Jewish Spiritual Direction: An Innovative Guide from Traditional and Contemporary Sources ed. by Rabbi Howard Avruhm Addison and Barbara Breitman (review)

Jewish Spiritual Direction, edited by Rabbi Howard Addison and Barbara Breitman, is a collection of essays written by those working in this emerging field, and it is a comprehensive introduction. Sections of the book are devoted to the evolution of the discipline, the techniques of spiritual direction, the development of a Jewish vocabulary and context for spiritual direction, and synergies resulting from the intersection of Jewish spiritual direction with disciplines such as art, poetry, and dance. Contributors to the volume represent a diverse group including Conservative rabbis, rabbis from the other liberal movements, and non-rabbinic practitioners in the field.

For those unfamiliar with spiritual direction (sometimes known as “spiritual guidance,” to suggest a less hierarchical process) the following definition may be helpful, one that I once heard Barbara Breitman herself offer in a training conference for spiritual directors I attended: “Spiritual direction (guidance, friendship) is an ongoing relationship in which one person desirous of being attentive to his/her spiritual life meets with another person on a regular basis for the purpose of becoming more attuned to God’s presence in order to respond more fully to that presence in all of life.”

There are several important elements in this definition. Spiritual direction is an ongoing relationship, not an isolated meeting. The purpose of the relationship is for the directee to become more aware of the spiritual dimension of his or her life in order to clarify how he/she experiences God in life. Cultivating an awareness of God in the unfolding of one’s life is the crux of the relationship. There are two parties to the relationship, a directee/seeker/speaker and a director/guide/listener. The desired outcome of the process is for the directee to become more attuned and to live more responsively to God’s presence in his/her life.

One of the critical questions for many Jews is whether the practice of spiritual direction is authentically Jewish. The authors raise this question in their introduction: “Because normative Judaism emphasizes Torah study and observing mitzvot as the legitimate pathways to God, many Jews may feel uncomfortable with the idea that we can have an unmediated, personal relationship with the Divine” (p. xix). While some of the essays in this volume attempt to ground the practice in Jewish tradition, and while there are clearly some Jewish antecedents, the discipline of spiritual direction as it is currently practiced comes out of a long history of Christian practice. Indeed, for lack of Jewish training programs, the first Jewish practitioners about a decade ago were all trained in Christian settings.

Clearly, one of the goals of this book is to establish Jewish spiritual direction as a field that can exist comfortably within Judaism and to define a Jewish theology and vocabulary for it. A number of the contributors to this volume claim that the field is compatible with categories of Jewish thought and expression. Most helpful in this regard is the essay by Rabbi Amy Eilberg, “The Siddur: A Guide to Jewish Spiritual Direction.” There, she takes phrases from the liturgy and illustrates how they can help the directee to nurture and ground his/her spiritual experience in a Jewish context. Also helpful is Barbara Breitman’s “Spiritual Transformation: A Psychospiritual Perspective on Jewish Narratives of Journey.” She shows how the Exodus narrative can reflect the stages of an individual’s spiritual journey through life.

At this point in the nascent development of Jewish spiritual direction, we should not be too preoccupied with the question of whether spiritual direction will emerge as an authentic Jewish practice. There is much that our tradition now considers authentic that at first originated outside Judaism or grew out the intersection of Judaism with different traditions or cultural systems (such as feminism). One of the challenges facing the development of this field is that the majority of practitioners come from...