Meditation Series on the Aleph Bet

Shalom and Welcome everyone to a new exciting zman at Webyeshiv.org. Tomorrow night we will begin a new series on the Aleph-Bet as a tool of meditation. Each week we will learn a portion of the mystical literature about the Aleph-Beit, Meditate on the concepts and then share our experiences. Looking forward to seeing all of you.

Avraham Shira

Shalom ans Blessings;

Tomorrow night, we will continue our new series on Meditation and the Aleph Beit.  We will return to the Zohar Breishit, and the amazing insights of Rav Hamnuna Saba, a contemporary of Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai, and who is buried near Rashbi on Mount Meron.  This piece describes the letters almost as living entities, and their power is something intrinsic in those who learn, pray and meditate in Hebrew.  Rabbi Nachman teaches that these letters, words, and ideas feed the mind new soul power.  LM 34.

Welcome.  Tomorrow night we will continue  God’s interviews the letters of the holy Aleph-Bet.  Afterward, we will continue our practice of meditation on these contractions of God’s wisdom, as Rabbi Nachman says, into the physical realm.  Look forward to seeing you there.

Avraham Shira

Shalom, welcome to our Meditation series on the Aleph Bet, according to Rav Hamnuna Saba and the Zohar haKadosh.  Tomorrow night we will continue to see how each of the letters defend their positions that they should be the first ‘letter’ in the Torah, an esteemed position throughout eternity.  The letters Yud, Tet, Zayin and Vav will each present their arguments before the King of Kings.  What will each say that may argue their place in the holy linguistic code of Creation?  Come and see.

Avraham Shira

Shalom.  Welcome again to our exploration of Meditation on the Aleph-Beit through the eyes of the Zohar and Rabbi Hamnunah Saba.  Tomorrow night we should complete this exceptional discourse as the Zohar records God’s conversations with the letters Dalet, Gimel, Bet and Aleph.  Each letter desires to be the opening letter of the Torah.  Which will be chosen?  Come and see the amazing display of personality invested in the living text of the Torah letters.

Avraham Shira

Shalom.  Tonight we will look into the Zohar for the secret of the Letters that appeared on the Breastplate = Choshen of the Kohain Gadol in the Beit HaMikdash, the same Choshen that King David and others used to consult with God before important events for Am Yisrael.  What was the significance of these letters and their purpose in communicating God’s will to the Jewish people?  What significance do they have for us today?  What does the Torah mean when it says, ‘Write them on the tablets of your heart’?   This class promises to reveal many important steps in our understanding of meditation on the letters of the Holy Alef-Bet.  Look forward to seeing you there.

Avraham Shira

Shalom and welcome to our last class of the series.  Tonight’s teaching can be called, ‘The Letters of a Blessing.”  We will learn the kaballist placements of the words of a blessing according to the divine names of the human form, in the order that represents the map of God’s light as it desscends into the world through our blessings .  This class is fundamental for understanding the union of the upper and lower worlds and how the letters of making a blessing become the conduits of blessing itself from God to man.  W will meditate and make a blessing tonight according to these teachings of the Rashash, and I encourage each of you to have an item of food or drink you enjoy that you can bless on after we learn and meditate and make our blessings.

Look forward to seeing you there.

Avraham Shira

Shalom and welcome to a New Zman at Webyeshiva.  We’re very excited to continued our meditation course on the Aleph Bet.  Each night is a mini seminar of learning, meditating, writing and sharing about our experiences in Jewish meditation.  Tomorrow night we will begin with a famous piece in Kabbalah literature called, ‘The Otiot of  Rabbi Akiva.’  This teaching will bring home the Midrash that says in Breishit Rabba, ‘When the wind blows, it blows in Hebrew.’  This mystical idea will guide us as we become more intimate to what the letters of the Aleph Bet really are:  The building blocks of Creation, or, in modern parlance, energy maps of how God creates and communicates to the world.

Look forward to seeing all of you there.

Avraham Shira

Shalom, welcome again to our series on Meditation and the Aleph Bet.   Tonight we will continue with the Letters of Rabbi Akiva, and how each letter is a symbol of action and importance in the life of human beings, and how the original aleph bet was a composite of divine wisdom expressed in shape, sound and number, and how our consciousness is a processor of these three features that enables us to use language, sound and number to communicate not only on th earthly plane, but to transcend lower consciousness and approach the upper levels of our souls, and their respective places in the worlds.

