Open to Surrender

Morning traffic in BK

Dear friends,

The first time I truly bowed down, fully prostrated both body and soul was decades ago in Paradise Island in the Bahamas at the Sivananda Yoga Retreat. That morning the instructor had us lie on our backs and for an hour just kept saying “relaxin’.” He went over every part of the body: “relax your toenails on your right foot. Relax your toes. Relax the bones inside them. Relax the hair on top of them. Relaxin’. Relaxin’.” Without any ideas, he taught the value of surrender. Later that day, at the end of a meditation in the sanctuary we were invited to bow down in front of a big statue of the elephant headed god, Ganesha. And I did. I surrendered to the suggestion to put my forehead to the ground, and to simply submit myself to that act. It was one of the great moments of relief in my life. 

I grew up with an ethos of resistance, survival and victory. Fighting against the grain is ingrained in me. I saw my tradition as one of questioning, doubting, arguing against, battling with God and the world and how they both behave. And I took deep pride in it. And still do. But bowing down in front of that imaginative God with a trunk and a fat belly and two crossed human legs calmed me down and showed me a different way to be.  

The truth is that victory has been quite a foreign concept, even a meaningless one to Jews throughout most of our history. In the eleventh century in Andalusia, considered the heart of the Golden Age of Spain, perhaps the greatest time our people have ever known, Rabbi Bahya Ibn Paquda devoted a wondrous chapter of his masterpiece The Duties of the Heart to the value of surrender. “all moral qualities,” he wrote, “are secondary to the trait of submission, which is the head and beginning of all of them. And it follows logically from this, that no piety can possibly exist in one whose heart is devoid of surrender to G-d or has in it any trace of arrogance or pride.” 

In the coming weeks I hope to explore the question of surrender. I suspect that truly accepting our lives, who we are, what’s in front of us, and the reality of this world we live in is somehow the healthy path to change. Ibn Paquda expressed this in part by placing surrender as the precursor to Teshuvah. Without submission there is no repair, he implies.  
As the powerful idiots of this world lead us toward a “victory” that is revealed as an overwhelming defeat, let us search for the surrender that will lead us toward justice and peace. 

I hope to see you tomorrow morning at our Shabbat service and celebration of Sophie and Devin's Bnai Mitzvah.

Happy Juneteenth and Shabbat shalom,

Rabbi Misha