Soul Boom - Shabbat Explained: The Secret to Sacred Rest (w/ Rabbi Susan Goldberg)

Episode Date: December 3, 2024

Rainn Wilson sits down with Rabbi Susan Goldberg to explore the enduring wisdom of Jewish tradition and its relevance to modern challenges. They discuss the dynamic nature of belief in God, the universal values that transcend religious boundaries, and practical ways to bring these spiritual virtues into our daily lives. Rabbi Susan shares the powerful concept of tikkun olam—repairing the world through action and intent—and reveals how Shabbat fosters a sacred space for joy, gratitude, and love. Whether you're navigating the wilderness of life or seeking courage in despair, this episode offers profound insights for living with compassion, faith, and purpose. Rabbi Susan Goldberg is a visionary spiritual leader and founder of Nefesh, a vibrant Jewish community in East Los Angeles rooted in universal values like compassion, courage, and faith. Through Nefesh, she blends ancient Jewish wisdom with modern practices, fostering a space where individuals and families can connect, grow, and live out their deepest values in meaningful and practical ways. Thank you to our sponsors! Airbnb: http://airbnb.com/host Aura (promo code: SOULBOOM): https://auraframes.com Fetzer Institute: https://fetzer.org/ MERCH OUT NOW! https://soulboomstore.myshopify.com/ 'Soul Definition' Mug: http://bit.ly/3ZnFyhp God-Shaped Hole Mug: https://bit.ly/GodShapedHoleMug Sign up for our newsletter! https://soulboom.substack.com SUBSCRIBE to Soul Boom!! https://bit.ly/Subscribe2SoulBoom Watch our Clips: https://bit.ly/SoulBoomCLIPS Watch WISDOM DUMP: https://bit.ly/WISDOMDUMP Follow us! Instagram: http://instagram.com/soulboom TikTok: http://tiktok.com/@soulboom Sponsor Soul Boom: [e-mail] Work with Soul Boom: [e-mail] Send Fan Creations, Questions, Comments: [e-mail] Produced by: Kartik Chainani Executive Produced by: Ford Bowers, Samah Tokmachi Companion Arts Production Supervisor: Mike O'Brien Voicing Change Media Theme Music by: Marcos Moscat Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

You're listening to Sobu. When people hear that I'm a rabbi, they like to say, oh, you're a rabbi? Oh, that's interesting. I don't believe in God. It's like this, something that people want to say. First of all, they're like, oh, wow, women can be rabbis. It's an amazing thing that deep thinkers often after they say, I don't believe in God. And I respond that, I don't know what you mean by that.

Because I don't know what you mean by believe. And I also don't know what God you're talking about. Hey there, it's me, Rain Wilson, and I want to dig into the human experience. I want to have conversations about a spiritual revolution. Let's get deep with our favorite thinkers, friends, and entertainers about life, meaning, and idiocy. Welcome to the Soul Boom podcast. Rabbi Susan, thanks for coming in. We've gotten to speak before, and I love your take on that incredible vast, ancient reservoir. of wisdom that comes from the Jewish tradition.

That just feels as old as the hills and is yet so applicable to the modern world. But obviously organized religion gets a bad rap for many, many, many good reasons. But people are very quick to overlook or ignore the role that religions and religious people, people inspired by their religion, not just kind of a general spirituality,

have been inspired to make the world a better place. I mean, obviously, Tikuna Lam is something maybe, I don't know if I'm saying it right, you can talk about a little bit. I have a friend Kenneth Paul, who was my makeup artist on the office, Kenneth Paul, if you're watching. And I remember having a conversation with him,

and he's from a Jewish background. And he's like, and he said to me just without any expression whatsoever, it's like, well, I don't believe in God, but you don't have to believe in God to be Jewish. And I was like, wait a second. That blew your mind. But I know that that's a very common thing of people feeling that strong pull toward a Jewish identity, but not necessarily believing that there is anything beyond the physical. And how do you rectify that?

Yeah. Well, there, you know, Jewish tradition is definitely rooted in a relationship with the divine. which is a different framework than belief in, right? That's a Christian question, do you believe in God? Whereas we would have what's your relationship with God. Judaism has multiple theologies that have changed over the centuries, but are still valid. Very few people would say they have a biblical theology, I think, today,

because of the nature of the expression of God in Torah, although certainly impact. And then there's rabbinic theology. that was very much pulled out this idea of relationship. Then there's in different expressions in the medieval period, the Rambam was very Aristotelian, and he went actually through all of Torah and said, or the Hebrew Bible, and said,

oh, you know, the eye of God, the hand of God, these are metaphors. This is not, we're not anthropomorphizing God, although the rabbis were very comfortable with that and wrote additional stories about aspects of God's self. And then later there's Kabbalistic in that medieval period, different emanations of the God's self. Then we have the modern period with somebody like Mordecai Kaplan that says, now we know that God is not omnipotent, omniscient, or omnipresent, the three-Os,

