A dozen men and women recently sat on the floor of a Manhattan living room lit only by candles, eyes closed as they listened to the sound of their own breathing.
They were a diverse group, and included a Hasid, a “black-hat” Orthodox man, a Conservative rabbi and several men and women with little Jewish education.
After moving into a meditative state, they focused on the sefirot, the kabbalist, term for the manifestations of the hidden God, and the traits they hoped to integrate into their lives. They went on to concentrate on the person in the Torah who best embodied the sefirah they wanted to incorporate.
And then, after opening their eyes, they eased back into the Manhattan night by slowly chanting the word “shalom.”
This eclectic collection of Jews was one of a small but growing number who are finding their spiritual lives enhanced by meditation.
And though for decades virtually the only places that Jews could be found meditating were in ashrams and with Zen masters, a growing number are now reclaiming the Jewish contemplative tradition.
In its contemporary incarnation, Jewish meditation brings together Jews from every corner of the community as they share a common quest for a deeper Jewish spiritual connection.
And meditation provides a connection not just to the Jews who learn about it through extensive study of Jewish texts, but for those who have been long alienated from Judaism and once sought their spirituality in other traditions.
Despite the fact that some Jewish religious leaders, particularly the Orthodox, are suspicious of the origins and influence of meditation, the history of Jewish contemplation is an ancient one, according to its practitioners.
MENTIONED IN PSALMS
The earliest Jewish writer to record evidence of meditation was the biblical poet who composed Psalm 19: “May the words of my mouth and the meditations of my heart be acceptable.”
And the students of the biblical prophets were also known to meditate, according to Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi, who in the late 1950s was one of the first spiritual leaders to reintroduce North American Jews to the practice.
But “suspicion runs very deep,” says Rabbi Jonathan Omer-Man, director of the School of Traditional Jewish Meditation, in Los Angeles. “It’s part of modernism’s horror with the non-rational, the non-linear.”
Omer-Man, who says that he has 350 students, started the school in 1990 with the help of a $200,000 grant from the Nathan Cummings Foundation with the goal of making “meditation have an impact on mainstream Jewish life.”
Many come to the practice with a great deal of experience in Eastern meditation and little Jewish background.
Mindy Ribner, who runs the Jewish Meditation Circle in Manhattan, followed a path that is not unusual. She describes herself as a lifelong “spiritual seeker” who found the Judaism of her youth spiritually empty.
She learned meditation in the 1970s, when she began practicing yoga and following the guru Amrit Desai at the Kripalu ashram.
She soon began living communally in the Manhattan ashram of Swami Muktananda. It was while living there, on the Upper. West Side, that she met Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach and started attending his synagogue.
After 18 months of longing for more of a Jewish spiritual connection, she moved out of the ashram and began leading a Jewishly observant life. But still she felt spiritually unfulfilled.
Then, while studying in yeshiva in Jerusalem in the early 1980s, she was invited to participate in a Jewish meditation group.
There she found the spiritual avenue she had been searching for. “I was looking for something else beside dry yeshiva learning. I was searching for the mystical connection,” she says.
JEWS FLOCK TO EASTERN RELIGIONS
Estimates vary, but experts say that as many as 70 percent of participants in Buddhist and Hindu groups in North America are Jews.
People at Ribner’s ashram used to joke that “if it weren’t for the guru, we’d have a minyan.”
According to Rabbi David Cooper, a meditation instructor near Boulder, Colo., “Virtually all of the teachers of Vipassana Buddhism, one of the most popular forms of Buddhism in America, are Jews.”
Cooper, who became Jewishly observant after more than 15 years of meditating with American Sufi and Hindu groups, continued to attend Buddhist retreats after becoming observant.
“I would walk into a retreat wearing tzitzit and a kippah. And all these Jews who thought they were Buddhist would come up to me saying they wanted to find the same kind of experience in a Jewish way. Jews came to me in hordes.”
Cooper is presently creating a retreat center near his home, on a mountaintop 40 miles northwest of Boulder, which will provide a kosher environment for Jews.
It will be free of the idols present in many of the Eastern environments, which abrogate the Jewish prohibition against idol worship, and will provide kosher food and observance of Shabbat.
While Jewish meditation really began gaining supporters in the 1980s, the first person to introduce the Jewish practices and concepts to a popular audience was Rabbi Aryeh Kaplan.
In the mid-1970s, his books on Jewish mysticism and meditation began appearing in New Age bookstores, where they attracted the attention of many Jews.
For many mediators who were estranged from the Jewish community and traditional practices, and who have little Jewish education, contemplation has provided a port of re-entry.
“It reaches people who are disaffected because you don’t necessarily need to know Hebrew and it doesn’t operate in a standard format,” explains Rabbi Baruch Frydman-Kohl, spiritual leader of Albany, N.Y.’s Congregation Ohav Shalom.
According to Boulder’s Cooper, meditation can be used to bring Jews closer to observance because “as beginners, it’s hard to step into halachah and appreciate it right away.”
As Ribner put it: “I try to help people to have this very personal and dynamic experience with God, and then show them how they can transfer it into traditional Jewish forms, so that keeping Shabbos is exciting,” she says.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
