Have a Java to increase your Kavvanah!
Am I serious or facetious? Well, half and half (pun intended.) On the serious side, I can tell you that coffee is noteworthy aspect of Hassidic life, and that contrary to what some dour types might prefer, it is almost always drunk before Morning Prayers. I have a little story to tell which will lead me to pontificate about some of my favorite topics. Who was the Baal Shem Tov? Did he found a Hassidic Movement? Is there really such a thing as a Hassidic Movement? These are questions of a historical and social nature not connected to meditation, but here is as good a place to put my soap box as any.
In case you are wondering: How can I doubt that there is such a thing as a Hassidic movement? Look at all those Hassididm, doing their distinctively Hassidic things. Aren’t they a specific movement within Judaism? Well….no they aren’t. For one thing they have no central governing body. Hassidim break down into a kaleidoscopic array of groups. Some Hassidim don’t belong to any group with any consistency. My father considered himself a “Hassidic Jew.” Which ever Rebbe happened to be in the neighborhood was good enough for him. There is only one group which self consciously claims to be a Hassidic Movement, and that is Chabad. But the existence of one movement within the total collective of Hassidic communities does not mean that Hassidism as a whole is a movement.
“Movements” are distinctive, but not every distinction makes a movement. Let me offer you an example. I live in Ashkelon , where 90 percent of the Torah observant Jews are Sephardic. There are a few religious Zionists, a tiny smattering of Haredim and us. Oh…who are we? We are the Anglos. We have special English Torah classes in a style quite different from any other Torah classes around. Other people often find our style of Torah learning strange, boring, too challenging or just unpleasant. We pray differently, talk differently and celebrate in our own way. I ask you: are we an Anglo Movement? Of course not! We are just being ourselves. Our practices are natural to us and reflect our history. We are a small but vibrant part of the culture of our town, but we don’t mean anything by it. Now let’s say that over time our children and students proliferate, so now the Anglo Torah learning, praying and social style spreads out across the land. Anglo communities proliferate morphing significantly as they grow. At some point we encounter the Anglos of Ashkelon. Beer Sheva, Kiryat Gat and Rehovot. The groups are similar, but they also argue with each other on many points. Once again, I ask: Have the Anglos become a movement, or are they still just doing what comes naturally? I reply: There is no Anglo movement. There is an Anglo style of Jewish practice manifested by various communities in diverse places. Anglo Judaism is part of the spectrum of Jewish observance, nothing more. We don’t need to make a point of convincing people to become Anglos. You will join us if it is right for you. In my understanding, that is exactly what Hassidic communities are like. There is a “Path of the Baal Shem Tov” and many diverse communities which offer “spins” on that path, but no Hassidic Movement.
But let me drop the big picture and get back to the yummy brew I love. As I said, I have a little story to tell, and here it is. One of my first exposures to real Kavvanah was when the previous Skulener Rebbe, R. Eliezer Zusia Portugal ZT”L would come to Miami Beach Miami Beach Miami Beach New York winters, arrive in Miami Beach and rent some low cost cottage or apartment way down in the dregs of South Beach
I got to pray with the Rebbe, sit with him at Shabbat meals, hear him sing and watch him dance. His intentions and concentration amazed me, and I could not be around him without catching his fire or coming to tears. He could raise his hands, intone a word and sway a certain way, and everyone there would be overcome with an intense sense of holiness. I still believe you would need a heart of stone not to be effected. From my teachers in the yeshiva (which was also located in Miami Beach
At the end of Psalm 27 there is a verse that says :”Kavve el Hashem” (Put your hope in Hashem) “hazak veametz libecha” (strengthen and fortify your heart) “Vekavveh el Hashem” (and put your hope in Hashem!) There is an obvious question. Why does the verse repeat the phrase “Kavveh el Hashem” twice. The answer, rather humorously given, is that the first “Kavveh” refers to liquid kavve (i.e. coffee.) That kavve strengthens your heart so you can pray and place your hope in Hashem (the spiritual Kavveh.)
The Rebbe’s Gabbai was asking the congregants if they wanted some coffee before prayer. I asked the Gabbai if it was really acceptable to drink something before prayers, since the plain sense of the Halacha is that you should not gratify one’self before praying. The Gabbai replied “This coffee is different, you drink it in order to be able to pray with Kavvanah”
“But” I kept on “The milk and sugar makes it quite delicious!”
