This week I spoke to Rabbi David Ingber about his new job as senior director of Jewish life at the 92nd Street Y. It’s an interesting marriage between a 150-year-old legacy institution and a high-profile rabbi who founded his popular Upper West Side synagogue, Romemu, as a once-a-month minyan in 2006. (Ingber will continue to lead services at Romemu.)
It’s also an intriguing melding of cultures. 92NY, as it now prefers to be called, is a temple of high culture on the Upper East Side, and, as I wrote in the piece about Ingber, is “better known for hosting chamber music concerts than religious services.”
Romemu, meanwhile is — what, exactly? I struggled for the right word to describe a congregation that draws on Judaism’s mystical traditions and Eastern spiritual practices, and whose style owes a debt to the 1960s counterculture.
All of the words that I could think of for this kind of religious institution sound pejorative: “Touchy-feely.” “Crunchy.” “New Age-y.” “Woo-woo.” It’s revealing, I think, that the words we use to describe movements that arose as alternatives to the mainstream are referred to with words that the mainstream uses to mock them.
Romemu, meanwhile, is an institution in its own right, with 1,000 members, multiple locations and a sizable clergy and professional staff. It’s not exactly the counterculture. It is one of a number of successful synagogues that are either non-denominational or affiliated with the Jewish Renewal movement, and which draw seekers based on experiences many say they are not getting in “traditional” synagogues, no matter the denomination.
It’s helpful, then, to see how these synagogues describe themselves. Romemu’s website says it is “experiential” and “irreverently pious.” Its Shabbat services are described as a time for “contemplative prayer, joyous music, ecstatic dance, and deep wisdom.”
Lab/Shul, another popular Manhattan synagogue, calls itself an “artist-driven, everybody-friendly, God-optional, pop up, experimental community for sacred Jewish gatherings.”
In Los Angeles, IKAR, a congregation that hesitates to call itself a synagogue, says its mission is to “reanimate Jewish life and develop a spiritual and moral foundation for a just and equitable society,” and that it “fosters a yearning for personal, purposeful, creative engagement in Jewish life.
Still another L.A. congregation, Nashuva, calls itself a place to “receive spiritual infusion and emerge transformed.”
All of these congregations share a few things in common: A charismatic founding rabbi, often with training or roots in the “mainstream” denominations. Prayer services known for their musicality. Rituals and study that borrow from Eastern practices, particularly “mindfulness.” Usually a commitment to social justice, and an open-door policy for Jews, non-Jews, LGBTQ folk and interfaith families.
And with the exception of Nashuva, the congregations above are part of the “Jewish Emergent Network,” a coalition of seven communities dedicated to “rethinking basic assumptions about ritual and spiritual practice, membership models, staff structures, the religious/cultural divide and physical space.”
“Emergent,” however, is not useful as a short-hand description — the way, say, a “charismatic” church describes a Christian congregation that centers ecstatic spiritual experiences, healing and a deeply personal relationship with God. The Jewish Renewal movement has been called “neo-Hasidic,” but that’s only useful if you know what Hasidism is, and that the movement is drawing not on the very insular piety of the Hasids but their ecstatic, mystical approach to prayer.
I leave it to religious scholars to give a name or description to Romemu and congregations like it. It would be useful not only in describing the movement these congregations represent, but the similar kinds of programming within the “big four” Jewish denominations. (If you have any suggestions, I’d love to hear them: asc@jewishweek.org)
In the meantime, it’s probably best practice to avoid labeling institutions, and to instead describe them on the basis of what they actually do and believe. Already, the names of a number of these communities are themselves descriptors. Who knows, we may soon be referring to 92NY as “you know, like Romemu.”