but that God is a force, a force that moves us towards goodness, towards love, towards justice. So there's multiple theologies within Judaism. I think of it of the Jewish Bible of like God, very, the most, anthropomorphized version of God lives there and God gets angry and sometimes he smites and sometimes he has conversations and well people often say we're the people of the book but it's much more accurate to say that we're the people of the commentary on the book the key thing too and like it blowing your mind that your friend could say that that he doesn't have a connection to God and he feels very Jewish is that

because we were in ethnos a group connected by blood and family, you don't have to say exactly what you believe. We just are. It's why people have a hard time pinpointing us, right? Oh, you guys are a religion. I'm like, no, well, first of all, the whole term religion was coined by Christians. And so it fits a framework that's Christian. I always say that we have Jewish culture, traditions, theologies, stories, you know, it's much more vast than what is the one thing you believe. And because we've been around for so long, as I said, we have these multiple experiences of the divine, but also you're part of this group. You're part of this, you know, Mordecai Kaplan would call it a civilization of the Jews.

And that there's no, you know, you don't have to present your card at the door about what you believe. We're just in this together as a group of the Jewish people. And that is a really different framework then. So it's a big tent kind of civilization. I mean, if you think about Christianity, what makes you Christian is that you accept Jesus Christ, right? That was a radical and revolutionary idea that moved us out of just being about your ethnos, right? It didn't, it didn't matter where you lived if you accepted this particular belief. That was a new idea. You could be a Roman, you could be a Jew, you could be an Ethiopian. And if you accepted, this changed you. This belief changed you. And one of the things that's really true about Jewish people with having multiple

theologies and different experiences and ways into the divine and for folks who are non-theistic, who are part of our tradition, really we have a very large emphasis on what we do. I don't want to simplify it too much to say we don't have gorgeous theological because so much of our wisdom literature is. And we have a very big emphasis on what we do. There are ways that we act. You mentioned Tikun al-Nam, right, making the world a better place, which actually is from an older mystical idea of the shattering of the vessels in the beginning of the world, and that we are, with our actions, repairing, literally repairing the cosmology of the world, in caring

for each other, in fighting for justice, and doing what we can do to repair the world. And even that idea of Tikun is so powerful, because it's all. also in our own personal lives. And it also connects to even an after-death situation. Again, saying there's many, many different beliefs within Judaism. This is one, which is that after you die, you could become what's called a gil-goul. And you could come back into the body of a living being in order to repair a harm that you did in your lifetime. And the repair is called a t-cun. That's very similar to like a bodhisattva in the Hindu tradition of like choosing not to having arrived, choosing not to move on into the realms of the mystic divine consciousness,

but I'm going to return and share my, you know, inspiration, my knowledge and knowledge. And wisdom, yes. And in this case, it's to do, yeah, it's to do some, is to do some repair. And there are, you know, wisdom and writing traditions about the Torah. even at the level of the Hebrew Bible, where there are some moments where harm was done earlier in Torah, that there are interpretations that later it's repaired by the Gilgul, the spirit of somebody, even at that time coming into somebody else. So one example is the story of Sarah, the matriarch Sarah, and Abraham, who struggle to have a child. She was like 137 years ago.

And before they have a child, they have a, Abraham has a baby with Hagar, his maid servant, her maid servant, and then that baby is Ishmael. And in a fit of fear and jealousy, Sarah insists that Ishmael and Hagar get kicked out. And then there's, you know, they're in the wilderness, God and an angel cares for them. And then there's a period later in Torah where there's a decree to kill all Hebrew babies in the story of the Exodus, the famous Exodus. And Moses is put in the basket, sent in the river, chased by his sister, Miriam, to make sure that he's okay.

And it's Pharaoh's daughter who takes him out of the water to care for him. And then he turns into Charlton Heston. And one of these really moving interpretations is that that's actually Sarah that goes into the body of Pharaoh's daughter to take care of this child. Because earlier she had a moment where she sent out a child. The Jewish tradition is so ancient. And we kind of live in a different kind of time. We have a sense of being connected to our ancestors in this moment and all the time. And this idea of a tycoon also means that our lives are about ourselves, but not only about ourselves. So there may be things that we are doing to heal or to repair harm that may have

come from past generations, that it's our work to do now. That's beautiful. You know, I talk about in my book this concept of the shaman and how I was taught in acting school at NYU by my teacher, Zelda Fitzhandler, famous Jewish theater matriarch who kind of founded the regional theater movement, that actors and all performers really are storytellers at the deepest possible level, which is a shaman. And a shaman, we don't know a lot about what a shaman was, but our hints about what a shaman was, because they existed in pretty much every culture of the world, was some kind of priest, prophet, holy man, also an entertainer, storyteller, stand-up comic, dancer telling tales of the hunt, mythologies of the tribe.

cajoling being kind of a gadfly to the Athenian nation, mocking, laughter, but also that kind of visionary that had one kind of root into the mystical realms. And she was like, artists are that. Artists can be that. Artists can have one, you know, one hand in the light and be telling stories that unite and cajole and and frustrated and anger and reveal and I just love that idea because so much of being an actor is kind of like waiting for the phone to ring. Oh, you got an audition. Learn these lines. I hope they like me waiting for the phone to ring.

