About
About Elie Schulman
Elie Schulman has returned to the practice of pausing before prayer for many years. The writing gathered here emerged not from mastery of the hour, but from remaining close to its questions.
Why I began—and what the motive concealed
I did not begin from a pure or especially elevated motive.
I wanted peace. I wanted calm. I suspected that this might be another way to feel better and perhaps another way not to face myself.
There was a kind of superficial materialism in that motive. I was treating an inward practice as another thing I could acquire: calm as a possession, quiet as a product, spirituality as a more refined form of comfort.
The hour did not reliably give me what I thought I wanted. Instead, it often made the wanting visible.
YishHeh is therefore not an escape from the self. It may become an encounter with the movements by which a person tries to escape.
How the work connects
In YishHeh, the setting is the pause before prayer. In Elie’s writing, it is a text or a question. At Cohort Learning Labs, it is a conversation with other people. Each offers a place to notice how quickly an explanation can settle what we think we see.
This site supports individual practice. YishHeh Circles remains a proposed communal form; Cohort Learning Labs is a separate facilitated offering.