Conversations In The Spirit: Rabbi Aryeh Kaplan

 http://www.nyspirit.com/spirit-readings/in-the-spirit/conversations-spirit-part-8-rabbi-aryeh-kaplan/

Rabbi Aryeh Kaplan: Let me just elaborate on that. As anybody who’s familiar with the Jewish community knows, the Orthodox Jew prays three times a day, and the central part of that prayer is a prayer known as the Amidah [or Standing Prayer]. If one says that prayer correctly, with intense concentration, one gently pushes away all outside thoughts and is drawn close to the Divine.

We never thought of this as meditation. When people come to me and say, “I’m a religious Jew, I pray every day. How should I meditate?” Now, I say, “Make your daily prayer into a meditation.” There are other meditations a person could do, but the major meditation that a Jew does can be part of the service. And this whole methodology was part of the Baal Shem Tov’s teachings in Hasidism. Although many other schools of Jewish meditation had existed, what the Baal Shem Tov did was to make the normal prayer service the integral part of Jewish meditation.

I might add that in Kabbalah, one of the important teachings is that every act that a person does throughout the day can and does become a meditation; that every act that a person does throughout the day can create a unification.