For a little more than a year, a group of five Bay Area women have been meeting quietly once a month in Rabbi Amy Eilberg’s living room in Palo Alto. They’ve been training with the Conservative rabbi, who is one of only a few teachers of Jewish spiritual direction — a practice that aims to help seekers see the ways God moves through their lives.
Eilberg says that while spiritual direction is an ancient practice in the Christian world, it did not hit the Jewish community until the 1990s, when Jews hungry for spirituality started showing up at Christian centers, such as at Burlingame’s Mercy Center.
Karen Erlichman was one of them. The Pacifica psychotherapist, pursuing her interest in pastoral counseling, applied to the Mercy Center’s Spiritual Director’s Institute on the advice of the Jewish Healing Center’s Rabbi Eric Weiss, himself a graduate of that program.
“It was important to me to be trained as a spiritual director from the tradition that gave birth to this model — that is, the Catholic tradition,” explains Erlichman, who also works part time as the interfaith program coordinator at the S.F.-based Jewish Family and Children’s Services. Yet she also wanted “a Jewish place through which I could filter and reframe some of the Christian teachings,” and approached Eilberg — whose many roles include spiritual counseling and spiritual direction — about leading such a group.
Eilberg, who is completing her studies at a Christian spiritual direction program and receives spiritual direction from a nun on the faculty of the Mercy Center, says finding an authentic Jewish language for spiritual direction is her primary teaching goal. The search usually entails mining kabbalistic, Chassidic and Musar (contemplative) texts.
Spiritual direction, also called guidance, is ongoing and not problem-oriented the way psychotherapy or spiritual counseling is, but implicit in every session is the question, “Where is God in this?”
Bobbi Bornstein, an outreach coordinator for New Bridges to Jewish Community, puts it this way: “We go through our daily lives, and so many miracles take place, but we don’t acknowledge them because we’re so preoccupied with the hectic, busy stuff.”
All these minutiae can make our lives seem like the messy, knotty back side of a tapestry, says Eilberg, but by sorting through the details with a guide, seekers sometimes glimpse the clearer patterns of the tapestry’s front.
To enable such moments of clarity for their students, spiritual directors learn not to provide answers but to create a receptive, prayerful and compassionate space. Eilberg’s trainees favor the Jewishly evocative image of the mishkan, the tabernacle that early Chassidic Torah commentators came to associate with the idea of God’s desire to live within each human being.
Trainees also learn ways of discerning the divine voice from lesser voices, especially that of the ego.
All the while, guides must remain humble about who’s in charge.
“The real director is God,” says Eilberg. The spiritual guide, many say, is more like a midwife to the soul. “A midwife sits with a woman in labor; she doesn’t make a baby come out,” explains Erlichman. Adds Nicole Bloom, a Berkeley resident who’s working as a lay chaplain while pursuing a master’s degree in Jewish studies at Berkeley’s Graduate Theological Union: “The guide is present for the process and helps the process move along, but does not produce the process.”
The chevruta (study partner) and the rebbe once served a somewhat similar function in some Jewish communities, but these and other spiritual traditions have been largely lost to post-Enlightenment and post-Holocaust Jews, says Eilberg.
One reason the training sessions — and sessions of spiritual direction — usually occur only once a month is they are understood to be only one component of spiritual growth. “It’s inappropriate to offer spiritual direction without being in spiritual direction ourselves,” says Eilberg, adding that directors must also receive supervision to discuss the work.
And while Jewish spiritual guides need not be halachically observant, says the Conservative rabbi, they must be serious, engaged Jews. “No area of Jewish life should be foreign to them,” she explains, adding that they must also have a Shabbat practice and a daily prayer practice.
Clearly fitting that description, this next generation of Jewish spiritual directors have decided with their teacher that they are ready to begin working with seekers.
“I’m supposed to do this work,” says Wendie Bernstein Lash with deep conviction, energized by a recent retreat with Metivta’s Morei Derekh (“Way Pointer”) program. The retreat-based distance-learning program, in which Eilberg also teaches, is one of only two institutional programs in Jewish spiritual direction in the country.
Among the seminaries, only the Reform movement’s Hebrew Union College and the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College currently offer Jewish spiritual direction to their students, but Eilberg strongly suspects the trend will soon spread through other seminaries — and thus to the broader Jewish community.
Says Bernstein Lash, who is executive director of New Bridges: “This is the beginning of something that could transform modern Judaism.”