This weekend at Berkeley’s Chochmat HaLev, an independent center of Jewish learning, Gottlieb brings her unique blend of storytelling, dancing and Jewish-feminist meditation to the Bay Area.
“I’m a playful person,” she explains on the telephone from her home in Albuquerque, N.M., where she now serves as rabbi of Congregation Nahalat Shalom. “My mother was a puppeteer — I’m into creative dramatics. Hopefully that’s somewhat evident in my work.”
The three-part program at Chochmat HaLev begins tomorrow evening with “Stories of the Mystical Feminine,” a storytelling concert in which Gottlieb delves into Jewish feminine archetypes. Central among these is Shechinah, the Jewish divine female presence, described in the Kabbalah and in the 12th-century mystical text known as the Zohar.
Shechinah comes from “the same root as mishkan, meaning portable shrine,” Gottlieb explains. Originally, “Shechinah” referred to “God’s abiding presence” among exiled Jews; later it merged with images of Israel as an exiled woman. In the Kabbalah, Shechinah is described as “Yahweh’s wife, lover and daughter.”
In reclaiming this little-known feminine antecedent, Gottlieb says she wanted to “look at a harmonizing universal myth that reflects the wisdom we’ve garnered.” Since traditional Jewish archetypes of “the self-sacrificing woman and the assertive male” were limiting and sometimes damaging to women’s lives, she saw the need for a more positive model.
The second component of the Chochmat HaLev program is an innovative ceremony devised by Gottlieb called “Reclaiming the Mishkan.” In this ceremony, all present “become” the mishkan, the portable shrine used by the Israelites when they were wandering in the wilderness.
“It’s a metaphor for looking inward,” says Gottlieb of the ceremony. The use of emotive symbolism is key to Jewish renewal, since “the important questions are, `What do I connect to in this tradition?’ `What are the points of interest to me?'”
Finally, she will lead a session called “Transforming Community: A Rediscovery of Earth-Centered Judaism.” In this, she draws upon biblical, Chassidic and contemporary feminist texts to focus on Eco-Kashrut, the system that prescribes re-evaluating kosher laws according to “the social and environmental consequences of what we use.”
In all of her work, Gottlieb tries to encourage audience participation and storytelling. “Too often in our congregations we only hear a rabbinic voice or the set liturgy,” she says. “Jewish renewal is about reconstituting sacred community, by allowing communities to have a voice all together.”
And “sacred community,” she adds, is an important concept within Judaism itself. “The Jewish community needs to accept the diversity within its midst. I hope, in the future, that there’s just more tolerance around.”
In the meantime, “storytelling is something we’re doing together, and it’s a way of healing and repairing the wounds between us.”