A Primer for Jewish Meditation
Some Personal Reflections
Let me begin this essay by quoting Rabbi Alan Lew of Makor Or:
“I am largely indifferent to the argument as to whether or not there are precedents for meditation in Kabbalah. Certainly the Jewish mystical tradition includes a range of exercises for contemplative spiritual transformation. But the context and the actual practice of these exercises has largely been lost. I very much appreciate the honesty of teachers…who readily admit that they are not teaching a continuous, received tradition of Jewish mediation, but are, rather, inventing a new tradition of Jewish meditation out of a creative reworking of the raw materials of Jewish Mysticism. My own experience however, is that Jewish meditation is any kind of meditation, when done in a Jewish context, in the service of Jewish spiritual activity— in the Jewish morphic field, as it were...”
However, I am not indifferent to the question of the authenticity of Jewish Meditative practice as it is taught or performed today. When you get past my contemporary externals, I remain a Yeshiva student at heart, a first born child from a semi-Hassidic family. I had my issues with the lack of spiritual depth that I found orthodox and even Hassidic Judaism, where everything seemed to be focused on the correctness of one’s behavior, the level of one’s identification with the proper group, and most distressingly, on the proper look and mannerisms of a respectable Jew or Yeshiva student. To a large extent, questions about “what it all means” were discouraged, or worse, taken as an indication that one’s faith was lacking. While my family has strong ties to Hassidut, I was trained primarily in “Lithuanian style” Yeshivot. Many of my early teachers expected us to take the impossible Aggadot of the Talmud as literal facts, and urged us to see the study of Talmud, the clarification of the Halacha and the actions of normative Jewish practice as being completely adequate for perfecting the soul and achieving life in the world to come. I felt myself driven to ask the big questions which came to me simultaneously from the rationalism and scientism of the modern world as well as from the Mitzvot and Halachot themselves. So much Halacha deals with the seemingly trivial and uninspiring particulars of life, like the famous “egg laid on a festival” which is the subject of a voluminous literature. I would wonder “How far this seemed from the real concerns of religion and spirituality!” My teachers for the most part would reply using the Talmud’s paraphrase of a verse in Jeremiah “If only they would abandon Me and keep my Torah!” This was intended as a way of saying “God is best served when we forget about Him and the spiritual life which seeks to find Him and focus on the logical structures of the Halacha, for that, in the end, is the true closeness to the Divine.”
Fortunately, I had other teachers as well, whom I encountered in my teens, who opened my mind to other vistas and skylines ands convinced me that there was a spiritual dimension to Judaism. I actually have had quite a bit of guidance from my teachers over the years. The literature which dealt with the “big” questions had both rationalist and mystical elements. I poured myself into these texts, working from Hassidism, to Mimonidean rationalism, back to Kabbalah, Lurianic Kabbalah and Zohar. In the meanwhile I went from being a Talmud teacher, to a US army chaplain, and after moving to Israel I became a student on two Kabbalah Yeshovot in Jerusalem
Of course, there is no denying that I attempt to present the tradition in a way which makes it conversant with contemporary life. I also cannot deny that in some way, I transform the traditions by making “my” sense out of them. Otherwise, I would not know them myself. Besides, if I transmitted them exactly as I got them I would be failing my students. For the most part; my students are not from within the ultra-orthodox communities. The members of those communities have no need for someone like me. Here I am sitting on top of a narrow uncomfortable fence. Still, I believe that I do, by God’s mercy, manage to be both authentic and contemporary. As I stated at the outset, I am very concerned with whether my meditative practice is a real part of the Jewish Tradition. If meditation in general, or any meditative technique is not Jewish then we should not, to my mind, make it part of our practice of Judaism. Indeed there is great wisdom in the wide world outside Judaism. One can and should meditate for one’s overall health and well being. I see no difference between doing a Yoga posture and taking fish oil pills to control cholesterol. But, the Torah forbids us from borrowing practices from other religions and adding them to Judaism to make our Divine service more fulfilling.
