Category: God (Page 1 of 2)

#BlogElul: Writing the story of your life #takeaseatmakeafriend

September 3, 2013 / gurevitzr

One of the images found in the High Holyday liturgy is ‘The Book of Life’. The traditional language makes it sound like a kind of ledger, with accounts being recorded, added and subtracted. At the end of the accounting, God decides if we’ve enough credit in the bank to make it to the next year. If you grew up being taught it this way, as I was, you may be mightily put off by it all. All these invitations to engage more deeply in the High Holydays may be falling on resistant ears.

A number of years ago I arrived at the belief that if my experience of life and my way of understanding the world around me didn’t correlate with an ‘idea’ of God that I thought my tradition had conveyed through its liturgy and the philosophy of Rabbis from centuries past, it was the old ideas that had to go. They were, after all, only the putting into human language of a God too ‘other’ to truly grasp, and so carried with them the limitations of the humans who wrote them. To truly have a relationship with God, I had to be present to my experience and trust it.

And so, I could no longer believe in a God filling out a ledger, at least not in a literal sense. But I liked the image of the ‘Book of Life’ and the pages that were filled. But I am the only one holding the pen. Whether I like what has been written, and whether what is still to be written will be worth reading is up to me. Sometimes we can be harder on ourselves than the God we imagine is forgiving us and erasing the bad lines and paragraphs to give us the chance for a re-write. But when we recognize our agency in writing our own Book, it can be incredibly freeing and empowering. For sure, we do not get to write every twist and turn in the plot. There are many things that life brings to us that are not of our design or our asking. But we write the response. We are always able to write the response.

We cannot decide how the next chapter will go if we are not willing to read what we’ve written so far. Now is the time.

#BlogElul: Connection to something larger #takeaseatmakeafriend

August 30, 2013 / gurevitzr

One of the challenges of our traditional liturgy at the High Holydays is the medieval language of our liturgy, compounded by the fact that most of us are reading these poetic passages in translation. It’s a bit like trying to navigate your way through Chaucer’s English. And some of the God images that I can get stuck on are the ones that seem to engender a feeling of fear. But in Hebrew, yirah can be translated as fear or as awe. I don’t connect with a God that is feared. That relationship does not convey the loving, compassionate energy that I want to feel connected to when I seek a sense of greater Presence.

But a God that leaves me in awe… that is something that I can completely connect to. When I try to wrap my head around the reality and complexity of the connections that exist between us all and all life, that is truly awe-inspiring. My mind can’t grasp it all, but if I can do my own, small piece to contribute to fostering connections that are truly loving and compassionate, then I’m participating positively in the flow of giving and receiving in that infinite and intricate web of connection.

That, for me, is the meaning of feeling the awe of God.

And, as Brene Brown puts it that, indeed, brings a sense of perspective, meaning and purpose to my life.

Mysticism: the Experiential path to finding God

March 6, 2013 / gurevitzr

I’ve just started teaching a new course at my congregation on Jewish mysticism. There are many ways to engage with this sizable topic: we could focus on the intellectual history of mysticism from Ezekiel’s vision of a holy chariot through Merkavah mysticism, the Zohar and Kabbalah, Lurianic Kabbalah and Chassidism, to name just a few eras and genres of literature. But I have found that the theory can get in the way of what really draws people to want to learn more about mysticism.

Mysticism, in its essence, is about the experiential. It points to direct experiences of that which others have then sought to do the impossible with – to put those deeply felt and powerful experiences into the limiting vessel of words. We need words to try and convey something to someone else. But words will never enable another to truly get inside the experience.

Take the biblical account of the Burning Bush. I don’t know if I can believe in that account in a literal manner. A bush that burned with fire yet was not consumed. And a voice spoke from out of the bush. But here’s what I absolutely do know from the story that is recounted. And I don’t mean ‘know’ in the sense of historical accuracy, but rather in terms of what the essential message of that moment in the story conveys to me. Moses, who had left his people and could have spent the rest of his life tending sheep and living among the Midianites, has a life-course altering experience. He is ‘called’ to do something else with his life. So powerful is the tug that he is willing to go back into the lion’s den, so to speak, to confront Pharaoh and lead his people with whom he has had so little contact. Perhaps it was the earlier interaction that he had had with a slave driver that weighed on his conscience for all those years until he could bear it no more, realizing that he had a responsibility to change the situation for the enslaved. Perhaps it was a dissatisfaction with his simple life and the question that had gnawed at him as he wondered what his purpose on earth truly was. But out in the wilderness with his sheep he had a mystical experience that caused him to entirely change the direction of his life and, with it, the history of our people.

