What is Mindfulness?

Dear friends,

We have called our theme this year the Year of Mindful Return, in hopes that we will be able to together form the right frame of mind to rejoin the world after this strange pandemic time. While many of us have a sense of what mindfulness is, we are influenced in our thinking about by new-agey notions of this originally Buddhist term. I thought it is important to take a moment to look at what mindfulness is in the Buddhist tradition, so that we can then look for the similarities and differences with similar Jewish notions, and contemporary ideas. Luckily, my brother, Tari (Eviatar) is the incoming Chair of the Department of Religions at Hebrew University, and a scholar of Buddhist philosophy who has written and thought about mindfulness for a couple decades. We sat down in the kitchen of my temporary abode in Tel Aviv to study Nehemiah and talk mindfulness, and taped some of our conversation for you all.

Shabbat shalom,

Rabbi Misha