13 Facts About Jewish Renewal

1.

Jewish Renewal is a recent movement in Judaism which endeavors to reinvigorate modern Judaism with Kabbalistic, Hasidic, and musical practices.

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2.

Jewish Renewal reads Torah as our deepest challenge and our most precious gift.

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3.

Ideas, texts, tradition – Jewish Renewal understanding laced together in a sweet web of life so clearly that I could unpack the teaching as easily as I could unzip a boot.

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4.

Jewish Renewal brings kabbalistic and Hasidic theory and practice into a non-Orthodox, egalitarian framework, a phenomenon sometimes referred to as neo-Hasidism.

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5.

The Jewish Renewal Catalog became one of the bestselling books in American Jewish Renewal history to that date and spawned two sequels.

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6.

Also, the Havurah movement has a deep aversion to the "rebbe" model, while the Jewish Renewal movement has seen it as a way into a heightened spirituality.

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7.

Jewish Renewal focused more on urban sustainable living than rural culture, and suggested for instance interconnected basements of houses in urban neighborhoods that would create collective space, while providing the level of privacy secular life had encouraged.

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8.

Executive-director of ALEPH said in 2016 that 50 Jewish Renewal communities had been established in the United States, Canada, Latin America, Europe and Israel.

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9.

Rabbis and Cantors trained by the ALEPH Ordination Program, the Jewish Renewal seminary, have begun to serve congregations with other affiliations and bring Renewal-informed influences to these environments.

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10.

Jewish Renewal is "part of the burgeoning world of transdenominational Judaism—the growing number of synagogues, rabbis and prayer groups that eschew affiliation with a Jewish stream".

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11.

Jewish Renewal is a "movement" in the sense of a wave in motion, a grassroots effort to discover the modern meaning of Judaism as a spiritual practice.

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12.

Jewish Renewal is sometimes referred to as "New Age" by people who do not know that meditation, dance, chant, and mysticism have been present in Judaism throughout the ages and not, as some mistakenly believe, patched on to Judaism from other cultures or made up out of whole cloth.

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13.

Some within the Jewish Renewal community maintain that the movement has been more successful in providing occasional ecstatic "peak experiences" at worship services and spiritual retreats than in inculcating a daily discipline of religious practice.

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