Ben Yehuda Press Blog

Jewish Renewal rabbi takes people on a journey through the Torah

By Leonard Felson

Take a few words from a prayer in the siddur or a short verse from the Torah. Look at what those words really mean and how they connect with your life. Now add a melody, and chant those words mindfully and repeatedly and meditatively based on your newfound understanding of them. Add 50 or 100 men and women chanting that one prayer, those few words for, say five minutes n often with harmonic parts or in intricate rounds, and you begin to appreciate what Rabbi Shefa Gold brings to the art of Jewish liturgy.

Now, the popular Jewish Renewal rabbi, best known for the hundreds of unique chants she’s composed from the liturgy, has written her first book called, “Torah Journeys: The Inner Path to the Promised Land” (Ben Yehuda Press). She will speak about the book, and lead chants, next Thursday, Sept. 28, at 7:30 p.m. at the Hartford Seminary, 77 Sherman St., in Hartford. The evening is co-sponsored by Congregation P’nai Or and the Seminary.

Speaking from her home in New Mexico n she grew up in a Conservative Jewish household in New Jersey, Gold says the event will provide “a little taste of the book by taking people on a journey through the Torah.

“There’s a way I understand and receive the Torah as a journey of the soul and it’s been a very useful text in my own spiritual life to reflect on the inner landscape. I don’t read it as a historical document or even as a document of the mitzvot or commandments,” says Gold.

Instead, as she reads it, she asks of every chapter, every verse and often, every word, where’s the blessing here? “And I have my eyes peeled and ears cocked to what are the spiritual challenges being given n so when I come across a passage that triggers me in someway or upsets me or makes me defensive n those become doorways to understanding what the spiritual challenges are that Torah is pointing out.” But her reading of the Torah doesn’t end there.

Once she’s uncovered those challenges, Gold says, she asks herself what’s the practice I need to do to rise to the spiritual challenge and to receive the blessing of Torah.
Gold, who is a leader in ALEPH: the Alliance for Jewish Renewal, received her ordination both from the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College and from Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi. She has produced nine albums and her liturgies have been published in several new prayer books. She teaches at workshops and retreats on the theory and art of chanting, spiritual community building and mediation.

The book lays out this practice and is organized in chapters following the 54 parshiot or portions of the Torah that come in a year. With Bereshit or Genesis, the first portion of the Torah, Gold concludes, for example, that the blessing comes with the realization of physical reality or “the palace” as the Zohar describes Creation. It moves on to uncover a spiritual challenge when G-d asks Adam, “Where are you?” Adam responds by hiding, saying, “I was afraid because I was naked.”

That interchange unveils a spiritual challenge, according to Gold, who writes: “The spiritual challenge of this Beginning time is to know that we are utterly naked and vulnerable. Yet rather than hide, we are challenged to stand in our nakedness…We are required to stand in our vulnerability, to open to the power that moves through us.”

Between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, Gold and Rabbi David Ingber will lead a retreat over Shabbat Shuvah, Sept. 29-30, at the Isabella Freedman Jewish Retreat Center in Falls Village. The two also will lead a Yom Kippur retreat there Oct. 1-2.

For Gold, she says, the special Shabbat of return between the two major holidays, “is meant to prepare us to rise to the challenge of Yom Kippur.” Each program will include chanting and opportunities for participants to examine issues they are going through in their lives.

“The way I experience Yom Kippur is almost as a death and rebirth experience,” she says.