By Janis Siegel, JTNews Correspondent
The midday sun warmed the children by the pond while dancers danced and musicians played on the nearby hillside. Others who wore rainbow-colored prayer shawls and woven multi-hued yarmulkes beat ethnic drums in drum circles, all as a way to spend a hot summer week seeking spirituality and renewal.
Roughly 700 attendees joined together at the Aleph: Alliance For Jewish Renewal’s 10th anniversary celebration. Participants at the Kallah, as the gathering is called, came from over 50 communities worldwide to study, pray, chant, sing, mingle and generally convene on the campus of Western Washington University in Bellingham.
As people wandered from events to meetings, or simply relaxed outdoors, all seemed genuinely happy to be there and as comfortable as folks at a county fair.
“Wherever you start, we welcome you,” said Susan Saxe, the Alliance’s chief operating officer, who has been with the organization since 1990. “It’s a blessing path. As you walk around you will see people dressed at the Orthodox level of modesty to completely modern people who are raised secular. You’ll find the entire range. We want it to be this big tent.”
Forty years ago, Rabbi Zalman Schacter-Shalomi began the Jewish Renewal movement by attempting to re-infuse post-World-War-II Judaism with its earlier, more mystical Chassidic traditions. Schacter-Shalomi later founded P’nai Or in Philadelphia in 1978.
Then, in the late 1980s, P’nai Or merged with the Shalom Center, another Philadelphia-based Jewish group founded by Rabbi Arthur Waskow, that was committed to peace and social justice. In 1993, this network of communities soon transformed itself into its current form Aleph: Alliance For Jewish Renewal.
“If there was one way to capture what it is we were all trying to do, the one thing we could all agree on,” said Saxe, “is that we wanted to infuse our lives with holiness.”
With that as its focus, Aleph has developed a variety of programs to offer to communities, and places outreach high on its list of organizational priorities. In addition to community visits from rabbis, traveling day-long intensives led by the Aleph Caravan and multiple publications, Aleph also offers a growing rabbinical program, programs for youth and the elderly and retreats for cultivating devotional practice.
The biennial Kallah had a theme of “Creativity, Hope and Healing — Our Future Renewed.” The 46 classes offered covered an array of Jewish topics ranging from “King, Warrior, Father, Lover: Reclaiming the Masculine Face of God”, “Miracle of the Morning: A Creative Exploration of the Morning Prayer Service” and “I Can’t Read Enough Hebrew, I Never Went to a Yeshiva, but I Want to Study Talmud.”
“This is a holistic Judaism that informs every aspect of what we do,” Saxe said. “It informs our business ethics, our personal relationships, how we raise our children, how we consume, what we eat and what we wear.”
Aleph tries to accommodate as many levels of Jewish observance as possible in their programs, and had the kitchen and food services at Bellingham’s Fairhaven campus made kosher and supervised for the event in Bellingham.
“We’re not here to judge where you are on the path,” said Saxe. “What is important are the very basic core Jewish values behind your decisions. We are conduct rather than creed-based. When we make innovations we ask, ‘Is this congruous with those core Torah precepts?’”
Saxe said the Renewal path is a wide one, but the parameters that define its boundaries are somewhere between “the straight and narrow” and “anything goes.” Rather than embracing any and all spiritual fads that come and go, Saxe said that study, tradition, Jewish values and right action are fundamental components that underlie Jewish Renewal programs.
“Text is very central, and learning is very important to us,” said Saxe. “Our rabbinic program has a very, very tough core curriculum. We’ve ordained about 60 people since the late ‘70s. It has now grown to over 40 students who are currently in the program.”
The rabbinic, cantoral and pastoral programs offered by the movement are all designed to train people to go out and bring Judaism into communities where there might not be any Jewish presence or teachers. Their mission is to foster inclusivity while teaching from Jewish texts and encouraging social activism.
While Aleph encourages gay and lesbian participation, environmentalism, and fairness in labor, social and economic justice, they do not back away from the most urgent problems facing Jews today, the Middle East crisis in particular.
“Where we have focused ourselves in that arena is conduct, how that conversation should be held,” explained Saxe. “People holding positions on both sides need to understand that God’s truth is 360 degrees. We can only hold a piece of that. We are not going to solve the intractable problems of the whole world if we can’t talk to each other decently. It’s a deeply painful issue and we need to figure out a way to heal it in the proper way. We feel called to help with the process of discussion.”
As the alliance faces this issue and others, it remains committed to moving Judaism into the 21st century amidst a paradigm shift they believe has taken place in the world in Judaism and at large.
“We are now seeing the fruition and burgeoning of things that Reb Zalman predicted 40 years ago,” said Saxe. “People thought you had to go be a Buddhist to meditate. But until modern history, that was never true in Judaism. There’s a long Jewish meditative and contemplative and mystical tradition, but it was hidden. We were people suffering from the horrible trauma of the Holocaust and the mixed blessing of modernity. So there was a need to re-open those closed passages and get back to the treasures of our tradition. Reb Zalman and others foresaw this.”