Spring, 2 0 0 7                                                                                                        VOLUME 3, NO. 4

periodic e-news about spirituality, wellness, and the common good
from Interweave Center For Wholistic Living, Summit, NJ

by Lisa Green

I first encountered Rabbi Irwin Kula in his DVD documentary, Time for a New God, shown at last year’s Jewish-Christian religious educators’ conference. Charismatic, iconoclastic—even blunt—Kula talked about experiencing the sacred in the ordinary moments of life. and especially in our bonds with each other, since we are the only genuine “images of God.”

An eighth-generation rabbi and president of the National Jewish Center for Learning and Leadership (CLAL), Kula gets around, appearing frequently on Oprah, The Today Show, and public television, co-hosting an “intelligent talk radio” show, and publishing a book, Yearnings: Embracing the Sacred Messiness of Life. What I find intriguing—and Interweavy—about all these activities is Kula’s commitment to bringing time-tested spiritual wisdom and ideas to people where they are. His mission, he says, is about “widening the definition of Jewishness to reflect the lived lives of Jews and translating the particularistic language and wisdom of Jewish tradition for a wider, global audience.”

Recently Kula delivered the closing address at the tenth annual Technology, Entertainment and Design Conference in Monterey, California. An annual “who's who of tech movers and shakers,” the TED conference draws 1,000 attendees and features over 50 speakers—scientists, engineers, technology wizards, venture capitalists, filmmakers and artists. “I was the only person who was officially religious in the room,” Kula recalls, “and at first I never felt so small in my whole life. These people were talking about how the world was going to look over the next century, in ways that were so profound that I was humbled and left feeling, ‘What does religion as we have inherited it actually have to say to this moment that isn't either simply wrong, self-righteous, preachy or obvious?’” He also felt strangled by the usual ways “insiders” talk about religion, focusing on “how to keep other people in the fold, rather than how to open up and liberate the wisdom of this 3,500-year-old tradition to be in conversation with the world.”

Kula began to notice, however, that many of the attendees, though mostly estranged from religious institutions, talked of their yearning for purpose, connection, possibility and making a better world—all characteristics of a religious worldview. And he also noticed that while the conference was focused on the mind, it was also full of what he calls “moments of the heart.”

“This was a group of people who don’t cry easily,” he says, “but again and again they cried, because the technology applied to certain human, quality of life purposes was so ‘miraculous.’ For example, there was one story about a voice simulation device for severely handicapped people. They showed a film of a 26-year-old young man who had never been able to speak to his parents. They put him in the device and the first words that come out are, ‘I love you mom.’ And now hundreds of people were weeping.”

These stories—and participants’ reactions to them—suggested to Kula the need to bring ancient wisdom and modern technology into conversation. “We need a “technology of spirituality,” he says, “so that the decisions we make about the uses of technology flow directly out of the kind of generosity of spirit reflected in these stories.” In his closing address, he invited participants to meditate for a few minutes, bring to awareness an insight they would take away from the conference, and then teach it to the person sitting next to them. “It was astounding,” he says, “like a giant beit midrash [the central “study hall” dedicated for study of the Torah and Talmud]. It was amazing to see this Jewish metaphor for learning being experienced in this global way.” Kula concluded by inviting the conference to chant a blessing, “Baruch ata adonai chonein ha'daat—Blessed is the One who in generosity gives us knowledge.” He used a Buddhist melody “as a way to recognize that no one religion is big enough to own this idea: that knowledge is a gift that can be evil or trivial, or that can speak to the deepest aspects of how we live our lives.”

Kula stopped after a minute or so, but the packed conference continued chanting. “It was so moving that I burst out in tears at the bigness of what Jewishness could be,” he remembers. “Again, these are not people who do a lot of crying and chanting in their professional lives. Here were hundreds of people from many different religious and ethic backgrounds, all chanting a bracha in Hebrew from the Amidah that elevates and deepens the universal experience of the gift of knowledge.”

