Great Love

This has been a week of talking to people about creating meaning.

Creating meaning out of the everyday, creating meaning by looking backward to understand our own journey seeing how far we have come and how much we have learned.

So often we are rushing headlong to the next thing on our path, that we fail to stop and consider where we are and how we got there. 

Out of these conversations came a very important AHA moment --it is never too late. It is never too late to forgive, to see one another more fully, to set an old fear aside, or to take a deep breath and be grateful for what one has learned along the way.  This week’s mitzvah is just for you. I invite you to take a deep breath and look at the plus column so that you can see the many ways in which you can love and care for yourself, enabling you to keep going.  I share with you this interpretation of the Ahava Rabbah prayer.  May it be a source of guidance.

Ahava Rabbah Prayer - Interpretation by Rabbi Sheila Peltz Weinberg

What is a great love?
A love that reaches deep inside our hearts and minds and never departs.
An expanding, continually surpassing compassion that flows toward and within us.
Those who came before us were blessed to learn how it truly is.
So may we have the merit to be open to this learning.
Let us know that we are held in an embrace of infinite kindness.
Let us become still.
Still enough to hear,
Still enough to get clear,
Still enough to know suffering and its release.
May we embody this wisdom.
May it shine from our eyes
As the love that it is.
May our minds and hearts be unified to behold with love and wonder
That which is ever becoming.
No more victims, no more powerlessness, no more blaming or
shaming each other and ourselves.
For our faith in this ,
In this sacred this, makes us joyous.
Continually gathering peacefully from the dispersed and distracted
into this right here, our home.
We engage in an ever faithful and mysterious process of drawing
close to your name, what is, sacred love.