Jewish religious life is an engaged practice. Jewish belief and commitment manifests through action – performance of the mitzvot, participation in religious ritual and communal organizations. Mainstream Jewish practice has never been monastic, even as individuals may have practiced forms of seclusion. Therefore, the introduction of retreat practice as a spiritual practice is innovative, and for some seems at first glance to be a betrayal of a Jewish ethos.

Yet, it is precisely the overwhelmingly social – and organizational – aspect of Judaism that has contributed to obscuring the spiritual in contemporary Jewish life. The American ethos of production, of constant measurement and evaluation and of achievement produce a culture constantly in forward movement. To sit still, to be and not do, is often seen as a sign of moral laxity and laziness, even among Jews who innovated the day of rest. Further, the competitive aspect of American culture, seasoned with the Jewish tradition of (scholarly) argument and contrarianism, has contributed to the creation of a contemporary Jewish culture that is often competitive and critical, expressing values in conflict with many modes of deep spiritual experience. As a consequence, many of those who would find a spiritual home in Judaism are alienated from it; those who could make it so, i.e. rabbis and cantors, suffer exhaustion and despair.

The emergence of a multicultural society in the late 20th century created more opportunities to experience a variety of cultures while also creating greater separation between communities. The pace of work and the profusion of activities for children impacted negatively the time families spent together. American culture became one in which everyone was “bowling alone.” Many people recognized that in the effort to create and sustain community that they were able to sense the presence of something larger than they, an intimation of the divine.

We have founded our program on retreat practice in response to this cultural manifestation. Retreats are the context in which to acquire and establish contemplative spiritual practices. We believe that retreats – as a mini-sabbatical, as a time for renewal – support the development of a spiritual openness and acuity necessary for the revival of our synagogues and institutions. Retreats provide the framework in which we can present, experience and learn to model spiritual community.

What Spiritual Community Is

The IJS professional programs are based on the foundation of four retreats. It is at these retreats that participants connect with each other face-to-face, meet and study with faculty members and engage in the Core Practices of the program. The goal of the retreat, however, is not social or professional networking, acquisition of knowledge or skills, or perfecting practices. Rather, it is to create the opportunity to seek depth in relationship, to support clarity of vision and hearing and to learn the power of practice in the context of shared activity. We endeavor with our participants to create a safe and supportive environment, framed by attention to the sacred in relationship.

The goal of our spiritual practice is to meet God in our hearts and in the world. The quest for union with God, to overcome the barriers between our soul and the Soul of all, may seem to lead us away from other people. Our primary experience as embodied human beings is that of duality: my self and the other, my self and the world, my self and my experiences, my self and God. If we wish to move beyond that duality, we need to work from the world we know. Thus, we reach out to others with whom we can find mutual support, and in whom we find that which we seek: God’s presence, God’s being. Spiritual community is that place and moment in which seekers join together to support each other, and thereby themselves, in seeking God.

Spiritual Community is both an enactment and an experience. It is the affirmative acknowledgement of unconditional acceptance of the other, grounded in awareness of the image of God inherent in the other. It is the active seeking of the spark of divinity in the other, for the sake of experiencing God’s presence in that manner, and to reflect that light back to the one in whom it resides. It is an offer of safety and security to another, toward the end of supporting the emergence of that which is deeply hidden in the heart and soul. Thus, as each participant enacts this offering of safety and security, loving curiosity and caring acceptance toward the other, each participant is the recipient of this offering as well. This mutual acceptance and offering, receiving and discovering, is the foundation of spiritual community.

We bring our participants together on retreat so that they might experience the creation of spiritual community. We invite them to seek to sustain this experience in their hevruta study, and in other formats in which they meet together. By supporting their practice of the creation and maintenance of spiritual community in the IJS program we aim to encourage them to bring this practice to their work-places and home communities.

How We Support It

At the start of the retreat we articulate the purpose of the program and the structure and practices that support our work toward that goal. In that opening session participants affirm their intentions to uphold the guidelines and forms, understanding that the norm is complete acceptance. This is what allows safety to prevail. No one is being evaluated in any way. No one is being externally judged. Our common intention is to gather in community and support each other’s deepest desire to be revealed, to ourselves and then to each other, both in our utter uniqueness and wholeness and in our brokenness. It is in the willingness to take this risk and to offer the opportunity to the other to experience this blessing that is the heart of creating a spiritual community.