“Bless This Mess: Turning Yearnings Into Growth,” based on Kula’s book, is the next Director’s Seminar, beginning Wednesday, April 11, 9:30-11:30 a.m. And Rabbi Kula is speaking on Sunday, April 22, at 2 p.m. at the Leon & Toby Cooperman JCC, Ross Family Campus, 760 Northfield Avenue, West Orange.

Answering the Call
by Lisa Green

Those who think of Interweave as a place to take a meditation or Tai Chih class might have been surprised to hear a prophetic call to fight poverty and global warming from the keynoter at our Annual Meeting on March 3. “More than two billion people around the world live without the most basic necessities,” declared the Rev. Fletcher Harper, Executive Director of GreenFaith, New Jersey’s interfaith environmental advocacy organization. “We also need to face the fact,” he went on, “that to address climate change seriously we need to reduce carbon emissions not by ten or twenty percent, but by eighty percent.”

To the more than sixty members and friends gathered for the meeting and celebration of the 40th anniversary of Director Bob Morris’ priestly ordination, Harper’s charge was a call to honor our founding vision. Since the beginning, Bob’s ministry—and Interweave’s mission—have been about wellness, spirituality, and the common good.

Harper’s keynote highlighted several challenges of the 21st century and the ways that Interweave can equip participants to face them. “Interweave is an entrepreneurial organization,” he said, “founded by an entrepreneur and encouraging that spirit in its members.” Pointing out the prevalence of conservative Christian messages in media coverage of religion, he encouraged us to bring an entrepreneurial spirit to the task of presenting a broader vision to the community. “What would the world be like,” he wondered, “if there were Interweave radio stations up and down the dial?”

Interweave has also not shied away from being countercultural, Harper said, praising Bob’s willingness to face ridicule in talking about the mind-body connection, interfaith dialogue, and Earth’s wellbeing a generation before these concerns became mainstream. Quoting Gandhi, he said, “With new ideas, first they make fun of you, then they try to kill you, and then you win.” Indulging a bit in the making fun part himself, Harper said in a tribute to Center Director (and Bob’s wife) Suzanne Morris that “one definition of a saint is someone who lives with a saint.”

Finally, Harper spoke of Interweave as a place where people gain a sense of inner freedom about their engagement with the sacred. “I’m sure there are people here who owe their sanity, if not their lives, to the sense of inner freedom they found here,” he said. Noting that a growing percent of the population is atheist or secular, Harper also called Interweave to the front lines of today’s struggle for the future of religion. “The valuing of diversity, and the courage to speak on the real complexity of spiritual experience,” he said, “are vital skills as we try to reimagine our religious organizations for a new era.”

Interweave’s relationship to organized religion, and particularly to Bob’s ministry as an Episcopal priest, was also highlighted by the evening’s three other speakers. Inspired by the fact that March 3 is the Feast of John and Charles Wesley, the Rev. Al Niese, former Rector of St. John on the Mountain in Bernardsville, preached at the Evensong service about the parallels between Interweave’s work and the Wesley brothers’ outreach to the marginalized through small group study and social action.

The Rev. Christopher Brdlik, Rector of Calvary Church, and the Rev. Denison Harrield, Jr., pastor of Wallace Chapel A.M.E. Zion Church, spoke of Bob’s ministry in the Episcopal Diocese of Newark and the city of Summit. Several members and friends also spoke briefly about the gifts of Interweave in their lives: illuminating the connection between organized religion and spirituality, encouraging the development of a mature faith, and weaving together traditional practices and cutting-edge innovations, contemplation and action.

As emcee for the “Bobfest” part of the evening, I got the last word before introducing the honoree, so I reflected on Bob’s fulfillment of his priestly promise to nourish and strengthen people to glorify God in this life and in the life to come. I closed with a passage from Frederick Buechner’s book Telling the Truth about the preacher’s call “to use words as the prophets used them to stir in us memories and longings and intuitions that we starve for without knowing that we starve . . . words and images that help make the surface of our lives transparent to the truth that lies deep within them, which is the wordless truth of who we are and who God is and the gospel of our meeting.”

It is this good news—the divine call to the place where, as Buechner says, “our deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet,” that Bob has taught for forty years. Fletcher Harper challenges him—and all of us—to keep hearing and responding.