A “Font of Every Blessing”
I recently ran across a post I had written for this blog around the end of my first year of Judaism, despairing of ever understanding the Jewish approach to mysticism – known generally as Kabbalah – and, I’m sorry to say, poking fun in little ways at that which I did not understand. Fast forward nearly two more years and I have not made tremendous progress understanding Jewish mysticism. But it is quite true that “when the student is ready, the teacher appears” and I do believe that I have found a teacher – a group of them, really, in the form of the ALEPH Ordination Program – who may finally help this soul connect to its mystical roots. I have recently started reading Rabbi Marcia Prager’s beautiful book The Path of Blessing , which takes an exhaustively detailed look at the six words that introduce a whole category of Jewish prayers known as b’rakhot : “ barukh attah Adonai, Eloheinu melekh ha-olam ” (typically, but as always without capturing the full sense of the Hebrew, t