What are the four forms of Jewish meditation?

Rabbinic Judaism is a thoroughly meditative religion. In a recently completed paper we show how the Jewish meditator’s kavvanah takes at least four forms. Here are some excerpts…

In the first form of kavvanah, blessings are formulaic texts that appear liberally around the landscape of prescribed rabbinic practice. Blessings demand mindful meditative awareness of the physical world. The blessings for deriving benefit and for the performance of the commandments are mini-mindful meditative experiences for the meditator, interspersed throughout the waking day.

Judaism articulates a system of blessings for food, the meal, other ritual performances and natural events. Though frequent and repetitive, those brief, even momentary, performances are habituated spiritual pauses for meditation. This manner of meditation that we describe in the liturgical personality approximates what we typically call “mindfulness.”...

In the second form of kavvanah, the Birkat Hamazon, grace after eating, we find a full blown meditation of compassion for sentient beings, to be engaged in after a meal (the Jewish beings of the covenant meriting the primary compassion according to its specifications)...

In the third form, the priest archetype’s kavvanah takes cognizance of consciousness – but not as a fulfillment of serenity in this world, of the peace of God, or of compassion for sentient beings. True to the archetype, the priest requires a meditation of discipline and obedience for the recitation of the Amidah. This is a martial kind of self-possession, standing with erect posture, feet together, facing Jerusalem, bowing as trained.

When the Mishnah prescribes that during his recitation of the Amidah prayer even if a serpent is coiled around his heel, he shall not pause his recitation, that means that the priestly-meditator is in authority, in control of emotions and consciousness – and not mindfully letting go to be enthralled in his presence. Like the palace guard, he is militarily focused on some activities and commanded to ignore the noises of other intrusions into his material context...

In the fourth form, the scribal permutation of this practice is the meditative kavvanah of a certain form of social circumstance. The Shema is to be recited while seated, the normal posture of the scribe. The Mishnah makes clear that kavvanah for the Shema means to simulate a focus on textual work.

Mishnah does this by asking and answering its own queries about whether one may interrupt his recitation of the Shema between the paragraphs or within the paragraphs, to return a greeting or to extend a greeting. These matters appear to us to be the same as those faced as a rule by a scribe or scholar sitting at a desk engaged in writing….

This then is how the meditator - through the various liturgical archetypes - hones his personality along a spectrum of meditative traits and skills, from the basic mindful meditative skills of blessings to the distinct alternatives of mindful meditative skills of kavvanah in the Birkat Hamazon, the Shema and the Amidah prayer.