“You are right. The Mishne Berurah says it is best to drink coffee without milk and sugar. But we think black coffee is just undrinkable. So we put sugar and milk. The point is that we drink this to be able to pray the right way, so it doesn’t pose a problem to prayer. So, will you have a Kavvae with your Kavveh?”
I did. Eventually I discovered that coffee with sugar and milk is just as likely to put me to sleep as wake me up, so I adopted a slightly more stringent practice. I add a small amount of milk, just enough to cut the bitterness. I do not add sugar. And that is the way I have been taking my pre-prayer coffee ever since.
We all know what coffee does. It gives a gentle buzz of wakefulness and focus. What might be surprising is the intentional use of coffee in awakening a state of Kavanah. Wouldn’t it be better if we generated wakefulness without the use of substances? Apparently not. The Hassidim stress the concept of uplifting sparks. This implies that there are latent forms of holiness in material things, which are released when material things are used to serve Hashem. It doesn’t matter that a substance is changing your brain chemistry. The altered state of awareness is a spiritual reality wrapped up in physical being and imprinted in its chemical structure. It exists in a physical substance because every physical object is part of G-d’s kingdom. It contains a lesson or a vision which becomes real through taking the substance. A state of awareness can be good, if it lifts you towards the light of truth. A state of awareness can be bad for you if it takes you down into unbalanced lust, passion, thoughtlessness or egotism. Some substances are helpful, while some are destructive and many are neutral. They react to the person. All substance use for spiritual goals has to determined by that purpose and take place in the company of Tzaddikkim and Torah scholars. Otherwise, watch out!
Since the beginning of history, the sacred substance most associated with Judaism was wine. I’m being perfectly honest when I say that our tradition explicitly sanctions the use of wine not just for ritual purposes, but as an aid to generating joy in the Divine service. (See Orhot Tzaddikim on Simha) Our tradition assumes that an enlightened person knows how to do this without lapsing into drunkenness. People who don’t have spiritual sense are not encouraged to drink alcohol. Just as an anecdote, I have gotten drunk with Chassidim and celebrated many times and tasted wonderful joy in drawing close to Hashem. When Becky and I moved to Ashkelon , I was invited to a bar mitzvah celebration of some people who were observant, but not Torah scholars. As is customary, as the celebration got going they passed around the hard liquor, drank “lehaim” endlessly and began to get rowdy. Thoughts of Torah and Mizvot went out the window. Laughter and off colored jokes flew around. I was deeply disappointed. I told the father of the Bar-Mitzva boy “You people don’t know how to drink!” the father replied: “Look at you! You have barely finished a single shot!” I left shortly thereafter, chastened with the knowledge that alcohol means different things to different people. I must mention that alcoholism is a real problem too. There are people who should never drink alcohol under any circumstances, and Hashem will certainly give them all the same spiritual heights in the merit of abstinence and humility.
Having said all that, I think it is fairly obvious that our tradition does have a certain shamanic element to it, in the sense that some substances are considered to be imbued with certain spiritual capacities which can be utilized for enhancing the divine service. In our tradition Wine is the original, and interestingly, aside from alcohol no other useful substances are noted until the early modern period. Whatever mind bending stuff was out there in antiquity, Jews didn’t do it. During the early modern period two new substances entered European society, one directly from the New World, and the other from Yemen through the expansion of the Ottoman Empire . They are tobacco and coffee. The fact that these substances were becoming available at that time was taken as an indication that the moment had come for certain sparks to be uplifted that could not have been uplifted prior to them. It was considered a very auspicious time in history.
The Baal Shem Tov was extremely taken with Tobacco, and is reputed once to have exclaimed to a baffled Rabbinic Tribunal “Let me show you the New Heaven and New Earth I create by smoking my pipe!” The question of what the Baal Shem Tov put in that pipe is often raised. It is always understood that it was plain, perhaps very strong, tobacco. In the new world, tobacco was apart of Native American shamanism and vision quests for ages. A substance doesn’t have to be hallucinogenic to convey new levels of awareness. Tobacco may have opened the Baal Shem Tov’s mind in some way, but his visions were the result of his meditations. Currently, with the awareness of Tobacco’s addictive power and negative health impact, Hassidic communities are struggling to root out tobacco use.
