There's an app for that. Seriously.

(Sunday)

Amazing. My journey to find Jewish meditation brought me to a bookstore where the owner decided to talk to me.  Not just me taking advantage of an opportunity, but someone else too.  Having added tanya to my search, I ended up at another bookshop and found a "fun" book I've only read in barnes&noble cafes. Then I came to the shop by the kotel and failed to find Jewish meditation (and I came all the way from tel aviv...) but finally opened a copy of Tanya. I read the intro ("warning"), read (skimmed, "read" just sounds better) chapter one, put it back on the shelf, and realized that I wanted to learn Torah and Tanya.  You can't read Tanya without Torah (I have mad respect for zalman's parenthetical referencing), and I have a good feeling that after I finish vol one and two on rabbi z, I'll have a better sense of whether this feels like the right road for me, syd schiff, right now.

I know you're not supposed to need a "reason" to study Torah, but it cant hurt to have one, achshav, can it?

Moral of the story: I learned a lot about myself today, picked up some great used books (and a bootleg cd...), but have more ground to cover since I still haven't found Jewish meditation.  Oy vey... At least I'm burning off this morning's rugulah. Marzipan is ridic. Ridic.

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Wow. What a ridiculously intense 48 hours. I found a pocket size book of tehillim and one of special prayers. The first was beautiful because after davening maariv, I said my kapitel for the first time, followed by a series of personal prayers that felt like something I could have written, had I just known what I wanted to say. And I made up for the missed opportunity to say the prayer at the Me'arat ha-Machpelah. I figure they're connected via the earth and they're not so far away, so it still counts. And the author was more right than he could have known (prob did know I'm just desirous of feeling special) about the long and arduous journey to get to chevron. Yep. Wow.

And I smell like a hippie. I smelled like a hippie 24 hrs ago. Eww.

I always knew it was the spirituality, warmth and beauty of chabad that attracted me.  It's the aggressive baal teshuva stuff that scares me away.  Chabad itself isn't bad. It's beautiful. It's become a business in recent years, which seems to be contributing to the occasional coldness and instant conclusion that I'm just like everybody else, which strikes me as antithetical.  What a shame.  Although it does explain why I'm attracted to specific people in this community.  And why Ivy leaguers might be drawn toward chochma-bina-da'at.

Now I just need to find a copy of Jewish Meditation...