Therapeutic Literacies: Text, Body, and Emotion in the Jewish Spiritual Renewal

Abstract

This article investigates the case of Jewish Spiritual Renewal (JSR) to illuminate the evolving landscape of Jewish textuality and therapeutic literacies shaped by spiritual, neoliberal, and therapeutic discourses. Based on qualitative methodology, utilizing case studies and long-term field work, it highlights the continuing importance of texts in contemporary Jewish expressions of devotion. Despite JSR’s primary focus on embodied spiritual experience, the article shows how Jewish texts are integrated into study sessions, workshops, courses, and rituals, to promote therapeutic insights and spiritual development. Aligning with other modern forms of Jewish spirituality, JSR posits that Jewish texts are valuable insofar as they facilitate personal growth and self-transformation. This is achieved through the intentional selection and performance of texts, particularly those from Jewish esoteric traditions, Kabbalah, Hasidism, and ethical literature (Musar), often interpreted in a psychological context.

1. Introduction

It is a warm Thursday evening at Metzoke Dragot in the heart of the Judean Desert. The members of the Hamakom community, a Jewish spiritual renewal group active at the beginning of the millennium, are holding their weekly study meeting at their communal Beit-midrash (study hall). However, instead of the harsh neon light and stiff wooden chairs and desks of the traditional Orthodox Beit midrash, this room resembles a cozy living room: colorful rugs are spread across the floor, low tables are scattered about, and the participants, men and women alike, sit on cushions, some barefoot, others sipping tea. A small shelf holds some books: the Bible, Hasidic literature, and New Age and popular psychology books. On the wall hangs a quote from the renowned Hasidic master, Rabbi Nachman of Breslov: “The whole world is a very narrow bridge, but the main thing is not to fear”. Sitting cross-legged, R. Ohad Ezrachi, the Rabbi and leader of the community, strums a guitar and leads a quiet singing of verses from the Song of Songs. At the end of the singing, he suggests a minute of silence “so that the learning would come not only from the brain but from the body.” The participants comply. They close their eyes and turn silent.

The lesson focuses on a tale by Rabbi Nachman of Breslov, “The Lost Princess” (in Hebrew: Ma’aseh me-avedat bat melekh), which describes the feats and tribulations of a viceroy who searches for a princess who has disappeared, and “wandered here and there for a long time, in deserts, fields, and forests, searching for her for a very long time.” The tale details the viceroy’s hardships and repeated failures to withstand the trials the princess sets before him. After another failure—falling asleep at the crucial moment of her rescue—the princess leaves him a handkerchief on which she writes instructions for her rescue with her tears. When the viceroy awakens, he asks his servant, “Where am I in the world?” The servant recounts what happened while he slept and shows him the handkerchief the princess left behind. The viceroy holds the handkerchief up to the sun and realizes through it the letters written in the princess’s tears.

The participants hold photocopied pages and follow Ezrachi as he slowly reads the tale. Occasionally, he pauses to explain complex words and phrases, especially those in Yiddish. He then offers the conventional interpretation of the story. Accordingly, the viceroy represents the simple Jew and his struggle to keep faith amidst spiritual hardships. The princess represents the soul, or the spiritual core within him, which has become exiled and lost. Soon, however, the group set aside this reading in favor of an alternative one. The participants suggest that the viceroy’s search is a spiritual quest, in which the search itself, and not the rescue of the princess, is the end. They conclude that the condition for embarking on such a search is a sense of inner authenticity; only when a person is truly at peace with himself can he set out on a spiritual search.

This vignette, drawn from my fieldwork on Jewish Spiritual Renewal (JSR) in Israel, highlights two central features of this movement’s approach to textual study. First, it underscores a preference for texts that resonate on psychological and existential levels, inviting personal insight and self-reflection. This orientation explains the frequent turn to Hasidic tales, and especially to the stories of R. Nachman of Breslov, as a primary source of study. Second, it demonstrates how textual engagement is integrated with embodied practice. In many JSR sites of learning, study is interwoven with music, song, and movement, creating a fusion of intellectual exploration with sensory and embodied experience (Weissler 2006; Werczberger 2017).

