Healthy Jew Sunset Meditation

Yeshivat Lev HaTorah greets the desert's darkness at the peak of the Negev's Mount Katom.

Jan 12, 2025

Sunset in the Negev Desert, seen last week from Mount Katom.

Dear Healthy Jew,

Come, the sun is setting soon! Join Yeshivat Lev HaTorah as we run up Mount Katom, a lovely little mountain in the Negev desert that sports a stunning panoramic view of the Zin Riverbed which is probably the southern border of biblical Israel. (I shared with you about the area after last year’s Negev trip in this post that later grew into the special Borders and Boundaries section of my new book, Land of Health: Israel’s War for Wellness.)

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We reach the top 10 minutes before sunset.

Sunrise and sunset have been important opportunities for meditation for millennia - and, at least for Healthy Jews, are also particularly tricky times. We want to experience the moment fully, but not go too far.

On one hand, the sun is our primary source of warmth and light, its rays shining light onto earth. Watching it come and go holds many messages about the rising and falling of our own lives, with their mornings, afternoons, and nights.
Yet our tradition flatly rejects any thoughts or actions that show a personal, spiritual relationship with the sun, because the only Power worth serving is infinitely larger than anything we can see. We’re God-people, not sun-people.

The Rambam even suggests the reason the Temple’s Sanctuary is to the west is to counter the idolatrous practice of worshipping in the direction the sun rises to greet the world. They bow east; we’ll bow west.

So after we listen to the sun’s lessons for life - following its fall and greeting the silent darkness - our Lev HaTorah students purposely turn our bodies away as its last rays fall away to the west.

Here’s an almost-full recording of our sunset meditation. I hope you’ll find it meaningful. (Thank you Max Silbiger for the excellent video take!)

As darkness descends on the desert, we carefully make our way down the steep slopes, and gather on the floor below to take a deeper, longer look at silence.

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