This episode of our podcast features a teaching and meditation by Rabbi Joshua Boettiger, Jewish Chaplain at Bard College and Rosh Yeshiva at the Center for Contemporary Mussar, where he teaches text, theology, and Jewish approaches to mindfulness and service. It's based on the novelist Marilynne Robinson's observations about the corrosive effects of cynicism on our society. Rabbi Joshua invites us to understand mindfulness meditation practice as taking a stance against or transforming cynicism. Cynicism begins with pain and calcifies around that pain, so we don't have to feel it; meditation is a sensitizing act which reminds us to feel. Cynicism keeps us stuck in a closed narrative; meditation is an act of imagination, opening us to possibility. Marilynne Robinson writes that "[e]very moment is a question being posed to you by God." Rabbi Joshua encourages us to stay open to possibility, to cultivate curiosity, to listen for the question being posed to us by God in each moment.