The River of Light: Jewish Mystical Awareness
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About this ebook
“Despite the obvious contradictions, complexity, and apparent randomness that assault any human being day after day, everything is somehow nevertheless connected, orchestrated. The universe is filled with meaning….
In Jewish mysticism, the river is a metaphor for the Holy Oneness that unifies all creation. Just imagine it: a sacred stream, luminous and ubiquitous, a river of light.”
—from the Preface to the Anniversary Edition
This is an invitation to wade into a deeper spiritual consciousness. Taking us step-by-step, Kushner helps us to allow “the river of light”—the deepest currents of consciousness—to rise to the surface and animate our lives.
Rabbi Lawrence Kushner
Rabbi Lawrence Kushner is one of the most widely read authors by people of all faiths on Jewish spiritual life. He is the best-selling author of such books as Invisible Lines of Connection: Sacred Stories of the Ordinary; God Was in This Place & I, i Did Not Know: Finding Self, Spirituality and Ultimate Meaning; Honey from the Rock: An Introduction to Jewish Mysticism; The Book of Letters: A Mystical Hebrew Alphabet; The Book of Miracles: A Young Person's Guide to Jewish Spiritual Awareness; The Book of Words: Talking Spiritual Life, Living Spiritual Talk; Eyes Remade for Wonder: A Lawrence Kushner Reader; I'm God, You're Not: Observations on Organized Religion and other Disguises of the Ego; Jewish Spirituality: A Brief Introduction for Christians; The River of Light: Jewish Mystical Awareness; The Way Into Jewish Mystical Tradition; and co-author of Because Nothing Looks Like God; How Does God Make Things Happen?; Where Is God?; What Does God Look Like?; and In God's Hands. He is the Emanu-El Scholar at San Francisco's Congregation Emanu-El and an adjunct professor of Jewish mysticism and spirituality at Hebrew Union College–Jewish Institute of Religion. Rabbi Lawrence Kushner is available to speak on the following topics: • Jewish Mystical Imagination • Rymanover's Silent Aleph: What Really Happened on Sinai • Zohar on Romance and Revelation • What Makes Kabbalah Kabbalah • Sacred Stories of the Ordinary: When God Makes a Surprise Appearance in Everyday Life Click here to contact the author.
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The River of Light - Rabbi Lawrence Kushner
Chapter 1
Like Ones in a Dream
The ultimate source of a dream may be traceable to tensions, or conditions, or events, antecedent not only to the dream itself but also to the physical organism that occasioned the dream and was its medium—primordial tensions and events which were not produced by, but which produced, the physical organism itself as well as producing the consciousness that is correlative to a physical organism.
—Owen Barfield¹
The dream is a ... plastic manifestation during sleep of an enduring, unconscious drama
operating continuously, day and night ... an expression of a more enduring fantasy.
—Herbert Fingarette²
[Raba] said to [the dream interpreter]: I saw two turnip tops. He replied, you will receive two blows with a cudgel. On that day Raba went and sat all day in the academy. He found two blind men quarrelling with one another. Raba went to separate them and they gave him two blows. They wanted to give him another blow but he said, Enough! I saw in my dream only two.
—Berachot 56a³
A consciousness glistens within each creature and each creature’s creation, even as it guided the hand of the One who spoke and the world came into being. Rabbi Oshaya, at the beginning of Genesis Rabba, reminds us that when even a king builds a castle, he uses a blueprint.⁴ So the Creator, too, returns again and again to that underlying pattern of being. Arrangements of motion that organize and animate all being. This is reality’s dream. Holy literature. Organizing motif beneath the apparent surface.
This consciousness is never still, not even for a moment. It will not be photographed or even named. In its wanting to become aware, it rearranges itself in one pattern after another. Feel it now in the blinking of your eyes. The moisture on your tongue. The gentle filling and emptying of your lungs. It rises unnamed through us, the incessant motion of the four creatures bearing the chariot in Ezekiel’s vision: human, lion, ox, and eagle, running and returning. Creation is in us. The plan the Creator used reappears everywhere: from the most erudite contemporary cosmological theory to the opening sentences of Genesis, it is the same.
Before we can follow Abraham’s journey, we must first meet him in the scriptural text. But this is itself an unknown place. For earlier generations, it was perhaps a place of literal truth and holiness. But now, even for those of us who can recite the words by heart, it is a place on no map. Logically impossible: entirely human and entirely God’s word. And, like other holy indescribable places and times, it has a dreamlike quality.
When the Holy One brought us back to Zion, we were like ones in a dream
(Ps. 126:1). Of course, there are many ways to understand the word dream.
Most commonly, it denotes a nocturnal hallucination. Something foggy, surrealistic, and above all, unreal. Another kind of dream speaks of a worked—for, hoped—for future, as in I have a dream.
Here the speaker concedes that the dream is a wish. And then there is the dream that is too good to be true. This is the kind of dream in which the author of Psalm 126 understood the returning exiles to live. Here the wish of the past and the future-now-become-present are the same. An order of being that ever flows beneath and unifies all reality. The great dream. The eternal