Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    The River of Light: Jewish Mystical Awareness
    The River of Light: Jewish Mystical Awareness
    The River of Light: Jewish Mystical Awareness
    Ebook199 pages2 hours

    The River of Light: Jewish Mystical Awareness

    By Rabbi Lawrence Kushner

    ()

    Read preview

    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.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTurner Publishing Company
    Release dateMay 16, 2013
    ISBN9781580237543
    The River of Light: Jewish Mystical Awareness
    Author

    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.

    Read more from Rabbi Lawrence Kushner

    Related to The River of Light

    Related ebooks

    Judaism For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      Kabbalah

      Feb 28, 2020

      Think of the mystical religion Kabbalah, and many will immediately picture the singer Madonna. As one of a number of celebrities to embrace its ancient wisdom in recent years, she has sought to study and understand Kabbalah’s deep teachings, often in

      5 min read

    • Article

      Six Hundred Thousand Faces

      Jul 13, 2017

      Six Hundred Thousand Faces
      6 min read

    • Article

      The Hidden God: One man’s path to knowing less about God.

      Jun 13, 2013

      David Friedman moved from Denver to the Israeli city of Safed in 1979 to live as a Haredi, or ultra Orthodox Jew. At 29, he and his wife Miriam already had four children. He enrolled at a yeshiva where he drew a salary to study Talmud. It seemed like

      11 min read

    • Article

      Syncretism

      Feb 28, 2020

      Syncretism
      1 min read

    • Article

      Woman letters

      Mar 21, 2024

      Woman letters
      6 min read

    • Article

      Anthropomorphising God

      Feb 24, 2022

      TO SEND REVIEW COPIES, CONTACT THE BOOK REVIEWS EDITOR AT DVBARRETT@FORTEANTIMES.COM Francesca Stavrakopoulou Picador 2021 Hb, 608pp, £25, ISBN 9781509867332 There’s no doubting Francesca Stavrakopoulou’s ambition. In this huge, hugely entertaining,

      11 min read

    • Article

      Anthropomorphising God

      Feb 24, 2022

      TO SEND REVIEW COPIES, CONTACT THE BOOK REVIEWS EDITOR AT DVBARRETT@FORTEANTIMES.COM Francesca Stavrakopoulou Picador 2021 Hb, 608pp, £25, ISBN 9781509867332 There’s no doubting Francesca Stavrakopoulou’s ambition. In this huge, hugely entertaining,

      11 min read

    • Article

      Faith For Troubled Times

      May 18, 2021

      Faith For Troubled Times
      4 min read

    • Article

      Beyond “Survival Of The Fittest”

      Oct 15, 2021

      If you learned about Charles Darwin’s evolutionary theory in school, most likely it was presented as a straightforward explanation for how species have evolved to become what they are today. Individuals with different traits competed, and the stronge

      4 min read

    • Article

      Poetry Is Prayer

      Feb 28, 2020

      Prayer and poetry are defined by being words that gesture beyond words themselves. The post Poetry Is Prayer appeared first on The Millions.

      13 min read

    • Article

      The Smutty Mystic

      Feb 10, 2022

      The Smutty Mystic
      10 min read

    • Article

      The Other Bibles

      Feb 27, 2024

      The Other Bibles
      12 min read

    • Article

      Ride The Waves

      Mar 21, 2023

      Ride The Waves
      4 min read

    • Article

      Book Briefs

      Nov 3, 2020

      Human beings have written paeans to everything from shadows to nightingales, but few things inspire more admiration in bodhisattvas than compassion. Yet what exactly does compassion, a word used so liberally today, consist of? In Praise of Great Comp

      4 min read

    • Article

      Book Briefs

      Dec 7, 2021

      FIRST PUBLISHED in 2001 when the author was seventy-eight, Setouchi Jakucho’s memoir Places (Hawai’i) has finally been translated into English, by Liza Dalby. Setouchi, now ninety-nine, is perhaps Japan’s most famous Buddhist nun; before she was orda

      4 min read

    • Article

      There Must Be Sacred Art: On Peter O’Leary’s ‘Thick and Dazzling Darkness’

      May 30, 2018

      “We prayed in Arabic everyday,” the poet Kaveh Akbar once wrote, “a language nobody in my family spoke.” His family spoke Farsi and English. Prayer, then, was a transformation: “From an early age, I was saying this mellifluous, charged language that

      5 min read

    • Article

      This Labor Was Never for You: Sex and the Small Press

      Mar 20, 2019

      More often than not, when we as women express intellectual interest, this curiosity is read through the lens of physical desire. The post This Labor Was Never for You: Sex and the Small Press appeared first on The Millions.

      5 min read

    • Article

      Private Devotion

      Sep 1, 2018

      Greetings from Angelus by Gershom Scholem (translated by Richard Sieburth). Archipelago Books, 2018, $14.00 paper. IN 1648—the year, according to the Zohar, destined to usher in the messianic era—a Smyrnan Jew by the name of Shabbatai Tzvi received

      5 min read

    • Article

      A Pained Intuition and a Palpable Longing: Katie Ford on Theology, Poetry, and the Unknowable

      Sep 13, 2018

      If You Have to Go, the new collection of poems by Katie Ford, is a book that conjures powers of possession. I feel that way about all of her books: Her poems bring me to a mystical plane somewhere between language and life. I’m left shaken. Her willi

      17 min read

    • Article

      Book Briefs

      Jun 28, 2022

      AS A STUDENT and teacher of Zen, Joan Sutherland has spent her entire adult life with koans. That she has “loved and struggled” with koans for so long is evident in her lush and evocative Through Forests of Every Color: Awakening with Koans (Shambhal

      4 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for The River of Light

    0 ratings

    0 ratings0 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

      Book preview

      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

      Enjoying the preview?
      Page 1 of 1