Amidah Meditation

A guided meditation that takes you through the essential points of a weekday Amidah.

You may stand through this, or sit and imagine yourself standing.

Close your eyes.
Breathe.
Open your heart
To praise, hope and gratitude.

1.   ANCESTORS

Imagine you are standing in front of an ark, praying.

You take one step back, and you pray with your parents at your side.

Step back again, and you pray with your Grandparents.

Step back again, and your pray with all the Jews who came before you, your great-grandparents, the immigrants, the Jews of Europe, Spain, Morocco, Egypt, the Jews in Babylon and Palestine, the Jews of Eretz Yisrael, of Sinai, of Canaan...

Can you see their faces?  Are they praying with you?  If they pray with you, then step forward and they will come with you.  

If they are not praying with you, step forward anyway.

You are now with your grandparents.  Are they praying with you?  If they are, step forward and take them with you as you move up to your parents.

If your grandparents are not praying with you, step forward anyway.

You are now with your parents.  Are they praying with you?  If they are, include them as you see yourself bow down with the burden and pleasures of your history and their history as you begin this Amidah.

If your parents are not praying with you, pray anyway.

2.  GEVUROT - GOD’S POWER

Rambam says,
If you can’t imagine God then you don’t exist.

Imagine God.

3.  SANCTIFY GOD’S NAME

Quckly, what are all the names and metaphors you know for God?  

What was the first one that came to you?

4. What do you want God to help you understand?

5. You are so sorry.  You know what you did. 

6. Ask for forgiveness.  You know what you need to do.

7. You are forgiven.  

8 Imagine one part of your body that feels pain. Imagine all this pain gone, healed and made whole.   Imagine the pain of the world. 

9. Pray for the Earth, our home, and all that it gives us.

10.  May the homeless be housed.  May the hungry be fed. May the exiled go home.

11.  May all judges rule with kindness and compassion.  May we always refuse to participate in wrongdoing.

12.  Do you have any enemies?  Imagine a place where they are your friends.

13. We ask for the gift of mindfulness.  Whatever you are feeling right now, note it and let it go and go back to your breath.  

14. Let us think of Israel as the best version of itself that you can imagine.

15.  Isn’t it wonderful to be who and what you are?  Isn’t it just amazingly wonderful?

16.  Think about your prayers, your holy conversation, your kadosh kesher.  Ask to be heard.  

You are heard.

17.  Ask for opportunities to serve others with your gifts.

18. Give thanks for this beautiful and complicated world and this gift of life that was given to you.

19.  Shalom.  Salaam.  Peace.

May the words of our mouths and the thoughts of our hearts become joyful truth.

May the good things we pray for happen and, if not, 

May we never forget to hope. 

And when you are ready, 
open your eyes.

Blessing The Name

Bless Hashem, Bless The Name
Of The Creator of Light and Darkness.

This is sometimes hard to understand:
Blessing the name and not naming the name.
Perhaps it means
We are in awe
And can only touch the hem of the garment,
Not even the name itself.
But sometimes I think
It just means that we haven't yet come up
With a satisfactory nickname.

In Genesis
God created the wild beasts and all the birds of the sky
And brought them to Adam to see what he would calll them
And the man gave names to them all.
Did Adam gain control of the animals because he could name them?
Or was that only an illusion of control
To comfort Adam in his newborn bewilderment?

And sometimes I think
That the God who receives all this blessing
Watches us to see what we will call God.
Giving us the illusion of control
Over the Eternal Ineffable Unnameable One-ness
So as to comfort us in our spiritual infancy.

So we bless that gift of comfort and delusion,
One among many
As we come together,
To Bless the Name
Of the Creator of Light and Dark
Of Life and Death
Of Everything
We are in awe
And can only touch the hem of the garment
Not even the name itself.

It is so interesting.
It is so lovely.
We are so lucky.

Adam and Eve Invent Hanukah

.וַיֹּאמֶר אֱלֹהִים יְהִי אוֹר וַיְהִי אוֹר





We can't avoid it.

The days are shorter,

The nights are longer,

And it's cold:

The sun is disappearing!

Damn.

Isn't it enough to get kicked out of Eden?

Isn't it enough that 
We work in the dirt for a living,

And give birth to screaming moist creatures with giant heads,

Now God is killing the sun?!

What did we do to God this time?
Sheesh.

What's next, a flood?

Start thinking fast, kids!

Invent fire, clothing, houses, fried food

And rituals to bring back the sun.

