Sometimes a crumb falls from the tables of joy
Sometimes a bone is flung.
To some people love is given,
To others, only heaven.
 

                         Langston Hughes
 
 
 
 
 

Introduction
 
 

       Sadness and joy are not opposites.  They exist as two notes of a sometimes
dissonant, sometimes harmonious, chord of quiet awareness.  Learning to
experience and accept one’s sadness as part of the unfolding perfection of Being is
to make the darkness visible, and beautiful.  It is a gate into deeply knowing that
all is God. 

       Denying sorrow, or pretending too quickly that everything is okay, denies
that God exists everywhere, which contradicts the unity and reality of God itself. 
If God takes place only when we are happy, it is not God.

        Sadness is not the same as despair.  Despair is a condition of the ego, in
which the “I” loses confidence that the sad mind state will change.  It is part of a
narrative, in which the desired happiness is feared never to come.  Sadness is not
part of a narrative; it is simply what is, at this moment.  In fact, despair hates
sadness, and seeks to avoid it – even as it believes that to avoid it is impossible. 
In this sense, despair and holy sadness are opposites.

        When we truly experience, not just merely learn, that sadness is a
manifestation of God, and when we feel -- not just merely theorize -- that we are
not alone in sadness, we can become one with an underlying peace with what is
that lovingly endures even our most painful heartbreaks. 

        The teachings in this book flow from many voices of Jewish traditions,
and some from Buddhist ones, though hopefully they can inspire any seeker of
communion with ultimate Being.  They do not represent the only voices in these
traditions on the subject of sadness, or even the dominant ones.  Most importantly,
this path is not a cure for sadness – it is an embrace of it.  The gate of sadness will
not make us happy.  But it can make us joyful, content, and loving in the midst of
pain.  With an open heart, sadness and joy may thus be united.
 
 
 
 

     1. 
 
 
 
 

        Nothing exists apart from God.  All of Being, including that which we
consider the self, is a vast, infinitely complex manifestation of the One.  This is
easy to say, but difficult truly to know.

        Scientific understandings of the universe have begun to resemble the
teachings of wisdom traditions, in particular the unity of matter (substance) and
energy (non-substance), of the unified fabric of spacetime, of how only the
presence of information (“wisdom”) determines the shape of the universe, from
our innermost thoughts to the contours of galaxies.  But even if such theories are
correct, map is not territory.  To directly and fully experience this simple point –
that all is in God – requires a shift in our minds and hearts.

        To attain this deep form of knowledge (in Hebrew, daat), many mystics
and contemplatives carefully train their minds not to constrict into the false
conceptions and attachments of the self; artists gain glimpses of the Infinite in
selfless moments of creative expression; and all of us arrive at moments of
transcendence, if we are open to receive them.  In all cases, the resultant
experience is often one of great rapture and joy.  With the veil of separateness
removed, many contemplatives encounter an overpowering love radiating from
the unity of Being.  That which we thought was far from us is, in fact, us.  Or
rather, we are It.

        This experience is so wonderful that it is often radically misunderstood. 
We hear about rapture and joy, and assume that it is only in such moments that we
are connected with God.  In fact, such moments are moments only of recognition.
Since God is absolutely everywhere, we are always fully connected with God,
even when we experience great sadness.

        It is easy to draw a map of how this is so.  But to understand deeply that
even in our moments of greatest separateness, aloneness, or pain, there is nothing
but God taking place – this is the challenge of liberation.
 
 
 

     2. 
 
 

        In the Jewish tradition, becoming filled with the Divine is described in
many ways, including devekut (cleaving, or merging with, God), achdut
(unifying), and others.  Since ontologically, we are always nothing but God, these
terms must represent primarily epistemological or psychological states.  God is
always here; but sometimes our attention is not.

        It is tempting to wax rhapsodic about becoming filled with the shechinah,
the immanent Presence of God.  But how do we regard these other times?  The
times at which our illusory wills and selfish interests seem to us to be the entirety
of life’s meaning?

        Traditional Jews begin every morning’s prayer service with the words of a
non-Jewish prophet, Balaam, who had been sent to curse the Israelites by Balak,
an idolatrous king.  On his journey, Balaam had been blind to the reality of God’s
presence, but when he arrived at the Israelite camp he was filled with insight, and
in his joy uttered this well-known line: mah tovu ohalecha ya’akov,
mishkenotecha yisrael.  How good are your tents, Jacob; your dwelling places,
Israel.

