Temple Shalom of Northwest Arkansas will have a meditative Shabbat service on Friday evening.

Although meditation is often thought of as a practice of Eastern religions, Rabbi Jacob Adler said it also has a long history in Judaism.

“Jewish meditation is an old practice, but for many years it was confined to secretive, restricted groups,” Adler said. “Now it is once again available to the wider Jewish world.”

Adler said the practice can be found throughout Jewish history in various forms, one being the repetition of a verse from the book of Ecclesiastes practiced by some in the 13th century. But, he said, Jewish meditation fell out of favor in the 17th century when some began to fear a false Messiah.

“People thought if this is what mysticism leads to, we don’t want any of it,” Adler said. “And in the 19th century people thought it was mystical mumbo jumbo.”

In the late 1970s, however, the practice again gained favor, in part due to the growing popularity of Buddhism, Eastern spiritual practices and Transcendental Meditation. Adler said many Jews were attracted to these meditative practices and some turned to their own Jewish faith and discovered similar practices could be found there.

“Now it is fairly common,” he said. “In a way, all prayer is, or should be, meditative, but sometimes it is worthwhile to focus on the meditative aspects.”

Adler said the service at the synagogue will include music and will feature a scroll of the Shema prayer, which begins with “Hear O Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord is One.”

“As part of the practice, we’ll gaze at the scroll while saying the prayer,” Adler said. “You are basically constructing an image with your eyes closed and you should be able to close your eyes and see the images of the letters on your eyelids, as it were.”

Adler said meditative prayer requires focused attention, which he said should also be a part of any prayer.

“You aren’t able to always focus the mind that intentionally but the ideal is a meditative practice,” he said.

For Adler, prayer is a transformative experience.

“Ideally, it is an experience that changes you,” he said. “You are not just saying some words and to make that change happen. You really need to have a kind of meditation, whether you call it that or not. Some of us seem to have a natural tendency to fall into a meditative prayer.

“But a lot of people need a more intentional attempt to enter a meditative state, and we hope in the service it will reach people who might not find it so easy to experience prayer in a meditative state.”

The service will be at 7:30 p.m. Friday at Temple Shalom, 699 N. Sang Ave., in Fayetteville. Information is available online at templeshalomnwa.org.

Religion, Pages 12 on 01/11/2014