Wednesday, August 8, 2012

Do What You Can: Rebbe Nachman's Meditation Practice





People have been cherry picking passages from Rebbe Nachman’s writings for a long time.  We see this in Outpouring of the Soul, called in Hebrew Histap’kuth HaNefesh. It was complied in 1904 by Rabbi Moshe Yehoshua Bezishianski, known as the Reb Alter of Teplik.  Reb Alter combed through Rabbi Nachman’s writings and found passages particularly suited to meditation, and its allied pursuit according to the Bratslaver Hasidim, prayer.

What we get in this small distillation of the Rebbe’s work is the rock hard center of his thinking about mediation and prayer.  How to do it, how to keep it up, and what to expect from it.  Translated by the noted expert on Jewish mediation, Aryeh Kaplan, this small book is really indispensable for an understanding of Jewish meditation in a condensed form.

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