How do you explain that to someone else? How do you express in words the power of such a transformative moment? There is no question that the image of the burning bush is a powerful one that conveys not only the extraordinariness of the moment, but also conveys that this is a God experience. Whether it actually happened that way or not is almost irrelevant – the transformative power of the moment is undeniable.

When I started my Jewish mysticism course this past week, I asked attendees if they could think of personal moments when an experience was so deeply felt that it seemed to point toward the existence of something beyond the here and now. A moment, if you like, when you ‘peered behind the veil’ of material existence, if only for a moment. The examples shared were not hard to find. Personal experiences of healing, or working with the sick and the dying, were particularly prevalent, perhaps because at these moments of greatest vulnerability we are more likely to let down our own defenses and be open to something larger than ourselves. And, as people shared, there was an emotion that came with the sharing; that lump in the throat and the tearing up of eyes as, through re-telling about the moment in words, the power of the original experience was felt all over again.

That’s the experience that we need to pay attention to. So often, we get caught up on the ways that others have defined God for us. We get caught up in philosophical debates about whether God is all-powerful or all-knowing. We may find the intellectual exercise an engaging one but, ultimately, it will not bring us any closer to truly understanding the nature of God. The most we can hope for are the brief glimpses that emerge in the fabric of our everyday lives. And we can learn, through awareness and spiritual practice (meditation in particular, but not uniquely) to pay attention to these moments and let them teach us and guide the path of our lives.

‘It was meant to be’, and other theologically complex statements

January 9, 2013 / gurevitzr

I recently returned from an amazing trip to Senegal. I was there to visit my step-daughter who is in Peace Corp out there. It was incredible to get just a brief taste of her experience living in a village in an inner region of the country. Returning home, as many have asked us ‘did we have a good vacation?’ I have found myself answering, ‘it was an experience.’ I’m so glad we had the opportunity to have this experience and yet it is unlike anything I’ve ever done for ‘vacation’ before.

There is much that I could say about the trip and all that we experienced, from the landscape, the people and cultures, the food, to the village way of life. But I’d like to share one story that I shared with two of my classes at Religious School last night in the context of our theological, ‘God Talk’ sessions. The topic – transportation.

Public transportation is quite an experience in Senegal. Aside from our initial trip in from Dakar to the inland region, where we shared a private ride with another Peace Corp family, we opted to use public transport to get around. We found ourselves getting into vehicles that, in any other country, I would never dream of traveling in. There was not a single taxi ride that we took for very local journeys that did not involve a taxi with multiple cracks across the front windscreen. All of the shared 7-seater cars that we took had taken some kind of beating on the severely pot-hole marked roads that we rode upon. But the most challenging ride we took was in one of their regional minibuses that ride from market town to market town. After a three hour wait on the side of the road following a beautiful hike to a waterfall in a fairly remote eco-tourist location, this was all that came by, and we decided that it was possibly our only ride back to home base that day.

These buses are loaded with as many people as they can hold, along with any assortment of items up on the room (in another location we saw 3 goats that had been purchased in the market town seated up top). After a very bumpy hour and a half ride back to base, one of us seated in the aisle on a bag of rice and one of us with a set of live chickens under our seat, we arrived safely at our destination.

We had planned to take a ‘night bus’ back to Dakar at the end of our trip so as to avoid traveling in the hot daytime. However, upon arrival at the market town where we expected to make that connection we learned that the reservation that had been made by phone didn’t exist as that particular bus had been rerouted for that one night to Touba for a Muslim pilgrimage. Another lengthy wait ensued and we got ourselves a ride on a seven seater car that brought us safely back to Dakar in plenty of time for our plane home the following night.

The following morning, sitting in a Dakar coffee shop, I picked up one of the French newspapers. My French isn’t what it used to be, but I could translate enough of the front page article to see that the previous night, a bus on its way to Touba had been in a head-on collision with one of the regional minibuses. Tragically, all 26 occupants of the minibus were dead.

After taking in the tragedy of the story, my very next thought, reflecting back on the previous day’s frustrations as our plans had gone awry and we’d had a long, hot wait for alternative transportation was, ‘perhaps it was meant to be.’ And in almost the same moment of utterance, I felt ashamed. Meant to be that we were not on one of those buses? Meant to be that we had to change our plans? But surely not meant to be for the 26 souls who died?