Did I get the job? Did I not get the job? And then showing up and just here's some lines and they want them set a certain way or something like that. But the idea that I'm so much more than that, yeah, I can do that. as an actor, but I can also help bring people together in a, in a sacred space of a theater or on a movie screen or, or what have you, and tap into something transcendent and evocative. So I've always seen, as I kind of tiptoed back into my Baha'i faith tradition, I've,

I've always felt that there was this kind of like a great and deep, spiritual lineage in the making of art that too often we view in contemporary society art as disposable and art as simply another form of distraction. It's like I can look at TikTok or I can look at art, you know, or I can play Candy Crush or I can look at some art. But art aspires to be something greater than that. Yeah, I think what you shared around what artists can do in being storytellers and cajoling people towards seeing things that need to be seen that people would rather not look at, you know, to do conscious discomfort, intentional discomfort. I think that's really connected to the role of a spiritual leader or a prophet. And I think that that's why the

crossover has made so much sense to me. And also the times of getting together in a community setting to worship, there's a lot connected to theater in that experience and music and movement. And, you know, Emil Durkheim wrote about collective experiences. He was a French sociologist. And he talked about this idea of collective effervescence, that there's something that you get in collective experience. And he linked it between theater. You can get that in dance. And a theater and a sacred space and a synagogue. That's right. And there is something that happens to us when we're together.

Even in meditation, they've scientifically proven the increased efficacy of meditation when you do it in a group rather than singly. And much, much, much of Jewish practices collective. You can do prayers on your own solo prayer, but there's so much emphasis on collective worship. collective prayer and collective spiritual practice. And that you are uplifted. There's even a moment in every service

where we each doing our own individual prayer, but we're doing it together. Collectively, yeah. And it's a silent prayer. It's called the amida. And it's a powerful thing to be in a large group. Do you know the prayer? Is that a prayer you can share or say?

Yeah. Is it a prayer I can share or say? It's a pretty long prayer. That's one of the reasons why we stand up and take time, but it starts with a vote, which calls forward our ancestors, which is very aligned in what we've just been talking about, and the way that Jewish people draw back, draw back in order to go forward. We have, like I was saying earlier, this sense of time that moves differently, right? that moves from the past, present, and future are kind of always simultaneous.

And so this prayer acknowledges that. I also call it our address because it mentions our specific patriarchs and matriarchs and says, hi, it's us, just in case you're wondering who's talking to you right now. We're this group, the group that went up the mountain this way with Abraham and with Sarah. And then the next one is Gavirot, which is about God's power, and then we go into holiness. then depending on whether it's a Shabbat or a weekday or a festival, the middle part is different. And then in the end, it's always thank you. And please, please, please, please, let's have peace.

And that's always how we end. And inside, there are different, as I said, different blessing, benedictions and prayers that we say. On Shabbat, we don't ask for things, so it's much shorter. and one of the beautiful things about Shabbat is that we're willing to just be with the world as it is. Six days of the week we make and fix and change. And on Shabbat, there's Sabbath. Oh, that's a beautiful way of looking at Sabbath. Yeah.

Yes. Just kind of being in acceptance. Yes, being with the world as it is. And not just being with it as it is, but celebrating. Loving it. Loving ourselves, loving our beloveds just as they are. We can nag the other six days of the week. But it's really important to have a day of the week where time shifts, where we move without

urgency, and we release the needing to change or fix and we are with the world as it is in a way that also cultivates gratitude for where we are right now. It's six to one. There's a lot of days to change in fix. Sure. But that one is so important. And I think some people think that you do the six days to kind of get to Shabbat, to get to Sabbath and then just, oh, collapse and rest. Thank God, I have a day of rest. Really, Shabbat in

Minukha, which is a sacred rest, is the generator of the six days. It's like the opposite. Rather than we do all the stuff to arrive at a rest, that Sabbath day is a place that allows for the generation of, you know, it's like when I was just talking about rehearsal or when an artist is first just playing with the paints or thinking about the colors. It's this idea that Aviva Zornberg calls the murmuring deep, which happens in creation. You know, we get let there be light, right? Those are the first words. But before that, there's silence. And Dr. Zorenberg says, before the silence, there is sound. It's like, it's the murmuring deep. It's the face of the waters. It's Panetta to home, which is what the text tells us. And she's like, well, what is that? We know there's

speech. We know there's silence. What's the ta home? And she talks about it being like a whisper, rumble, like the sound of weeping, the sound of orgasm, the sounds that are just so connected deeply to who we are. And that then there's silence and then there's speech. And then there's And in that realm of the murmuring deep, so much is possible. But it doesn't have to be named or formed yet. And Shabbat allows us to be in sacred time where we don't have to know. We don't have to be connected to screens and news and all of the things that, you know, try to hold on to the known and in a reality that's just unknown all the time.