The attempt to craft an embodied spiritual experience through textual study characterizes many groups that can be coalesced under the umbrella term of ‘Jewish Spiritual Renewal’ (Werczberger 2017) that are at the center of this article. I use ‘Jewish Spiritual Renewal’ as a broad umbrella term to refer to the diverse discursive, practical, and communal initiatives that have emerged in North America and Israel in the last few decades. Differences between these initiatives notwithstanding, they all share a commitment to revitalizing the Jewish tradition by emphasizing what they perceive as the spiritual core embedded within it and by focusing on personal and unmediated experiences of the transcendent. JSR proponents often merge elements of Jewish tradition with various non-Jewish spiritual practices, such as Buddhist meditation or Sufi chanting, and reinterpret traditional Jewish lore, such as Kabbalah, Hasidism, and lately even Musar (Ethics) in a New Age and therapeutic perspective (Werczberger 2017). In accord with broader trends in Jewish spirituality and contemporary religion and spirituality more broadly, individuals involved in these grassroots projects insist on their democratized license to choose their own religious and spiritual path and to create their personal bricolage (Altglas 2014). This ethic of individual choice reflects the hyper-consumerist ethos of contemporary spirituality under neoliberalism across religious contexts (Gauthier and Martikainen 2013; Rudnyckyj 2009).

While these initiatives are often labeled New Age Judaism—that is, the Jewish iteration of broader New Age spirituality (Werczberger 2017; Salkin 2000; Ruah-Midbar and Klin-Oron 2010)—I use the term Jewish Spiritual Renewal (JSR) to capture a wider spectrum. This framing encompasses not only the eclectic and experimental expressions typically associated with New Age Judaism, but also more stringent and mainstream configurations, such as Orthodox neo-Hasidism and the new Jewish spirituality in North America (Persico 2014; Werczberger 2023). A central characteristic of these cultural formations is their emphasis on embodied spiritual experience. This emphasis is expressed through an expanded practice of ritualization: traditional Jewish rituals are reinterpreted with new, often self-focused meanings andinnovative rituals that creatively fuse Jewish elements with non-Jewish sources emerge (Ochs 2010; Silverman 2016; Werczberger 2017). At the same time, as the ethnographic vignette above illustrates, embodied ritual practice is not pursued in isolation from textual engagement. Most JSR initiatives regularly organize text-study groups, and their leaders frequently draw on the Jewish literary canon to anchor and authenticate their teachings (Werczberger 2017).

Historically, textual engagement constituted a defining feature of Jewish religious and cultural life (Guzmen-Carmeli and Rubin 2021). Today, most of the studies on Jewish textuality focus either on Orthodox male-only Yeshiva study (Boyarin 1989; Heilman 1983; Guzmen-Carmeli 2020) or on secular Jewish Renewal groups with a scholarly interest in the Jewish literary canon (Sagiv and Lomsky-Feder 2007; Guzmen-Carmeli 2020). In this article I turn to explore the textual engagements of JSR groups that emphasize the spiritual dimensions of the Jewish tradition and favor embodied ritualized experience over intellectual endeavors.

To examine these novel forms of textual study, I draw on the anthropological perspective for studying scriptures, emphasizing textual meaning-making and focusing on how individuals and communities strategically use sacred texts to construct and negotiate meanings (Bielo 2009). I also build on current scholarship on contemporary spiritualities and New Age culture, which links the spiritual discourse with the therapeutic discourse (Tucker 2002; Simchai and Shoshana 2018) to perceive JSR’s textual engagements as a form of Jewish therapeutic literacy. This type of Jewish literacy is neither a detached intellectual exercise nor an act of traditional text-based religious devotion. Instead, it is a performative, experiential, and creative engagement with text and textual study to foster personal growth and healing.

Given JSR’s emphasis on emotional and therapeutic forms of worship, I ask what cultural logic underlies these groups’ selection and rejection of texts and how those texts are read and interpreted. Moreover, I explore how JSR’s conception of Jewish spirituality as an emotional and therapeutic experience shapes both the study itself and its performance.