The quality of interpersonal encounter to which we attain is a form of spiritual practice, which reflects and builds sacred community. Our participants come with diverse educational backgrounds, skills, status in the Jewish world, theologies, experience, levels of commitment to Jewish and spiritual practice, family and professional roles, etc. Both lay and professional Jews are deeply conditioned to judge and rank themselves and each other in multiple ways. The formal structures of our culture reinforce this competition and hierarchy, especially in wealth and power and certain kinds of knowledge. Hierarchies have their time and place. IJS, however, is dedicated to working with that conditioning in order to create a greater sense of ease, comfort and safety. Listening with respect and without judgment to one another becomes a practice that forges the bonds of community and breaks through stereotypes. We name the blinders, that are often unconscious, that tend to limit our ability to open our hearts to the subtle truth of the soul and the preciousness of each being.

It is safety that builds the trust that enables isolated individuals to leave the private wilderness where they imagine they are alone. In this way, step-by-step, they ease into the comfort, power and hopefulness of sacred community. Once individuals taste the possibility of sacred community and the soul is stirred or rekindled, a process of transformation is set in motion. They are motivated to take on spiritual practices or to enhance their current practice with deeper intentionality. They will seek to join and create more opportunities to participate in sacred community and to inspire all their relationships with what they have experienced and learned.

How This Is Related To Other Practices

Sacred community is intimately tied to embracing spiritual practice, a life of mitzvot with kavannah, as a way of life. Just as we require a minyan for the recitation of certain prayers, we also need the support of like-minded people to support our spiritual growth. We will not find that support or the affirmation of these values in most quarters. It is very difficult to sustain the ongoing development of a relationship with the Divine, a way of perceiving life as a journey to wholeness that is redolent with meaning when one is cast ashore alone in secular, materialist America. The IJS articulates the imperative of a supportive and safe community for the flourishing of personal practice and the enhancement of our relationship with the Divine. Sacred community is not a luxury or merely a nice idea. It is the heart of our work, the center of our heritage and the vessel of our vision.

Just as we articulate the structure and guidelines for creating a spiritual community, and the frame of the retreat itself helps to sustain it, so all of the activities of the retreat practice sustain it. When we gather for prayer, in our presence to one another, making a minyan, responding “amen” or joining voices with others, we express our willingness to give up a part of our independence to create something larger. Like the angels in the kedusha we offer with loving assent our invitation and welcome to create a sacred community.

There is a similar quality to the mindfulness meditation and yoga practice, but it manifests in silent awareness. That is, except for instructions and an infrequent question, meditation and yoga practice take place in silence. When we sit, we confront our inner voices, learning how our commentary regarding ourselves and others is self-generated, independent of the acts, manners or characters of others. We learn to let go of our self-assessment and our jockeying for position to become present to the given moment. Similarly in yoga, while all of the participants are present for the activity, each is involved in his or her own personal practice. Each is invited to attend to the inner experience of resistance, reluctance, pridefulness and the comparing thoughts that arise. Out of that awareness we come to recognize each participant as a perfect being in that moment, no more and less than we ourselves. When we learn to let go of our embarrassment or overcome our pride we open to the other and offer willing support in our personal, perfect performance to the other. Yoga is as much dependent on spiritual community as it is a mode of creating it.

In the text study, particularly in hevruta, spiritual community comes into being again. The smallest community is the face-to-face meeting of two people. When participants join to study in hevruta they are made aware of their need for help in accessing a text, or in their well developed skill in the same task. They are challenged, then, to be able to either speak the truth without shame or hesitation, or to offer help without lording it over the other. Acceptance of self and of other, appreciation for the other and oneself are the dynamics contributing to the sacred quality of this relationship. Once experienced in the small unit of the hevruta, participants learn to practice this in the larger group as well. Self-control – often absent in Jewish professional gatherings – becomes a communal virtue; interrupting others, calling out and dominating a discourse become communal vices.

The Value To Our Participants

The experience of spiritual community is difficult for rabbis and cantors to experience in their congregations and largely lacking in Jewish professional circles. While rabbis and cantors are part of the Jewish communities that they serve, they are simultaneously employees. Hence, every Jewish communal interaction has an element of judgment and evaluation inherent in it. This naturally colors the ability to feel safe and relaxed enough to allow the soul to unfold. As beloved and appreciated as the Jewish professional might be in their setting, the employee-employer relationship has a necessarily unequal power dynamic. The professional may facilitate a sacred community for their congregants or students, but the professional is not on equal footing and cannot ultimately drink the nectar of spiritual community in their own workplace.