And allows us to be in a sacred space to read and study wisdom text. to pray and to hang out with people we love. We're encouraged also to have the pleasure of sexuality on Shabbat. There's so much that connects us to places that are generative and unknown. I had no idea Shabbat was a sex day. Well, I don't know if I would characterize it that way, but yes, that's the delight. One egg, Onag, delight of Shabbat. So, Rabbi Susan, you have a spiritual community called Nathesh.

What does Nefesh mean? Nafesh means soul. Oh, okay. So you have a beautiful East Side, L.A., Nefesh, soul, spiritual community based on Jewish themes and values. And we were in preparation for this conversation talking about some of those values and how they are not only Jewish values. They're universal human values. They're in every faith tradition. but that these values are kind of spiritual ideas but are intensely practical. You talked about six days a week to Kunalaam repairing the world doing, drawing on those Jewish values in the Baha'i faith we would call them spiritual virtues.

It's just different potato potato. So can you tell me about that? What are these values? How would you describe them to a person that's never heard anything about this before? Yeah. So in the Jewish tradition, these values are called me dot. And again, spiritual values, virtues, they're called other things in other traditions. And my path as a rabbi and our Jewish community that's called Nephash, as you said, is what we say is me dot driven.

value-driven. And what that means is that we are holding the deepest values of the Jewish tradition, things like faith, amunah, rahamim, compassion, omates, love, courage, and on and on, ahava, love. And we think deeply and we study in our tradition, what are the wisdom texts on this. and in addition to thinking and studying, we really prioritize the doing, the living of these values. And it's in multiple realms. It's in the realm of how we, it's in four realms, how we look and act towards ourselves, how we look and treat and act in our in relationship with our close ones, right? Our beloveds, our deepest relationships of family and dear friends.

And then it's how we do so in community, which is a third layer. it's how we do so in the world around us. And so a lot of spiritual communities I've seen tend to do an inner outer split, right? They'll be like, oh, a lot of concern about the inner life, but not paying much attention to the world around. Or I certainly grew up with a lot of very close attention to the problems of the world and working to make them better, but not always tending to the inner life or to the relationships, how people talk to each other and treat each other.

And so midot driven means that we take each of these spiritual traits, midot, and we dive deep into them and say, okay, if I was going to center my life in compassion, what would that mean? I can learn about compassion and we have a lot of beautiful. And one of the beautiful things about this is that we can draw from any century. We have thousands of years of teachings and lived examples of people's lives and how. how people have lived compassionately. And then we have to do it, right? It's one thing to think about it. And it's another to do it. So we are really also a community of practice and we encourage each other, hold each other accountable in different ways. We have what's called Hevruta, which is like one-on-one.

So we have a buddy, essentially, who you check in with at least once a month. Sometimes people are doing more to say, how is it going? An accountability partner. Exactly. That's it. And then we have small groups, which are called VAD. You know, you can be in a group together. We have large groups where we talk about it all together. And certainly in our worship together on Shabbat and holidays and weekdays and festivals, it's all integrated. We really use the lens of these mid-dot as the way that we move in the world.

Also, our kids' education program is rooted in the MEDOT. And it's endless, right? I mean, you're not one and done with faith. You're not one and done with courage. And the thing, compassion as I was talking about a moment ago is a good example because I think people often confuse empathy and compassion. Okay. And empathy is a beautiful spiritual practice, right?

It's a big part of my spiritual practice. But empathy alone is not compassion. So we can step in with empathy, we step into the experience of someone else, really feel to think, imagine what it might be like for them to be living where they are or experiencing what they are. And that could be with, you know, your spouse who's driving you crazy, right? And it also could be with somebody who you know. How did you know?

Could also be with somebody who you completely disagree with politically, right? So it's a huge cross-section or somebody who's lived experience is so different than yours, right? walking in the street and seeing an unhoused person. So we can have empathy and concern. But within compassion in Rachamim, it's when empathy and concern, which is step one, then moves to action to alleviate suffering. The move from empathy and concern to doing something to alleviate suffering.

And so I think for all of it, you know, a lot of people come to me and say, oh, Rabbi Susan, I really want to be more spiritual and I want to do this. I want to deepen my spiritual life. I want to be more connected to the tradition. And how do I do it? It's not magical. It's like anything, right?

We have to practice. And a lot of people, you know, we'll say prayers and we'll think deeply and read texts. But there's the step that you take where it becomes what you're reading and studying and learning. And when you're living it, when it's embodied, when in a moment you're faced with something and you make. make a compassionate choice. That could be that I, I, you know, one of the things that's central to Jewish practice of this,

which I think is a unique offering, it's what we do, but also what we don't do. So refraining is a big part of this. So say if you're, you notice that you have a inner dialogue that's not very compassionate. Yeah.

