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

There are two Hebrew words for fear—pachad and norah—and although these words are often used interchangeably, they roughly correspond to two very different spiritual states.

real spiritual practice is not about pyrotechnics, but about the grinding dailiness of our lives—the

from beginning to end, and especially at its center, the Torah continuously expresses this formal pattern, an elaborate structure, carefully centered around both the infinite and the impermanent, around God and death, around change and that which is beyond change; in short, around the great flow of being that is God’s very name. 2.

The implication of this linguistic oddity is that God is the only thing that can be absolutely present, and if we think about it for a moment we see that this implication is entirely correct. We ourselves can never be absolutely present.

All of this reflects the infinite, multivalent will of God, a will that emerges as a single and indivisible impulse out of an apparent chaos of volition.

The great rush of words (I don’t mind that we pray as quickly as we do) works as a kind of antilanguage. It wipes my mind clean of language and conceptual thought.

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

what is really essential in spiritual work is the daily, disciplined practice of spirituality—not the highs we might experience at a weekend retreat or a workshop or a hike at Yosemite, but the essential work of connecting ourselves

God is never encountered in either convention or habit. God is encountered in reality, precisely the ground of being—the present-moment reality that convention and habit obscure.