Focussed on the Place

One of man’s deepest desires and most profound needs is place.

The rabbis describe a special practice of the “early Hasidim”, the great endearers of life. They would pause, focussing and “aligning their hearts with the Place.”  Apparently (and so Maimonides and others say), they would sit in silence a long time to do that and only after that would they speak. When they did speak, what they spoke was prayer.

Prayer comes from silence because it arises from unbounded and, as yet, unmanifest potential. The world as it is now, will change, and that change will come from the same silent pool of potential from which life came. When we contact that, we are in touch with the deepest place we can pray from: the Root of existence itself.  From there Will begins to emerge and opens into the Wisdom that creates life. That is where the Vision of what life can be and what G-d wants it to be resides and contacting it and then speaking it channels it into the world and makes life better.

I try to speak from that Place and the Torah on this site has moments when it is touched.