You know, picking on yourself for a variety of things, not doing that. Or judging someone. else. Or judging someone else, absolutely. Not doing that, refraining from doing that, interrupting that is a practice, right? Or, you know, making, like you said, making judgments, or if we see somebody constantly an unhoused person and we, oh, it's just, that's really too bad. Well, what else can we do besides feeling that it's too bad? You know, at most communities have, you know, in our community, we do weekly food distribution. There's working, there's one thing,

which is alleviating immediate suffering by doing service work, right? Like working in a shelter or providing food. And then the other is that another step, and everybody has the place that works for them. But another step is asking a larger question. Why are there so many unhoused people in a city like Los Angeles with such extreme wealth? And so then it's like what could be political solutions. There's no end to what you can do. But you've got to do something.

Right. And living our spiritual values means that we need to act in them, in our words, in our actions, in the things we do. And also, as I said, in the things we don't do. And that requires ongoing work. That's not one and done. We need to commit to this work. And they really are the deepest values of the Jewish tradition.

And as you said, not only the Jewish tradition, these same spiritual virtues or values are what all ancient traditions are really pointing us towards. Yeah. It's funny in the in the Baha'i faith tradition and I have a couple, you know, chapters about this. In Soul Boom, it's the idea that these spiritual virtues or values are qualities of the divine. Yes. And they're what we take with us at the end of this physical journey. Whatever happens, whatever plane we move on to, we're certainly not taking our Tesla or our coffee cups, we're taking with us those spiritual virtues that we've cultivated over our lives. So one could say, in a broader context, the meaning of life is the gathering, a cultivating practice, discipline, and flourishing of these spiritual virtues and values. And that's

what we see. When we see a really wise, loving, wonderful person, thanks America. What we are seeing, what we're responding to is exactly what you talked. Oh, what wonderful faith they have. What compassion they have. What love they have. What joy and delight they have. What creativity they have.

What, you know, imagination and kindness and honesty. And the list goes on and on. But those are the different facets of the jewels of the divine that we have to continue to polish. Yeah. And people that maybe we have a negative reaction to have it. really polished those values. But I loved this idea and I just want to go back to it and touch on it a little bit because I'm really fascinated by this about spiritual practice because in any spiritual faith tradition, you go in so that you can go out. So you go in and meditation and prayer or journaling,

contemplation. And part of that is going into the medotte to manifest it, connect to the divine charge that's within these qualities, nurture, recharge your own batteries, so that you can look at homelessness and say, how can I use my compassion and my creativity and my joy to maybe take on this issue that's so important to me? And it could be anything. It could be racism. It could be climate change. It could be income inequality. You know, it goes on and on. But then we have to take it's like a yin and yang dance, right? We have to take that, that inner work and put it into the world and discharge it and do.

Yeah. And then we learn from that and we go back and we recharge your batteries. But if you're just doing one or the other, I think you can get off track. If you're only meditating and you're only going in and contemplating these virtues and then just going about your life and checking your phone and earning money and having a good time. maybe not as quite spiritually fulfilling. And if you're only going out and you're not taking that time to recharge your spiritual batteries, then you'll get burned out as well.

And you see that with so many social activists and people that are just giving, giving, giving, doing, doing, doing and then frying out and having mental health issues and whatnot. Yeah, I do think it's inner outer as always in relationship. So sometimes it's our inner work that leads out. And sometimes it's something that we see or come upon in the world that is a challenge to us that then brings us back in to do the growing that we need to do to stand up to the moment. And I do think also generationally there is a shift in younger folks who are doing the work of repairing the world, that there is a deeper understanding of the importance of a spiritual life.

And that's uplifting to see. And there is also sometimes, though, I think that deep spiritual work doesn't always get counted that way. So I think that sometimes people think, oh, the person who goes away and, you know, steps out of society to meditate and be in small spiritual community. that that's a beautiful choice and that's a choice that some people make. And I think it doesn't mean that the Jewish tradition is very much a lived tradition right here, right where we are. And there are lots of people doing profound spiritual work who don't always get seen for it. I think about the spiritual value of courage, of the mida of courage, which in Hebrew is Omates Lev, which means strength of heart. And I think societally when we think about courage, it's often the big moments, right?

