In her former life as a high-powered attorney, Berkeley resident Ruchama Burrell used to swim with the proverbial sharks.
Today, she is more likely to be found kneeling on the living-room floor, eyes closed, palms up, silently visualizing the four Hebrew letters that represent the name of Adonai.
Burrell, 60, is one of 37 students from Chochmat HaLev’s first graduating class of certified Jewish meditation teachers.
The graduation ceremony, held Dec. 8, marked a milestone in the history of Chochmat HaLev, the renowned Berkeley-based center for Jewish meditation. (The name is Hebrew for “Wisdom of the Heart.”)
Although Buddhism or Transcendental Meditation often come to mind first when the topic comes up, meditation actually has a long and venerated tradition within Judaism.
“Many people have been turned on to Judaism through the path of meditation,” said Chochmat HaLev co-director Nan Fink Gefen.
With few
similar centers
anywhere, Chochmat HaLev has emerged as a hub for Jewish meditation over the years since its founding in the mid-1990s.
“We had been very much aware that we needed to take Jewish meditation out to the world, ” said Fink Gefen, “but we also knew we couldn’t do it by ourselves. We had to train people.”
To that end, Fink Gefen and Chochmat HaLev founder and co-director Avram Davis launched the Jewish meditation teacher training program in 1999 to certify new teachers in the field. Now those original pioneers have reached the next level.
It wasn’t an easy road. The intensive three-year course of study demanded much from its students, including extensive classwork, attending frequent symposia, serving as interns, sitting for rigorous exams and initiating individual community projects.
Yet in that time, only a tiny handful of students dropped out of the program, a remarkable statistic according to Fink Gefen. “We were careful in our student selection process,” she said. “We wanted motivated people committed to our goal of taking Jewish meditation to the world.”
The class of 2002 boasts a diverse line-up of doctors, therapists, lawyers, salespeople and Jewish educators. Program graduates also reflect the broad spectrum of Jewish belief and practice, from strictly observant Orthodox to Jewish Renewal.
Interestingly, many of the graduates were “distance students,” telecommuting from across the country and coming into the Bay Area several times a year for conferences, evaluations and retreats.
Fink Gefen understood that before students could properly teach meditation to others, they first had to fully develop their own personal meditation skills. That understanding proved the centerpiece of the teacher training program.
“The focus was always on the individual’s own meditation practice,” said Fink Gefen. The program required students to set aside time for daily meditation, while it organized biannual class retreats and offered other opportunities to deepen the students’ meditative lives.
Said Burrell, who has been meditating since age 15: “I was surprised at how much this program changed my life. It gave me a different orientation towards reality.”
Another program graduate, Miriam Smolover of Oakland, was similarly inspired. “The focus of Jewish meditation is not just to relax the body or be self-aware, but to experience echad, oneness with the Divine,” she said. “I’ve taken that sense much deeper into my pores.”
That’s a good thing, given that Smolover, 50, assumes the directorship of the teacher training program early next year.
Meanwhile the graduates will be fanning out across the country in the months ahead to do their good work.
One will teach meditation to health-care workers; others will draw on meditation techniques in their work with psychotherapy patients and children; some will hang out their shingle and teach meditation to the public.
Smolover is putting together a series of CDs to enable groups and individuals to do self-led chanting and meditation.
Like any graduation, this one has its bittersweet qualities. Smolover, for one, will miss her colleagues. “It was wonderful to have these kindred spirits from all over the country learning together,” she said. “From the beginning, this group had a willingness to be present with each other. It was the least discordant group I’ve ever been in.”
Fink Gefen is proud of the graduates, and happy that Jewish meditation continues to grow, thanks largely to the efforts of Chochmat HaLev, which recently received a Walter and Elise Haas Foundation grant to expand its programs into the Bay Area, she said.
The center also has links with the budding meditation movement in Israel.
“The aim of Jewish meditation is to come closer to God,” Fink Gefen said.