Look forward to seeing you there.

Avraham Shira

Shalom and Welcome.  Tonight we continue exploring the letters as vehicles of meditation.  We have reached the Gimel, the third letter, a letter of synthesis, the power of giving, the levels of giving, the receiving that is really giving, and how in meditation we both give and receive in our relationship to the Creator.  Look forward to seeing all of you there.  Avraham Shira

Shalom and welcome to our Thursday night class and meditation on the Letters of the Aleph Beit.  Tonight we will begin with the letter Dalet, and explore its concept, structure, number and significance, with an eye on the transformation properties in this and all letters, in relation to a letter system, but in relation to human beings and the Creator, Himself.  Look forward to being there with all of you.   Avraham Shira

Shalom and Welcomd to our Thursday night Aleph Beit meditation on Web Yeshiva.  Tonight’s letter is ‘Hey’, one of the most significant and profoundly integral letters in God’s creation of the world.  We will look at Hey as the quality the Rabbi Akiva ascribes to it, ‘the window’.  The window to what?  How is it open?  Who opens it?  When is it closed?  Why all of this attached to one letter?  Can we ourselves become ‘windows’ for the sunlight of Hashem to shine through us?  Look forward to seeing all of you there.  Avraham Shira

Shalom and welcome again to our Aleph Beit Meditation.  Last week we tried a new format, a teaching and meditation combined into a 37 experience of learning and contemplating, deep breathing and sublime peaceful contemplation.  I think we may try it again.  Come join us and weigh in on your experience.  We will be learning a piece from Likutei Moharan 48, where the Rebbe explains how our speech can become God’s speech, and it is quite astounding when you hear his explanation.  And we will learn techniques on how to fulfill this teaching.  Looking forward to seeing you there.  Avraham Shira

Shalom and Welcome. Tonight we will focus our learning on the Letter Vav as a tool or vehicle for information in deep meditation. The mystery of how infomration is impregnated into ‘letters’ will be discussed, as will our understanding of how god uses letters to communicate with us much in the way sign languages are used by people. This mystery is very deep and powerful, and not for all students of Jewish meditation. A person must be extremely stable, humble, receptive and patient in this work, but this is the work that all masters of Kabbalah point to when speaking of the prophetic methods that lay behind the Aleph-Beit. I welcome you to enter this teaching cautiously and modestly. Avraham Shira

Shalom and Welcome.  Tomorrow night we continue our journey through the letters of the Aleph Beit, and we have arrived at the seventh letter, Zayin, which means ‘a weapon’, and is shaped like a hatchet, and in Kabbalah reflects the concept of 7, the completion of the physical realm.  This letter represents, amongst other ideas, the convenant, and the power of the agreement between man and God, the Jewish people and the Torah, and the soul of the tzadik, Moshe, our Teacher.  Come join us on the infinite web of divine associations and connections that make up God’s Blueprint for all reality.  Avraham Shira

Shalom and Welcome.  Tonight we have come to the letter chet in our Aleph Bet meditations.  This letter, whose name is synonymous with an idea most of us abhore, the idea of sin, its meaning, according to Rabbi Akiva, is a fence.  Come learn why such concepts collide in the names of letters and human beings as well, with ideas we prefer to avoid, or censure.  There is a little referred to concept in Kabbalah called in Hebrew, ‘A davar and chipucho’, a thing and its opposite, which in fancy english might be called, ‘The reflexive inversion of letter permutations.’

Look forward to seeing all of you tonight.

Avraham Shira

Shalom and welcome to our continuing series on Meditation and the Aleph Beit.  Tonight we will discuss the letters Tet and Yud.

As with all the Letters, each is a construct of three basic forms, the ‘point’, the ‘line’ and the ‘curve’.  Aside from basic geometry, these forms craft shapes and ideas that are endlessly duplicated in the physical world.  Rabbi Akiva, with his inspired wisdom, teaches us how these Letters, or primordial forms, represent objects in everyday human life.  It is the connection between everyday human life and primordial structures in Kabbalah that we turn our attention, and discover the wisdom of God embedded in all life.  Meditation enables us to clear the mind, soothe the heart, and open both to each other, to receive.  Here we discover the wisdom of God in Man.

