Practicing Lightness

Blue Cliff Monastery

Lightness is not a state of being that the Jewish tradition tends to espouse. Ours leans towards the weighty, the digging into concepts complicated and deep, toward responsibilities placed on our shoulders for the sake of preserving our tradition, healing the world and doing what we were placed on this planet to do. The Hebrew word for light (the opposite of heavy), Kal, appears a whopping zero times in the Torah. The few times in which the verb using…