As I shared the theological implications of the statement with my students, we reflected on how often we find ourselves, upon seeing the larger picture, or realizing that something good has come out of something that we initially perceived as bad, voicing such a statement. Its familiar to many. But what do we actually mean by it?

For some, their belief is indeed shaped by a sense that something larger than ourselves – often understood as God – is guiding the direction of our lives. When we experience something negative or painful or tragic, one who believes this can find it a meaningful way to manage their suffering through the faith that there is a bigger picture and a larger plan that we simply don’t understand. However, for others, this kind of belief leads to incredible anger toward God and a magnification of their suffering.

For some, the statement is less of a theological statement about God’s hand in our lives and more of a pragmatic statement of relief that, perhaps by random chance, we ended up going left instead of right, left 5 minutes later instead of 5 minutes earlier. In order that we find ourselves where we are right now, it had to be that the turn of events prior evolved as they did.

Beliefs about the extent to which God has a will and is directly engaged in our lives are many and varied throughout Jewish philosophical thought. They feed into a wide range of beliefs and opinions of the extent of free will vs ‘fate’. If we do not believe in fate, is it a contradiction to believe that something was ‘meant to be’ in the sense of God having a hand in the specifics of our lives?

For some, their belief in God is more of a sense of the pulsing energy of existence that encapsulates and goes beyond all things knowable and unknowable. To that extent, it is more of an ever-unfolding ‘is’ than an entity with conscious will, at least in the way that we understand those words in human terms. For such a believer to use the phrase ‘it was meant to be’, they have more in common with the one who believes that it is all just random chance, except that this unfolding of their life and reality may be imbued with a greater sense of awe and a sense of the mystery of it all that provides the foundation for their spirituality.

Personally, it is in this latter group that I find myself. But what I realized as I analyzed these ideas with my students is that a variety of different belief systems can lead to the same outcome – a way of accepting that which ‘is’, whether felt as positive or negative, and taking the next step forward into life because or in spite of what has just come before. Its not arriving at the specific formulation of one’s belief that is most important; it is recognizing how it serves or hinders one’s ability to live a meaningful life in this world. And understanding that the only moment that we truly have is this one.

#BlogElul 5 & 6: How great is Your trust in me

August 23, 2012 / gurevitzr

I’m taking two of the #BlogElul themes and putting them in one for this blog – Trust and Faith. In Hebrew, there is one word that can capture aspects of both of these english words – Emunah. There is another word in Hebrew, bitachon, that can also convey ‘trust’, and sometimes bitachon and emunah get used interchangeably. But in rabbinic literature, emunah is often the word that conveys both meanings.

When we awake in the morning, the traditional blessing that is recited upon noticing that we have regained consciousness is Modeh (Modah for women) Ani lefanecha, Melech Chai v’kayam, she’he’chezarta bi nishmati b’chemla rabah emunatecha: Thankful am I before You, Living and Eternal Sovereign. You have returned my soul to me in mercy. How great is your trust/faith in me!

The idea of waking with this blessing goes back to Talmudic times and is derived from verses in Lamentations (3:22-23) that rabbis interpreted to mean that Creation is renewed every day. Our souls are safeguarded in God’s hands, metaphorically speaking, while we sleep and, when we awake, it is God who has restored our souls.

When I pray these words, I often focus more on the first phrase – Thankful am I before You… There is so much to contemplate in these few words. A story is told of a Hassidic master, the Apter Rebbe, who had not started his morning prayers, yet it was now noon. He explained that he had awoken and begun to recite modeh ani, but began to wonder, ‘Who am I?’, and ‘Who is the You before Whom I am I?’ Still pondering these questions, he had been unable to go forward. (in ‘A Book of Life: Embracing Judaism as a Spiritual Practice, by Rabbi Michael Strassfeld, p. 5).

Focusing on the first part of the prayer can invoke a sense of awe if, like the Apter Rebbe, one truly begins to think about the essence of the ‘I’ and what we understand to be the ‘Thou’.

But the last part of the prayer is where we find the word, emunah, and the emphasis is quite different. How great is Your faith. Does God need faith? Surely not. But on days when we might not feel like opening our eyes, on days when we might not be looking forward to the tasks that lie ahead, on days when we feel loss, pain, loneliness… uttering the words of Modeh Ani can remind us that each day is created anew. We have been given the gift of today. What shall we do with it? When we are lacking faith in our own strength, our own abilities, or our own will to get ourselves up and out of bed, we remind ourselves that God has faith in us. Its God’s little daily pep talk with us.

