Expand Your World on the Inside

Let It Be Interrupted from the Outside

Rosh Hashanah, Second Day — Congregation Shearith Israel, Atlanta

We do not perceive the whole world

Every creature on earth lives inside a world of its own making. Biologists call it an umwelt, a German word for our perceptual world — the narrow band of reality each creature is built to sense.

A moth, a whale, and a human being can occupy the same patch of earth and never touch the same reality, because what each perceives comes from their senses, not from the world itself.

A whale's umwelt is shaped by sound in ways we can only imagine. She swims through water so dark that eyes are useless, and her clicks go out and come back with an image no eye could see — miles of ocean floor, canyons, ridges, valleys beneath and before her. To what can we compare that?

More familiar to many of us, a dog's umwelt orbits around smell. He stops at a bush and reads who was here, how long ago, in which direction they went. He is called to follow footsteps invisible to us.

There are whole senses we do not possess. Magnetoreception. Infrared detection. Ultraviolet vision. As the naturalist Henry Beston writes, animals are "other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendour and travail of the earth." Our senses take a flood of raw signal and hand us a small, usable slice of it. Everything else is sorted out before we ever know it arrived. And we do not all receive the same. Some of us navigate without sight, or without hearing, or with a nervous system that takes in the world at a different volume.

Which means every one of us is receiving a partial world. But of course it does not feel partial. It is the only reality that arrives through our senses.

For humans, something narrows this further: our cultural umwelt. The world we are raised in and the stories we inherit shape our perception without us noticing, teaching us what to pay attention to and what to walk past. Sociologists call this habitus, and it is different from a worldview. A worldview is the set of things you believe. A cultural umwelt is what reaches you at the level of intake. A worldview is what you say about something you noticed. A cultural umwelt decides what you notice.

Which means that even before we disagree about something, we may not be receiving the same information. A tone underneath a sentence. A look between two people. Each one of us is moving within our own world.

Judaism trains us to perceive beyond our inherited world

But Judaism does not tell us that the world we inherited is the world we are destined to remain inside. Jewish practice trains new receptors. It teaches us to notice what we once overlooked, until what was invisible becomes impossible not to see.

Shabbat is an instrument for perceiving time — not time as a resource to be spent, but time as a place you can stand still inside of. A bracha is an instrument for tasting the fruit in your hand instead of eating it while you think about tomorrow. The shofar is an instrument for calling your attention to what is yet unfinished.

Sefer HaChinuch states the principle in four words: אַחֲרֵי הַפְּעֻלּוֹת נִמְשָׁכִים הַלְּבָבוֹת. Hearts are drawn after actions. You do not just believe your way into a set world. You act your way into one, over and over, and the world you enact echoes back to shape you. Which means a mitzvah is not only an instruction about how to behave. It is an organ of perception. And like any organ, we grow its capacity through use.

Rambam writes in Hilchot De'ot that a person is drawn after their companions and acts according to the custom of the people of their city — and that if you find yourself in a place whose customs are corrupt, you go and live somewhere else. And if you cannot, you go and live in the wilderness. Because the world does not simply tell us what to value. It shapes what we are capable of seeing — and if we never interrupt those habits, we can lose the choice to see differently.

This morning we read about a man who loved his son and brought him up a mountain to kill him. Our tradition never once suggests that Abraham loved Isaac any less than we love our own children. A midrash tells us that Abraham saddled his own donkey that morning instead of a servant. Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai says this is because: אַהֲבָה מְקַלְקֶלֶת אֶת הַשּׁוּרָה. Love disrupts the natural order.

So this is not a story about a cold man. The sages describe a man on fire with joy. He rises early. He saddles the animal himself. He splits the wood with his own hands. A person moving with intention toward something he believes. Loving, devoted, certain that he is doing what God has asked.

The Torah tells us twice that Abraham lifted up his eyes. The first time he sees the mountain from far off. The second time, with the knife in his hand and the angel shouting, he lifts his eyes and sees a ram.