        In the parallel structure of Balaam’s speech, we can see a microcosm of
the mind states of gadlut (great mind, when we know we are filled with God) and
katnut (small mind, when we do not think we are).  The “tents of Jacob” represent
katnut – grasping mind; Ya’akov, whose first act was to grasp the ankle of his
twin brother Esau; Jacob, who stole his brother’s blessing and tried to live his life;
mere tents.  The “dwelling places of Israel” are gadlut; Yisrael, he who wrestles
with, embraces God; the person who has become transformed; dwelling places
made into mishkenot for the shechinah.

        Yet Balaam does not say that only Israel’s mishkenot are tov (good).  He
does not say how wonderful it is when (and only when) our finite tents are
transformed into places for the Infinite.  He says that both sides are good.

        Moreover, according to the Zohar, the word Mah, which ordinarily means
‘what’ or ‘how,’ is a signifier of the shechinah.  With this understanding, mah
tovu teaches us that ultimate Goodness, the Presence of God, inheres both in our
times of Yisrael, when it is obvious, and our times of Yaakov, when it is not. 
Devekut with God is all-inclusive.  When we cry, when we feel isolated, when we
encounter loneliness or pain – these too are tov, Good. All of our soul is purely
God, even those parts which are absolutely sure that, whatever God is, they are
not God, even those parts our egos regret or despise. 
 
 
 

     3. 
 
 

        Human beings seem capable of great, radical evil, from the massive scale
of the Holocaust to the minute scale of individual cruelty and violence.  How is
this tov? 

        The conceptual and theoretical problems of evil will be discussed later. 
For now, though, we should be wary of the trap they pose: inviting in the rational,
critical mind.  There is nothing wrong with the rational, critical mind, of course. 
But the trap is that we use it to avoid real openness.  It is easier to think of the
Holocaust than it is to deeply experience our own loss or loneliness.  If an
objection arises, make sure it is one which involves the whole soul.

        Na’ar hayiti, v’gam zakanti, v’lo raiti tzadik ne’ezav – I was a youth, and
now have grown old, and I have never seen a righteous person abandoned.  Was
the Psalmist naive?  Did he (or she) lead a sheltered life, in which no one
suffered?  We know from David’s own biography that he felt abandoned himself,
and saw righteous people of his generation betrayed and even killed.  So whether
David wrote the Psalms, or someone else did in his name, clearly the line cannot
be ontologically descriptive.

        The secret teaching of lo raiti tzadik ne’ezav is that love is stronger than
death (as Franz Rosenzweig said).  The tzadik was never abandoned by the
underlying Presence of God, because the ‘Now’ is always available.  As one
contemporary teacher has said, “Pain is mandatory.  Suffering is not.” Suffering is
caused by our desire for pain not to exist.  When we recognize pain as what it is,
our experience of pain can be accompanied by a knowledge of deep, abiding joy.

        This is true even in the most heinous circumstances of war and privation,
and in our own lives.  It is not OK to be victimized by evil.  But Awareness is not
about the OK.  It is a ground deeper than that which is entirely not OK.
 
 
 

     4. 
 
 

        In the Jewish tradition, ‘secret’ wisdom is experiential wisdom.  That is
why it is not committed to books – not because it is a proprietary formula, but
because it cannot be written at all.

        When I was younger, I would imagine that somewhere, there was the book
with The Answer.  I even found a book that had the answers to famous Zen koans. 
It explained the sound of one hand clapping.  It did not make me enlightened.

        Likewise, the ‘answers’ in Abraham Abulafia, the great ecstatic Kabbalist,
are often less important than the process through which the answers are received. 
Really, what answers are there?  All is God.  Cogito ergo sum – thought produces
the illusion of selfhood.  But there is nothing to the self, or to anything else, other
than the or ein sof, the Infinite Light.  Is there anything new here?

        The secret does not lie in the translation of experience into information – it
lies precisely in the opposite.  In Abulafian practice, to arrive at the place where
the Divine shefa (‘influx’) flows freely requires a change of consciousness into a
place in which connections are seen everywhere and the normally, falsely solid
aspects of the world splinter apart into their constituent elements.  It is not hard to
write down how this practice is done, or to relate some of the insights that
Abulafia gained by means of it.  If it can be written, it is not sod (secret).  Secrets
are not concealed for the sake of mystery.  They are unwritten because there is no
alternative. 
 