So I talk about this idea of the Exodus moment, right? The moment where we're on the edge of the sea and behind us is oppression and slavery and the Pharaoh's army coming after us. And on the other side is the unknown and is freedom. and the willingness to take a big leap into the water, right, to feel the mud on our toes and to have this incredible moment of faith and courage of getting to the other side. We have moments like that in our life, right? But they're rare, where it's what I call big leap courage or Exodus courage. Mostly it's the moment that comes right after that, which is when the people turned and noticed the meat bar, the wilderness opening in front of them. And pretty much right away, we're like,

whoa, this is really scary. Moses, what are we going to eat? What are we going to do? Like, this is not right, you know. And that is wilderness courage. And most of the Torah of the Hebrew Bible is spent in the wilderness. That we have the book of Genesis, a couple of chapters of Exodus that give the grand epic narrative. And then all of the rest of the books of Torah are in the wilderness. The majority of our lives are in the wilderness. And the kind of courage that being in the unknown and the every day of the unknown is incredible courage. Let's stay on this because one of the things we spoke about the other day was finding courage in times of despair and hardship, which is what you're getting to. But what's the practical application of this? What is our contemporary

idea of wilderness? How do we find courage in the day to day? That isn't. the big thing because you're right we think about courage you look on a YouTube video and it's like 70 year old man fights off attacker who's robbing convenience store you know and it has jumps off a cliff and it's like and that and that's what what courage is but courage can be a very small thing yes i normally am a little bit grumpy and reactive to people in service positions and it's maybe an act of courage to kind of say thank you uh because you're challenging your own pattern in a very, very minute way. But that might be an act of courage. Well, I think the way that I think about the sort of the steps of courage, one is the willingness

to feel the fear, you know, to have a dance with fear and uncertainty. And the next is to draw up that omates love, that strength of heart and to do something, to be clear at why you're doing it, right? What's the value? And then to do it. it, right? I'm doing this because I want to be a more kind person. I'm doing this because I want to have more compassion, because I want to be more courageous. I want to work for the good. So that means that in our lives, it means that I am, you know, the wilderness, courage is everywhere. It's people taking risks to be more fully who they are, right, to share with their beloveds. Hey, I know that you've seen me this way, but I'm also these things, right?

the incredible, one of the most powerful paradigms for spiritual life in my experience is that of coming out, right? And we can absolutely thank queer folks. I'm a queer person, but I, in a legacy of queer people in my family who have done the work, right, to allow us to get here. But that paradigm of coming out can be about sexuality, but it can be about gender, but it can be about so many things, the willingness to be seen and known, right? That's a courageous. act. It's a courageous act when we're being in times of total despair in the world, polarized times, right, when we can lead with compassion and say, I see your suffering. I see the suffering of your people as well as the suffering of my own people. And I am not willing to say and close off to your

suffering. It's a courageous act. And to say to the other people in my community, we need to be open to the suffering of the people around us. But let's get to the nitty gritty. My name's Joe Schwartz or Josephina Schwartz and I live in, you know, Omaha, Nebraska and I'm working at a Starbucks and I'm going to community college and I feel stuck. Yes. How does the medote of bravery of heart? What was his name?

Joe or Josephina Schwartz. I don't mean to be. Josephina. Gender. Oh, dear. Josephina. Just Josephina Schwartz in Omaha, Nebraska. Yeah.

He's feeling stuck and his, her, their job and life and feeling some despair. Yeah. How do you harness these values? Yeah, I think from the Jewish tradition in really specific ways. One day at a time, it's going to be Thursday. What does Joe or Josephina do to kind of move forward? I think the process first is for Josephina to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to come together with other human beings to not do this alone and to have a process of looking at

their life and saying, what is it that I want to be cultivating in my life? What is it that I feel like I am wanting and what do I see around me that the world is needing? Because you need to have some kind of vision. That's the conversation. Yes. And so we look at say a list of me dot, which is what our community does every year at the beginning of our year, which is reshoshana. We break into small groups. We look at the mid-dot, long list. What is it right now that calls to you? Would it be great for you to do all of them? Yeah, but that's not really realistic all at once. So we start with one. And it's amazing if you're centering your view of life in compassion, for example, or in love, or in courage, or in faith. It's incredible how it opens a doorway to so many things. So for Josephina, what would that look like at school?

it look like at home? What would it look like at their job? What would it look like in our daily moments of speaking to people, of talking to ourselves, of being in the world if we were led by our deepest values? I really do feel deeply that please God, amen, Zela, please God, let's have a global community that is putting our deepest values first. It would just be such an alignment. a realignment because for most, certainly in this country, the alignment around our deepest values, if we would step out and look, it's not around those, it's not around love and courage and compassion. The deepest values are often around money and fortune and fame. And, you know, the Protestant theologian, Paul Tillach, you know, his work.

The ground of all being. Yeah. And he speaks about idolatry when he talks about faith. He wrote beautiful treaties on faith. And he says, idolatry is that which is our ultimate concern. And if that which is our ultimate, well, faith is our ultimate concern, right? That's faith, ultimate concern. And idolatry is when that which is your ultimate concern is not aligned with these deepest values.