Here faith and trust are interconnected in one Hebrew word – emunah. God has faith in us. Our soul has been entrusted to us for one more day so that we may do something remarkable with it. And God believes in our capacity to do just that. God trusts that we will use this day wisely. Rabah emunatecha, we say – Great is your faith/trust. Why so great? Because perhaps we didn’t use the gift we were given so wisely yesterday. Perhaps we didn’t do all that we could have with our time. But great is God’s faith that we may still live up to our full potential. Preparing for Rosh Hashanah, we are invited to consider how we are using each gift – each day. We are called upon to have the faith to believe that more is possible. We are called upon to trust and believe that we can raise ourselves higher.
Rabbi Rachel Gurevitz

I am Jewish: Eighth Graders reflect, 2010

May 16, 2010 / gurevitzr

I teach Eighth Grade at Congregation B’nai Israel; something that I have come to enjoy immensely as I watch teens who are just post-bar and bat mitzvah grapple with expressing themselves and their own sense of Jewish identity. We spend the year on personal theology and making ritual meaningful, ethics and values applied to our lives and our world and, with the help of a 19 year old emissary from Israel, an exploration of life and culture in Israel in a way that our teens can relate. In the midst of it all we have a weekend retreat with a theme that focuses on a multitude of ways to live Jewishly and express Jewish values.

At the end of every year, our closing circle ritual consists of reading a few short excerpts from the wonderful book written in memory of murdered journalist, Daniel Pearl, ‘I am Jewish.’. Most of the excerpts we read are written by other teenagers or young adults from all over the world, illustrating the diversity of ways to express Jewish living. Then each student takes a few minutes to write their own reflection based on what Jewish means to them at this point in their lives. What is warming and wonderful is to see how they are all able to offer a genuine reflection. They feel it, and they mean it. Here are a selection of the reflections from this year’s closing circle:

I am Jewish because I was born a Jew. My parents are Jewish, and so were my mom’s ancestors. Being Jewish is who I am. I was born Jewish, but it was my choice to be a true Jew.

I am proud to be Jewish. I love the fact of how I am different from my friends. I have different holidays and different food, but being Jewish makes me who I am and it will always be a part of me.

I am Jewish – this means that I am a minority which is quite different from everybody else. This makes me feel special inside.

I am Jewish and I am proud of being Jewish. The stereotypes may bring one down, but a true Jew will be proud and not let the mean thoughts strip them of their Judaism.

I am a Jew – means that I belong to a community that comes together through hardships and times of happiness and holidays.

I am Jewish. That means that you follow what you believe and that will bring you to God. Although this God is the same for everyone, each and every person must find their way through the Torah and find God.

For me, being Jewish means thinking about my Jewishness in everything I do, whether it is writing a paper about religion in school or talking about a famous Jew with my friends. I love being a Jew and I am proud of my Jewish heritage.

I am Jewish because I go to Hebrew School and Temple. I am also Jewish because I read from the Torah at my Bat Mitzvah.

To me, being Jewish means that I belong to something. Not only do I belong to a temple but I also belong to a group of people.

To me, being Jewish is being lucky. I get to be a part of a people that I share beliefs with, that I go to Temple with, that I want to connect with. Being Jewish is who I am.

As a Jew, I feel that the religion is not something that is to be used in a way that is stressful. To me, services should be an enjoyable atmosphere. I enjoy every aspect of Judaism, such as the freedom to make decisions, and the feelings. I think that it is crucial that we are able to survive, and be respected. I follow a Jewish way of thinking every day and that is why Judaism is most important to me.

Personal story as prayer: A Yom HaShoah Reflection

April 7, 2010 / gurevitzr

Yesterday, at our religious school prayer service for 4th, 5th and 6th graders, I had planned a short service around a selection of poems and biographical extracts from witnesses and survivors of the Holocaust, in remembrance for Yom HaShoah – Holocaust Memorial Day, which we commemorate this Sunday. I quickly changed direction after the first few minutes. After we had lit six candles, as many Jewish communities do, to remember the approximately 6 million Jews who were murdered in the Holocaust, a teacher asked to add a thought and, rightly so, brought our attention to the further 3-4 million who were not Jews, but were also murdered in the Holocaust, because of their political beliefs, or because they were gypsies or homosexuals. It was more than just bringing awareness to the suffering of others – to show that hate has many targets. I could tell that it was personal and, being so, there was a passion behind the teacher’s sharing.

