Mainstream Mysticism

In Kabbalah, women find a way to make spirituality integral to their daily lives.

By Jacqueline Egosi

Tradition discourages the study of the Kabbalah, Judaism's mystical writings unless one is male, married, at least 35 and well-versed in Torah. But as anyone who reads People magazine—or pays attention to bulletin board fliers at the health food store—no doubt has noticed, that proscription is going unheeded.

Kabbalah is suddenly everywhere. Madonna proselytizes for it. Britney Spears appears on a cover of Entertainment Weekly wearing one of the red string bracelets distributed by the Kabbalah Centre to keep away the evil eye. It's being taught at workshops at yoga centers and is the focus of New Age summer retreats.

Traditional religious authorities look askance at many of these secular activities, contending that they're closer to pop psychology than authentic Kabbalah, which requires a thorough knowledge of Hebrew and Torah to understand its nuances.

But that hasn't stopped Kabbalah fervor from spreading to the Jewish world as well, where community centers and synagogues of every denomination are now offering Kabbalah classes. Those classes are often filled with women, who seem to feel a special link to the mystical aspects of Judaism.

Many different doorways into the world of Kabbalah are opening. Here we present the stories of four women, each of whom has found a path into the richness of the Kabbalah and, through it, stronger ties to her Jewish heritage.

Melinda Ribner - Mysticism Through Meditation
When Melinda Ribner was part of an ashram in New York City, where she was a follower of the guru Muktenanda, she and 60 fellow seekers would get up at 5 a.m. for hours of meditation and prayer, with hours more each night.

What Ribner found there filled a need that hadn't been met in the synagogue services of her youth, although her family belonged to several congregations in Albany, N.Y. She enjoyed attending, but ended her Jewish education when she became bat mitzvah. "I was alienated from synagogues because I couldn't feel any spirituality there," she says.

In college she discovered yoga, and got intensively involved with Eastern religions. When she graduated with a social work degree, she moved into the Manhattan ashram.

Her father, concerned, had her look up Hinduism in an encyclopedia. She then realized she'd been following it, though in the ashram it wasn't presented that way.

Ribner didn't immediately leave the ashram, but she began attending Shabbat morning services at the synagogue headed by the late Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach just a few blocks away, on Manhattan's Upper West Side. After Saturday morning meditation she'd head to the Carlebach shul, where she found people made ecstatic by Reb Shlomo's holy energy.

Carlebach was a Lubavitch Hasid who went to San Francisco in the 1960s to reach the Jews turning to drugs and Eastern religions. He brought them back through his House of Love and Prayer and became famous for the tunes he composed to words of Torah and Jewish liturgy, incomparable melodies now sung everywhere.

After first visiting in 1976, Ribner eventually became one of Reb Shlomo's assistants, participating in classes and Shabbat and holiday celebrations, organizing concert performances, and preparing food for his many other disciples who came to the shul. Through him she discovered the Hasidic way, which is based on Kabbalah and considered its practical application.

"Shlomo was my guru replacement," she says. "Being with Shlomo and celebrating the holidays was dynamic and powerful. He provided a doorway into Jewish mysticism, and to Jewish spiritual awakening and journeying."

She became observant and went to Israel to learn. While there, she discovered Jewish meditation. Since then, Ribner has taught it to growing numbers of people at synagogues all over the country, and out of her home and rented spaces. Dozens of her students gather to celebrate the beginning of each Jewish month, Rosh Chodesh, with her, and High Holiday worship services.

She recently started a "spiritual smicha" (ordination or certification) program for more intensive learning. Now in its second year, the program has 15 students preparing to lead Kabbalistic meditation, give sermons and provide pastoral counseling.

Ribner works as a spiritual psychotherapist herself, using meditation as part of treatment with 10 current clients.

Since Kabbalah is about accessing the hidden dimensions of Judaism, there is a special connection that women have, she says. "Women understand things in a more experiential than intellectual way than men. For me as a woman, the hidden, inner dimensions of life resonate.

"Kabbalah means 'to receive.' The feminine is the vessel, and the feminine energy is all about receiving. We are vessels in a way that men have to learn how to be."

Had she not discovered Kabbalah through Reb Shlomo, Ribner says, she doesn't know whether she'd be who she is today. "For me, Kabbalah is the essence of Judaism, and without it I don't know that I could be a Jew."

A Connection Through the Kabbalah Centre
Robin Davis owns a media relations company in Greenwich, Conn., that represents luxury goods.

A well-known fashion designer, whom she prefers not to name, had been going to the Kabbalah Centre in Los Angeles. Davis could see that it was good for him. So one Friday night when he was in New York, she agreed to accompany him to the organization's midtown Manhattan building for Sabbath services and dinner.

And she made an immediate connection.