Right? So if your ultimate concern is, you know, pushing people, other people down to get ahead or making as much profit as you can without thinking about the cost to the earth and, you know, your reaping of oil or whatever it is, we want our deepest concerns to be these values. And that is not just theoretical and heady. That is in every moment of our lives. and we're so blessed to have thousands of years of a wisdom tradition that nudges us towards this, that gives us inspiring and uplifting and challenging texts.

That's true in the Jewish tradition. That's true in the Baha'i tradition. That's true in the Christian, the Hindu and in Islam. There are so many incredible texts that are encouraging us to live our deepest values. But let's go back to Josephine Schwartz. she could journal on a value that's important to her that she wants to center on, find a community of people, easier said than done. Sometimes it's a very isolated. People feel extremely isolated. Loneliness is an absolute epidemic. It's an epidemic, yes.

So we don't know how that works exactly, but strive to find a community to undertake this journey with and to start focusing on a value that's important to that person and see what doors open from that. On a very practical level, I talk about it in three parts, right? First, we learn about that value that we want to practice in our lives. We learn about it. And that could be for us in the Jewish tradition. This whole pathway, by the way, in the Jewish tradition, is called Musar. And so we learn about it from our wisdom texts.

Then we come to awareness. We see, oh, how is this operating in my life? That could be through journaling, through talking to people, to asking someone, hey, I'm working on the quality of patience. Would you be willing to be honest with me and tell me, how do you think I do at being patient? Right? We can ask people around us, we can reflect. And then the next one is the practice.

And we try to do one to three practices over the month of something very practical. And then we have somebody, because we don't do this alone, to check in with it. How is this going? How am I doing? Right? And then sometimes we choose one a month, maybe the next month we're moving to the next practice or we focus on one for the year. And I have people in my community that have done something for a year and then have been like, oh no, I need another year. I need to keep going on this. And we call this the idea of our spiritual curriculum, which is partly why we need to meet Josephina to know what her individual spiritual curriculum is. Because for some of us, we look at certain values and we think, oh, that actually comes pretty easy to me. That's not

something that I am, you know, I'm called to do. And other ones in which we really do are challenged to do that in our lives. What are medotes do you, are you most challenged with? Oh, for me, one. I'll tell you mine. Show me yours and I'll show you mine. Oh, I work on a lot of these me do a lot of them I find that I really need to work on. I think one of the things that, one of the practices around compassion, it's a guiding force for me, Rachmane, because I feel it is in a lot of what I do. But just because I do it a lot doesn't mean that there aren't challenges to me in it. And inside of Rachim, one of the teachings that comes from our mystical tradition is that it's a balance of Hecad and Gavura, kindness and strength.

Strength also in like boundaries and setting boundaries in a way that's healthy and good. And so this idea of how to balance the two continues to be ongoing work for me and how to make sure that I'm constantly working on and reviewing. these different levels of compassion and making sure that there is a balance between the the Chesed and the Gavura. Because sometimes I really need Gavura, and it takes me a minute to get there, right? To draw that out and say, this is a boundary, either to protect myself, to protect my community, to make things, you know, this idea of things feeling safe in a community.

I think it's that sometimes a setup, so I say safe. because, you know, no place is going to be completely safe. And there is some element of struggle that is a part of spiritual practice. But how to have that balance and compassion is lifelong work for me. That's beautiful. We spoke about joy as well and finding joy in times of despair. Can these same tools be harnessed for Josephina in Omaha? or for any of us to help find joy.

I mean, there's despair everywhere. It's climate change. There's political division. There's war all across the globe. There's mental health epidemic and issues. Everywhere you turn, there are incredible challenges that, from my perspective, didn't feel like there were those same challenges exactly there in the 90s, as much as they are now.

They're exacerbated. their flash points. So how do we find joy, solace, meaning with so much suffering and so many tests coming at us all the time? And keep Josephina in mind as you answer the question. Yeah, I think that the, I mean, you and I have talked about this about the mida, the spiritual quality of joy, which in the Jewish tradition is called Simcha. The fact that it's a mida is so uplifting to.

me, that it's a spiritual value that we cultivate. And absolutely, it's times of despair. And as an ancient people, again, that time travel, that we're always in the past, in the present, and in the future in our tradition, that there is, we have seen times of plagues, of tyrants, of war. And so a lot of the things that, that are happening today, I hear you're saying that they feel new, but there are also things that have happened in the past. Sure. And so to be able to call forward a tradition as we have had

that has had such suffering that we have been able to call up joy, that my ancestors have been able to do that, really informs the urging to do that now. I think one of the things about the spiritual virtue or quality or value or media of joy is that I think a lot of people think that all the conditions have to be perfect in order to experience it. And that's not going to ever be the case. That we choose joy. We choose it intentionally and on purpose to elevate joy. And we do that in the Jewish tradition in time. There's these vessels of time like Sabbath is a time that we

elevate joy, we dance, we sing, and we do that on purpose. Is everybody having the best time in their lives who are singing and dancing? No. And in fact, often in a place of sorrow is where the possibility of joy can open. I can tell you that I always was interested in the midot and these spiritual values as being at the core of a life, whether it's inner life, outer life, working in the world, all of that. And I was focused on them. But it really had a tremendous opening when I went through a cancer journey. And I found that the midotte that already were around and I knew were important became literal lifelines that I had to hold on to because it's one thing when they're theoretical. It's another when it's all there is.

