Kabbalat Shabbat Kavannah | Rabbi Rebecca Weintraub | October 31, 2025

Shabbat Shalom to everyone.

That's nice.

Don't be afraid of your voices. It's beautiful. We want to hear it.

We want to hear it.

We want to sing together.

Want to pray together.

There's a concept that I was introduced to

in, a mindfulness class that I took.

It was called mindfulness, birthing and parenting.

It was my introduction to mindfulness.

And, the book was based off

of a partner of an student of John Kabat-Zinn,

who has another book that is called Wherever You Go.

There you are.

And this concept, I often think about this idea,

very much so in this sense of often we try to run away,

and then we just find out that we're still there.

We're still in our own minds.

We're still the person that we may be.

We're trying to change things, but just by picking up and going or moving

someplace or trying to change the clothing we wear,

or potentially even the environments that we're in, that part of this practice

or this mindfulness practice, is that we also need to learn to sit

and be in the present and be open to who we are.

And we're at partial.

And I was thinking about these words

of last lecture, which are translated in many different ways.

Abraham, it's the first time that we meet him, has this encounter with God.

And God says, go, go forward, go to yourself

is one of the mystical and Hasidic readings of this idea.

What is this idea of?

And I was thinking about it in particular.

It opens the opening of the past as Bill

Maher tonight of Abraham Lama says, go May Arts.

Sarah, we know that that's how we beat every art a share.

Our he says to him, go from this land

in which you know so well, from the place where you were born,

from the house of your father, to a place to a land that I'm going to show you,

and there you're going to have all of these blessings.

I will bless you.

And I was thinking of this idea of

Abraham

going and then just being Abraham himself.

But that's not the case here.

And there is a beautiful teaching, and there are many kind of that

come together in this idea.

But many of the teachers and again, in the Hasidic,

dynasties have gone through this and kind of said,

what is this list that we're getting that Abraham is coming away from?

And it says, from your land, from your will.

And they say, Eretz in Hebrew or sown are connected.

The word for will in Hebrew is retz01.

Eretz is land.

So go away from this place of your will or your wants,

your desires, from your birth place, from your emotional and behavioral self.

A place in which we were a product of just a person's environment.

The ways in which we've been experience.

Almost this idea I was thinking of like, wherever you go, there you are.

But separate a little bit from what has been.

And then finally it says from your father's house, the house of your father,

from your intellect.

And in this idea in Kabbalah, there's a sense of the intellect

is referring to that father or that parent that's within us.

And this idea of the authority

over our feelings and our behaviors and our patterns.

And I was thinking about this as a moment of saying,

what is so radical about this in so many ways where you say, okay,

Abraham just listens to this God that hasn't existed or hasn't

been in relationship with anyone yet before, at least to our understanding.

But there's also this sense of

this is what Judaism is all about.

It's not, let's go and be

wherever you are, there you there, wherever you go, there you are.

But it's actually the opposite of this, where it's saying

God is coming and saying, I'm going to be a partner with you.

And part of this journey that we're going to go on together,

part of what we're going to do is that you don't always have to be the same person.

Actually, you shouldn't be.

That's what religion is about.

That's what this relationship is all about.

That is what I'm going to unfold with you and in partnership with you is to say

you have potential to be this or that.

This is your calling in the world.

But how do we uncover that?

How do we not just simply leaving all of these things all the time,

but turning toward the meets vote, the commandments that we have,

and in particular, thinking about the gift of Shabbat every single week,

which comes once again to say, who do we want to be?

Who are we meant to be in the world individually, as a people, as a humanity?

What is it the world that we're trying to build?

And in this partnership, and in this beauty of this moment of last,

it's a question of saying you're not on this journey alone.

You will never be on this journey alone, and you will also never

be the same person.

If you're open to really experiencing this and really separating

from all of the buzz that might be around you, all of that past that has made you

who you are, and we're not going to leave that so quickly.

We're not trying to leave all of that, but that this is also another way

in which we're going to engage with the world.

And we're going to live in the world.

And so my hope is that as we go into this Shabbat of last year,

that it's a moment and it's a reminder of not the journey

in which we're just kind of

going from place to place with our eyes closed, but staying the same person.

But going back just a few weeks ago to this journey that we started

and opened up

on the Yemeni dream, during these high holy days in which we were reaching

and striving and continuing that journey and saying, we're moving.

We're moving together.

We're moving in partnership with God, with each other, with all of the pieces

of this beautiful and spectacular and challenging religion that we have,

which is telling us, go, go forward to be yourself.

But it's not going to be that same self in which you started this journey

if you're doing it and you're doing it seriously.

And so I hope for us, we're blessed with the bravery and with the openness

to be able to crack ourselves a little bit and to reach a little higher,

to reach those places.

And ultimately, like Abraham, be blessed in all that we do.

Shabbat shalom.