Guidelines For Making Torah Study A Meditation Practice
• You must approach your Torah learning with a deep and sincere desire to be transformed by God’s will and its Truth. Ideally this intention should be articulated as an actual prayer before study.
• You must find (or create) a place within you that is burning to understand what the text is teaching because you understand that your “life” depends upon it, that it holds a key to your quality of life. The measure of your drive-to-know will be the measure of your willingness to work, for our sages teach, “the reward (i.e. benefit of a spiritual practice) is only proportionate to the labor.”
• The means are the ends. Release all expectations of covering a certain amount of text or of getting to the end of the chapter within a certain time frame. Each sentence (sometimes each word) has its own treasure. Even if it is just restating a previous idea you must seek to experience it now, in this moment, as a new revelation. You should get excited by the concept each time you hear it. You should feel stretched and delighted anew by its depth. After each sentence ask, “What do I know now that I didn’t know before?” Stay in the present. All meditation is training to access the depth of each moment.
• After each new idea recap the logical development of the piece. Go back to the beginning and follow it through adding this next piece of information on to the end. The recap becomes a mantra that triggers new associations.
• You must be rigorously precise in your translation. Look up all unfamiliar words, as well as all Biblical, Talmudic, and Midrashic citations. Your understanding of the text’s most basic level of sense becomes the vessel that draws the creative insight. If this stage is sloppy and superficial, it will not pull a clean light.
• Go through each piece at least three times discovering new layers of implications with each round.
• It is good to have a concise and unobstructive “mantra” to touch at periodic moments in your learning and that can quickly bring you back into an alpha state when you lose your focus. On the first page of Mishna Brura (a code of Jewish law) is a highly recommended Jewish meditation that is perfect for this practice. Watch your breathing, it should stay slow and deep.
• Note any places where resistance and anxiety appear. Breathe into them. Affirm your commitment to truth:
I seek truth from the depth of my being. I do not want to be limited by my own narrow-minded conception of what it should look like. I will open myself to these teachings with one condition: Whatever is true should enter my life and take root. Whatever is false should pass through and leave no impression. I trust that it will be so. I embrace truth and deflect falsehood (A Still Small Voice, Prayer and Destiny, Lesson 1).
This essay was published in Meditation from the Heart of Judaism which can be purchased at amazon.com
This article can be viewed in adobe pdf format.