Professional associations do not tend to develop sacred community either. They focus on institutional agendas and programmatic issues. Professional meetings do not generally prioritize spiritual growth or the creation of sacred community. Their plates are full or so they perceive them to be. Meanwhile, competition for jobs, status, recognition and resources mitigate against the creation of a safe and truly supportive community.

Retreat As Pilgrimage, Movement Along A Sacred Path

Pilgrimage, or aliyah l’regel, is fundamental to Biblical Judaism. The three regalim (pilgrimage festivals) Pesach, Shavuot and Succot are called “sacred gatherings” that involved travel to Jerusalem to experience community, including sacrifice and celebration. These are times to leave home and work behind and join a group of fellow travelers with the intention of appearing before God. In later Judaism, travel to Eretz Yisrael, often in the most hazardous conditions, was considered a sacred pilgrimage. We have come to see the experience of creating spiritual community as a form of pilgrimage, manifesting in the following ways:

• Retreat includes traveling with a group (through time and space) with a shared spiritual intention.
  
• It entails a process of reflection leading to a significant commitment.
  
• It includes the process of preparing, traveling to the sacred site (the retreat), time in sacred community the return home and re-integration there.
  
• Retreatants or pilgrims let go of work obligations (just as no work is done on a chag) and forego many normal life routines: control of their schedule, habits of behavior, certain comforts, family and local relationships, use of money, and modes of social interaction even including speech for certain periods of silence. Letting go may be likened to sacrifice, which is a part of the Biblical chag. Sacrifice is korban from the root k-r-v – to bring close. Ultimately, we let go of the known in order to draw close to and know the previously Unknown, the One.
  
• There is a relationship between letting go and finding or discerning one’s intention. One lets go in order to see more clearly, come closer to God. This experience helps to clarify the inner desire to find new meaning in Jewish life, to renew one’s spiritual life, to find allies and soul friends, to gain a new perspective, to have a revelation, to enter into spiritual community, to establish or revive spiritual practice, or to learn how to do things differently.
  
• On retreat we let go of expectations and face the unknown. Unexpected things happen on the way to and from retreat. They are part of the process. Not everyone is able to show up every time and when they do show up, they are not the same from time to time. Showing up – physically as much as emotionally and spiritually – is a big part of the process.
  
• The Institute creates a structure and a container through developing a schedule and offering teachings and practices, which allow the mystery to unfold for each person in a unique way. Each pilgrim has a completely unique experience, still within the context of a sacred community
  
• The teachers on retreat play the role of guides to new territory. They can be guides because they are also practitioners and are engaged in a sacred journey. They teach from a place of “knowing the territory from inside.”
  
• The sacred pilgrimage or retreat as spiritual practice does not elevate the external power of a place. It allows the pilgrim to travel to the core of life itself, the sacred dimension of soul, which is always present.
  
• Retreat/pilgrimage is not a “stand alone” practice. It needs to be connected to one’s ongoing personal and professional life, one’s daily and weekly practices, community and greater social context. Thus, we do not remain “on retreat” but return home, bringing with us all that we have learned, prepared to grow even in our normal situation.

Application of and Support for the Retreat Practice

Retreat as pilgrimage minimizes one element of the traditional pilgrimage: travel from one place to another – at least during the retreat itself. The participants themselves, however, do travel from their homes to the retreat site – in itself a sort of pilgrimage (this is felt in particular as participants return to a familiar site, to the experiences of the previous retreat and in anticipation of renewed contact with the retreat form). On the other hand, during the period of the retreat, we maintain a fairly consistent schedule; the order of the day does not change from one day to the next. As the participants come to know this routine, they experience “falling back into it” as reassurance that it is possible to return to and continue on the pilgrim’s path.

There is no physical end-point to the path of this pilgrimage; it is all an inner journey. Success is experienced from moment to moment; from experience of awareness through dullness and apathy and back to the awakened heart. The depth of experience supported by retreat practice makes more likely the experience of deep awareness and profound awakening. What we learn on retreat, however, is that it is the dedication to being “on the path,” to following our intention to waking up, that sustains and inspires us in our daily endeavors. We leave our “home” of comfort to set out to do that work that will sanctify all action, redeem the mundane world.