Generations later, Jeremiah says out loud what the Torah leaves in question. Speaking of the people who burned their children in the valley, God says אֲשֶׁר לֹא צִוִּיתִי וְלֹא דִבַּרְתִּי וְלֹא עָלְתָה עַל לִבִּי. Which I did not command, and did not speak of, and which never came up upon my heart. The practice of child sacrifice did not come from heaven. It came from the world our ancestors stood in, where giving a child to your god was what devotion looked like.

So what interrupts Abraham? According to the story, the angel. Abraham, Abraham. And Abraham says הִנֵּנִי — hineni. Here I am. Three times Abraham says hineni: to God, to his son, and to the angel. But to Isaac he adds something — hineni v'ni: here I am, my son.

Isaac exists in Abraham's eyes in relation to Abraham, not by his own name. The rabbis read tenderness in v'ni, my son — and of course there is tenderness there. But it is a tenderness that keeps Isaac inside Abraham's story. It is love that does not make room for another person to be a world of his own. The rabbis say that the ram was created at twilight on the sixth day of creation and had been standing in the thicket the entire time. So what made Abraham capable of seeing it?

Each hineni brought him closer.

I don't know if it is possible to read this story and not wish that Isaac's call — avi, my father — had been enough. But the angel's shout shows us the power and the necessity of interruption. And Abraham teaches us what it looks like to be aflame with conviction and still be reachable.

To become reachable, we first have to become aware of ourselves

There is no relationship in which I try harder to be reachable than with my own children, and that is part of what makes reading the Akedah so painful. I have seven- and six-year-old daughters and a five-month-old son. Every day I hear Lyla and Oriah's stories about school, their new favorite songs, and I listen in for the joys and the pains left unsaid. I hear Ezra cry and feel my chest tighten with a mother's question: should I go and comfort him, or give him space to learn? Responding to what my kids are actually experiencing — not what I would be experiencing in their place, or what I experienced at their age — is a daunting task. And struggling to reach across that gap is not a failure of love, although it can feel like one.

Judaism affirms that these gaps are real. There is a rare blessing said upon seeing a vast crowd, in which we bless God as חֲכַם הָרָזִים, Knower of Secrets. Because God sees a whole nation whose minds are unlike one another and whose faces are unlike one another, and God knows what is in each of their hearts. We bless the One who perceives us in the fullness of our internality — and by doing so, we acknowledge that none of us have this power.

We cannot close the gap. We can only make ourselves reachable from the other side of it. But first, we have to be able to locate ourselves.

Let's do a quick experiment: Close your eyes, take a breath, and slowly, with your eyes closed, bring your finger to your nose. Open your eyes. Did you miss? Did you have to feel around for your own face?

There is a sense that directs this, and most of us were never taught its name: proprioception — the sense of where your body is in space. Aristotle's five senses are wildly out of date. Neuroscientists argue we have closer to twenty or thirty distinct senses.

Another of them — interoception — reports your own bodily state: hunger, fatigue, dread.

Both of these senses are activated on the Yamim Nora'im. Fasting on Yom Kippur is a practice in interoception. We remove smell and taste, we dull the visual sense with plain white and no makeup, and we tune more acutely into feelings within our own bodies — perhaps a headache, perhaps hunger pangs. And when the cantor walks from the back of the sanctuary singing hineni, every one of us becomes more aware of where we are in space.

Rebbe Nachman of Bratslav taught that we must have great compassion for our own body, because the soul is perceiving constantly — it sees exalted things, all the time — and the body does not know. So the work is not acquiring more insight. It is clearing the body enough to receive what the soul already sees. The obstacle, he says, is the azut of the body. Its hardness. The density of habit the soul cannot get through.

And we come by this hardness honestly. We pursue purpose, and learn to treat our bodies as things to manage, improve, discipline, or sometimes escape from, rather than as holy places to inhabit. So how do you break a habit, soften the hardness? Nachman says you need a holy brazenness of your own. And one of the most forceful is the sound of the shofar. He quotes masechet Brachot: אֲנָחָה שׁוֹבֶרֶת גּוּפוֹ שֶׁל אָדָם. A groan breaks the body of a person.

