If you’re listening to this on the day of its release or the next few days, happy Chanukah. I hope you’re having a joyous and wonderful holiday. As you may have heard last week, I’m on vacation with my family, so we’re running two weeks of older episodes. I think they hold up pretty well, if I do say so myself. In this week’s episode, we talk about rage. I know, a little weird for a holiday episode, but actually to me, Chanukah is all about the mistakes we can make when our emotions control us.
Instead of us being mindful of our emotions. Have a listen and let me know what you think.
Welcome to Soulful Jewish Living, mindful practices for every day with me, Josh Fagelson. I’m grateful you’re here and I hope you benefit from our time together.
I want to talk about aggressive driving for a minute. I know, an unusual place to begin, but stay with me. Years ago, I lived in New York and I owned a car. Now, if you’ve ever driven in New York City, you know that it’s basically a contact sport. The term bumper-to-bumper traffic was kind of created to describe it. And that population density, people on top of people, cars on top of cars, can lead to some aggressive moments.
I remember once being cut off abruptly by someone who crossed in front of me exiting the Triborough Bridge into Manhattan. A friend of mine who was in the car introduced me to the term, assholing, to describe the behavior. Yes, this is a family show and I’m a rabbi, but that term is just too perfect not to mention. Even though I live in Chicago now, it’s not like driving has gotten any better. There’s still a lot of assholing out there. There’s a lot of aggressive driving. And people get angry with each other. Come on, buddy, go!
or use your freaking blinker next time. And I have to admit, I’m not only a victim, I’ve been a perpetrator too. Road rage is a real thing. And in the worst cases, it can result in confrontations, fights, and worse. Most often though, road rage doesn’t lead to direct confrontation. Instead, it just leads us to stew in our own anger.
When I found myself yelling at another driver, as soon as I have a minute to think or to breathe, I often then find myself wondering, who am I really yelling at? And what is this getting me other than feeling angry? As my friend and colleague Rabbi Mark Margolius likes to say, what an opportunity for mindfulness practice. Why am I talking about road rage? Well, I actually think Chanukah is a lot about road rage.
Yes, we did a Chanukah episode last week, and guess what? It’s an eight-day holiday, so we’re gonna do two. What do I mean? Last week we talked about the major symbol and ritual of Chanukah, the light of the menorah. But another important part of the Chanukah story lies in its historical roots, namely the military campaign by the Maccabees that overthrew the Seleucid rulers who governed the land of Israel. Program note.
You can get more of this history at Jewish History Nerds, one of our sister podcasts produced by Unpacked. We’ll put the episode link in the description. The campaign was bloody. It wasn’t just a war against the foreign rulers. It also really, ultimately, was a civil war targeting Jews who liked the cosmopolitan culture those foreign rulers had introduced. A lot of people were killed. To put it even more bluntly, a lot of Jews were killed by other Jews.
After the Maccabees were successful, they installed themselves as rulers of the Jews, and let’s just say they weren’t great. And their incompetence ultimately led to the Jewish people’s loss of self-determination in the Holy Land for 2,000 years. All of that is perhaps a reason why the rabbis of the Talmud really didn’t talk about that side of Chanukah very much. know, the every other holiday gets a lot of treatment from those rabbis. Shabbat, Passover, Yom Kippur, Sukkot,
But Hanukkah is nearly absent from the 2,711 pages of the Talmud. And I think that’s because they were worried about celebrating the rage of the Maccabees and their descendants. Now, the thing is that the flame that drove the Maccabees to be such fierce fighters is the same flame that can light up our minds. The flame lies within us. It lies within me.
and we can either let it burn and burn until it’s a raging fire or we can learn to control it and kindle it. We can use it as a source of great heat or we can tend it so that it’s a source of illumination. We can allow it to overtake us on the highway so that we yell at the asshole who just cut us off or we can use it to respond to other drivers in a wiser, more generous way.
Given that there’s a war going on, a war I bet everyone listening feels emotionally connected to, I also feel a need to clarify that I’m not arguing for pacifism here. Even soldiers, perhaps especially soldiers, need to be mindful about how they’re directing their inner flame, just like the rest of us. Even though I have a regular meditation practice, I get agitated on a regular basis.
whether it’s while I’m driving or when the dog eats something she shouldn’t, or if something just doesn’t go according to plan. My guess is you do too. That’s totally normal. We all experience things that bother us or even provoke our outrage. But as the great psychologist and Holocaust survivor, Viktor Frankl, taught, quote, between stimulus and response, there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response.
In our response lies our growth and our freedom. To me, that space is the space of the candle flame, the space of Hanukkah.
The truth is that all the practices we talk about on this show are in service of holding that space open in our minds and hearts so that we might choose mindful, wise responses over mindless, reactive ones. And having a regular practice definitely helps. But in the moment itself, here’s a very simple practice I find can help. Just breathe.
Take a good deep breath in.
and out.
in
in.
and out.
Medical science tells us that even with just three good breaths, our bodies begin to calm down from their heightened state of anxiety. If you can do it for a couple of minutes, even better. And if you can be aware of your breathing, I’m breathing in, I’m breathing out, that helps even more. And while you’re doing that breathing, you might visualize a flame in your heart. See if you can keep that flame going.
not extinguishing it, but guiding it so that it doesn’t become a raging bonfire. Let it be light that lets you glow with wisdom, with generosity, with compassion. Let it be a light that helps you choose a peaceful path, whether that’s a path in life or just the path off the exit on the highway.
Blessings for the journey. Know that I’m on it with you.
Thank you for joining us for Soulful Jewish Living, Mindful Practices for Every Day, a production of Unpacked, a division of Open Door Media, and the Institute for Jewish Spirituality. This episode was sponsored by Jonathan and Corey Kallifer and the Somerset Patriots, the Bridgewater, New Jersey-based, AA affiliate of the New York Yankees. If you like this show, subscribe, give us five stars, and write us a review on Apple podcasts. Check out Jewish Unpacked for everything unpacked-related and subscribe to our other podcasts.