Jewish

About Jewish Meditation

Judaism has a contemplative tradition older than most of the ones it is usually compared with, and for about two centuries it was almost entirely forgotten. Its roots are in the Hebrew Bible — Isaac goes out into a field toward evening to do something the text calls lasuach, a verb the tradition has always read as meditation. From there it develops in several distinct directions: the chariot mysticism of the first centuries CE, with its ascent through seven palaces and its famously grim warning about four sages who entered the orchard; the letter-permutation techniques of Abraham Abulafia in thirteenth-century Spain, coordinated with breathing and head movements; the intricate prayer intentions of Isaac Luria's circle in sixteenth-century Safed; the Hasidic practice of hitbodedut, an hour a day alone speaking to God in one's own everyday language; and the analytical contemplation developed in Chabad. Most of this went dormant after the Enlightenment. Its recovery is recent, and owes more to one man — Aryeh Kaplan, writing in the late 1970s and early 80s — than to anyone else.