Not a thought. Not a resolution. A sound, heard and felt in a body.

And when the hardness breaks, the body becomes צַח וְאוֹר — tzach v'or, clear and shining. And then the soul can come close and tell it what it has been seeing all along. Which means the sensory life of the body is not the obstacle to the spiritual life. It is the aperture.

From the book of Job: וּמִבְּשָׂרִי אֶחֱזֶה אֱלוֹהַּ. From my flesh I see God. Through the body, not despite it.

In my life I have practiced embodiment therapeutically, through somatic processing and learning to live with chronic pain. As an adult I have had to relearn how to notice what I actually feel, rather than numbing or narrating past it. At times I worried that turning my attention inward would make me more absorbed in my own experience — a kind of navel-gazing, while there is so much suffering and so much work to be done in the world. But the opposite is true. The more precisely I could feel myself, the more I could recognize how my feelings conversed with what was happening around me.

Today's rabbis who teach mindfulness call this hitlamdut — from the root ל־מ־ד, to learn, in the reflexive form. Making oneself a learner of oneself.

Teshuvah is becoming interruptible

And this is the key to practicing teshuvah. Because teshuvah is far more expansive than repairing harm after we have caused it. The holy days offer an intensive training in something we need all year long — becoming interruptible by another person's account of reality.

If you have ever practiced teshuvah and tried to make amends, you know that the hardest part is fully witnessing the other. Shame, or defensiveness, our own sense of injustice — so many pieces can get in our way. These powerful emotions blend into our senses, so that we receive a muddied sense of what is happening inside ourselves. When we lose access to ourselves, we lose access to one another, and we cannot see clearly.

For most of human history the people around you shared a world close to yours, and disagreements happened inside a common frame. Now each of us receives a world assembled for us alone, tuned by whatever keeps us hooked to the screen. And each of us concludes, honestly, that the other has stopped caring about something sacred. It is the whale and the dog, reporting on the same patch of ground.

But while our perceptions are partial, reality is not. And becoming attuned to your full spectrum of internal senses strengthens your capacity to know the fullest truth. There are facts. There are harms. There are reasonable and inflamed reactions. There are moral boundaries we do not cross. When you accept that your perception is partial, you can learn how to allow others to change you without losing anything. And the more conscious you are of the patterns and pulls of your internal sensory life, the clearer you are to receive divine guidance.

I tried for years to talk and think my way toward that distinction. But until I learned to feel this process in my body, I remained stuck. Because what you cannot feel inside, you will not notice outside. And only what you notice can interrupt you.

Saying Hineni with your senses

What, in practice, am I talking about?

Someone says something that challenges you. Before you respond, notice what happens in your body. A tightening. Maybe heat. The urge to turn away.

You stay with the feeling, for a breath.

Hineni. Here I am.

Here, with the senses in my body.

That is the beginning of teshuvah — not changing your mind, but making enough space to be changed. And we can practice this together as a community, pausing during our prayer, inviting awareness of our internal senses.

We cannot know the secrets of one another's hearts. But we can widen the world we perceive. We can recognize what we are carrying, and make room for what we cannot yet see.

This year, may we grow this capacity to feel, to experience the fullness of our physiological umwelt.

May we be reachable — by one another, and by heaven.

Abraham lifts his eyes and sees the ram that was there all along. The world did not change. His perception did.

May ours, too.

הֲשִׁיבֵנוּ ה' אֵלֶיךָ וְנָשׁוּבָה

Take us back to You, and we shall return. Shanah tovah.

Sources

Ed Yong, An Immense World · Henry Beston, The Outermost House (1928) · Pierre Bourdieu, on habitus · Sefer HaChinuch, mitzvah 16 · Rambam, Mishneh Torah, Hilchot De'ot 6:1 · Bereshit Rabbah 55:8 · Genesis 22 · Jeremiah 19:5 · Berakhot 58a · Likkutei MoHaRaN I 22:5 · Berakhot 58b · Job 19:26 · Lamentations 5:21