Suddenly it became clear that there were likely to be others in the room who had a personal, family story that emerged from the terrors and tragedies of the Holocaust, and that to uncover some of this was likely to be far more meaningful and powerful than even the best selection of written reflections read from a prayer book. But when I asked who had a personal, family story that they knew of, I was quite unprepared for the number of hands that went up. In addition to most of our teachers, I think that almost half of the hands of our 4th, 5th and 6th graders went up. I put aside the prayer book and, instead, about 8 people, some adults and some children shared what they knew of their parent’s, grandparent’s, great-aunt or uncle’s experiences, those who survived and those who did not. There were amazing stories of escape, deeply sad stories of those who lost entire families, camp experiences, and much more.
When we stood for the El Male Rachamim prayer at the end, remembering these souls, that they be bound up and united with the Divine Source of All and be at peace, the deeply prayerful energy in the room was palpable.

The Holocaust deeply engages us at an emotional level in so many ways. But yesterday, in addition to the remembrance of the horrors of the Shoah, the incredible stories of survival, the terrible tragedy of lives ended, and the remembrance of the power of hate to strip us of our humanity and cause incredible harm and destruction to others, I was also reminded of something else. While we have such a rich tapestry of written prayer in Jewish tradition to dip into, our ultimate Source for connecting to the power of prayer, the power of community, and our yearning for a sense of the Divine Presence that accompanies us and bears witness to our lives, is our own experiences. So often when I speak with youth about different ideas of God that we find in our tradition, again and again I come back to encouraging them to trust their own experience. If they have experienced good people suffer, then it makes little sense to declare faith in a God that punishes with suffering. If they have experienced love and support during difficult times in their lives, perhaps it makes sense to believe in a Presence that can add to those feelings of love and support when we need them the most.

And when we want to pray for a world where there is no place for hate, where swords are turned into ploughshares, and where each of us sees ourselves as the hands of a God that will help to make our world a better place for all people, we need to create space in our prayer rituals to get in touch with our own experiences, to draw on family history and heritage, and remember the feelings and emotions of those experiences. Because then our prayers will be real, and meaningful, and heart-felt. And then our prayers are truly powerful and truly have the potential to be transformative.

Prayer by a Jewish Woman: In solidarity with Women of the Wall

December 27, 2009 / gurevitzr

Tonight, our last blog in solidarity with Women of the Wall is a prayer, written by Becca, created last week at our Rosh Hodesh group program.

Dear God,
I am a Jew and I celebrate my life as a Jew.
Dear God,
I am a woman and I celebrate the joy of being a woman,
and dear God,
I am both Jewish and a woman and can only imagine embracing both passionately.

I want to draw closer to You, to learn more about how to learn Your truths, Your love, Your trust in the people of this world. I want to understand more and cannot get enough of Your Presence.

Dear God,
I am a Jew and a woman and I want all of that, and I celebrate becoming that Jewish woman, growing and blossoming in Your love.

I am thrilled to know that I, and my Christian male bell choir director, and my Conservative daughter, and my atheist son, and all the other people who I have not yet met – that we are all loved by You.

And I sing Hallelujah!

Playing in the Symphony. Jewish Meditation, part 4

November 11, 2009 / gurevitzr

Kol haneshama t’hallel Yah, Hallelu Yah (Psalm 150:6)

Let every neshama praise God. Hallelu Yah.

This is the last line of the last psalm in the Book of Psalms – it is the culmination of so many words of poetry, prayer, contemplation and praise. The psalm is part of every Jewish morning service, and it is equally a part of many Christian worship services. And, to add to its universality, many synagogue communities today have become familiar with a melody that just chants this last line over and over again, and that melody was an adaptation of a Pakistani Sufi chant (the mystical, and most universal form of Islam) written by the late Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan.

Six words. On face value, just a simple declaration of praise. Six words that are a gateway to an awesome experience (awesome, as in ‘wow!’ and awesome as in ‘Oh boy, that’s overwhelming, I don’t know if I can handle that’).

It begins with that Hebrew word that I didn’t translate – neshama. Biblically, it means something like ‘living thing’. So sometimes you’ll see a translation that says ‘Let every living thing praise God’, or ‘Let everything that lives praise God’. But the rabbis of ancient times took a look at the creation story in Genesis and found in the second description of how God created human beings the line, ‘And God blew into his nostrils the breath of life (nishmat chayyim), and the man became a living thing (nefesh chayyah) (Gen. 2:7). They understood this to mean not only the ability to breathe, by which we are alive, but that the aspect of our selves that ‘enlivens’ us – the God-given part – is what we call our soul. And so, for the rabbis, neshama also means soul. In fact, in an ancient midrash (expounding on the Torah), they describe 5 different names that were given to the spirit by which we live (Midrash rabbah 14:9), enabling them to describe and explore different aspects or attributes of the soul, of which the neshama is just one.