Light the candles! More every day!

And cook up something comforting.

Will potato pancakes bring back the warmth?

We don't know but

They couldn't hurt.

So let us eat
By the glow of the hanukiah
And look into the flames
while we dream of overthrowing oppressors
with miracles of light,
As we spin the dreydl

And place our bets
And say our prayers
And our thanks
For the return of the sun.

Bless Elohim, the ancient God of our ancestors, creating light, making miracles and sustaining us through the winter.

Place Yourself: An Unetaneh Tokef

PLACE YOURSELF in front of the fear. 

You will be judged, you will die.

Place yourself in the center of the universe

You earned that spot simply by existing.

Place yourself under obligation to God

However you understand or don’t understand God.

Place yourself on the path of holiness and justice, joy and truth.

Bless and be blessed by HaMakom, the Place where we find ourselves.

REMEMBER  

Remember what you did wrong

Remember what tyou did right.

Remember those who came before you.

Remember that you are responsible for those who come after you.

Remember your history.

Remember Torah.

Bless and be blessed by Shaddai, remembering us.

DECLARE YOURSELF

Because the truly evil are already condemned

The truly good are already blessed

And then, there’s the rest of us.

It is said that on Rosh Hashanah God decides your fate: life or death.

And the ten days until Yom Kippur are your opportunity to change God’s mind.

So don’t blow it.

This is a powerful day, a fantastic opportunity!

Choose to be yourself.

Declare yourself for holiness and Justice,  joy and truth.

Bless and be blessed by Shechina, listening.

NOW WE DECLARE

And as a congregation, we proclaim:

Let the holiness rise up!

On Rosh Hashanah it is written

On Yom Kippur it is sealed.

And let us declare together:

We understand nothing.

All that is physical, ends.

We die.

But not today.

Except sometimes, today.

We fret about the past and worry about the future

And forget to live with where we are now.

And then we die.

We understand nothing.

But  

Teshuvah, Tefilah & Tzedukah 

Restore us to our place.

Teshuvah, when we return to our true selves;

Tefillah, when we stop time in holy conversation;

Tzedukah, when we transcend self;

And that’s when God decrees,

That's when you decide.

Bless and be blessed by Ruach HaOlam, breathing mindfulness.

THE DAY IS HOLY

Listen to the Shofar as it announces:

Awesome and sacred is this sweet day!

The world is filled with the Divine, we are surrounded!

Hear us, know us.

Love us, enjoy us.

Remember us, rouse us.

Forgive us, inspire us, 

Bless and be blessed by Elohim, the Creator, the Created, Creating. 

We place ourselves in front of the fear,

On the path of holiness and Justice, joy and truth.

Amen.

A Prayer for Praying Before Blowing The Shofar

This was written as a kavanah For the Women of the Wall on Rosh Hashana 5774

From Rabbi Arthur Waskow:  'There are three notes on the shofar-  Tekiah, “Awake!”,  Teruah ,”Open your heart!”,  Shevarim, “Sob with all who suffer!”

Let us blow the shofar

So that everyone can hear:

Awake!
Open Your Heart!
Sob with all who suffer!
We pray for all who thus pray.

However you may gather

Only with your own kind,

Only with your own gender,

Only in mixed company.

After a bowl of cholent,

After a BLT,

In a minyan,

On your own.

In your holy language whatever it may be
Hebrew, Arabic, English, Yiddish, Latin, Russian, Sanskrit, Mandarin, Farsi, Spanish...
all the languages we yearn in.

At your holy sites

In a church,

In a temple,

In a shul,
In a mosque.

In a forest,
In a foxhole,
On a mountain,
At a wall.

However you may be heard
Singing,

Speaking,

Reciting,

Whispering,

Moaning,
Silently,
Blowing a shofar.

However you may hold yourself
Eyes open,
Eyes closed,

Kneeling,

Sitting,

Standing,

Shukeling,

Spinning.

For whatever reason

With your heart, wishing for the health of a loved one,

With your mouth, reciting liturgy within community,

With your body, dancing in spiritual transcendence,

With your feet, acting for a socially just world.

Because when you pray

Whether in obligation to a commandment

Or in mindful awareness of every moment,
Whether in deepest faith or faithful doubt,
When you pray you are  holy, kadosh.

And we honor you

Even if you do not honor us.

Please remember,
You speak to God

But you do not speak FOR God

So let us blow the shofar now

So that everyone can hear

That on this holy day

We pray for all who pray
Even those who would stop us from our prayer.

