Comfort You, My People
Exercise: Take a deep breath. Allow yourself to imagine that there is a force of love in the Universe beyond our comprehension. Imagine that force surrounds you, offering you love and comfort, wanting to heal you, every single moment. Become aware of that energy, that love, that comfort. As you breathe, imagine that comforting energy expanding into you, easing those broken places, offering healing to what is wounded. Hold that thought for two minutes. Take another breath, and then say, “Praised Are You, God, who loves and comforts Your people.”
Background: We use the word imagination in a variety of complex ways. Sometimes we mean a flight of fancy. We imagine something impossible, like being able to fly or do magic. Other times we use the word to mean the first step in planning. We imagine something different and better as we think about how to bring our imagined outcome to reality.
One additional sense of the word is to use the mind to create or form an idea / a mental image. Maimonides used the word in this sense. He instructed us to imagine God when we are praying. In saying this, he neither implies that God does or does not exist. And further, he of all people cannot mean to imagine God as a person or figure or image. After all, Maimonides repeatedly teaches that God is unique in the Universe. Further God is both of and outside of this Universe, which means we as humans lack the necessary perspective to ever really understand or envision what God is.
Instead, he means that our imaginative faculty, our ability to form a thought and meditate on it, has impact on our consciousness. That faculty is a bridge between us and God. That meditation then invites us into experiences of awareness of God. We have an experience that touches our mind. We cannot know if that experience is internal or external to the self. I wonder though if that question matters. This is what Isaiah means when he asks to imagine God as mighty and filled with wisdom.
Isaiah in a moment of prophecy, meaning a moment of feeling subjectively that he was channeling a message from God to the world, describes God as saying, “Be comforted, My people.” He connects with a force of hope that promises a voice will cry out in hope and in joy. His connection with that imagined Divine led him to imagine redemption, an end to suffering, and an opening up of joy and new possibility. The exercise above is designed to help us experience some small measure of the hope and comfort that Isaiah describes.
Shabbat Shalom,
Rabbi David Booth