Come join us tonight, 9pm Israel time, as we continue the journey of this ancient understanding.

Avraham Shira

Shalom and Welcome.  Tonight in our meditation on the Aleph Beit we will explore the Yud, the yad or hand of the letters, the place from which all things emerge, the letter which is in all letters, the energty field above the physical plane that must be brought down by man’s relationship to the Creator.  Look forward to seeing you all there.

Avraham Shira

Shalom to all.  I hope everyone had a wonderful festival of freedom on Pesach.

Welcome to a new zman on Webyeshiva.org

Tomorrow night we will return to our weekly explorations and meditations of the Aleph Beit, but this zman we will incorporate new techniques for using the letters in various meaningful ways in our lives, including discovering through the letters the allusions imbedded in our names, our family names, including numerical equivalents, translingual interpreations of our non Hebrew names, and letter permutations in general.  All of these are tools passed down to us over the centuries of Kaballistic scholarship and piety by our sages.

We will begin where we left off, with the letters ‘caf,’ ‘lamed’ and ‘mem’.   The information laded in these letters is truly dynamic and transforming to those open to it, and clearly reveals the fingerprints of God’s wisdom.

Hope to see you all there each Thursday night at 9pm.

Avraham Shira

Shalom and Welcome.  Tonight we will continue to look at the letters of the Aleph Beit as storehouses of understanding, treasure chests of insights into God’s management of Creation.  We have come to the letters nun, samech and ayin.  Each letter contains an endless amount of information that links with endless other places in the Torah and the Kabbalah.  We will explore a portion of them, with an eye on the techniques we began incorporating into our understanding last week, manipulations, cycphers and permutations.  With merit, we will also return to our weekly meditations on the letters and continue until the end of the aleph beit.

Look forward to seeing all of you tonight.

Avraham Shira

Shalom.  Tonight’s Meditation on the Alef Beit will focus on the idea of miracles as embodied in the letters ‘nun’ and ‘samech’ and their relationship to the ‘ayin’ or eye, especially the inner eye, or third eye of the intellect in Kaballah.  This teaching is essential for the meditative practices that our Sages describe as leading to Divine Inspiration, which has many many levels.  We should prepare ourselves properly before such meditations, with prayers for purity, an immersion or extended shower in which we consciously remove the outer ‘selves’ that attach us to this world.  Look forward to seeing all of you tonight on Webyeshiva.org.

Avraham Shira

Shalom and Welcome.  This week, we will begin to examine the letters Peh and Tsadi, looking at both their structure, numerology, placement and function in this Divine Source lettering system we call the Aleph-Beit.  We will also meditate on these letters with a focus on the our relation to our soul and our body and how they work together to create a living being in this world; how consciousness emerges into the vessels of language and creates awareness.

God bless you with a fine, peaceful day,

Avraham Shira

Shalom and Welcome.

Tonight we continue our learning and Meditation on the letters of the Aleph Beit, kuf and reish.  These letters, as they appear at the end of the eneergy continuum of ‘holy’ to ‘Unholy’  that is reflected in the order of the letters, represent the beginning of instability and judgment, power without boundries, the intellect for its own sake, and when that intellect is put into the world, without order and structure.

With Hashem’s help we will learn the nuances of constriction and judgment, both necessary and exaggerated, that are active forces in our souls.  With blessing we will begin to see the infinite wisdom of the Creator in both the structure of the aleph beit and the soul of man, and the divine patterns imminent and transcendent in the Torah.

Look forward to seeing all of you there.

Avraham Shira

Shalom and Welcome to our Thursday Night Meditation on the Aleph Beit at Webyeshiva, 9pm Israel time.

