Elizheva Hurvich sat cross-legged inside a homemade chuppah in her Oakland backyard, surrounded by friends, as Amanda Nube, a kohenet (Hebrew priestess), performed a ritual to welcome her as a newly ordained Renewal rabbi.
After readings from Sefer Yetzirah, a 2,000-year-old book of Jewish esotericism, Hurvich was showered with flowers (earth) and lightly brushed with feathers (air), before a bundle of sage was lit (fire) and passed around for everyone to enjoy its fragrance.
“It’s an ancient ritual that predates the Kabbalistic four elements,” Nube said, referring to Jewish mysticism that emerged out of the 13th-century Zohar and is at the core of Hasidic Judaism. “I like it because it’s holy time, holy space and holy selves.”
The swirls of fragrance, myriad blessings and ancient symbolism in the ritual is typical of Jewish Renewal, an approach to Judaism that combines old and new, and blends the Hasidic emphasis on direct connection to the Divine with New Age practices, from radical feminism and egalitarianism to meditation, dancing and drumming.
Although much smaller than the other major Jewish streams — in a 2020 Pew study of Jewish Americans, Renewal was counted in a group with “other” small branches, representing a combined 4% affiliation — Renewal has influenced Jewish practice in certain circles, particularly in the Bay Area where the movement has a long, strong history.
That is especially true in the East Bay. Aquarian Minyan, founded in Berkeley in 1974, is one of the oldest Renewal communities. It was joined in 1984 by Kehilla Community Synagogue in Piedmont, in 1994 by Chochmat HaLev and in 1996 by Beyt Tikkun, both in Berkeley.
Taking their cue from Renewal founder Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi, who fled Nazi-occupied Europe and helped create the first Renewal communities in the 1960s, leaders today refrain from calling it a “movement,” preferring to call it an “approach” to Judaism. But one could argue that it looks a whole lot like a movement, with Aleph: Alliance for Jewish Renewal, an umbrella organization that has an ordination program for rabbis, cantors and rabbinic chaplains; a professional organization called Ohalah that meets annually; and a directory of four dozen affiliated congregations, primarily in North America.
Like Hurvich, newly ordained Rabbi Zvika Krieger was celebrated by his community in a colorful ritual at Chochmat HaLev, where he’s served as spiritual leader since 2022.
Weeks after Krieger’s Aleph ordination, in the main sanctuary of the 30-year-old congregation, five local Renewal rabbis each spoke about one of Krieger’s spiritual heroes, including the Ba’al Shem Tov who founded Hasidism in the 18th century, the late Schachter-Shalomi — known as Reb Zalman — and the late Rabbi Burt Jacobson, founding rabbi of Kehilla.
Then a dozen Renewal rabbis lined up in the center aisle while Krieger walked between them, stopping for hugs along the way, as the congregation sang a niggun, or wordless melody. He made his way to the bimah, standing under a purple chuppah while Rabbi SaraLeya Schley, a former spiritual leader at Chochmat, told him, “Today you receive a second smicha [ordination], from your community, which will make a brit, a covenant with you.”
After Krieger shared a list of his commitments with the congregation, those attending shouted out their commitments to him: “I commit to holding you with love,” “I commit to emulating your ethical chutzpah,” “I commit to dancing ecstatically with you and loving God on the dance floor.”
Finally Krieger turned around, the congregation pressed forward tightly, and he fell backward into their waiting arms as blessings for him were shouted out.
“Do we accept Zvika as our rabbi?” Schley asked, to which the congregation responded with a loud “Yes!”
Hurvich and Krieger are two of the eight rabbis ordained by Aleph last month, and both live in Oakland, illustrating yet again the East Bay’s preeminent position in the Renewal family. Five of Aleph’s approximately 40 affiliated communities are in the Bay Area, including Chadeish Yameinu in Santa Cruz. California as a whole has a major footprint, home to a fifth of all Aleph-affiliated Renewal communities in the country.
In an interview, Aleph executive director SooJi Min-Maranda described the Bay Area Renewal congregations as “flagship communities” and Aquarian Minyan as “ground zero for Renewal.”
Along with the congregations formally affiliated with Aleph are fledgling communities that Aleph advises. “New communities are starting all the time. Almost every month I get a call,” said Min-Maranda, who on that very morning heard from a new havurah, or prayer community, in Hood River, Oregon.
Aleph has produced 220 rabbis since the formal ordination program was established in 2000, in addition to 34 cantors, 38 rabbinic pastors and 91 spiritual directors.
Rabbi David Cooper, the former spiritual leader at Kehilla in Piedmont, estimates that “15 to 20” Renewal rabbis live in the Bay Area. Not all were ordained by Aleph; some went to other rabbinical seminaries and now identify as Renewal, and some of the older rabbis received direct smicha from Schachter-Shalomi.
Cooper remembers moving to the Bay Area in 1976 and spending Kol Nidre at the House of Love and Prayer, a San Francisco community founded by Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach, who, like Schachter-Shalomi, was a former Chabad emissary.
“On Yom Kippur Day I went to the Aquarian Minyan, and Reb Zalman was leading the service,” Cooper said.