The final element of this teaching that we need to put it together with a mantra meditation practice on this verse of Psalm 150 requires us to know that, in the Hebrew language, all words are formed around a ‘root’ of three consonant letters. Changing the vowel sound, or the grammar, can change how we would translate the word into English, but the common root in Hebrew teaches us that the words are conceptually and experientially linked. And so, if you look again at the verse from Genesis, you’ll see the word nishmat chayyim – the breath of life. N’shimah means ‘breath’. And so, in the ancient teaching of the midrash, we find that Rabbi Levi says in the name of Rabbi Hanina,: “at each and every breath (neshima) which you breathe, you must praise the Creator” What is the meaning of this? “Kol ha neshama tehallel Ya, Let everything that has breath praise God (Psalm 150, 6).

Jewish mystics turned the phrase one more time, and this becomes the foundation for our meditation practice – let each and every breath be a praise to God.

It is through the act of breathing that we can bring awareness to the Divine spirit that gives life to everything. With this awareness comes gratitude, an opening of the heart, and from this comes praise. When we meditate on the breath with this awareness, it takes us beyond ‘my breath’ and connects us to everything that breathes. We become but one musician in an orchestra; we are responsible for how we play our instrument and the contribution we make with each and every note we play, but we are able to do and be so much more than is possible within our own limitations, when we recognize that we are part of the symphony.

This meditation, connecting us to life itself, and to the Source of all life, cannot be grasped with the mind, but it can be experienced, at least in brief moments. And it not only transforms our awareness of the power of the breath, it also transforms the meaning of what it is to ‘Praise God.’ That will have to wait for another day’s blog.

Rabbi Rachel Gurevitz

The breath of all life: Jewish meditation part 3

November 8, 2009 / gurevitzr

Continuing contemplations on the spiritual wisdom emerging from the breath, today I share teachings that I have gleaned from some of my teachers, Rabbi Arthur Waskow, Rabbi Jeff Roth, Rabbi David Cooper and Shoshana Cooper. Opportunities to study and practice with these teachers directly can be found at The Awakened Heart Project and at Rabbi Cooper’s website.

We know from science that the air that we breathe in is air that the trees and plants have breathed out, and the air that we breath out is the air that the trees and plants breath in. But to know these things intellectually is quite different from knowing experientially. Contemplative meditation on the breath can open us to the experience of our interconnectedness with all life in a profound way. Jewish wisdom guides us to understand this experience as a God experience. Sometimes our inability to see it that way is more about our choice to claim that label for what we know, instinctively, to be a deeply spiritual awakening and realization. But the Torah points us toward the truth of this realization when Moses asks God how he should explain to the enslaved Hebrews who it is that has sent him. God responds:

Ehyeh Asher Ehyeh (Exodus 3:14)

The hebrew letters in the first and third word revolve around the verb that means ‘to be’. Biblical hebrew has two basic grammatical forms – the ‘perfect’ (something that has happened/has been completed) and the ‘imperfect’ (something that is in process/ongoing). And so, encapsulated in this label is the teaching that God is constantly in the process of being; some would understand this to point to God as Existence itself. And, in our world of experience, our ability to exist in this moment, and the next moment, begins with the breath.

Many Jewish translations of the Torah do not translate this phrase, because to do so using the English language would limit something that is pointing us to the Infinite. It is not dissimilar from this teaching from another wisdom tradition:

The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao.

The name that can be named is not the eternal name.

The nameless is the beginning of heaven and earth.

The named is the mother of ten thousand things.

Ever desireless, one can see the mystery

Ever desiring, one can see the manifestations.

These two spring from the same source but differ in name;

This appears as darkness.

Darkness within darkness.

The gate to all mystery.

(Lao Tsu)

And, drawing from early Jewish philosophical teachings:

And God said, “At first say unto them, ‘I am that I am, ‘ that, when they have learnt that there is a difference between Him that is and him that is not, they may be further taught that there is no name whatever that can properly be assigned to Me, who am the only being to whom existence belongs. –Philo, from Plaut, p 408 (both this and the preceding quote are found at bluethread.com).

There is much to contemplate here, and the next posting will offer some paths from the practice of Jewish chant – mantra meditation – that can deepen our understanding of these teachings.