A few years ago, during what I remember as a difficult time in my life, I began learning meditation with the hope of calming my panicked mind. What brought me to my knees at the time was not any particular crisis, but the daily monotony of taking care of three small children. I was physically exhausted, frustrated, and afraid of my own feelings. Life does not stop to make room for parenting. It just keeps barreling forward with all of its commitments, ambitions, needs and unexpected events. It forces us to keep stretching our hearts and our energies beyond what we thought was imaginable.
Each student in my meditation class was given the task of choosing one simple activity to perform mindfully as a form of beginner’s practice; some picked brushing their teeth, others chose putting on their shoes with purpose. I focused my efforts on reading bedtime stories to my youngest child with engaged awareness. The mind-numbing, nightly repetition of “Goodnight moon” and “Big Red Barn”, for the sixth year in a row (as my children are staggered in age) was an activity I could have done with my eyes closed in my sleep. And I often did. The transformation of having to awaken to the experience and read my children’s favorite books, as if each word was being pronounced for the first time was life changing. It made me realize how much of my daily tasks were done on autopilot and how much more joy I was able to squeeze out of life if I only woke up to it.
Meditation in itself is not panacea for all of life’s challenges, but it has become an indispensible tool in my ability to turn down the background noise of my own mind, making room for awe and delight in simplicity. Mindfulness is not a new age concept and Judaism has much wisdom to offer on the subject of intentional prayer and spiritual awakening. Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel wrote “Our goal should be to live life in radical amazement. ….get up in the morning and look at the world in a way that takes nothing for granted. Everything is phenomenal; everything is incredible; never treat life casually. To be spiritual is to be amazed.”
Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg recently wrote “Nurture the Wow”, a book that raises a very important and often overlooked question: What does Judaism have to say about living a spiritually awakened life, while also tending to the never-ending needs of small children? For years, my first thought when I woke up in the morning was not about gratitude, but the throbbing pain in my neck as it was scrunched over the side of the bed from yet another night of sleep with an uninvited, sweaty child.
Ruttenberg reminds us that, for thousands of years, men who were not intimately involved in the daily routine of childcare wrote books on Jewish tradition and law. The Babylonian Talmud, for example, is a compilation of writing on subjects of enormous variety pertaining to the real and hypothetical questions of daily life. But it has little to offer on the subject of children: tantrums, mid-night waking, what to do when a baby won’t nap, or how to comfort an inconsolable child. Ruttenberg’s assessment is that “for most of history, the people who were raising children weren’t writing books.”
Rabbi Ruttenberg poses a challenge: “What would the Talmud look like if were writing it today?” Another words, how could our experience as parents influence our spiritual and religious life? Conversely, what can we glean from our rich tradition to help us stay spiritually connected while in the thick of parenting fog? Ruttenberg’s book is engaging, at times self-deprecating and funny, and at other times deeply poignant. It is not a book on how to parent our children. I read it as contemplation on how to parent our souls while engaged in the hardest, most intense work of our lives, accompanied by a love so fierce and intense that it literally makes us crazy.
“Nurture the Wow” asks us to shift our mindset about parenting and think of it as a spiritual practice. That means staying awake through the mundane and forgiving ourselves for the mistakes made today, so that we can keep trying again, and again.
