Imbolc Anniversary Moon
“Look at the candles. Choose one. Focus on receiving the light from the candle. Let your thoughts go. When they intrude, come back to the light of the candle.” Sounds like a meditation seminar. It wasn’t though. The speaker was Rabbi Jamie Arnold at Beth Evergreen last night. This was during last night’s shabbat service.
Had I not attended the kabbalah session on Tuesday I would have missed a key point. Kabbalah originally meant receive. It now has the connotation of tradition, teachings received by students over the centuries from kabbalistic sages.
Too, another key idea of kabbalah is that of a broken world. Shards of light, of divinity, of the sacred scattered from the vessel chosen by God to be the other in a newly created universe. That vessel could not contain the light and shattered into the matter that forms our world. This means that each part of our cosmos contains that light, a spark we can access in our Self, our soul, which is pure awareness. As pure awareness, we can attend to the light of the world.
As masked souls-our always state, we have to learn how to see the light. The service at Beth Evergreen offered mediation styles for that purpose. The second focused on following our breath and punctuating it while visualizing the Hebrew letters forming the tetragrammaton, one of the names of God. This was difficult for me since the shape of the Hebrew letters are distant memories. My Hebrew class was in 1974. Still, the breathing and its pauses on the inhale and exhale was meditative in itself.
I’m staying open to learning from this ancient faith, a tribal religion sustained by its traditions and the difficult history of its people.
