like meditation, this encounter is always about transformation.

Yet something in us aspires to heaven, something in us is always reaching beyond the limits of our earthliness, and we only ignore this heavenward impulse at our peril.

We are not the first to connect these two lights—the primordial light of creation and the Hanukkah light. The rabbis of the Kabala, the Jewish mystical tradition, claimed that these lights were one and the same, that the light we contemplate on Hanukkah is in fact the Or Genuzah (literally, “the light that was stored away”), the primordial light of

The central imperative of Judaism, I believe, is to recognize and manifest the sacred in everything we do and encounter in the world.

according to the tradition, we really do have a destiny, but the question of whether or not we live out that destiny is in our own hands.

we need to establish a countervailing inertia of equal force,

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

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

I am frightened because, deep down, I feel responsible for saving the person who is ill, and of course I cannot. I cannot make them well nor save them from death, if that is where their illness seems to be taking them. So there at the threshold, I remind myself that I have not come to do anything at all, but simply to be with the person I am visiti