The verse as it appears in the Leningrad Codex, oldest known complete manuscript of the Hebrew Bible.
And Isaac went out to meditate in the field at the evening time: and he lifted up his eyes, and saw, and, behold, camels were coming (Genesis 24:63)
The last time I saw my childhood rabbi Victor Weisberg Z”L was at a talk by Roger Kamenetz the author of the Jew in the Lotus at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1999. Roger Kamenetz was the poet who documented a legendary expedition of eight rabbis to Dharamsala to have a dialogue with the Dalai Lama. “Tell me your secret,” he said, “the secret of Jewish spiritual survival in exile.” The Jew in the Lotus unpacked some of the phenomenon of the JUBU (Jewish Buddhists) movement that emerged in post Shoah America as young Jews searched for meaning and spirituality in Buddhism.
Years later, the memory of this encounter with a towering figure of American Reform Judaism is propelling my thinking about this week’s Parashah. While the film was pivotal in the journey of a generation of assimilated American Jews to find their way back to spiritual Jewish practices the meeting with my childhood rabbi reminds me that meditation is rooted in Jewish practice from the beginning.
In Chayei Sarah there is a hapax legomena: lasuach. A hapax legomena is a word (or expression) that appears only once in a text (though there is a small dispute regarding if a word appears in different verbal forms in the Tanakh it is a pure and true hapax). When words appear only once their meaning has to be deduced from context and understanding of the word is constructed based on an educated guess as to the root of the word. The meaning is then built around where this root appears in other verses in different forms. Rashi believes that lasuach means that Isaac went out to meditate – but this is not undisputed. Ibn Ezra holds that it means to walk among the trees.
This word ultimately describes what Isaac was doing when he saw the camels coming. Defining lasuach as meditating (following Rashi) puts contemplative practice at the beginning of the Jewish story.
The Jewish Buddhist relationship potentially dates back to the Roman Jewish Diaspora. de vita contemplativa is Philo of Alexandria’s early 1st Century treatise on the Therapeutae an aesthetic group who lived communally on the shores of Lake Mariout. Philo considered the group of men and women philosophers. They were dedicated to a contemplative life, renouncing worldly possessions and spending six days of the week in solitude and prayer. Philo describes their practice as such:
[25] In each house there is a consecrated room which is called a sanctuary or closet and closeted in this they are initiated into the mysteries of the sanctified life. They take nothing into it, either drink or food or any other of the things necessary for the needs of the body, but laws and oracles delivered through the mouth of prophets, and psalms and anything else which fosters and perfects knowledge and piety.
Exactly who this group was has been hotly debated since the 4th Century, and there are at least three different scholars who argue that this community was influenced by early Buddhist monasticism- which is not impossible- given the trade routes and exchanges of the Roman Empire. In the Jew in the Lotus, professor of world religions Nathan Katz standing before the Dalai Lama explains:
Judaism and Buddhism had contact in the past. “The ancient Greeks,” he declared, “knew about the Buddha. Ancient Israel also knew about India. The Buddha and our King Solomon share legends. Words from Sanskrit and Tamil are found in our ancient holy book, the Bible. We construct memory in the present, and by constructing memory we create our identity. What we remember constructs who we are, and that’s an insight of Buddhist philosophy also. What we forget also makes us who we are. Both of us, Jews and Tibetans, have forgotten we go back a long way together. It’s only recently that we’ve forgotten.
Rav Kook in 1908 wrote “The old shall be renewed, and the new shall be made holy”. it is feasible to argue that in the light of Philo’s da vita contemplativa, the influence of Buddhism is part of the fabric of Judaism and the JUBU phenomena was not the height of assimilation rather it was an ancient instinct for something that has always been part of Judaism.
In Berakhot 26b Rabbi Yose b. Chanina teaches that Abraham instituted the morning prayer, Isaac the afternoon prayer and Jacob instituted the evening prayer. This contradicts what Rabbi Yehoshua ben Levi said earlier on the page, that the three daily prayers were instituted after the Temple offerings. Dispute and discussion is central to both the history and practice of Jewish prayer. But the haxa legomena invites us to think more deeply about how and where we pray. Is prayer a conversation with the divine? If we reason in line with Rabbi Yose b. Chanina (and Rashi) should afternoon prayer be more of a meditation? Should it be outdoors?
There is something in the plurality of interpretations of Isaac’s actions and this word that captures what it means to pray as a Jew today. The web of possible meanings of lasuach is an invitation to consider how we each want to pray and that there are many truths about prayer.
And that prayer in itself
Each one
Each utterance
Each day is an utterly unique expression in the text of our lives, occurring only once.
Jennifer Verson, LBC rabbinical student
The views expressed in this D’var Torah do not necessarily reflect the position of Leo Baeck College.