There were times of peace and prosperity, to be sure. Not enough, but some. There were far too many horrible times, evil times.

Sometimes the reason for killing us, they said, was the blood libel, the accusation that we Jews used the blood of Christian children to bake our Passover matzah. Sometimes they accused us of trafficking with the devil, with demons, with evil spirits, and killed us for that. Sometimes they killed us in a drunken frenzy, peasants egged on by their own oppressive governments. Worst of all, the Nazis killed us coldly, rationally, exterminating people they insanely thought were part of an inferior race.

A miracle that we’re still here, some say. Even more of a miracle, they say, that we’ve produced so many geniuses, leaders, scientists, artists. Our accomplishments are out of all proportion to our tiny numbers. There are about thirteen million of us, less than 1/4 of 1% of the world’s population. Yet,

Since 1899, when the Nobel Prize was first presented, Jewish people have received 16% of the overall prizes and 22% of the specific prizes for medicine and physiology… [Torah- Fax, Beraisheet 5758, Rabbi Jack Segal.] 

How have we survived? Maybe it’s not such a miracle. Maybe it’s due to the incredible tools we created. I think so. “The world stands on three things,” says Pirke Avot, the ethics of the Fathers: on Torah (learning), on Avodah (worship and ritual) and on Gemilut Chasadim (deeds of loving kindness).

We created a rich system of ritual practice and prayer that ordered the days of the calendar, marked life cycle events, and bestowed a sense of piety and order on those who followed it.

Acts of loving kindness tied the community together in the face of external forces that might have destroyed it. People learned to share even the little that they had with others.

Torah study allowed them to be in touch with something far greater than themselves. They studied God’s own words in the Bible and pored over the incredibly extensive commentaries on it that are still being written even today.

But as much as study allowed one to know God’s will rationally and intellectually, there was another crucial component that taught people to experience God directly: Jewish mysticism, Kabbalah. It took its adepts deep into the recesses of the soul, ultimately to bring them back to help perfect this decidedly imperfect world.

Jewish mysticism, Kabbalah, the internal dimension of Judaism, the journey into the self, is what we will look at during this most sacred time of the year. All of this year’s High Holyday sermons attempt to explore some of the many facets of Jewish spirituality, this profound and largely unknown aspect of Judaism.

If Jewish mysticism is one of the tools of Jewish survival, the major tool of Jewish mysticism is meditation. It is certainly not one of those fads imported from California, a place that one woman I know calls “the land of perpetual Purim.” This is the real stuff, a profound and complex discipline that has been part of Judaism for centuries. What do you do if you want to “do” Kabbalah? You meditate.

There is a prayer that can be said before meditating and after it as well. If you’ll allow me, I’ll say it for all of us:

Baruch attah Adonai, Eloheinu melech ha’olam, chonen l’adam da’at.

Praised are you, Adonai, our God, sovereign of the universe, who endows human beings with knowledge. 

Ah, but special kinds of knowledge, with unique tools for learning them, such as paying exquisite attention to something so mundane and simple as the movement of our own breath. Meditation, like life, begins with breathing, say the Kabbalists:

Listen to your heart. Hear its beat. Feel its cadence.

Breathe along with your heartbeat: inhaling, exhaling. Your heart beats. One time. Two. Three. Four. Five… You breathe in. Your heart beats, one, two, three, four, five… You breathe out. 

Breathe. Inhale with your heartbeats, exhale with your heartbeats. You are both empty and full. You are only yourself. Just be. [After Steven A. Fisdel, The Practice of Kabbalah] 

The outside world is filled with evil beyond our control? Then redeem the internal world, turn evil into goodness. Start with the only thing we do control: ourselves. The Baal Shem Tov, the founder of the branch of Jewish mysticism known as Hasidism, taught:

… if you see another person doing something evil, meditate on the presence of the same evil in yourself. And know that it is one of God’s mercies that He brought this sight before your eyes to remind you of that fault in you… [Sefer HaDorot HaChadash, p. 59f.] 

New techniques were created in the attempt to master the internal self. Hundreds of years before Esalen and EST and Shmest and life coaches and motivational trainers, the Kabbalists taught something that we would call visualization. They were, of course, more concerned with piety and prayer than with scoring touchdowns, but the technique is the same:

If you are having trouble directing your mind in prayer, and it is difficult for you to… direct yourself to God, then picture yourself pushing forward through a great crowd of people to get to where God is. And actually do this, that is, tense your body and make the bodily motions of someone trying to push forward this way; actually contort your face [with the effort] and think, “I am going to get through them all to get to God.” [Hovat HaTalmidim, pg. 101.] 

