Rabbi reveals secrets, benefits of spirituality

By Anne Koppel Conway

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Rabbis provide spiritual support for their communities, but who comforts the comforters? That's where Rabbi Sheila Peltz Weinberg, senior faculty member and director of outreach for the Institute for Spirituality comes in. The Institute, founded six years ago, holds spiritual retreats on both the West and East Coasts for rabbis, cantors, educators and most recently everyone else.

On Jan. 20, Weinberg participated in Shabbat services at Congregation Neveh Shalom, led a meditation group following the Kiddush meal and spoke about spirituality after Havdallah to about 40 attendees, including some from Eugene.

"We're living in daunting times," said Weinberg, who is from Amherst, Mass. "We struggle with being alone and being with others. We're dealing with vulnerability in times of change and feel out of control."

"We need to cultivate our own strengths" to deal with all that and whatever issues that are complicating our existence, she said.

One way to do that is to bring spirituality into our daily lives, according to Weinberg.

Twenty or so years ago words like "meditation" and "spirituality" would not have been used in the same sentence with Judaism. Then, as now, Jews were called on to be "activists" as in tikkun olam, the obligation to repair the world. Two decades ago spirituality was thought to be passive, she said.

"Hassidic teachings have been marginalized in western Jewish culture for the last couple of centuries," she said, adding that relatively recently, beliefs have shifted to allow spirituality in to enrich Jewish lives.

"Spirituality won't make us passive," she said. "It won't cause us to withdraw from the world. It's the balance of effort and surrender, not apathy. Set an intention and relax around it."

In the meditation session, Weinberg had everyone concentrate on breathing. She mentioned that in another session in a community outside of Portland, someone came with a portable oxygen tank. Normally, healthy people don't think about breathing. Weinberg recalled that the woman with the breathing problem said that when she learned to relax, instead of stressing about each breath, the act of breathing became much easier.

Dan Schiff, a Vancouver psychologist in attendance, said that the general population is now "mindful of the connection between the body and the mind." Spirituality is part of the cultural climate, "a zeitgeist. It adds depth to Judaism."

Weinberg spoke about the importance of "living in the moment" and having silence in our lives—"It's a way of finding self-acceptance and building community."

But when the Institute was getting under way, she said the founders were worried about introducing the concept of silence to rabbis, who are hardly silent beings. The rabbi retreat participants, however, flourished with the concept.

"They chose silence and found it restorative. If no one talks to you, you don't have to talk to them," said Weinberg.

In the Neveh Shalom meditation session, Weinberg had participants move their bodies in various ways and become aware of what each body part was doing.

She had the 50 or so meditators lift their right hand and pay attention to what that felt like. The simple action was significant for Neveh Shalom's Rabbi Daniel Isaak. He recalled that when his mother-in-law had a stroke, her doctor repeatedly asked her to raise her arm,  and she mistakenly believed she was doing so.

Also, in the meditation session, Weinberg asked everyone to put a raisin in his/her mouth. "What does it feel like? See how busy your tongue is. Pay attention to what your teeth are doing," she instructed. If you pay attention to each bite, "you're going to eat less," she said.

When she was a congregational rabbi in Amherst, she said she often had working breakfasts, lunches and dinners and merely consumed the food. But once she learned to really taste the food and even become ecstatic about it, it seemed a natural follow-up to understand the blessing of food and to thank God for it.

Weinberg spoke about the importance of listening, which is "hard to do in a life full of distractions." But if we are open to what we hear, we can let God in, she said.

Both Isaak and Cantor Linda Shivers are Institute graduates.

Rabbis, said Weinberg, emerge from rabbinical schools steeped with left-brain intellectual knowledge. To balance that out, the Institute is working heavily on the right-brain, training the hearts and minds of rabbis and others  "looking for the pathways of meaning in their lives."

Anyone interested in making the 18-month/four-retreat commitment for the spiritual retreats can visit www.ijs-online.org.  Participants examine hassidic texts, participate in yoga exercises, walk, pray and eat well. At retreats Weinberg teaches mindfulness meditation to rabbis, Jewish professionals and lay folk.

The Institute's goal is to have the participants "purify their hearts," so they can go back to their communities and be "of great service in this world."

Shivers reminded attendees that Neveh Shalom has a meditation service, Shabbat Unplugged, every second Friday of the month, starting at 6:15 p.m.