Being Heart-Led

Being Heart-Led 
Rabbi Shira D. Epstein

One recent sticky July afternoon, I escaped the heat during a Philadelphia mini-vacation by ducking into a childhood favorite, The Franklin Institute – an amazing hands-on, multi-sensory science museum. The lobby was abuzz with camp groups and young families, so I made a B-line for what I most fondly remembered – the Giant Heart, a 28-foot-wide model that guides visitors to experience first-hand a journey of the heart’s vital functions. I happily wound through atria and ventricles, the rhythmic “th-thump” heartbeat soundtrack guiding the way. Directly in front of me, as a mom and her young daughter stepped down into the heart’s lower chamber, the girl loudly queried, “Mom, Is this real?” The mom briefly glanced back at me. We locked eyes. She turned to her daughter and replied, “I don’t know how to answer that”.

How many of us can relate to the mom’s honesty? She was stumped. How should she answer what was likely the umpteenth existential question of the hour? ‘Is this real?’ I felt sympathy for the mom, as I, myself, had responded to countless similar questions with my own child, way back when. Is Big Bird real? Is the action on a Broadway stage real? The girl was 95 percent sure that she was not walking through an actual beating heart, but all she was experiencing, the sensory overload, told her something different. And after all, don’t we as adults also often catch ourselves wondering ‘this moment I’m in – is this for real?’ While we intellectually know the heart is doing its thing, pumping blood, sustaining us, most of us – medical professionals and researchers aside - aren’t completely clear on how this happens. We can go about our business, until we need to remember it - a physical challenge or the pangs of heartbreak. When it comes to our hearts, we generally function on a ‘need to know’ basis.

This week’s parshah, Nitzavim, invites us to develop a relationship with our hearts that moves beyond ‘need to know’, because, according to the Torah, our hearts serve as bellwethers - they predict whether we are available to notice the abundance and blessings that surround us, or to solely focus on what we lack. God, via Moshe, invokes the Hebrew word for Heart, LEV, 11 times. Notice, our brains and thoughts are not mentioned at all. This is because our hearts do the leading -they guide us to make good choices for ourselves. It is no accident that we always read the Torah portion of Nitzavim the Shabbat before Rosh Hashanah. This heart-centric section of Torah always precedes the marathon spiritual engagement just a few days away – the 10 days between Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur. The tradition is suggesting that much as nobody would run a marathon without training, we need to prepare our hearts to engage with ourselves and others, and to do so in a loving, supportive community.

In Nitzavim, Moshe shares that if we show up for God ‘with all our heart and all our soul’, we will be rewarded with abundance:

וּמָ֨ל יְהֹוָ֧ה אֱלֹהֶ֛יךָ אֶת־לְבָבְךָ֖

Modern commentators translate this passage as ‘then God will open up your heart.’ Our hearts can be open or closed to noticing the blessings in our lives, though, inevitably, we can’t be open-hearted all the time; there are times when we are going to feel closed-hearted, rightly so. Rabbi Shefa Gold, an expert in Jewish meditation and contemplative practice, offers us a tool for what to do in these moments. She says that when we are experiencing difficulties in this challenging world, “IN THE MOMENT when you notice that your heart is closing, take a slow gentle breath into the heart and ask God for help.”

What is compelling about Rabbi Gold’s interpretation is that it acknowledges both that we don’t always feel open, and that when we are in this emotional state – be it heartbreak or loss or disappointment - it is supremely unhelpful to receive a directive to ‘be more open’. After all, healing is always a process. In these times, we can do something for ourselves that is infused with self-kindness: take one slow, gentle breath. Just one. This one breath is enough to help us to pause, and could very well lead to a second, and a third. As we do so, we are resetting - metaphorically lacing up our shoes and setting the course for this 10-day spiritual marathon of the High Holidays, in which we are invited to reflect on our relationship with God, with ourselves, and with others. The practice of slowing down and taking a few breaths can help us to prepare our hearts.

Recent studies demonstrate that even a few minutes each day of deep breathing has the power to generate feelings of appreciation and gratitude while simultaneously calming our negative thoughts, and that this is possible even in the face of personal challenge. The oxygen we breathe floods our blood stream and pumps into our bodies through our ever-opening heart. What might be the cascading positive effect, as a bubbling of these feelings helps us experience more of the “fullness” and “openness” within our hearts to which the Torah alludes, which in turn, helps us to feel deeper compassion for ourselves? If we briefly pause, breathe, and listen to ourselves, might we be more prepared to trust our hearts as wise guides, the compasses that will lead us in the right direction?

I, myself, have been taking time each morning to cultivate this practice of pausing, breathing, and listening. With all honesty, this sometimes is reduced to one to two minutes – and these few minutes of slow, deliberate breathing help me to become that much more open to noticing the blessings in my life. As we welcome this Shabbat before the High Holidays, we can celebrate that we each showed up this evening for worship and our own spiritually moving experience, to pause, breathe, feel, reset. The hope is that as we have more gently and tenderly noticed our hearts, they become that much more open, and that we, in turn, can step into these upcoming 10 days of High Holidays that much more open to opportunities for reflection and connection. Wishing you Shabbat Shalom, and Shanah Tova.