Coffee came originally to the Arabian peninsula from Ethiopia
I don’t know of any Baal Shem Tov stories involving coffee, but I think the Skulener Rebbe’s Gabbai gives ample testimony enough to the intentional use of coffee in the divine service. If you take the three substances together (coffee, wine, and tobacco) they seem to form a triad of important states of awareness: Concentration, Ecstasy and Vision. However, over time, tobacco turned out to be a dead end. It is much too bad for you. Wine (or alcohol) is problematic in an age when not many people seem to have much spiritual sense, and easily fall into addiction or wantonness. Currently I think that all the Hassidic groups are de-emphasizing or discouraging the use of alcohol. Coffee persists, and every Kabbalah yeshiva I know has a coffee station (or at the very least tea pot.) The sight of a person meditating on a Kabbalah text, coffee cup in hand, is commonplace.
I love coffee. I think I have made that clear enough. I think it can be said that I take it in a shamanic way. And please don’t misunderstand. I don’t have conversations with the coffee bean spirit. This is important to me because I struggle with the issue of the relationship between brain chemistry and spiritual experience. You can’t invalidate a spiritual state awareness because it emerges out of a physical phenomenon or a chemical structure. Spirituality is imprinted on material structures. That gives any particular physical substance its “segulah” or natural spiritual property. I take my coffee with the understanding that has a state of awareness imprinted on its makeup, which becomes lived awareness when I drink it, and which leads me to the creator, Hashem, King of Kings. Coffee conveys the taste of concentration and focus. Baruch Hashem that we live in a world with this substance in it! As long as I am on this topic, I may as well tell you that I also drink wine also in some contexts, but that is a different (though not unrelated) story.
Now let me move back to the big historical picture. Hassidic coffee drinking suggests a connection to Sufism. For certain, they invented coffee drinking for spiritual purposes. Many Torah observant Jews get upset if you point out any similarities between Jewish practices and those of other people. I don’t have a problem with that. I think there are some undeniable parallels between what Hassidim do and what Sufis do. However, I do not mean to imply that Hassidic practices are taken over wholesale from Sufi practices. Parallels are not necessarily the result of direct imitation. They may result simply from the fact that in each part of the world, spiritual activities take forms that are natural to that place. The Land of Israel and the Middle East is our natural place. We were there long before Sufism and Islam and we undoubtedly exerted out own influence of the religious development of those and other traditions. (By the way, Rabbi Avraham son of the Rambam admired Sufis and explicitly made the claim they learned their practices from Jews.) Whatever you make of the similarities, there are great contrasts as well, which show that our tradition did not take up practices just because the neighbors were doing them. For instance, Sufi whirling is something that Jews don’t do.
(If you want to compare Hassidic and Sufi styles of dancing, singing and dress here a some You Tube links you can follow)
Hassidim
Sufis
The parallels and contrasts deserve to be explored in a much longer work, so I will stick to one similarity which you can see for yourself. Sufi dancing is reminiscent of Hassidic dancing, often comprising a group of worshippers and disciples standing in a tight circle, swaying and chanting while the spiritual master moves about in the center. The master is likely to wear a robe and a turban, the latter consisting of a cap around which a length of cloth is wrapped. While the material and colors are different, Hassidic clothing and head-gear seems to me to bear the same general form. A shtriemal looks to me like a turban adapted for European climates and sensibilities. Once again, my point is not to equate Jewish practice and Sufism, rather my general thesis is that much of what we think of as Hassidic practices are simply long standing traditional Jewish practices coming naturally from the Middle East and the Ottoman Empire . This style of Judaism is more ecstatic and more strongly flavored with Kabbalah than the European Ashkenazi practice which originated in Germany and which later moved into Poland and Lithuania
During the renaissance the Ottoman Empire extended over the southern Ukraine
I maintain that in their Middle Eastern tradition Torah and Mitzvot were more a practice of transforming consciousness and cleaving experientially to Hashem than in the more objectivist European Ashkenaz tradition. Torah study was not valued as information to be accumulated but rather as a way of encountering the Divine. Self nullification was more valued than self mastery. In particular the Middle Eastern tradition saw European style clothes, and especially pants, as immodest and decadent, even for men. In the Middle Eastern tradition men wore tunics and robes that did not know the shape of the legs. In the older version of the Hassidic Dress, the caftan was not worn as an overcoat over pants but as a robe over long underwear. The Hassidic style of dress, (long caftan and distinctive hats) does not, in my opinion, serve to differentiate Jews from Non-Jews, but modest and chaste Middle Easterners from decadent Europeans.
