Calling religion “the journey of the soul,” Rabbi Joseph Leibowitz of Jerusalem’s Pardes Institute plans to take East Bay residents on a voyage through scripture next month.
From Sunday, Feb. 16 to Friday, Feb. 21, the former spiritual leader of Berkeley’s Congregation Beth Israel will serve as scholar-in-residence for the Center for Jewish Living and Learning of the Jewish Federation of the Greater East Bay. He will be focusing on Genesis.
“My purpose is to teach people to read the Bible correctly and teach them that it has much to say to modern people in their searches,” he said during a phone interview from his home in Kfar Saba, Israel.
“Religion is…the way you structure your life to give expression to deepest feeling in your soul. It’s the foundation.”
The Orthodox rabbi and teacher immigrated to Israel in 1984 after serving Beth Israel for 15 years. The highlight of his East Bay visit will be the first annual CJLL Institute, a three-day course co-sponsored by Lehrhaus Judaica. Titled “The Soul’s Journey,” the class takes place Sunday and Monday, Feb. 16 and 17, at Berkeley’s Reutlinger Center and continues Tuesday, Feb. 18 at Oakland’s Beth Jacob Congregation.
In addition, Leibowitz will lead sessions with seniors, day-school students, teens, synagogue and lay leaders, Jewish educators and community professionals. Fran Alexander is chair of the scholar-in-residence program.
The East Bay visit is one of several American teaching stints Leibowitz is doing this year on behalf of Pardes, a yeshiva that educates men and women, observant and nonobservant, together. About 85 percent of the students are North American.
As a teacher and spiritual leader both at Pardes and in Kfar Saba, Leibowitz says his goal is to encourage men and women of all levels of religious commitment to sit down together, study Torah and dialogue.
During his U.S. lecture tour, he will be conveying Pardes’ teaching methods. “Rather than teaching about the Bible, we teach the Bible, giving people tools to learn to appreciate the Bible,” he said. “If you do a careful word analysis, it opens up many exciting things.”
Genesis, he said, is about “the nature of human beings and their relationship to the world. It’s neither a scientific document nor a historical document. It’s a religious document. Its function is to make sense of our position in the world and to deepen our experience in the world.”
When people of different backgrounds study text together, he said, “I think what it does is remove false definitions and false barriers. It turns them back into individuals seeking truth who have more in common with one another than they ever believed before.”
In such a context, he said, students are not addressing political questions such as whether women should be called to the Torah, but instead are looking at the “fundamental meaning of existence and the meaning of attachment to God. It’s something everybody shares, regardless of their different religious commitments. I feel what they’re getting at Pardes is a very authentic way of studying texts, without political or polemic messages. Very few institutions are teaching this way. We combine the tools of a university with the spirituality of a yeshiva.”
Leibowitz, 55, began his own spiritual journey in Brooklyn, receiving a master’s degree from Brandeis, rabbinical ordination from Yeshiva University and a doctorate in Near Eastern studies from U.C. Berkeley.
In 1988, four years after he moved to Israel, where his three children now also live, his wife, Eda, died of cancer. He has since dedicated part of a library in her memory at a Kfar Saba school serving disadvantaged youth. During that year marked by the intifada, he returned to his old pulpit as interim rabbi.
Nine years later, gulfs still exist — and the one between Jew and Jew seems to have widened.
One of the conflicts, he said, is that the religious position places a higher value on responsibility than it does on freedom. While a democratic regime, such as Israel’s, permits individuals to make choices, those who maintain a religious orientation are often distressed by the kinds of choices others make. Yet, nonetheless, that is their own right.
“As long as they don’t interfere with other people, they’re permitted to sin,” he said.
When is one obliged to chastise? “Only if you feel it’s productive. The purpose is not to punish or inflict damage but to convince them what they’re doing is wrong.”
Turning to the Cain and Abel story, he said it’s “about the first sin of man against man. The word `sin’ isn’t so central. It teaches us that there’s a path of truth that the soul is supposed to take, a fulfilling way of living. When one strays away from that path, we have to do tikkun nefesh [healing of the soul]. If a person’s unable to correct the behavioral pattern, sins become worse and worse. The result is the act of Cain.
“What’s called tikkun olam [healing of the world] basically comes from making your soul a more fulfilled soul.”