Awareness In The Sanctuary
Opening to Fresh Perspectives
Summer 2021
“If you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change.” Wayne Dyer
“Your vision will become clear only when you can look into your own heart. Who looks outside, dreams. Who looks inside, awakes.” Carl Jung
Open your eyes to fresh outlooks with the Feldenkrais Method®. “Fresh Perspective” begins with a topical reading selected by Rabbi Donna Kirshbaum followed by a guided, body-based meditation with a focus on your eyes.
Lessons are appropriate for people of all abilities, body types, levels of fitness, faiths and spiritual orientations. Led b, BHC member and Guild Certified Feldenkrais Practitioner® Jacki Katzman with special introductions by Rabbi Donna Kirshbaum.
The BHC summer Feldenkrais series, Awareness in the Sanctuary is in its fourth year. Awareness Through Movement® is Dr. Moshe Feldenkrais’ life work and gift to humanity. The practice is a form of body-based meditation of simple, small, and extreme low-impact movements. Enjoy these lessons as a gift from Bethlehem Hebrew Congregation to our friends and neighbors. Recordings below.
“The sights the wicked chose to behold brought them down to Gehinnom. The sights the righteous chose to behold raised them to the highest heights.”
“Please consider a donation to Bethlehem Hebrew Congregation. Suggested donation $5/lesson. Send checks to Bethlehem Hebrew Congregation, PO Box 395, Bethlehem NH 03574. Or online.”
Lesson 1: Faraway Eyes - Relax and Refocus Your Vision
On January 14, 1963, Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel gave a seminal speech called “Religion and Race”at a conference of the same name in Chicago. There he met Dr. Martin Luther King and the two became friends. Two years later, on March 21, 1965, Rabbi Heschel marched with Dr. King in Selma, Alabama. Their friendship continued to grow and deepen until King was assassinated on April 4, 1968.
Here is an excerpt from ”Religion and Race”: In several ways man is set apart from all beings created in six days. The Bible does not say, God created the plant or the animal; it says, God created different kinds of plants, different kinds of animals (Genesis 1: 11 12, 21-25). In striking contrast, it does not say, God created different kinds of man, men of different colors and races; it proclaims, God created one single man. From one single man all men are descended.
To think of man in terms of white, black, or yellow is more than an error. It is an eye disease, a cancer of the soul.
Lesson 1: Faraway Eyes - relax and refocus your vision
Allowing the eyes to drift side to side, to the center, and then far, far away relaxes the optical system, including the muscles around the eyes, the muscles that focus the eyes, even the muscles of the cheeks, lips and neck. And as the optical system calms, so does the entire nervous system. Relax your focus and begin to see with fresh eyes.
Lesson 2 - Deep Eyes, Telescope Eyes – Where You Look From Matters
If you read the popular JPS English translation of the very last three verses of the Torah, you find only this:
Never again did there arise in Israel a prophet like Moses – whom YHVH singled out, face to face, for the various signs and portents that YHVH sent him to display in the land of Egypt,
against Pharaoh and all his courtiers and his whole country,
and for all the great might and awesome power that Moses displayed before all Israel.
But the original Hebrew, combined with the insights of Reish Lakish, a Torah sage; Rashi, our most beloved commentator; and Aviva Zornberg, arguably our own generation’s greatest Biblical interpreter, make it clear that something else entirely may be going on here.
The Torah’s final words, translated literally, actually say this:
...and for all the great might and awesome power that Moses displayed before the EYES of all Israel.
Lesson Description:
Go deep into the eyes, behind the rods, cones, retinal to the optic nerves and back into the optical cortex. Or that’s one way to think of it. Another is the imagery of this lesson: a telescope that passively receives the image at which it is pointed. With relaxed breath, chest, tongue, cheeks and facial muscles, and finally, eyes as they rest on the supportive skeleton, feel what it’s like to simply receive the world from a place of balance and grounding.
Lesson 3 - Eyes from Within
“The world can be likened to a human eyeball. The white of the eye to the ocean surrounding the whole world, the iris to the inhabited world, the pupil of the eye to Jerusalem, and the face in the pupil to the Holy Temple.”
Babylonian Talmud, Derech Eretz Rabbah 9:13
“The pupil of the eye is that circle of darkness through which the Infinite calls to us.” David Patterson, The Holocaust and the Nonrepresentable
Lesson 3 - Eyes from Within
Do you know where your eyes rest in your head? This session invites you to trace the inside of your mouth to place your eyes in your body. Enjoy the sensation of heavy eyes resting on the roof of the mouth, contained in the skull, and marvel.
Lesson 4 - Focus on Prayer
Prayer Hands Lesson
Focus your attention by focusing your eyes on the back of your hands, and follow, follow. Your mind, breath, eyes, attention, intention calm. Your prayer has body.
WENDELL BERRY’S SABBATH POEM, “1985, V”
How long does it take to make the woods?
As long as it takes to make the world.
The woods is present as the world is, the presence
of all its past, and of all its time to come.
It is always finished, it is always being made, the act
of its making forever greater than the act of its destruction.
It is a part of eternity, for its end and beginning
belong to the end and beginning of all things,
the beginning lost in the end, the end in the beginning.
What is the way to the woods, how do you go there?
By climbing up through the six days’ field,
kept in all the body’s years, the body’s
sorrow, weariness, and joy. By passing through
the narrow gate on the far side of that field
where the pasture grass of the body’s life gives way
to the high, original standing of the trees.
By coming into the shadow, the shadow
of the grace of the strait way’s ending,
the shadow of the mercy of light.
Why must the gate be narrow?
Because you cannot pass beyond it burdened.
To come in among these trees you must leave behind
the six days’ world, all of it, all of its plans and hopes.
You must come without weapon or tool, alone,
expecting nothing, remembering nothing,
into the ease of sight, the brotherhood [and sisterhood!] of eye and leaf.
Wendell Berry, July 27, 2021