Be Still and Get Going: A Jewish Meditation Practice for Real Life

the meaning of this verse becomes that for six days God spoke the world into being, and on the seventh day, God stopped speaking and went back to breathing again, and all the forms that had come into being by virtue of God’s speaking were now perpetuated in their beingness by the natural flow of God’s breath.

Time flows in every direction in this great stream. Those who enter it do what those who were already there did, and those who were there from the beginning take on the practices of those who came after them.

Every language is also a theology. It is one of the peculiarities of the Hebrew language that there is no way of expressing the verb “to be” in the present tense, except for the name of God.

Shabbat is a sacred space, a time full of no-thing, no activity, no creative work. A time when according to the Torah we must shavat vayinafash—stop and re-ensoul ourselves, stop and breathe again, stop and allow ourselves to fill up with the great wind of the Ain Sof once more.

all these things—fullness, decline, destruction, renewal, tearing down, rebuilding—are actually part of the same process, points on a single continuum, consecutive segments of a never-ending circle.

Practicing in community keeps us going because we don’t want to let the other members of the community down. We feel that they need us, that we are indispensable to them, and this will keep us going for a long time.

If one is willing to relax one’s grip at such times and let one’s consciousness blur a little bit, intimations of God-light creep in through the screen of nature.

“And Jacob awoke from his dream.” And we find ourselves awaking from the dim, dull dream we have been occupying up till now, and we exclaim, as Jacob did, “Achen, yesh Adonai ba-makom hazeh v’anochi lo yadati”—“God was in this very place all along and I didn’t know it.” So it is in meditation.

This had been this woman’s secret: she had made everyone around her into wonderful people by her gift for appreciating them. Her capacity for gratitude had created a beautiful reality in her life. It had made ordinary people extraordinary; it had made the commonplace sacred. Her attitude had changed the nature of her life. This, I think, is the kin

Suffering is suffering. It can neither be controlled nor explained, but we can meet it with compassion, with presence.