As children, we are born to a world of breath and pure sound. At first everyone responds to our breathing, and then to the noises we make, but as time goes on, and little by little, these sounds acquire form and become words and concepts. No one pays attention to the sounds we make anymore. We become so infatuated with, so attached to language,

The first letter of the Torah is the veit (V or B) of the word Breshit—“In the beginning.” The last letter of the Torah is the lamed (L) of the word Yisrael. The letters lamed veit spell the word lev, “heart” or “center.” So the beginning and the end of the Torah are quite literally its center.

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.

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.

like meditation, this encounter is always about transformation.

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.

This, I think, is the most significant moment of personal transformation we ever reach in our lives—the moment when we realize that the thing we can’t stand about ourselves is our divine name; the moment when we realize that the thing about ourselves we have been avoiding, the thing we hate to see, is the very thing that makes us unique, that gives

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.

if we persevere through this phase and continue observing Shabbat, we may eventually find that Shabbat has altered the deep structure of our consciousness, of our mind and soul; it has implanted the rhythm of the cosmos there—the alternation of stasis and motion, of activity and rest, of rising up and falling away.