With more than 1,000 attending the Jewish Meditation Conference in San Francisco over the weekend, the seeds of a mass grassroots movement appear to be germinating.
Conference organizers and workshop leaders used the event as a forum, suggesting that meditation can become a catalyst for a revitalization of Jewish life in America, much as Chassidism brought a new, emotion-charged popular spirituality to Orthodox Judaism in Eastern Europe in the 18th century.
“We’re involved in a new `Chassidic’ movement, as an antidote for ossification,” said Rabbi David Cooper, a workshop leader who came from Colorado. “In 200 years, historians will write that this was a real movement in Jewish life. And we’re a part of it.”
Plans are already under way to create urban retreat centers for Jewish meditators and to establish structured programs for training meditation teachers across the country.
For workshop leader Estelle Frankel, the change can’t come fast enough. “Judaism desperately needs the revival that meditation is bringing,” said Frankel, a Berkeley psychotherapist and Jewish mysticism teacher.
“Jewish Meditation Conference: The Next Step,” organized by Berkeley’s Chochmat HaLev, took place Saturday and Sunday at Congregation Emanu-El.
The number of participants doubled from the first-ever meditation conference, which was organized by Chochmat HaLev here two years ago.
Three-fourths of this year’s participants came from the Bay Area. Most of the others came from other parts of California, but also from as far away as Florida and Jerusalem. The Bay Area touch was most apparent at lunchtime Sunday when the two lines were for kosher vegetarian — considered standard fare by this group — or vegan.
The ambitious, but seamlessly produced event featured panel discussions, thrice-daily group meditations in the synagogue’s main sanctuary, and 19 workshops in subjects ranging from the nuts-and-bolts of a regular meditation practice to methods of drawing closer to the Divine.
At Sunday’s closing session, Rabbi Rami Shapiro of Congregation Beth Or in Miami spoke of plans to build “urban Jewish retreat centers” in several cities where interest in Jewish meditation is strongest.
He also wants to see the eventual creation of “regional yeshivot” to train meditation teachers and provide permanent residential and study opportunities for serious practitioners.
Shapiro plans to resign his own pulpit in three months to head the Dvekut Center for Jewish Meditation, set for a June opening in Miami.
Similar retreat centers are in the works for Los Angeles and San Francisco, where Congregation Beth Sholom is raising money to rebuild its synagogue. The future building will include permanent space for meditation practice and teaching.
Avram Davis, founder and co-director of the independent meditation center Chochmat HaLev, acknowledged that meditation “will always be a minority interest within Judaism. But I believe it will continue to grow.”
As a result, he wants to make sure that it doesn’t expand without intention or purpose.
“We’d like to see a little order brought to it, a sharing of knowledge about who’s teaching what, where, and why they’re doing it that way,” he said.
Noting that because interest in Jewish meditation is burgeoning so quickly, there’s a tendency for some people to jump on the bandwagon without proper preparation.
“Folks sit and meditate for a few weeks, then start to teach,” he said. “That’s not good. There’s a need to systematize the teaching a bit, bring a deeper level of seriousness to it.”
To that end, Davis hopes to establish a yeshiva for meditation and teachers of meditation in the Bay Area, with an extension school either in Tel Aviv or Jerusalem.
Those centers, like Jewish meditation itself, would not be affiliated with any particular stream of Judaism, but would try to draw in practitioners from all along the Jewish spectrum.
“There is a critical mass of very strong spiritual interest in the Bay Area,” Davis said. “And people here get along — Orthodox, Reform, Conservative — without the deep anger I find, God forbid, in Israel, and even on the East Coast.”
Conference teachers and panelists echoed Davis’ assertion that interest in Jewish meditation — which began in the late 1960s and ’70s as young Jews joined ashrams in India and studied Zen Buddhism — has taken off in a big way the past two or three years.
“There is a ready-made market for this among people accustomed to contemplative practice in Eastern traditions, who want a Jewish context for their meditation,” said Cooper, who re-discovered his Jewish roots at a Sufi retreat 18 years ago and now runs a Jewish retreat center with his wife at their mountain-top home outside Boulder, Colo.
Indeed, when one panelist asked how many conference participants had experience with meditation outside Judaism, hundreds of hands — belonging to nearly everyone in the room — went up.
“Many of us who grew up in mainstream Jewish life got the feeling that spirituality is not part of Judaism,” said Chochmat HaLev co-director Nan Fink Gefen, addressing her beginning-meditation workshop.
Jewish meditation, she said, differs from other forms of meditation primarily in its use of Hebrew, its Jewish context and its Jewish goal x”of meditating in order to become closer to God.”
Most of the conference focused on highly personal matters, as panelists and participants talked about how meditation enriched their lives.
Frankel said her regular meditation sessions “make me able to respond to life less defensively” by putting her “in the eye of the hurricane, where I can maintain equilibrium.”
Davis expanded on Frankel’s thoughts, saying that meditation enables people “to cut through the busy-ness in their lives” by “seeking to transform the heart completely, so that paradise is within us, whatever we’re doing, every day.”
Meditation should not be looked upon as an escape from life’s problems, but as a way to enter more deeply into one’s spiritual side, said Rabbi Jonathan Omer-Man, a workshop leader and founder of the Los Angeles-based Metivta: A Center for Jewish Wisdom.
“Meditation isn’t about staying awake, it’s about sleeping less,” he stated.
Omer-Man cautioned against treating Jewish meditation as a fad, something to be sampled lightly like a new sport. Without textual grounding in Torah and other Jewish learning, he fears that meditation will continue to be dismissed by most American Jews as “flaky.”
“Rabbis who try to bring meditation into their synagogues find that 50 percent of the congregation don’t want it, and that includes 90 percent of their board members,” Omer-Man said to appreciative laughter. “Mainstream Judaism is not hospitable to the spiritual sector. Our task is to make it so.”