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

we come not so much to understand life, but to feel its supernal depths, to feel the profound meaning and mystery that inform it.

What we call suffering is often just the differential between how life really is and how we wish it to be. A

The nuts and bolts of Kabalistic practice are never found in these texts. These practices were rarely reduced to writing; rather they were handed down person to person by an unbroken chain of teachers. One of the overlooked consequences of the Holocaust is that this chain was largely broken.

Pretty perhaps, but not beautiful, not perfect. Only the truth is beautiful. Only the truth is perfect, and the truth is almost always frightening. The truth can never be explained nor controlled, and we often enter it through the gateway of our suffering, a portal of fire we are disinclined to enter.

Pain is often the differential between how we want things to be and how they actually are. Pushing pain away indicates that we wish it were somehow otherwise. Turning toward it, being with it, on the other hand, releases us from the pain of

Suddenly I realized that when you truly entered the great stream of spiritual consciousness from which the Jewish people had been addressing God for the past several thousand years, time ceased to flow in only one way. Every point in that stream was connected to every other point and partook of it.

we need to establish a countervailing inertia of equal force,

Many of us are driven to lives of ceaseless activity by a deep fear of stillness and the intimation of the great stillness at the end of life it carries with it. Shabbat enables us to befriend this stillness, to see that it doesn’t threaten us after all, but is simply part of the natural rhythm of our lives.

“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.