Tonight we will examine the letters Shin and Tuf, the last two letters in the holy Aleph Beit.  Each has a significance to the other, forming amongst other things, the name of Shet, the third son of Adam, through whom the human race would receive its return and restoration from the fall of Adam and the murder of Kayin.  These letters represent on the Tree of Life the connecting forces between Yesod and Malchut, Yoseph and David, and Abba and Ima, the two intellectual powers that transmit lifeforce from the mind to the heart, or the head to the body.   As in all our learning over the past 8 months of this series, the letters are described as ‘stones’ for building concepts in the primordial consciousness of Creation.  The more sensitive we are to them, the more they can transmit to us their power and clarity.

Look forward to seeing you all tonight.

Avraham Shira

Shalom and Welcome.

Tonight we will focus on the final letter Tav in the Aleph Beit, the thread of living lettters that  creates a language link between god and man.  Tav is the symbol of absolute Judgment and the gematria 400 appears in several places in the Torah.  The first was the forehead of Kayin, who was saved from dath by this quixotic symbol, which shined fear into the animals that would otherwise have considered him an enemy or dinner.  It is also a letter that carries the power of aggression and harsh decress, and appears at the end of many words, and the feminine pluralization of many nouns

Come and explore the Tav, and how it is sweetened, just as judgment is sweetened in the lives of people.

Avraham Shira

Shalom and Welcome.

Tonight we will look at some of the great Kabbalists of the past and what they teach us about Meditation and the Aleif Beit.  For rest of this term we will explore teachings from Sefer Yeztirah, Sulam Aliyah and Shaarei Kedusha of Rabbi Chaim Vital.  At this stage, I would call the class, Creating The Tree of Life with Letters.  We will learn how each letter is placed in the Tree and its purpose in connecting the Sefirot and their relationships to the flow of Divine energy through the body.  We will meditate on clusters of letters that form channels in the different levels of the soul, attempting to unify them as one would create a powerful chord made of many smaller strings.

Look forward to seeing all of you there.

Avraham Shira

Shalom and Welcome.

This week on Webyeshiva.org., 9pm Israel time, our exploration of the Holy Aleph Beit takes us to the sefer, Sha’arei Zedek of Rabbi Shem Tov Sephardi, published in the book of Kabbalah entitled, Sulam Aliyah of Rabbi Yoseph Albotini.  This is part of an introduction and commmentary on the Sefer Yetzirah, the holiest and most ancient of Kabbalah teachings attributed to Avraham Avinu.

We will first discuss some basic ideas about Sefer Yetzirah, and why it is so important to our tradition, the warnings the Sages have given us over the centuries, and how it helps to build our wisdom and awe of the Creator and Source of Life.

We will begin in the ‘Gates of the Letters’, which is also a general introduction that links this wisdom to the life of Avraham Avinu, and Yitzhak Avinu.

This level of learning Kabbalah demands awe, love, purity and humility.  The book was first made public and published by the Yeshiva Sha’arei Shamayim in Jerusalem in 1989.  Its authorship is attributed to Rabbi Shem Tov Sephardi, of Liyon Spain, in Hebron, written in 1295,  Both Rabbi Shem Tov and Rabbi Albotini were students of the Abulafiyan school of Kabbalah.

It is an honor in awe to learn these works together.  Look for you there.

Avraham Shira

Shalom and Welcome.   Tomorrow night on Webyeshiva.org, 9pm, we will continue with our exploration of Aleph Beit Meditation with an overview of how Vowels activate movement and desire in the Heart of Heaven, and the heart of human beings.  This will include how the 9 vowels parallel 9 sefirot of the mind and body, each sound transmitting intellectual and emotional content to the soul of the speaker, especially the one who prays.  This class will take us to a new level of listening, both to ourselves and others.  Look forward to seeing all of you there.  Avraham Shira

Shalom and Welcome.

Tonight will be the last class in an almost year long series of Meditation and the Aleph Beit.  It has been a great priveledge to share these teachings of the Kabbalah masters.  Tonight we are going to read over and examine the letter of ascension of the Ba’al Shem Tov into the heavens, on Rosh HaShanah, 1746, or 5507 according to the Jewish calender.  In this letter we will experience, ‘first hand’, the power of letter meditation through the description of one of the greatest masters of all times.  We will pay attention to perception and analysis of perception, two different mental functions that the seasoned student of meditation must have to remain grounded, healthy and humble while experiencing the ultimate journey of man.

Look for you tonight.

Avraham Shira