The Jewish Healing Movement
by William C. Berk
I've always liked being where the action is. In college, I loved being in the San Francisco Bay Area where so much counter-cultural and interesting political activity was going on. When I became a rabbi, I hoped to be part of building a new community. I figured that being involved in such a community, trying to create a community that studied and lived Torah, would be exciting. Temple Chai has not let me down. Struggling to create this community has been the greatest privilege of my life.
There is a new movement in Jewish life that Temple Chai has helped start and it’s a movement I find compelling and fascinating. Its called the “Jewish Healing Movement.” There is a lot of action in this “movement.” This movement can be seen in the creation of Jewish healing centers – 14 of them – across the country. We have the only one of these centers attached to a synagogue – the Deutsch Family Shalom Center, directed by Sharona Silverman. The impact of this movement can be found in the growth of healing prayers (misheberach) in congregations across North America. It can be detected in an effort to search deeply in the Jewish tradition for healing wisdom.
At the core of the movement is this notion that our spiritual traditions have something to tell us about healthy living and about healing our bodies and our souls. With science discovering more and more the connections between mind, body, and spirit, it was only a matter of time before people would ask, “If spirit is crucial to wellness and the healing process, then what do ancient spiritual traditions have to say to us about this?” Some of this material is explicit, easy to find, and incredibly helpful. Some of this material, in the Jewish tradition, needs to be dug up. When we realized this, Sharona Silverman and I began talking about the need for a conference on “Mining the Jewish Tradition for its Healing Wisdom.” We lucked out when Professor Bill Cutter of the Hebrew Union College in Los Angeles fell in love with this vision and joined us as partners in creating a conference to give people a chance to dig deep into our tradition for its wisdom, its intuitions, and its teachings about healing.
This May 15-18, we are co-hosting this special conference. We have attracted some of the greatest teachers in the Jewish world for this conference – Rabbi Elliot Dorff of the University of Judaism, Dr. Arnold Eisen of Stanford, Dr. Art Green of Brandeis, Dr. Tamara Eskenazi of the Hebrew Union College, Tsvi Blanchard of CLAL, Rabbi Mordechai Gafni, currently lecturer in mysticism at Oxford, and many more. Some of the titles of learning sessions are quite compelling: “Myths that Hurt, Stories that Heal” (Rabbi Ed Feinstein), “To Knit the Heart to God” (Rabbi Shelly Marder), and “The Radical Torah of Eros and Healing in Zohar, Luria, and Ishbitz” (Rabbi Mordechai Gafni) are a few examples. If you are interested in healing, or Jewish healing, or in serious adult learning, you might want to take a good look at coming to this conference. Call the Shalom Center for information.
Sociologist Philip Wexler argues that we are slowly moving towards what he calls the “mystical society,” a society more and more attuned to intelligent spirituality. He believes that at the core of this spirituality will be a new healing movement, nourished by the ancient healing traditions. We can be quite proud that the Jewish tradition will have much to offer this movement.