Right? When you're in a place where you're walking through a tremendous unknown, a terrifying unknown as a mother as a spouse you know it was a terrifying time and to know that these things that had always been there all of a sudden I had to just grasp onto with all my might and then also feel how they littered like I had the sense of a rope that I was in free fall and I had to reach up and grab onto them and then they wrapped around me and held me in ways that that I never imagined. And one of them was joy. I experienced tremendous joy in the times

of incredible suffering. The protocol that I went through to deal with the cancer was unbelievably difficult. But I also had hope because I said, this is gonna be really, really grueling, and this works, this can work. Yeah. And to know that the, I have very vivid memories.

I had a day, putting on Jimmy Cliffs, the harder they may come. And I would dance every day. At that time, I had a five-year-old, and I also, you know, I had an 11-year-old, a 13-year-old. It was terrifying times, and to be able to dance every day and to feel the incredible, uplifting reality of joy in scary times. And as a rabbi, I've been able to be with people. people in these places. It's one of the biggest honors of being a rabbi is walking through these journeys that are challenging, journeys of addiction, journeys of mental health crisis, of sudden death and loss, loss of a child, loss of a parent, I mean, divorce, so many things. And to see how these qualities

that might seem, oh, what a nice idea when everything is stripped away. And you are really in the center of the wilderness, this is what there is. Everything else falls away. This is what there is. There is faith, there is love, there is hope, there is courage. This is what there is. And then when we then center that in our lives, then our lives are transformed. I mean, I have the beauty of meeting with a lot of cancer survivors. And there's this thing that we say to each other, which is like, gosh, never would have wanted to go through this. But it's unbelievable how our life has been transformed. Isn't it funny how much gratitude one gets after suffering for that suffering when it feels like it's going to kill you at the time? I think about this in terms of

God or people saying, I don't believe in God. And I always think of it in terms of like, that may be true, but everyone worships something. We do it collectively and we do it individually. So it just, it just, we are wired to worship. And you might think, well, wait a minute, I don't worship. Well, material success or status or having a killer job or working out and having a killer body or power. We collectively worship, you know, material success and profit at all costs. But what do we individually worship? So I'm always like, well, maybe if you shift this idea of God away from some kind of anthropomorphized patriarchal daddy with a beard on a cloud and just substitute truth, beauty, love, and art and worship those things instead of these, you know, the gold bowl of materialism, maybe things would move in a better, in a better direction.

Yes. Yeah, I think a lot of times, I always say it's like a party thing for me. When people hear that I'm a rabbi, they always used to like to, they like to say, oh, you're a rabbi? Oh, that's interesting. I don't believe in God. It's like this, something that people want to say. First of all, they're like, oh, wow, women can be rabbis. And then, oh, and I don't believe in God. It's an amazing thing that people who, especially who are intellectual and who are deep thinkers, all. Often when I ask them after they say, I don't believe in God, and I respond that I don't know what you mean by that. Because I don't know what you mean by believe. And I also don't know what God you're talking about. And we started by talking about the multiple theologies. And usually people are pointing towards the biblical God. But there are so many different theologies and so many approaches to the divine.

And yes, inside of the midot is the way or our spiritual verse. values to say, well, could you focus your life on compassion? Could you focus your life on faith? Could you focus your life on love? And if that's the case, it doesn't matter what you call it. You don't believe in God. Do you believe in love? Isn't that a song? Do you believe? I'm not going to go there. Gandhi, I have heard this teaching where somebody asked Gandhi, is God love? And Gandhi said, I don't know if God is love, but that I know that to love is God. And so that brings back that very active doing, right, of being engaged in the deepest values in the world and in our lives. Yeah. I love that too because it takes it out of like belief can be kind of an intellectual, cognitive exercise that

happens in a philosophy classroom. Like, what do I believe? I'm like, I'm going to believe in as opposed to I'm going I'm going to do. It says in the Baha'i faith, there's a famous phrase, strive therefore day by day that your actions may be beautiful prayers. So the idea that a prayer isn't just this kind of thing, but that our actions can be prayers. And maybe that's something that Josephina can strive for in Omaha is to have each action that manifests a middote is a prayer because it is a little shard of the divine that is being

cast out into the world. Rabbi Susan, this has been a wonderful conversation. Really, thank you. You've given me so much to think about. Thank you for the opportunity to talk about this, these really meaningful and delicious things. I love it. I love it. It's my favorite thing to do. Thanks for watching everyone. The Soul Boom Podcast. Subscribe now on YouTube. Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and wherever else you get your stupid podcasts.