Welcome to Soulful Jewish Living: Mindful Practices for Every Day with me, Josh Feigelson.
I’m grateful you’re here, and I hope you benefit from our time together.
At least once a year I try to go on a silent meditation retreat. I had planned to attend one in the summer of 2024, but I had to cancel last minute due to a family emergency. So when I landed in San Francisco in October 2025 for a weeklong retreat, I was really excited. It had been a couple years since I was on a retreat of my own, and I was looking forward to everything the retreat would offer. And I was especially jazzed because this was a retreat with a Buddhist teacher who I have really come to love and respect. It was gonna be awesome.
But then a strange thing happened. As I got in the car and started driving to the retreat center, I felt my anxiety start to rise. It took me a little while, but I figured out what was fueling it. This was my first retreat in a non-Jewish setting since October 7, 2023. Here I was in northern California going to a retreat center with a bunch of people as a kippah-wearing Jew. Antisemitism is on the rise. Based on the rhetoric out there, it seems like people are thinking, feeling, and saying things about Jews that are pretty awful. What are they going to think of me? My mind started to spin, and I could feel my anxiety rising.
That continued for the first afternoon of the retreat. And then I remembered something I had wanted to ask the retreat organizers, but had forgotten to email about beforehand. Would it be okay with them, I wondered, if I wore my tallit and tefillin to the first meditation session of the day at 6 am? I knew that, for me, this would be important: it’s a part of my regular practice, a way of integrating my meditation into my prayer life. But it’s one thing to do that in my home or at shul–it would be another to do it in the meditation hall with a bunch of people who might look at me funny and wonder what those fringes and leather straps were all about.
The way you ask a question on a silent retreat is by writing it on a piece of paper, folding it up, and putting it on a bulletin board. Then you go do your things while you wait for the teacher to write back. And in this case, the wait was excruciating. I was really spinning up some stories in my mind, imagining that these people—who were lovely, well-meaning, sincere, kind, but also silent!–thought all these horrible, antisemitic things about me.
And so, when I unfolded the note a couple hours later and read, “Josh, we would love for you to wear your tallit and tefillin at the morning sit—thanks for asking!” I was literally moved to tears. I felt safe, embraced and welcomed. My anxiety started to melt.
This is the fourth episode in our miniseries on anxiety. In our last episode we talked about the anxiousness that can arise when we’re in a waiting room—outside a doctor’s office or waiting for a job interview, or in a metaphorical waiting room like when we’re waiting for a specific text or email. My story here is also about waiting, but it’s about another aspect of it: what we might call ayin hara, a fatalistic, negative way of perceiving the situation and other people. Ayin hara, and its opposite, ayin tova, or a generous kind of perception—that’s our topic for today.
When I was waiting for that note to come back, I wasn’t just waiting for a yes or a no.’ I was living in a world built entirely by my own Ayin Hara.
Now, in popular folklore, Ayin Hara is often translated as the ‘Evil Eye,’ which makes it sound like a spooky hex. But in Jewish mindfulness, Ayin Hara is an internal state, a constriction of perception. It’s what happens when our anxiety becomes the filter through which we process the world, causing us to perceive hostility where there may well be curiosity, and judgment where there may actually be an open door.
In that meditation hall, my ayin hara had done something clever: it had turned a group of kind, silent strangers into a jury. I was projecting my worst fears about the world onto their silence. I was perceiving them as a threat before they had even made a sound.
But then, I opened the note. The teacher didn’t just say ‘fine.’ They said, ‘We would love for you to do that.’ In that moment, the teacher was helping me to shift my Ayin Hara into an Ayin Tova—a ‘Generous Perspective.’ And that flipped the situation on its head.
Ayin Tova isn’t just ‘seeing the bright side.’ It is a spiritual discipline of spaciousness. It’s the ability to hold a person or a situation in a way that assumes their potential for goodness rather than their potential for harm. The teacher processed my request not as a disruption, but as a beautiful integration of practice.
Because the teacher at this retreat held a generous space for me before I even stepped into the room, they enabled me to open up my own ayin tova.
When we’re in a state of uncertainty, our default setting is often a constricted perception—the state when the ayin hara makes its presence known. We perceive the boss’s silence as disapproval; we perceive the delayed text as a rejection. We ‘protect’ ourselves by assuming the worst.
But this constricted way of perceiving is a self-fulfilling prophecy. It keeps our nervous system in a state of high alert. Remember that Doom Loop from our first episode in this miniseries? That loop spins on the axle of the ayin hara.
Ayin Tova, on the other hand, is a way to lower the temperature. It is the choice to say: ‘I don’t actually know the intent of this silence, so I’ll choose a perspective that allows for kindness.’
Here’s a practice that can help. We can call this a Filter Check.
First, slow down. Take a few deep breaths. Try to get a little calmer and restful.
Now, see if you can think of a situation right now that is causing you anxiety. What is the ‘constricted’ story you are telling yourself about it? (e.g., ‘They are judging me.’)”
Notice how that perception feels in your body. Often it may feel like a tightening, a narrowing, or a weight.
Now, just as an experiment, try to change the filter. See if you can hold that same situation with a generous perspective. What is the most expansive, kind interpretation possible? Not as a way to ignore reality, but as a way to provide your neshama, your soul ,with some breathing room while you wait for the facts to catch up.
What if the silence, the waiting, doesn’t mean something negative? What if it just means someone else is taking their time, or they’ve just been busy? What if this situation isn’t inevitably going to cause your pain—but, instead, it might just open up into something good?
Try to breathe with this feeling for a minute. Try to loosen the constriction of the ayin hara, and let in the expansiveness of the ayin tova. And notice how it feels in your body: a bit more expansive, less tight. A bit less suspicion, and a bit more love perhaps.
The goal isn’t to be right. The goal is to recognize that since you don’t know the truth yet, choosing a generous perspective is a choice you can make—and might be a wiser, more mindful path to take.
Blessings for the journey. Know that I’m on it with you.
Thank you for joining us for Soulful Jewish Living: Mindful Practices for Every Day, a production of Unpacked, a brand of OpenDor Media, and the Institute for Jewish Spirituality. This episode is sponsored by Jonathan and Kori Kalafer and the Somerset Patriots: The Bridgewater, NJ-based AA Affiliate of the New York Yankees. If you like this show, subscribe, share this episode with a friend, give us five stars on Apple Podcasts. Check out our website, unpacked.media for everything Unpacked-related, and subscribe to our other podcasts, and check out the Institute for Jewish Spirituality. Most importantly, be in touch–about what you heard today, what you’d like to hear more about, or to dedicate an episode. Write to me at josh@unpacked.media.
This episode was hosted by me, Rabbi Josh Feigelson. Audio was edited by Rob Pera and we’re produced by Rivky Stern. Thanks for joining us.