Quote of the Week 155 - The Holy, the Unholy, and the Not Yet Holy

Open Orthodoxy “does not mean Orthodox-lite,” he says. “It is following the law but seeing the importance of the outside world: To paraphrase [the early 20^th century] Rabbi Kook, there is no such thing as the ‘unholy, there is only the holy and the not yet holy. The study of English, the study of chemistry, the study of art, all have the potential to be consistent with kedusha, to be holy.”

--From a Moment magazine article by Sarah Breger in the November/December 2010 issue regarding Rabbi Avi Weiss and his ordination of the first Open/Modern Orthodox female rabba, Sara Hurwitz

Meditation and the Bible, by Aryeh Kaplan

The following has been added to the Bibliography/Book Review article on Aryeh Kaplan:

I have now read Meditation and the Bible. It is quite interesting and inspiring. It validates many of the hunches I have had about the authenticity of Jewish meditation practices. He has conducted painstaking research, providing translations from little-known texts never before translated into English. He weaves together references to meditation and meditative states through his analysis of terminology that many scholars before him did not cognize. There is a heavy focus on the biblical Prophets and evidence that they entered meditative states in which they attained their prophetic revelations. He also refers to two hatha yoga-like prophetic postures, both of which are most likely variations on the child pose. There is also a focus on the Psalms as either tools for entering meditative states, or as descriptions of experienced meditative states. There is a particular focus on the 119^th Psalm, which curiously is organized in groupings of eight verses marked by each letter of the Hebrew alphabet per grouping. He points out that this particular Psalm contains a high number of references to words that relate to various forms of meditative states or techniques.

Quote of the Week 154 - The Smile That Is

Because a star explodes and a thousand worlds like ours die, we know this world is. That is the smile: that what might not be, is.

--Source forgotten

Quote of the Week 153 - Einstein's Not-God

I cannot imagine a God who rewards and punishes the objects of his creation, whose purposes are modeled after our own – a God, in short, who is but a reflection of human frailty.

--Albert Einstein