Kabbalah
Kabbalah comes from the Hebrew root meaning to receive. Indeed Kabbalah is a received tradition. But that meaning obscures its true meaning. The true meaning of Kabbalah is receiving from God, the eternal, always beneficient, giver. Receiving from God involves more than just turning on some internal emotional/intellectual switch from the off position to the on position. Receiving from God, means living a reality in which each event and situation is understood and experienced as the hand of God; in short, to live with God consciousness. For in truth, there is none other, there is nothing else, than God.
To live with God consciousness requires more than just making a decision. It requires a decision and a disciplined way of thinking and interpreting what is going on, situation by situation. In each moment, it requires transcending the appearance of the situation and receiving the situation as an essence from God. Without transcending the appearance, the receiving of essence from God cannot occur. Since the appearance of the situation comes from our interpretation of the situation, it is in us. Transcending the appearance, means in the moment of the situation to transcend the common godless way of interpreting the situation. To reinterpret the situation as something other than its godless appearance requires that we must make some shift in ourself, some change in value, some change in judgment, some change in emotion. This is what Kabbalah is all about.
We try to capture the discipline of Kabbalah through essay, through poem, through story and through Torah commentary.There are people who recite Psalms. But their reciting the psalms does not alter anything in them and so they accomplish little. The Kabbalistic reason for reciting Pslams is to make a change in oneself, to renew a framework and perspective from which to live the day with a greater God consciousness.
In order for the Psalms to serve this purpose, they must be regarded as a meditation. Here we provide an explanation of how Psalm 145 is just such a meditation.
