Meditative Mondays with Cantor Jen Rolnick Jennifer Rolnick

Meditation Jan 28

This week, we read about the tale of two brothers, Jacob and Esau.  Esau is the physical, strong hunter while Jacob is the mild mannered, gentler son.  The two brothers fight even in the womb over who will be the stronger brother. The struggle between these brothers in many ways mirrors the internal emotional struggles we often face.  In today's meditation, I encourage you to explore different parts of your personality, to feel the tension between them and to work towards reconciliation. 

In this week's Torah reading, Vayishlach, we are reminded that sometimes in life, we face struggles.  Jacob has a physical struggle with an angel and from out of this exchange he is given the name Israel, one who struggles with God.  Jacob is also struggling emotionally with how to repair his damaged relationship with his brother, Esau.  The two had not spoken since Jacob’s deception in tricking their father and stealing his brothers blessing.  Jacob is afraid to approach his brother, but he is able to face that fear and the two reconcile.  Jacob’s physical struggle with the angel is perhaps a metaphor, an outward representation of the emotional struggle going on inside.  This physical, tangible image of complicated emotion can be helpful to us in sorting out our emotions and facing our challenges.  Today I would like to invite you to go on a journey with me, one where we visualize facing a difficult situation and how we can out of challenges healthier and stronger.

The theme of this week's meditation is on finding role models and accessing our capacity for leadership. 

Each month we celebrate the arrival of the new moon and a new Jewish month.  In today's meditation we explore the theme of the new moon and the blessings it can bring to us at the beginning of each new month. 

Each year, we begin reading the Torah anew from the very beginning.   Many of us are familiar with the creation narrative that appears at the beginning of the Torah.  In the beginning God created light and darkness, which is how it is commonly explained.  But if we look closely at the Torah, we see that, like many things in our world, there is a little more nuance to the story.  According to the Torah, in the beginning there was chaos, long before God came into the story.  God did not do away with the darkness, but instead found some light within the dark and separated the two so that we could distinguish between darkness and light.  There will always be things in the world that we cannot understand or explain.  To us, they appear to be chaos.  This meditation will focus not on eliminating darkness and disorder from life, but rather on finding the light within.