Adonai and Elohim in our tradition”
There are two parts to this that could use some explanation.
I tend to think of the divine as impersonal (as does Judith Plaskow, and I would argue Maimonides, so not exactly an unknown position in Jewish thought). Hence my formula of “Great mysterious, sacred power.” I’m not wildly satisfied with this formulation and it is in the back of my mind to play with it some more.
The second part is my choice of names. Tradition teaches us that the divine has 70 names, so choosing amongst them seems a meaningful approach consistent with tradition. It is important to me to embrace the two most prominent female names/expressions of the divine, since the idea of the divine as only male is repulsive to me. I also think that if the divine is personal as opposed to impersonal, the divine would have to be gendered. That is, the idea of a personal God who is beyond gender seems incoherent to me because in my view of the world, all beings are gendered.
I ask for the angels of the four directions to be present and for their help. The traditional prayer that invokes them, known as the angel blessing, has them oriented left, right, in front, behind and then the shekhinah on top and is recited for protection at night. Both Shlomo Carlebach and Debbie Friedman have wonderful versions. However, it felt right to me to call them in to bolster my prayer in the morning and to use cardinal directions. It’s not quite casting a circle of protection Following Rabbi Mike Comins, I situate Gavriel in the East, Michael in the South, Raphael in the West and Uriel in the North. There’s a ton of disagreement about where to situate which angel, so do what speaks to you.
I want to acknowledge that all four of these angels are male. I haven’t thought about how to include female angels in this process. I’d encourage playing with this—maybe the 4 matriarchs only or the patriarchs and the matriarchs together instead of the angels?
My prayer practice proclaims the general virtues of the direction as well as an element. Here’s the chart—sorry that I can’t make this into a table in this formatting of the website.
DIRECTION NAME CHARACTER ANGEL
East Mizrach Shining, air, lightness of being Gavriel-courage
South Darom Heat, passion, sex, fire Michael-strength
West Maarav Blending place, earth Raphael, healing
North Tzafon Hidden, mystery, water Uriel--vision
I ask the angels of each direction for specific help both for specific people in my life and for everyone. I developed this chart as part of the “Discover your true earth based purpose” course I’ve been playing with developing the past few years. I also invoke up and down as sky and earth, since I want their presence as well.
I request that any merit from this prayer extend beyond me to all beings. Merit transfers are both a Buddhist conventional practice in Mahayana Buddhism and a Jewish phenomenon where we pray for healing based on the merit of our ancestors in the Misheberach and in the weekday Amidah where we pray for benefits again using the merit of our ancestors. There’s no question that in Judaism praying creates merit and there’s no problem transferring it, hence my practice here.
I do all this standing and then I sit down. When I sit down, I introduce myself. I am Dances with the Rhythms of the earth. This is my mythopoetic identity (see Plotkin’s work Journey to Soul Initiation). I was given this name in a hotel ballroom of all places while I was doing a transformational workshop in the mid 90’s, but it wasn’t accepted—another example of the lack of mentorship that is such a problem in our world. I also introduce myself as Yared Yaakov Natan ben Shaul Zalman, which is my Hebrew name and Jared Gellert, my American name. Giving these lineages grounds me as a Jew, but also as an American who has chosen to live in an ecosystem that isn’t present in Israel. I certainly could and maybe should add that I live in the Mid Atlantic ecosystem, the Brandywine river valley watershed in unceded Lene Lenape land. I’ll have to play with that and see how it feels.
I then start my conversation with the divine. As part of that conversation, I include a specific gratitude practice where I praise the billions of beings who die everyday that I may live, my spouse, prominent teachers of mine, the person who now runs my business, the person who succeeded me as the board president of my local day school, my undergraduate school for teaching me to read, my Jewish teachers from when I was a kid (not by name). I also go out of my way to acknowledge the other beings around me, the different trees, the multiflora rosa, the wineberries, different birds, the squirrels and the deer. Usually I do this based on who shows up at the time and I say hi and acknowledge them. I think the beings of the more than human world want to be seen and acknowledged by us as individual beings and not just an “it” to exploit in some way. This period is more of a conversation than praying for something specific, though that happens as well. It is relatively unstructured time.
This prayer practice also includes the death prayers I detail in a shorter blog post under philosophical reflections. I believe deeply that “there is no life without death and there is no death without life” is a core teaching that has certainly transformed my life. I close the talking part by saying thank you.
I then do a 10 minute silent sit counting my breaths. I started doing this as a way of calming my system down which was running too hot. Living in suburbia amongst as many people as I do is stressful for me, so this silent sit is a way to put that aside. I don’t try to sit rock solid and unmoving as I did in my Buddhist practice days. Instead I pay attention to the more than human world and am perfectly willing to let my attention follow a squirrel running along the ground, two cardinals chasing each other, the leaves blowing in the wind. This is what feels right to me, in a way that the rigidity of traditional meditative practice would not.
One other reason for doing this practice is that it is the only Eastern part of the practice. There are lots of different medicine wheels, including hints of it in Jewish thought. In my way of understanding the cardinal directions, east is about transcendence, south is about fire, passion, sex, being in the body, west is about death, north is about being responsible and working. North is the strongest direction for me, south is the weakest that I have practices to work to address, West is important and is captured in my attention to death and the underworld. But I found I had no practices for the east and I felt it important to do something on a daily basis—another reason for the meditative practice.
One last note. I think it is incredibly important to do this outside, if possible. The little woods behind my house gives me at least a hint of privacy. I like to do this in the morning, but there’s just nothing macho about it. On winter days I bundle up, including insulated snow pants or longjohns, gloves and a blanket that I wrap about my body. If it is raining and warm, out comes the rain coat and rain pants. It’s not that it is (usually) dangerous to be outside without this kind of protection, but it is so easy to just say the weather is bad and to stay warm and cut off inside the house.
I’m more than happy to answer any questions that you might have about this practice, so feel free to reach out to me or add a comment.
Thanks
Jared
