Breathing out, we let go of the world we have imagined. Breathing in, the life we actually inhabit begins to emerge, to take shape.

We can’t help erecting houses, and the houses will inevitably fall down. As long as we struggle to keep the houses erect, we will suffer.

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.

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.

when I assumed the lotus position to meditate every day, Abraham also crossed his legs. But only to the degree that I was in the stream; only to the degree that I had given myself to Jewish spiritual consciousness; only to the degree that I practiced it every day and thus became part of it; only to the degree that its koans became my koans. On the

Pachad refers to projected or imagined fear. According to Rebbe Nachman, suffering is the state of being afraid of something that we don’t have to be afraid of. This

we need to establish a countervailing inertia of equal force,

The felt sharing of another human presence encourages us to imagine that our awareness is not really ours after all, but rather something we share, a part of a larger awareness that will continue beyond us whether or not we endure as separate selves. It is the prison of our individuality that the presence of another frees us from.

Both the Temple and the Tabernacle were elaborate structures, a complex mass of stuff arranged in intricate concentric patterning around a charged emptiness at the center. The Holy of Holies, the sacred space at the center of the sanctuary, was essentially a vacated space, a place no one could ever enter except the high priest, and even he for only