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

doing nothing, we experience the nothingness beyond all forms, that charged state beyond definition or utterance which gives meaning to our activities.

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.

Shabbat imposes the same structure onto the larger arc of our life, so that we understand that we participate in it, both in the moment-by-moment rising up and falling away of our lives with each breath, and in the fact that we ourselves will fall away one day. We were born and we will die, and this is the natural order of things and not something

if Judaism is going to survive in this country, it will be because it will have succeeded in retrieving this sense of itself as a practice—not as an ethnicity, not as an occasional church—but as a set of intentional and disciplined gestures that have the effect of transforming us, of deepening our relationship to the sacred.

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

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.

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.

The prayer service uses language, but it describes an essentially nonverbal event, an exchange of pure energy.

we need to establish a countervailing inertia of equal force,