By Janis Siegel, JTNews Correspondent
Rabbi Zari Weiss is a spiritual friend, and a companion for the soul. As she practices a technique she’s been trained in since 1996, called “Spiritual Direction,” her clients often become very quiet as they try and listen to that knowing, intuitive voice inside them.
Weiss calls it holy listening or discernment.
“It’s not therapy,” Weiss told JTNews from her home and office near Seattle’s View Ridge neighborhood. “There’s no explicit intention to heal anyone or to improve one’s psychology, and it’s not coaching. It’s a contemplative model. I function as a midwife to the soul.”
For more than 15 years, Weiss has been helping people get closer to the voice of God inside them, although she won’t necessarily call it God in one of her sessions.
Her work in Jewish spirituality began after graduating from the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion in New York in 1991. Weiss was a co-founder of Lev Shomea, a training program in Spiritual Direction at Elat Chayyim, a Jewish spiritual retreat center.
In this work, Weiss uses Jewish prayers, or philosophy, or scripture to gently nudge a seeker of one’s own truth and to come to terms with what he or she may not want to face in life. It could be a deep struggle with his or her self-image or image in the community, or a decision about life changes that are too sensitive to confront. Whatever it is, Rabbi Weiss will listen, and gently push this truth seeker deeper.
She works with Jews and people of other faiths as well.
“Most [Jewish] people go to services to connect with God in a Jewish way,” Weiss said. “Some have that relationship but don’t identify it as Jewish. Others have a longing for that but can’t name it or access it.”
Weiss’s job is to put a name to that connection.
In a series of classes called “Cultivating a Meaningful Relationship with God” that she teaches at Tree of Life Books & Judaica in Seattle, Weiss points out to students that Jewish people are often surrounded by stories of miracles given to ancestors of the faith. These stories contain rituals meant to remind us of God’s commitment to us, but we often don’t nail down the role of God in our own lives.
However, said Weiss, we also don’t look for the meaning or the answers to our personal needs and desires, yet we sense that they, too, must be part of the “bigger plan.”
“There are sociological and historical reasons for this,” Weiss said. “Today, we’re a product of the modern world. Faith, however, cannot be proven and it cannot be compartmentalized. Also, the Holocaust was a breach of faith. And the institutionalization of religion has lost a lot of its realness.”
For most Jews today, this intimate sharing of such sacred stories is unusual, if not foreign; so Weiss has developed a contemplative model called Mishkan, the Hebrew word for a sacred place of dwelling. As she uses this concept in her work, she wants Jews to open up and allow an “intimate sharing.”
Maybe, she said, they can shed what she calls “their ambivalence or distrust” of the Godly realm.
“Science is not the whole story, it’s not enough,” Weiss said. “We are spiritual beings. We have a longing for more. We want to know what it’s all about.”
Weiss will be offering a three-class series on “Cultivating the Mind of God” for the Kadima Reconstructionist Community in December.
In the class, she uses traditional teachings about God and prayers to help students explore their own relationship with God. Much like her one-on-one sessions, the class uses a combination of text study, discussion, and practice with Jewish prayer.
According to Weiss, it doesn’t work for everyone all of the time, but for some, it provides a perfect setting for revealing truth, or bringing deeper meaning into their everyday experience.
“There is no agenda, and for some, it provides exactly what they need,” Weiss said.
“Spiritual direction is really spiritual companioning. I might ask them if they have a spiritual practice and take them through maybe one of the daily morning prayers in a personal way. I use prayer a lot.
“Or I might study text, or work with them to find an image for the feeling, or use a ritual. I also use scripture, and other writings.”
According to Weiss, in the last 10 years, Spiritual Direction has been offered as part of the curriculum at the Jewish Theological Society, in the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College, and Hebrew Union College. That is a strong indication, she said, that it is a missing element in traditional Jewish training programs but that it needs to be an essential component in their curriculums.
“Sometimes a person is in the dark night of the soul where they don’t have trust,” she said. “I can hold that trust for them through their despair and anguish, or negativity and cynicism. There is in them that longing, to have more synthesis and more meaning. I really believe that the spiritual is the only salvation.”
More information about Rabbi Zari Weiss’s spiritual exploration can be found at www.mishkanasacredplace.org or by calling 206-524-9274.