A Spiritual Renewal

Sunday

For this week’s Daily Meditations, we share wisdom from Hasidism, a Jewish mystical tradition that emerged several hundred years ago in what is now Ukraine. Jewish scholar Arthur Green summarizes this movement’s origin and its reliance on contemplative prayer:

Hasidism [is] the great movement of religious revival that brought new spirit to the lives of Jews in the towns and villages of Poland and Ukraine toward the latter half of the eighteenth century. Here worship, particularly in the form of contemplative prayer, came to be clearly identified by a new group of religious teachers as the central focus of the Jew’s religious life. Both the ecstatic outpourings of ordinary people and the highly sophisticated treatments of devotional psychology in the works of early Hasidic masters bear witness to this new and unique emphasis upon the inner life of prayer. [1] 

The Polish-born rabbi and influential theologian Abraham Joshua Heschel (1907–1972) found great inspiration in this period of Jewish spirituality and history: 

Then came Rabbi Israel Baal Shem (c. 1700–1760) in the eighteenth century, and brought heaven down to earth. He and his disciples, the Hasidim . . . uncovered the ineffable delight of being a Jew. God is not only the creator of earth and heaven. He is also the One “who created delight and joy.”. . . Jewishness was as though reborn. Bible verses, observances, customs, suddenly took on a flavor like that of new grain. . . . The Jews fell in love with the Lord and felt “such yearning for God that it was unbearable.” 

They began to feel the infinite sweetness that comes with the fulfilling of the precept of hospitality or of wearing the tallith [prayer shawl] and tefillin. [1] What meaning is there to the life of a Jew, if it is not to acquire the ability to feel the taste of heaven? [One] who does not taste paradise in the performance of a precept in this world will not feel the taste of paradise in the world to come. And so the Jews began to feel life everlasting in a sacred melody and to absorb the Sabbath as a vivid anticipation of the life to come. [2] 

One of the great themes of Father Richard’s teachings is the importance of experiencing God’s love and delight, and the emptiness of religion without it: 

The trouble with much of civic religion and cultural Christianity is the lack of religious experience. People who haven’t had a loving or intimate experience with God tend to get extremely rigid, dogmatic, and controlling about religion. They think that if they pray the right words, read the Bible daily, and go to church often enough, it will happen. But God loves us before we do the rituals. God doesn’t need them, but we need them to tenderly express our childlike devotion and desire—and to get in touch with that desire. The great commandment is not “thou shalt be right.” The great commandment is to “be in love.”

God Before Us Always

Monday

Rabbi Israel ben Eliezer, often credited as the founder of Hasidism, is known as the Baal Shem Tov or by the acronym “Besht.” He lived in Mezhbizh (now Medzhybizh in western Ukraine). The Besht was ecstatically in love with God. Like Francis of Assisi, he began a grassroots movement of joyful love and service that appealed to ordinary people, not only to a scholarly elite. Rabbi Rami Shapiro explains this stream of Judaism:

The ancient Rabbis taught, “God desires the heart.” They themselves, however, seem to have preferred the head. Judaism has struggled through the ages to find a balance between heartfelt yearning for God and the intellectual mastery of God’s Word. Generally speaking, it was the head that won out. Yet, when things got too heady, the pendulum would swing in favor of the heart. The eighteenth-century Jewish revivalist movement called Hasidism was one of these heart swings. . . .

The concept of d’veikus (“clinging” or “cleaving”) is found in the Torah [the Hebrew Scriptures] where the verb davak signifies an extraordinary intimacy with the Divine: “To love YHVH your God, to listen to His voice and to cleave to Him, for He is your life and the length of your days . . .” (Deuteronomy 30:20). To achieve d’veikus is to realize that God is your life. While later Hasidic masters spoke of d’veikus as a union with God requiring the dissolution of the self, this was not the original understanding. God is your life, but your life is still yours; that is, Torah speaks of d’veikus as an experience of feeling the fullness of God present in your self without actually erasing your sense of self. . . .

The essential message and practice of early Hasidism are simple. The message: “. . . the whole earth is full of God’s glory” (Isaiah 6:3). The practice: “. . . I place God before me always” (Psalm 16:8). Understand these and you understand Hasidism. . . . 

Although the Hasidim themselves do not use this analogy, the relationship of a wave to the ocean aptly captures the situation Hasidism says we are in. . . . Focus on yourself as a wave, and you are increasingly frantic and worried. Focus on yourself as the ocean, and you find tranquility and peace of mind. . . . Hasidism tries to wake the wave up to being the ocean. Awakening to your true nature is what it is to “place God before you always.” Everywhere you look you see God, not as an abstract spirit but as the True Being of all beings. . . .  

The Besht believed that God was everywhere and could be found by anyone whose heart was open, simple, and pure. At a time when Judaism was focused on a scholar elite, he reached out to the masses with a Judaism rich in compassion, devotion, and hope. His inner circle of disciples took his teachings out into the larger world, creating a global movement that continues to this day.  

Tuesday

Silence Is Preferable

Rabbis Or N. Rose and Ebn D. Leader consider the role of silence in Hasidic prayer. They stress the delicate balance of action and contemplation:

Judaism has earned a reputation as a religion of words and deeds. Silent meditation is a practice we associate more readily with various Eastern traditions. Our daily experience strengthens this impression. How much silence was there in the last Jewish prayer service you attended? Our tefilot(prayers) tend to be overwhelmingly “wordy”; the siddur (prayer book) demonstrates the cumulative effect of generations of liturgists adding more and more words to our prayers.  

The practice of silence emphasized by the Hasidic masters . . . may come as a blessing for those who have learned its benefits from other traditions, and who now wish to integrate it into their Jewish lives. 

Yet the Hasidic masters were careful to point out that silent meditation is not an end in itself. It is a practice whose test must come in the world of action and interaction. The hanhagot [spiritual practices] provide us with guidance for meditation and prayer, but the ultimate challenge they pose is this: Can we maintain our spiritual focus in the world beyond the synagogue, study hall, or retreat center? Each night, as we review the events of the day, we must ask ourselves: Have I lived this day with awareness? [1] 

Rabbi Dov Ber of Mezeritch (Ukraine)—a disciple of the Baal Shem Tov—commends contemplative silence as a way to meet God:

“He who speaks too much brings sin” 
     (Pirkei Avot 1:5).

The meaning of this teaching is as follows:  
the word sin means deficiency.  

Even when you speak with others about the wisdom 
     of the Torah,  
silence is still preferable.

Silent contemplation offers greater possibilities for 
     connection with the Divine 
than does discussion or speech. [2] 

For Father Richard, the sacred nature of silence is at the heart of contemplative awakening: 

Silence is not just that which is around words and underneath images and events. It has a life of its own. It is a being in itself to which we can relate and can become intimately familiar. Philosophically, we would say being is that foundational quality which precedes all other attributes. Silence is at the very foundation of all reality—naked being, we might say. Pure being is that out of which all else comes and to which all things return. 

To live in this primordial, foundational being, which I am calling silence, creates a kind of sympathetic resonance with what is right in front of us. Without it, we are just reacting instead of responding. The opposite of contemplation is not action, it is reaction. We must wait for pure action, which always proceeds from a contemplative silence. 

We have to be awake right now and we can be through silence. It is not a matter of being more moral but of being more conscious—which will eventually make us more moral! [3] 

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