"I felt like I was surrounded by the nicest group of people. It was like being completely enveloped. I left and kept smiling. It's just something that you want to go back to.

"When I began reading all of the books [published by the Kabbalah Centre], I felt so influenced by them that I found myself wanting to learn more," she says.

Davis has since become a devotee, traveling into the city twice a week to study with a spiritual teacher named Eliyahu, and to attend Friday night services and dinner, and lectures.

She meets with Eliyahu, whose last name she doesn't know, for about an hour and a half of informal study. One week he might share a Jewish parable, another week discuss with her an element of Kabbalah's wisdom as understood by the organization.

"The spiritual teachers give you a different topic each time, and then you talk about what's going on in your life and how to deal with it. It's a spiritual way of looking at things, not like going to a doctor or psychiatrist," Davis says. "It's getting strength from the teacher's light, his wisdom.

"Every time I'm with him, he seems to focus into something that really touches me personally, and guides me through something that I'm having trouble with. Through the teachings of Kabbalah he is able to explain to me how to navigate through it," she says.

"I leave with such an incredible sense of accomplishment, feeling like doors have opened. I get energized by it. The most wonderful thing is that I leave wanting more and more."

The organization charges no fee for her sessions with Eliyahu or for attending its Friday night services but asks for donations, and Davis says she has been generous.

The Kabbalah Centre has garnered controversy for several reasons. For one thing, it divorces Kabbalah from Judaism and observance—a point that its teachers are upfront about, presenting Kabbalah as a universal system for understanding the secrets of the universe.

Davis, who's in her early 40s, and her husband have four teenage children. Growing up in WASPy New Canaan, Conn., she had no connection to Judaism or other Jews. Her husband is a religious Episcopalian who has raised their children primarily in the church.

At the Kabbalah Centre, Davis has found an acceptance she hadn't realized she needed.

"Whatever you are, there are no restrictions there. There aren't rules. To me, that's the most humane way to deal with people: to be receptive to anyone open to learning; that's what it's really all about," she says. "They are not judgmental at all. Usually with religion there are so many rules and regulations, you're damned."

She has also found validation for the way she lives.

"I'm very driven in my career, as a provider and as a woman provider," she says. "I am a complete capitalist and believe in earning a lot of money and being successful. I don't want to feel ashamed of that.

"Kabbalah really embraces those things," she says. "They say it's good to be strong, to achieve, and to be successful. It makes you feel good as a woman, telling you that your success is something quite extraordinary. I've never had anyone before telling me that I've done the right thing and that I've set a good example for my children."

New Age Connection
Today Zohara Meyerhoff Hieronimus, known as Zoe, has begun attending an Orthodox synagogue, covering her hair and wearing only long skirts. She has become the benefactor of an Israeli Kabbalist and a teacher of Kabbalistic meditation.

It wasn't always this way. Hieronimus was born 50 years ago into a Baltimore-based philanthropic Jewish family. At 16, she refused to participate in her family's Reform synagogue's Confirmation. "I loved God and decided it was too private," she says.

Precociously intellectual, she was reading Martin Buber on Hasidim and mysticism, along with the German philosophers Hegel, Goethe and Rilke.

"I was experiencing metaphysical things and trying to find someone to talk to about it within a Jewish context," she says. "I was very interested in Kabbalah but found no route to it, so I started journeying away from Judaism."

For years she practiced aspects of Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism and Shintoism. She went to Boulder, Colo., to study with Samuel Avital, a teacher of mime and Kabbalah. She ultimately returned to Baltimore, where she settled with her husband, Bob Hieronimus, who is not Jewish, his two children from an earlier marriage, and their daughter.

They were deeply involved in a New Age approach to spirituality. In the 1980s they established The Center for Esoteric Studies, "where all the traditions commingled," she says. And in 1984, she founded a holistic health care center called Ruscombe Mansion.

Hieronimus soon became a political activist with her own radio talk show. In 2000, after a decade of involvement in politically charged issues, she needed to change course. "Whenever I thought I had found the darkest of our capacities there was something worse the next day," she says.

She was in spiritual crisis.

"For 88 days I was in a mystic sea. Every time I closed my eyes I would be in a massive wave of water with no horizon. On the 88th day it stopped, when I had the thought to call Samuel Avital."

By phone, they studied Kabbalah for over a year. Hieronimus continued the meditation she had long been doing but wove in Kabbalistic approaches. One day she found herself visualizing Rabbi Avraham Brandwein, who runs a Kabbalistic Jerusalem yeshiva and whom she had earlier met.

She offered to support his work, and in 2001 they established the A-Z Kabbalah Forum, which runs a weekly Torah study class based on Brandwein's interpretation, and hosts guest speakers at the Ruscombe Mansion. Though open to everyone, Jewish women are the ones who most often attend, Hieronimus says.