New techniques or not, the Kabbalists knew there were many obstacles in the way of those who sought to experience God through meditation. They explored many of these difficulties in order to surmount them. Long before Freud and psychoanalysis, they understood the power of the subconscious mind. So, after directing attention to one’s breathing, one meditative exercise continues:

You may think thoughts. They are your thoughts. You may see images. They are your images. You may hear voices. They are your voices. You may have feelings. They are your feelings. They are yours, but they are not you.

Now think of someone who makes you angry. Watch your thoughts, images, voices, feelings, rush to gather around that anger like a pack of hungry wolves around a bone. Just watch the gathering your anger calls forth. Breathe. Exhale them. Let them go. Watch the thoughts and images and voices and feelings float away. If they resist, don’t push. Be kind, even to them. Let them do what they need to do. They all are yours, but they are not you. You are much, much more than that… [After Steven A. Fisdel, The Practice of Kabbalah] 

Do you think that this is foreign to us? It isn’t. I bet you’ve experienced this sort of thing, just as I have:

One day I was sitting at a red light. I absent-mindedly found myself humming the Hawaiian hula song. When I realized what I was doing, I wondered why, since I really don’t like that song. Then I happened to glance up. On the back windshield of the car in front of me was a University of Hawaii sticker. [My Own True Stories]

These internal dramas, these internal dialogues, are always with us, triggered by things we see and hear and think and feel. Sometimes, as in my Hawaii story, we don’t even notice the triggers. But they are always there, pulling our strings, pushing our buttons. It turns out that we’re far less free than most of us would like to believe. Meditation, like many of the psychological disciplines we now call therapy, attempts to free people from the internal ties that bind them.

The ultimate goal of Kabbalistic meditation was to experience, if only for a split second, a moment of wholeness, of non-contradiction, of no-choice because all was one and so there was nothing to choose from. The human experience of oneness was found in something the Kabbalists called ayin, nothingness. In their meditations they looked for it in the split second between when breathing out becomes breathing in. They looked for it in the split second between when a sound is heard and when it becomes silence.

Who is unfragmented, whole, without contradiction all the time? Only God. So the mystics translated the Shema: “Hear O Israel, the Eternal our God is Oneness,” and in one meditation they taught:

Softly, softly, say the last word of the Shema. It means “oneness,” Echad. Say it again and let the final sound, the daled, the “d” stretch out into infinity until it fades away. There will be the tiniest moment between the sound and the silence, an infinitesimal moment of ayin, nothingness. Stay with it. Cling to it. It is nothing and everything. There are no words. There is only joy, joy and light and oneness. You are one with God in the act of creation. [After Steven A. Fisdel, The Practice of Kabbalah] 

The outcome of such an experience, the mystics said, was joy, pure unadulterated joy.

Confusing? Mind boggling? Paradoxical? Of course. This is not science. It is mysticism. Yet we’ve all experienced these moments of wholeness, probably many of them. We’ve all experienced times, far too short, no doubt, when it seemed that we could do no wrong. We made a wonderful, high scoring word each time it was our turn in the Scrabble game. Every decision we made at work that day was the right one. Every shot went in. We played the piano (or the Irish whistle) like we’ve never played before. We were in the zone. We were so whole, so at one with ourselves, it didn’t feel like we were trying at all. Weren’t these indeed moments of oneness that produced intense, profound joy?

And after the meditation, after the joy of oneness, what then? All this internal preparation, our tradition insists, is preparation for doing more than just survive. It is preparation for working along with God in mending the external world, a process that we call tikkun olam . Says The Ethics of the Fathers,

We are here to do. And through doing to learn; and through learning to know; and through knowing to experience wonder; and through wonder to attain wisdom, and through wisdom to find simplicity, and through simplicity to give attention; and through intention to see what needs to be done. [Pirke Avot 5:27] 

We began tonight by looking at how Kabbalistic meditation is one of the crucial tools that helped us survive.

We looked at the meditative process of transforming evil into good within ourselves.

We looked at the technique of visualization as a tool for self-mastery.

We looked at how awareness of our internal dialogues, of our unconscious mind, can help us to overcome some of the obstacles to our spiritual growth.

We looked at the attempt to experience a sense of wholeness and the joy it brings.

We looked at all of this as preparation for acting to repair our broken world, of doing tikkun olam.

But even all of this is only, my friends, what my grandmother would call a forshpeis, an hors d’oeuvre, a little taste of meditation. If you didn’t “get” some of this, don’t worry. Perhaps God has other things for you to do today. You’re in good company. This is pretty advanced stuff and all of us, including me, are only beginners.

One of our teachers says,

Why does the bird sing? Not because it knows the reason. It sings because it knows the song. 

We began our exploration of Jewish mystical meditation with a blessing. Let us end with the same one:

Baruch attah Adonai, Eloheinu melech ha’olam, chonen l’adam da’at.

Praised are you, Adonai, our God, sovereign of the universe, who endows human beings with knowledge. 

This year and in all the years to come, may we be blessed with knowing not just the reason, but also the song.