Today the East Bay Renewal communities have a symbiotic relationship, Cooper said. “We had quite a few people turned on to their Judaism through Beyt Tikkun, and then when they wanted [a different] community they came to Kehilla,” he said. “And Kehilla is sometimes a funnel to Chochmat. I always love it when people find a synagogue that meets their needs.”
Kehilla also “spawned Afikomen,” the Judaica shop and bookstore in Berkeley where Cooper once worked, he said. And he and Rabbi Stu Kelman, founding rabbi of Berkeley Conservative Congregation Netivot Shalom, spearheaded the creation of Gan Yarok in Marin, the nation’s first green Jewish cemetery.
“We are not an insular community,” he noted. “You find Renewal-oriented folks in many places.”
The two newest local Renewal rabbis have strong Jewish backgrounds and have been filling functions often thought of as rabbinic for many years.
Hurvich, 56, grew up in Mill Valley, where her family belonged to Conservative Congregation Kol Shofar in nearby Tiburon, but “I had a real boundary-crossing family,” she said. On some Saturdays her father would head to the Shabbos Shul, led by the “rock ’n’ roll brothers” in a church basement. And they spent vacations with his Orthodox, kosher-keeping family in Alabama.
When it was time for her bat mitzvah, she refused, saying it wasn’t meaningful to her. But she kept up with a teen group that met weekly with the rabbi “to talk about Jewish values and research on animals or space exploration.” She marked her bat mitzvah after high school and said her rabbi set her on the path to becoming a Jewish educator “because he took me seriously.”
After receiving a master’s degree in art, Jewish art and material culture from the Conservative movement’s Jewish Theological Seminary in New York, she returned to the Bay Area in 1999. She has since compiled an impressive resume in Jewish education, including stints as community liaison at the Contemporary Jewish Museum and the JCC of San Francisco, and director of Kehilla’s Hebrew school. Today she continues to prepare b’nai mitzvah students and is a freelance Jewish artist and ritual leader.
So why rabbinic ordination, and why now?
“I remember thinking when I was still in college, I’m a Jewish woman at the end of the 20th century in America, and I don’t define myself through the Holocaust. I’m part of that pivot generation. I thought, what can I do that will have the most impact?” she said. “I know, I thought: I’m going to be a rabbi.”
It took her 30 years. She got married, had a baby and spent a decade running the religious school at Kehilla. It derailed her from that goal, she said, but she “didn’t lose the fire.”
Receiving ordination has changed her life, she said. “I feel different. It’s like marrying someone you already lived with. The ceremony felt like a veil was being lifted.”
Krieger has likewise been filling a rabbinic function without the title for years, notably the past three when he has served Chochmat HaLev as its part-time spiritual leader.
People who meet Krieger for the first time might find it hard to believe he grew up quite Orthodox, “somewhere between Modern Orthodox and black-hat,” as he told J. It’s not just the piercings and the long hair. It’s the total package.
At his congregational welcome on Jan. 25, the 41-year-old told the 150 people gathered in the sanctuary that he “resisted the calling” to become a rabbi for many years, both because of the “hierarchical implications” and because he was “uncomfortable with this model of rabbi being ‘symbolic exemplar,’ the idea that people expect their rabbi to be the paradigm of perfection.”
Instead, he continued with a grin, “I can be a Shabbat-observing, neo-Hasidic, mysticism-loving, queer, body-positive, tech bro, single dad, ADHD, Enneagram 7, surfer, [Burning Man] Burner, meditator, ecstatic dancer, and everything else that goes into the soup of what makes me, me.”
Krieger is a whirling ball of energy. After getting his bachelor’s degree from Yale in 2006, he spent almost a decade in journalism, covering the Arab world for Newsweek and serving as foreign policy correspondent for the Atlantic, among others.
Government work followed, including postings at the Pentagon, the World Economic Forum and the State Department, where he served as that body’s first-ever “ambassador to Silicon Valley,” working with the tech sector on emerging technologies. He has taught design, technology and social impact at Stanford and UC Berkeley, and most recently has advised tech and social media companies including Meta and TikTok on “responsible innovation” strategies to mitigate potential harm caused by their products.
In contrast to many who leave the ultra-Orthodox world, Krieger looks back at it fondly. He’s grateful for the years of Jewish learning, which give him a facility with Jewish texts not always available to new (or old) rabbis.
As the years passed, he knew he wanted to do Jewish communal work but couldn’t envision a path to the rabbinate. What seminary would admit him? Where would he feel at home? In 2014 he heard about Jewish Renewal for the first time when he read Schachter-Shalomi’s obituary in the New York Times.
“I remember thinking, ‘Who is this guy who grew up Orthodox and was a Chabad rabbi but also dropped acid with Timothy Leary and is into singing and dancing and meditation and is egalitarian and pro-LGBTQ and cares about the environment and social justice?’” he told J. “If he could be a rabbi, perhaps I could be too.”
Now a rabbi, he continues to work part time in responsible innovation at social media companies, mostly TikTok, and is raising his 10-year-old son.
“I think the Bay Area has the richest Jewish community in the country,” Krieger said. “Even the institutions in the East Bay are great, and the mainline synagogues are, I’d say, some of the best synagogues of their denominations. Then you have so much entrepreneurial Judaism and creativity, and the fact that the communities get along so well with each other.
“Many of the innovations that happen here, just kind of radiate outward into the country. I feel just thrilled to be here!”