Rabbi Sheila Peltz Weinberg, founder of the Institute for Jewish Spirituality, will be the featured guest at the Shavuot study session at Bnai Keshet in Montclair on Sunday, June 8.
Photo courtesy Institute for Jewish Spirituality
June 5, 2008
The traditional Shavuot all-night study session, or tikun leil Shavuot, sponsored by the Montclair area synagogues, will be a little quieter this year. Or at least, some sessions will be. That’s because featured guest Rabbi Sheila Peltz Weinberg believes we all need some quiet time to get to the true meaning of Torah.
Peltz Weinberg is a founder of the Institute for Jewish Spirituality, where she now serves as outreach director. IJS offers retreats for clergy, lay leaders, and educators that focus on meditation, yoga, and text study. It also explores the ideas of contemplative Judaism, an alternative approach to the religion that often involves chanting and meditation.
A Reconstructionist rabbi, Peltz Weinberg has been at the forefront of introducing meditation into Judaism. Sometimes referred to as a Buddhist teacher, she is a leader in the practice of contemplative Judaism, and can often be found leading days-long silent retreats sponsored by the IJS.
But there will be no silent retreat at the Montclair tikun, to be held erev Shavuot, Sunday, June 8, at B’nai Keshet beginning at 8 p.m. and running all night until 7 in the morning. There will, however, be plenty of discussion about spirituality. The evening’s sessions — to be led both by Peltz Weinberg and area rabbis — will include chanting, meditation, drumming, yoga, singing, prayer, and text study.
The joint tikun, now in its sixth year, includes Conservative synagogues Congregation Beth Ahm of West Essex in Verona and Congregation Shomrei Emunah in Montclair, the Reform congregations Temple Ner Tamid in Bloomfield and Temple Sholom of West Essex in Cedar Grove, and the Reconstructionist Bnai Keshet. The evening will be divided into two sections, the first from 8 p.m. until 12:30 a.m., culminating in the reading of the Ten Commandments, and from 12:45 a.m. until Shaharit at 5:30 a.m. Breakfast will be served at 7.
Seeing a new way
The idea of Shavuot meshes well with contemplative practice, according to Peltz Weinberg, because both involve seeing the everyday in a new way. “Revelation is about revealing what is concealed — it’s about what is always present, yet we do not see it. We do not pay attention to it. We do not remember it. All of the holidays urge us to pay attention to what is present but out of our awareness.
“Contemplative practice is another way of talking about what is always available,” she said from her home office in Massachusetts.
She said she also likes to view the Ten Commandments “as practices rather than commandments,” a way to deepen one’s awareness. She offers the example of “Thou shall not steal.”
“There’s the obvious level of not stealing,” she said. “But if you contemplate what it means, it’s about not taking what is not fully given. This raises a whole range of ideas. What about the businessman’s desire to charge more than he should? Or our desire to take more from the earth than is enough? If we contemplate on that, we have the ability to expand what the commandment might mean.”
And that is her goal.
She views contemplative practice not as an end itself but a method of assessing “how we grow as human beings, how we connect with a dimension that is more true, more real, more awake than the everyday.
“The goal is to develop the heart and mind, not to feel happiness, but to develop a capacity to live a more ethical life. And that’s what God wants. That’s Torah. That’s what revelation is all about,” said Peltz Weinberg.
For her, the way to get there is through quiet, to close off the distractions of the everyday world. “Then I can see more clearly what are my choices, and what’s really true,” she said.
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