Jewish Meditation for Everyone Institute for Jewish Spirituality

This episode of our podcast features a teaching and meditation by Rabbi Sam Feinsmith of the IJS Core Faculty. It's the last in a series of four meditations on the theme of "From Constriction to Expanse," a series intended to help us prepare inwardly for Passover. Rabbi Feinsmith reminds us that we are usually suffering from a case of mistaken identity. We erroneously understand our constructed self-identity, generated by our ego, as our true self. But the ingrained narrowness of our ego, which seeks to protect, cherish, and justify itself, inflicts suffering on ourselves and the world -- just like Pharaoh in the Exodus narrative. Whereas our deepest, truest self emerges from that which is timeless, ever-present, and infinitely spacious. On Pesach, we move from the constriction of the false self, and move towards the expansive freedom of our essential, true self -- which emerges, and is never separate from, Timeless Presence.

This episode of our podcast features a teaching and meditation by Rabbi Sam Feinsmith of the IJS Core Faculty. It's the first in a series of four meditations on the theme of "From Constriction to Expanse," a series intended to help us prepare inwardly for Passover. The Jewish mystical tradition teaches that beyond the tyranny and constriction of the ego lies our true nature: a spiritual core or essence that is innately compassionate, wise, connected, and spacious. In Hasidic teachings in particular, the journey of discovering or recognizing this inner essence is understood as a kind of internal Exodus that transports us from servitude to freedom. In this meditation, Rabbi Feinsmith draws on Hasidic wisdom to remind us that we can experience freedom in any moment, simply by noticing that we are not synonymous with or bound by our thoughts and feelings. We can taste freedom simply by remembering our essence as human beings created in the Divine Image.

This episode of our podcast features a teaching and meditation by Rabba Dr. Mira Neshama Weil, of Neshimah in Israel. She notes that just like the experience of childbirth, all new beginnings and liberation often require of us blood, sweat, tears, and brokenness. She asks: What might be born out of the heartbreak so many of us feel these days? What destructive patterns are being shattered right now? What might break open within ourselves that might give birth to new possibilities? In this meditation, Rabba Weil asks us to sit with this powerful question, as we move towards Passover, the season of rebirth and liberation: "If something could break open within me, what would it be?"

This episode of our podcast features a teaching and meditation by Rabbi Daniel Raphael Silverstein of Applied Jewish Spirituality. It's a teaching he offered just as Rosh Hodesh Nisan, the new month of Nisan, was arriving in Israel. The appearance of the first sliver of the New Moon of Nisan — the first month of the year for the Jewish people — is an especially auspicious moment of renewal. Rabbi Silverstein invites each of us to grow in awareness of the freshness, the newness of each breath, of each moment of our lives, and to see them as brimming with possibility. In these fraught times, it is a practice that can help us nurture our capacity for hope, and our ability to chart a new course in the days, weeks, and months ahead. We hope you find it meaningful and helpful.

This episode of our podcast features a teaching and meditation by Rabbi Sara Brandes of The Awakened Body in Israel. Rabbi Brandes invites us to hold in our imagination two cups from the Passover Seder: the Kiddush cup, representing goodness and blessing, and the cup of Miriam, a cup filled with water inspired by Miriam's well. Rabbi Brandes describes how her family combines the traditional diminishing of the wine in our cup of blessing during the recitation of the 10 plagues with a family tradition of washing the fingertips in the waters of Miriam's cup, enabling us to rebalance and transform pain into love. This is a beautiful practice for holding both the cup of blessing, the cup of joy, as well as the cup of tears, the cup of pain and suffering.

This episode of our podcast features a teaching and meditation by Rabbi Dr. Jenny Solomon of Beth Meyer Synagogue in Raleigh, North Carolina. Rabbi Solomon offers a simple but deep practice based on a teaching from the Jewish mystical tradition that one of the names for the Divine is simply "zot," the Hebrew word which means "this." We can connect with the sacred simply by bringing our attention to what is present for us in each moment — in this place, this sensation, this person, this breath. In other words, through mindfulness practice we can notice that God is present in each moment, just as it is; the Divine is always hiding in plain sight. God is — this. Please join this beautiful teaching and practice.