I fly a lot for work. In fact (pulling back the curtain here for a minute, as is our jam on this podcast), I even wrote this episode at 33,000 feet while flying over Michigan.
I recently requalified for gold status on United, and the year isn’t even three-quarters over. Which is kind of cool, right? At least I think it’s cool. But here’s something ridiculous: One of the challenges I experience in flying (aside from being a constraining box in the sky for hours at a time) is that there always seems to be someone who has it better than me. Even with my gold status, there are the platinum people. There are the people with the club membership or the people flying first class, or the people who get to go to the ultra fancy club that even the people who pay $700 a year can’t go to. And that’s not even getting into the universe of private jets.
I will admit that the effect of this for me sometimes is to make me feel like I’m somehow less-than: I’m not as sheeshy as the people in the next tier up. And I imagine the people in the tiers quote unquote “below” me—or, heaven forbid, all the way in boarding group 6—might feel like that towards me.
And you know, I get it: United is a company and it needs to make money to pay its employees and its investors. Capitalism and all that, yadda yadda. And it does have the nice Gershwin jingle and all. But still: I often feel like flying demands a lot of spiritual labor from me not to feel envious, covetous even, of my neighbor up at the front of the cabin.
We’re up to the tenth of the Ten Commandments in our miniseries. As you may have guessed, the Tenth is all about this: “Do not covet your neighbor’s house,” the Torah says. Don’t covet their spouse or their animals or anything that belongs to them. In the version of the Ten Commandments that appears in Deuteronomy, Moses includes the words lo titaveh, don’t desire what belongs to your neighbor.
I said in our episode on the Fifth Commandment, about honoring parents, that the Torah doesn’t command us to love them because it can’t command us to feel an emotion. And yet here, it definitely seems like we’re getting an instruction not to feel a certain way: Don’t feel that desire of the person who gets to board in the group above you. So what’s going on, and why is this how the Torah sums up the Big Ten?
Rabbi Abraham Ibn Ezra, a medieval Torah commentator, says something really incredible in his comment on this commandment: Ikar kol hamitzvot l’yasher halev, the central purpose of all of our Jewish spiritual practices, all of our mitzvot, is to align our hearts. And, this, to me, is incredible. Yes, the mitzvot are also about bringing about a good and just society, caring for the people on the margins, and about a million other important things. But the thing it’s really all about, says Ibn Ezra, is our inner life: straightening out our hearts.
I don’t know about you, but I think that’s kind of amazing to hear. And if you buy it, then ending the Ten Commandments with a mitzvah about living mindfully with our desires makes perfect sense—because we’ve been building towards it. Don’t murder, don’t steal, don’t cheat, don’t bear false witness—these are all outward-facing manifestations of living with our desires. But with this final commandment, the Torah goes inside: If you really want to bring it all together, then you’ve got to start understanding and managing your heart’s desires. To quote the great rebbe, Frank Sinatra, “If you can make it there, you can make it anywhere. It’s up to you.” Old Blue Eyes was talking about New York, but I’d like to think he was talking about our hearts, as well.
This episode is airing as we begin a new Jewish year, which is really the perfect time to work on this. The sound of the shofar, a sound which according to the Torah rang out at the moment the Ten Commandments were spoken by the Holy One—that sound is meant to wake us up and stir our hearts.
There’s a Bible verse, Psalms 16:8, which is a foundation of Jewish mysticism. Its first four words are, “Shiviti Hashem l’negdi tamid,” “I will place the Divine before me always.” In many synagogues the verse is written on the wall or above the ark. Some people have artwork in their homes—artworks that are called “Shivitis”–to help remind them of it. And for our practice on living mindfully with our desires, I think it’s a wonderful verse to work with.
The practice is really simple: Take a breath, focus, and just say “Shiviti.” As you do, try to become aware of the desire that might be working inside you—and then try to align the stirrings of your heart with your deeper intention: to live mindfully, to choose the path of expansiveness and compassion, with yourself and with the world.
The Jerusalem-based musical group Nava Tehillah has a wonderful setting of these words. In their version, the name of God is pronounced “Havaya,” a rearrangement of Y-H-V-H that translates to “Being.” So you can hear it as “I will set Being—-the source of life—before me always.” And since Havaya sounds a lot like ahava, love, that also, fittingly, becomes part of the song. We’ll put the recording in the show notes, but to close out our series and give us a musical practice to work with, I want to play the song here.
Blessings for the journey. Know that I’m on it with you. Here’s Nava Tehilla.