We pray with a loud joyful noise

So that we may be heard
Through all the walls
Because this is a holy conversation.

Awake!

Open Your Heart!

Sob with all who suffer!

Amen.

The Trees

"The trees are killing us,"

The man said.

The Rabbi has escorted us here

To this village in the desert,

Or what's left of it,

So we can see for ourselves.

We are a few European Christians, 

One Harvard Divinity student.

And mostly Jews:

American and Australian and Canadian 

And a couple of Israelis.

We are there to 

To meet the Bedouin, 

Israeli citizens all. 

They have lived in this village for a long time

With houses and fields

But officially unregistered

As far as the Israeli government is concerned.

The paperwork is not properly filled out

Someone can't find a deed from before World War One

When such things didn't exist

for the Bedouin

Or something like that.

I admit my knowledge is fuzzy

And there may be room for interpretation,

Though what is crystal clear is that

Someone wanted that land

And the land of 18 other such places.

The State of Israel wanted it,

Developers wanted it,

Large municipalities wanted it,

And they passed a law so they could  "legally" take it.

The man, son of a Bedouin sheik, speaks.

We are seated in a trailer in this village in the Negev

and he tells us,

"The trees are killing us".

The Rabbi had brought us here in a mini-bus from Jerusalem

To witness the grab

And he asks us to tell others what we see.

Okay.  
So this is what I saw:

One of nineteen villages

Now ramshackle sheds and trailers

But there used to be houses and fields and livestock:

They showed us a movie of happier times.

Then the army came and tore it down with bulldozers:

They showed us this movie as well.

Someone wants the lands

On which sit the nineteen villages.

In one location the powers that be want to build factories,

In another, suburbs for Beersheva,

It's a done deal, there are larger needs,

There is Long Term Planning

And the Bedouin are not part of that Plan. 

So what is the plan for the Bedouin?

Take them off the land

But do it "legally".

This is going to happen

Whether they like it or not,

Whether it's legal or not.

At least this way they will get compensation

Of a sort,

And some support 

Of a sort,

As their way of life is destroyed

And they are forced into ersatz towns,

Reservations really,

And into the cities

And what may be lives of

Crime

Alcoholism

Drugs

Despair,

All the terrible things that happen when you take people out of their context

And force them into yours.

Those of us on the mini-bus are all the children of immigrants,

No one's history entirely clean:

The Europeans think about the Gypsies, or the Jews;

The Americans, the Native Americans;

The Canadians, the First Nations;

The Australians, the Aborigines.

An Israeli professor I meet later will boast, "as land grabs go, this one is pretty civilized."

Now maybe I don't have all the information,

Maybe there are wheels within wheels

And probably not all Bedouin motives are pure,

Not all Bedouin are victims,

But still...

In this village, the Jewish National Fund wants to plant trees.  

Yay, trees are wonderful!

I love trees!

When I was a kid and did well in Hebrew School?

Or graduated from something

What did get?  A tree!

A tree was planted in Israel in my name,

What could be better?

What could be more ecological?

In the empty Negev,

They planted your tree,

A Jewish tree!

Screw the Nazis and plant a tree!

And you got a certificate

And imagined that someday when you went to Israel

You would look up your tree

And it would have your name on it.

God forbid any of these trees have my name on them,

These killer trees

Planted on top of

The not so empty Negev.

Planted in an ecology where they don't belong

Stealing water they shouldn't have

On land that isn't theirs.

In this village the JNF planted only about half the trees that were planned

And then they got stopped.

By lawyers.

Now the people of the village are poor

They say they can't leave to get work

Because if they leave the village unwatched

The Army will come and finish the job.

The village will be dead.

"The trees are killing us."

On the way home

The Rabbi asks us how we feel.

Most of us despair.

One Israeli is defensive and grabs the mic on the bus to harangue us:

“You just can't let people move anywhere they want!”

We let him talk longer than we should,

We can see how much it hurts him that the accusation of state-sanctioned thievery may be true.

The Rabbi has seen all our reactions many times

And he lets us feel or think whatever we will.

After the defensive Israeli puts down the mic

We are quiet for some time

On the mini-bus taking us back to Jerusalem.

Then someone asks the Rabbi,

How is it you are not burnt out?   

How can you keep doing this,

Year after year

With so few victories?

And the Rabbi says,

"I believe in Jews

And I know that eventually they will do what is right,"

Let us hope so, 
Because

The trees are killing us, too.

For more info:  http://rhr.org.il