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The Point of Jewish Meditation by Norman Fischer 
Many of us have lost touch with God. It's normal to become distracted, lose our connection, which is why all of us — no matter who we are or how we behave — need to return. The need to return to God is not really a choice: it is built into our human make up and to our human consciousness, which can equally dread death and imagine eternity. It is also built into our human psyche — which perpetually desires and schemes and deceives — that we will constantly lose our connection to God. This is how I read the Adam and Eve story and the whole of the Torah. It is not really a question of sin and failure as we normally take it to be; rather it expresses the tragedy of the human condition. We are necessarily in a relationship with God because of what we are and we keep losing track of that relationship because of what we are. Israel means struggle.
Most people feel oppressed, understandably, by a relationship in which God seems like Big Daddy, the neurotic superego we all want to get out from under. On the deepest level this concept couldn't be further from the truth. And this, I think, has been the purpose of the Jewish meditation movement — to bring our relationship to God, through meditation practice, to a deeper, more basic and more direct level. At this deeper level we see that our human vulnerability, which causes us so much anxiety and fear, can only be healed by embracing a spaciousness within ourselves that includes that vulnerability yet extends beyond ourselves to reach a larger presence. Our consciousness is as God's consciousness. At the level of consciousness, which is being, we can meet God and be met by God, as Torah says Moses did, face to face as a friend. This is true teshuvah — to return to God face to face, to return to what we are, to bring the heart back from its inevitable wandering and lusting and wanting and scheming and worry and fear and allow it to rest in its basic nature, which is to love and be comforted by God. Meditation practice offers us a very concrete and realistic way to realize this profound and experiential truth. When you meditate you will eventually get in touch with how much fear exists inside you. You get used to it, and sometimes you're even willing to acknowledge it and express it. Over the years I've worked with people in spiritual practice I have observed this many times. People who function quite well, who live successful lives, even successful personal lives, tell me that deep down they are quite afraid. What do they fear? Life, death, failure, rejection, revealing who they really are, engaging their lives fully without holding back, loving wholeheartedly, never being able to love, never really being loved. Maybe they fear all of this or perhaps none of it, it's hard to say. But the fear is quite real and it is fundamental. Fear is more than an emotion among other emotions. Where does fear come from? I think it comes from the structure of identity. We all take for granted our sense of being someone. The body, the thoughts, feelings, desires, cherished viewpoints, relationships — all this is us. But all of it is actually pretty shaky stuff. The body ages and dies. The thoughts come and go and are most of the time boring or unreliable. The feelings are also unreliable and mostly unsatisfactory — and the ones we like we can't produce at will, and when they do come they pass away all too quickly. Our viewpoints are mostly unexamined; it's debatable whether we actually believe them, and our relationships are as apt to drive us crazy as make us happy. In other words, our identity is inherently dubious and entirely unstable. At the deepest levels of our psyche we know this and are afraid. So we need to expand our identity. This is the only way to deal with our basic fear. When in meditation practice we open up through our fear and reach out to God; this is exactly what we are doing. We are saying, "Okay, my usual sense of identity works just fine to get me through the day, but in the dark of night, at the bottom of my heart, in life and death matters, which are always only a breath away, it doesn't work." Here on my meditation cushion, in the stillness of my heart, what am I? I am one who is willing to admit my radical vulnerability and exactly because of it to reach out my hand to God as God's friend and partner. I am a husband, a father, a mother, a wife, a worker, a fool maybe, a distracted person, but I am also God's companion. I am God's expression in this world. God alone is nothing, maybe with a capital N, but still nothing. God needs others, needs us, in order to realize God's self. This is what Buber and Heschel have taught us: God creates a world as God's expression. And God creates human beings in God's image, that is, as conscious beings capable of profound mindful awareness, so that God can have someone to talk to. God talks because we are capable of listening. That's why the Shema is our central prayer. Listen. God is talking. Love God with all your heart and all your might and remain mindful of this everyday all day long. And God makes demands: live righteously, live profoundly, don't forget who you are. Return over and over again to God. And we have to respond to God's words and God's demands. Big job. Norman Fischer is the founder of Makor Or, the Jewish meditation center in San Francisco, and is on the faculty of the Elat Chayyim Advanced Meditation Program (ECAMP) at the Isabella Freedman Jewish Retreat Center.
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