 

     5. 
 

        In our culture, sadness is either a sin or a disease.  Once, America
recognized it as an inevitable part of a sincere life: Abraham Lincoln’s
melancholy was seen as part of his wisdom.  Now, it is seen as Unamerican,
indulgent, almost European.  Sorrow is diagnosed as depression, and medicated
with drugs; after all, why else would one be sad, unless one were sick?

        In Buddhism, that life is suffering is one of the four noble truths.  It is said
to stem not from illness, but from the natural human propensity to want the world
to be other than it is.  This propensity is essential to our survival as a species –
without want, no neanderthal would ever hunt or build a home.  The Talmud says,
“Without the desirous inclination, nothing would ever be accomplished.” Yet it
also ensures our unhappiness, since the world will never conform to our desires.

        We can still enjoy life’s pleasures, and must still seek to alleviate suffering
in others, but we can only gain happiness by not attaching ourselves to the desire
that the world be different.

        One of the most important desires to let go is the desire not to be sad. 
Often, when we feel sad, it is primarily at the fact that we are sad.  Everyone else
seems so happy –  and they don’t deserve it.  Why can’t I be?  What is wrong with
me?  Or, perhaps our sorrow turns to anger: How hateful is the world, that some
people are given love, success, and happiness, while I am not.  For many people,
the  most important step on a path to equanimity is accepting our sadness. 

        Acceptance of sadness is not the same as immersion in it.  Immersion
comes when we repeat the story of why we are sad; what is lacking; what aspects
of the world should be different.  We become enveloped by the sadness, wrapped
up in its stories and resultant despair.  Acceptance, though, comes from seeing
that we are sad, and seeing that this, too, is God.

        We must actually believe that the sound we hear now, at this moment,
here, is perfect.  John Cage tried to teach this in 4'33" and other works.  Beautiful
music is not only pleasant melodies.  What you are hearing now is the perfect
symphony of the now.  What are you hearing now?  What part of it is, do you
think, not God?

        If not John Cage, then the simple words of George Harrison can also teach, 
even if some may find them worthy of derision.  Sometimes simple teachings are
the best teachings:

  If you’re listening to this song,
  You might think the chords are going wrong.
  But they’re not.
  I just wrote it like that.

        Now, if this is true for sounds, it is true for the soul as well: If you’re
listening to yourself, you might think the heart is going wrong. But it’s not. God
just is like that.

        This is not a teaching to dwell on pain and wallow in self-pity.  Those are
attempts to make sadness something other than what it is – part of a story of how
we really do deserve something better, or a story about how sadness is more noble
and exalted than happiness.  Sadness is painful.  It is not better than happiness. 
Both are perfect.
 
 

     6.
 
 
 

        Psalm 150 teaches that kol haneshama tehallel yah.  This may mean one of
two things.  Either it means that “every soul shall praise Yah” or it means that “the
whole soul shall praise Yah.” 

        Both sides of this teaching are valuable. Every person has the opportunity
to make his or her life an inchoate praise of the One.  And the whole soul; all of it.
So there is no part of any soul that does not, as it is and with what we perceive it
to be its flaws, praise God.

        Part of the God-process within each individual is the propensity to believe
that the self has needs and wants, and to try to advance those wants.  In this, the
self is going to be disappointed, though it may succeed to some degree too.  The
critical point is that however much we do or do not succeed in meeting what we
think are the self’s needs, this success is not equivalent with how much we are
praising God.  (If the self’s advancement comes at the price of causing suffering,
it may even be diametrically opposed.)  We can also praise God from our tears –
and to do so, in the Jewish tradition, is the most sincere form of prayer.

        Sadness is not an expression of the heart to be discarded in favor of those
which are better.  To believe that everything happens as it must is not to be
fatalistic and cowed; it is not to believe everything happens for the best; it is to
understand that sadness is part of the unfolding of the God Process.  Praise God
with it.  Even that which is not, apparently, for our best may be turned to an
instrument of praise.  Not by denying its painfulness, but by deeply seeing this
soul, in this body, at this moment, as manifesting the unfolding of the One.  The
pain is real, and it is God.