As it turns out, the Baal Shem Tov practiced standard Judaism for his part of the world. If there was anything out of the ordinary in his teachings, it was in his ability to explain the more opaque aspects of the Zohar and Lurianic Kabbalah in terms that made sense in lived experience. As I see it, this does not qualify as a revolution. It is a natural growth out of the older Kabalistic tradition which simply makes it more accessible. Everybody in that social context accepted and embraced Kabbalah, though not that many may have personally understood it or experienced it. The Baal Shem Tov’s genius was in his expository method which helped explain at least some Kabbalah to everybody. In his day to day life the Baal Shem Tov was the official Kabbalist and healing practitioner of his city, which was not, as many think, some obscure backwater town far from the eyes of the Rabbinic establishment. Recently discovered documentation bears this out. In the official records of Mydzhibozh, it is noted that the Baal Shem Tov lived a house belonging to the Jewish community, that he was a public servant, and that his job title was "Doctor" or "Kabbalist"! The Baal Shem Tov functioned as a full member of the rabbinic establishment. He was not a fringe phenomenon. He helped everyone draw close to Hashem, the advanced scholar in one way, and the simple worker, shop keeper, merchant or artisan in another. Kabbalah was the official theology of that community, this helped make the community stronger and more committed to Torah.
I believe that eventually, as Middle Eastern traditions expanded they came into confrontation with European Ashkenaz traditions and attitudes. Some people criticized Hassidim for making innovations. My suspicion is that such criticism was misplaced. It was not a matter of someone overturning a previous community precedent, but of an encounter between traditions which originally came from very different places. Hassidim did not see them selves as innovators or revolutionaries. Quite the opposite, they saw themselves (and continue to see themselves today) as defenders of authentic old time traditions! However, some Hassidim did tacitly accept the terms that were use against them. They accepted the idea that they were changing something. They had to ask themselves “Why are we justified in changing the status quo?” or “What were we striving for?” Hence the awareness arose amongst some Hassidim that they were justified in making changes because they were part of a new movement, founded by the Baal Shem Tov and tasked with the accomplishment of some great mission. This sense of being a movement with a mission seems to have coalesced around the Chabad dynasty. The great mission, of course, could not have been anything other than bringing the Mashiah! What other mission could there be?! Hence, I think that both the belief that Hassidism is a "movement" as well as Chabad Messianism arises out of the same historical process.
There, I said it. Chassidism is not a movement. I believe it is the perpetuation of profound ecstatic Jewish traditions, originating in the fertile earth of the land of Israel , spreading through the Ottoman Empire and into Europe , morphing as it goes, but everywhere teaching a path to oneness with Hashem. It is currently distinct from Sephardic practice (which has been more influenced by the Rashash’ Kabbalah than by the Baal Shem Tov’s) although Moroccan Jews seem to have grown from the same tradition as Hassidim. There is a great affinity between Moroccan Jewish thought and practice and Hassidic ones. They share the same ideas about theology and Kabbalah. My Rebbe told me that the famous Abu Hazerah clan study Kabbalah primarily according to Chabad and Breslov interpretations. Baba Sali was known to have great reverence for the Baal Shem Tov. Hassidim, in turn, tell the story about how a Moroccan Sage, Rabbi Hayyim ben Attar traveled to the land of Israel Land of Israel Land of Israel
So, do we need to talk about the coffee meditation? Just get a cup of brew. Then say the blessing over it. Taste the concentration in your mind. Remember that this coffee is imprinted with the chemical signature of a spiritual reality. Acknowledge how in the complexity of creation, materiality is spirituality. Your soul becomes embodied so it can discover the uniqueness of its own vision of the light of truth. Your body is etched with this vision of your soul in its physical form and chemical processes. When you concentrate your awareness you let it burst out of those material forms, like the taste of coffee, which is just a chemical form, but which bursts forth from that form as you taste it, enjoy it and understand it. When you focus yourself it feels like you are contracting (like the tight taste you get from coffee) but if you take that far enough, your contraction becomes reversed into an expansion. The secret meanings of your chemical processes shine outward like an explosion of awareness. Use this awareness to reach for the King and to transport yourself to the divine presence. Use it to try and understand a Torah text. Leave yourself a few gulps of coffee at the end. These you will drink quickly, so you may be certain that you can recite the final blessing. Give thanks for your experience and praise your creator!
