Discernment
Practice: After entering into prayer as described in the previous emails, take a moment of awareness about awareness. Take three long breaths. Notice the gift of thought and discernment. Feel gratitude for your intelligence, that you can learn and take in new information. Take another breath. Appreciate the ability to be compassionate, that we can notice and understand with empathy the feelings of another. Finally, with a third breath, feel gratitude for wisdom. Wisdom, meaning a deeper understanding of who we are, the ability to explore our purpose and to act upon it. Barukh Atah Adonoi, Honan HaDaat. Praised are You, God, who grants discernment.
Mystical Addition: Imagine in saying these words that you are exploring the deepest place of your consciousness, the part before thoughts and words emerge. On a surface level there might be a surge of feelings, of fear, of love, of anxiety and hope and despair all mixed together. But if we can plunge deeper we see the holiness of all those feelings. We realize that all of it is holy and a gift of God.
Background: We are granted perhaps uniquely in the universe a capacity to make distinctions, to have wisdom and understanding. We can imagine futures and bring them about; we can engage with people we love and care about and see and understand their pain and loss. Our intelligence is a tool that lets us unlock the secrets of the Universe, all a gift from God.
Intelligence can be used in ways that are destructive and filled with curses, or with blessings and great creativity. Even our emotional intelligence and compassion can be misused when our own pain, or the pain of our family or immediate community, blinds us to the suffering of others. People use their understanding of others in ways manipulative and painful all too often. By thanking God for the blessing of understanding and discernment we are challenging and inspiring ourselves to make use of these tools as the gifts they are. We assert that our intelligence and insight is a an act of grace. Like any such gift, it must then be used with wisdom and compassion.
Mystical Background: The words used in the prayer, da’at and binah, literally mean discernment and wisdom. Yet they also have a mystical layer. Da’at is the capacity that Moses’ possessed to be in tune with the Divine at all times. Moses lived in the place of God’s kedushah every moment of his life, fulfilling the commandment to “know God in all our ways.” Saying that we have da’at means each one of us possesses the innate capacity to connect with the Divine energy in our own ways.
Binah similarly is wisdom, the place of the origin of thought. It is the place in the Divine where inarticulate divinity becomes expressed into thought and potent word. To say that we are also gifted with Binah means we have the capacity to speak words of great meaning, to have well up from the depths of our self a kind of understanding that can be world redemptive.
As one says this blessing, a person is invited to imagine the very depth of the conscious self. We are asking for our deepest place of love and compassion, the very origin place of our thoughts, to be given expression. We are asking for our words to emerge directly, without corruption from fears and separation and ego. When that happens, we speak authentically, fully, and with great potency.
Shabbat Shalom-
Rabbi David Booth
