In this Jewish meditation talk given at the Elat Chayyim Advanced Meditation Program, Rabbi Jeff Roth talks about ignorance and the patterns of mind which prevent us from truly meeting the Divine in our lives.

From the talk…
There’s a kind of ignorance that just goes hand in hand with being lost in thought. You’re basically ignoring everything that’s happening now. Except perhaps for the thoughts themselves.

I took a sip of the soup and it was incredibly good and delicious and I immediately started thinking, ‘I could figure out what the ingredients are in this soup. I could figure out what the spices are and then I could make this soup and I could have it whenever I wanted. And I always wanted to have a restaurant, it’d really be nice to own a restaurant.’

Now the whole bowl of soup is gone. In the meantime the whole bowl of soup, you eat a whole bowl of soup and everything is lost. This is a kind of ignorance that comes out of the pleasant.

Ignorance is not about not having knowledge, it’s about having the wrong kind of knowledge. We don’t know how long we’re going to live, we don’t know what’s going to happen to us tomorrow, we don’t have the slightest clue what sense door is going to be struck next, we don’t know what the next second of the sit is going to be. Not knowing is an antidote to ignorance.

There was a rabbi who lived in this town for 30 years, it was a shtel. He lived on a village square on one side and on the other side was the synagogue. The town was run by Cossacks and the police chief was a Cossack. Most of the time they got along OK, but occasionally there was friction. Every single morning the rabbi gets up goes across the square and leads davenenning, leads the morning minyan.

One morning the rabbi, it’s 30 years later, the rabbi’s crossing the square one morning and the police chief says, “Good morning Rabbi. Where to?” as if he doesn’t know, maybe he’s just making conversation. And the rabbi says to him “I don’t know.” And the Cossack police chief gets really furious, he thinks the rabbi’s dissing him, he knows where he’s going and the rabbi knows where he’s going. He grabs the rabbi by his coat and takes him to the jail and throws him in and as he’s closing the door, the rabbi says, “See you never know.”

It doesn’t matter, you never know what the next moment’s going to bring.

October 15 - 19, 2008

with Roshi Bernie Glassman & Rabbi Jeff Roth

at the Maezumi Institute in Western MA

Read more

November 13 - 16, 2008

with Rabbi Jeff Roth

at Am Kolel Sanctuary outside of Washington DC

Read more

January 4 - 25, 2009

with Rabbi Jeff Roth and other teachers

at the Am Kolel Retreat Center in Beallsville, Maryland
(1 hrs from DC - 3 hrs from Philadelphia)

Read more

March 8 - 15, 2009

with Sylvia Boorstein & Rabbi Jeff Roth

at Isabella Freedman in Falls Village, CT

Read more

Another opportunity to wake up. In this talk, Rabbi Joanna Katz names and gives real-life examples of the obstacles that prevent one from being truly present and consciously with G-d.

Desire (lust), aversion (things that we push away), sleepiness, restlessness and doubt. These forces really hinder us from being present in the moment.

When we’re caught in these mind-states, we are invariably completely separate. We’re right there separated by the anochi, we’re really there in the small sense of I and we’re no longer connected to the larger unfolding, the larger truth that I am part of the ever unfolding of G-d.