Rabbi Alan Lew guides them through exercises that focus the breathing. They then concentrate on the four Hebrew letters that make up the unpronounceable name of God, envisioning the letters, then envisioning the form of each letter dissolving. Once the sole province of male kabbalists over 40, Jewish meditation is being revived in a less esoteric, more egalitarian form. Based in Berkeley, Chochmat HaLev offers meditation groups throughout the Bay Area. She is also working on her own book for beginning meditators.
Fink sees three types of Jewish meditation emerging.
The third channel, she says, is meditating on Jewish images and Hebrew words. I learned what it was to concentrate on that, to put your whole self into that. That was the first step. I then devised a way in which, instead of saying all the words, I meditated on the different sections of the service. For Beth Sholom's Lew, it was practicing meditation as a Zen Buddhist that opened him to the richness of the Jewish prayer service.