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

like meditation, this encounter is always about transformation.

Yisrael—he continually struggles with God and with man, rails against his lot in life, tries to take that which is not his. Yet here we learn that he is this way because this is how God has made him. This is his uniqueness, the source of his power in the world, and this no doubt is precisely why he can’t stand this quality in himself.

Every day of our life, as we meditate, we engage in the exercise of inhabiting the house of God—of Yud-heh-vuv-heh, of being in the present tense, of absolute becoming, past, present, and future—until we have saturated the present moment of our life with consciousness. Then cosi revaiyah, this consciousness spills over from the act of meditation it

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.

Conversely, decline and destruction necessarily precede renewal; a tearing down is necessary before rebuilding is possible.

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.

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.

We spend a great deal of time and energy propping up our identity, an identity we realize at bottom is really a construct. So it is that we are always living at some distance from ourselves.

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.