She attributes her new commitment to observance to her study of Kabbalah. "No [religious] system is as complete, and I've read about many of them. Kabbalah gives you a way to integrate the spiritual and the material, rather than sometimes feeling that one lives a material life and has spiritual experiences. So you don't spend your life in meditative bliss, but take your meditative bliss and make it help you serve others."

She leads a Jewish women's meditation class focusing on the Hebrew letters, through them teaching "how to come into rapport with the interior essence of things." Though just now learning to read Hebrew, Hieronimus already has an intense relationship with the alef-bet, making sculptures of the 22 letters.

"The beautiful part about Kabbalah is that when you begin to study it, it begins to make your spiritual life more integral in your everyday life," she says. "Like setting a table—what does it mean? It shows you that you're setting the conditions for the life force to express itself, to sustain us, to nurture us."

A Doorway Through Dante
Film and video artist Ardele Lister, 54, found an unlikely doorway into Kabbalah study: an obsession with Dante's Inferno. "What I only understood later," she says, "was that Dante's search for faith was also my own."

As an adult "I was consciously and culturally a Jew, but not religiously observant or connected to a synagogue" except when going to Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur services each year, Lister says.

She read The Inferno and was fascinated by Dante's conceptions of heaven, hell and purgatory, so she created an art piece about hell in the newly dawning digital age.

"People asked me what the Jewish line on heaven and hell was, and I didn't think there was much of one," she says. "But the question stuck in my mind." She looked it up at the Brooklyn Library and found long encyclopedia entries citing the Zohar and Kabbalah. Like most American Jews, she didn't know what they were.

So she started reading. And discovered that "there's a lot of symbolism, visually and numerically, which from an artistic point of view was very compelling."

When their daughter was two, Lister and her husband moved to Brooklyn, and for the first High Holidays there ended up at the Park Slope Jewish Center, an egalitarian Conservative synagogue, where she found herself so moved that she cried.

They began taking classes together to prepare him for conversion to Judaism, and Kabbalah was part of what they studied.

"It gave me answers to things that were never clear in other sources," she says—for example, kashrut. "No one ever tells you why you do it. But one of these Kabbalah books had a beautiful explanation. It said that the energy of eating milk comes from life, and the energy of eating meat comes from death, and you don't want to mix those energies. There is sanctity to eating whatever God or nature has provided, and you want to pursue a purification that will allow access to spiritual clarity and the possibility of connecting with the Divine.

"I found things in Kabbalah that were really speaking to me. It was interesting to me in ways that most synagogue practice isn't," says Lister, who is now long divorced.

A presentation of God as something other than the old judge in the sky appealed to her, as did the wrestling with questions of free will, and the partnership between man and God, which she found in Kabbalah.

She soon began attending Jewish Renewal gatherings where aspects of Kabbalah were explored by the progressive, egalitarian, neo-Hasidic Jews there. She learned about Jewish meditation, and then began going to the Elat Chayim Jewish retreat center in upstate New York several times a year, where she learns with teachers whose approach is grounded in the Kabbalistic perspective.

In a regular synagogue service if she feels "the spiritual zing" for five minutes she's been lucky, she says. But when interspersing creative Jewish liturgy with meditation and other Kabbalistic approaches, she is able to hold on to her sense of connection to the divine.

"I 'get' the connections this way," Lister says. "It's very imagistic. And the power of the feminine energy is not played down. It's as awesome as the male God energy, not subservient at all."

She still belongs to the same Conservative shul, but learning Kabbalah has deepened her practices, like keeping a kosher home, because "now it makes sense to me. And I'm not the kind of person who does things because someone tells me to."

Lister continues her independent study of Kabbalah. "I read it the same way I would read Torah. I get a different insight every time. It doesn't matter how often I read it. It's never dull."

From a Woman's Perspective
Nowhere is the Divine feminine more evident in Judaism than in Kabbalah.

While Judaism’s God is infinite, without limitation in form, time or gender, the tradition’s texts contain mostly male imagery, and in Hebrew, references are primarily in masculine language. The Talmud’s references to women are often framed negatively. And of course until a few decades ago, almost all interpreters of the tradition—the rabbis—were men.

Even today, few references to the feminine aspects of God are to be found in typical, mainstream synagogue liturgy and Torah study.

But there is a rediscovery afoot, an exploration of a part of Judaism’s holy literature that has been long divorced from the Western world’s post-Enlightenment approach to Judaism: Kabbalah.

In Kabbalah is found contemplation of Divine holiness in the feminine form of Schechinah, with reflections on female erotic energy threaded through, and the cosmology of Rabbi Isaac Luria, who first described the universe as born in a storm of contractions and expulsion. What woman, if she has given birth, can’t relate to that?

Jacqueline Egosi is a writer who lives in New York. She writes about Jewish spirituality and other subjects for national and local newspapers and magazines.

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