2. Method

To answer these questions, I turn to the JSR data I collected in Israel and North America over the last decade. The research commenced in the beginning of the millennia in a field work on several Israeli JSR communities. The field work included participant observations in JSR public events, interviews with over 30 participants and leaders, and textual analysis of online and offline texts. Since then, I have been following JSR groups and initiatives in Israel and North America and documenting their online and offline activities.

Following the model proposed by Miles and Huberman (1984), the analysis unfolded in four stages: a preliminary interpretive reading to gain an overall understanding of the material; narrowing down to excerpts most relevant to the research questions; conceptualization to identify key ideas and relationships; and thematic processing to refine and organize recurring themes into a coherent framework. The data analysis revealed the distinct patterns of textual engagement of the JSR, highlighting how participants interact with Jewish texts not only as objects of study but also as a resource for spiritual reflection, personal development, and therapeutic practice.

3. Theoretical and Analytical Framing

The Therapeutic Life of Scriptures

Lately, the anthropological scholarship on sacred texts has shifted from the study of ‘scriptures as texts’ to studying the ‘social life of scriptures’. This shift reflects the move from perceiving these texts as repositories of tradition to studying their active role in religious meaning-making and community formation (Bielo 2009; Bowen 1992). In this empirically grounded, human agency-oriented approach, the focus shifts from the text’s philological study and its semantic content to its social and cultural employment for constructing and negotiating meanings (Bielo 2009). This approach undergirds the current study of trajectories for individual and collective engagements whereby sacred texts are perceived as focal points of shared cultural meaning and collective representations (Guzmen-Carmeli and Rubin 2021; Obeyesekere 1981, 1990).

Other studies point to the therapeutic potential of sacred texts and how the language of the texts acts as the chief medium in traditional and contemporary healing practices (Klassen 2006; Tambiah 1968). Anthropological scholarship documents various examples of bodily healing achieved through the recitation of religious words and even their embodiment, for instance through the swallowing of the material text (e.g., Bilu et al. 1990; El-Tom 1985; Wilkens 2011). For instance, El-Tom (1985) describes Sunni Islam ritual healing ceremonies in which verses from the Koran were immersed drinking water (El-Tom 1985). Similarly, Jewish mystical texts such as the Zohar are often deployed for healing purposes, both in private and public settings (Guzmen-Carmeli and Sharabi 2019). Dein’s (1992, 2002) study of the Lubavitch Hasidic community, for example, uncovers how the Rebbi’s manipulation of religious words resulted in the bodily healing of his followers.

Scholars of Jewish life have long noted the importance of texts and text-based practice in Jewish culture, whereby the text is an agent of knowledge and a medium of cultural exchange (Heilman 1983; Boyarin 1989). Jewish tradition’s deeply literate character has engendered multiple social spheres where text and practice intersect to generate meaning and community. These textual engagements manifest through diverse forms, from ritual and prayer to study and healing, creating rich intersections between traditional practice and contemporary interpretations.

Jewish studies typically examine Jewish texts’ historical, philological, and exegetical dimensions. In recent years, however, the anthropological study of Jewish life has expanded to focus on the significance of texts in everyday life and daily religious practice. Sociologist Samual Heilman (1983), for instance, argues that the participation in the study of sacred Jewish texts constitutes not only an act of acquiring knowledge but also a “cultural performance” (Heilman 1983; Geertz 1973). Through repeated reading, the abstract text transforms into a lived reality, and participants come to a deeper understanding of their own culture (Heilman 1983; see also Boyarin 1989, 1991; Baumel-Schwartz 2017).

4. Textual Study in Jewish Renewal

Until recently, intensive Jewish text study in Israel was confined mainly to Orthodox men. Yet over the past two decades, a kind of revolution has taken place: Orthodox women and secular Jews, previously excluded from this practice, have begun studying religious texts.1 From the 1990s onwards, secular Israelis in particular have engaged in such study, most often within one of the various initiatives associated with the Secular Jewish Renewal movement (Azulay and Tabory 2008). In fact, in the first phase of the movement, the emphasis on reappropriating the Jewish text was so strong that the movement’s moniker was “The return to the Jewish bookshelf” (Azulay and Tabory 2008; Sheleg 2010). Frequently, the renewed engagement with Jewish texts was accompanied by discourse of resistance against the perceived hegemony and dominance of the rabbinic establishment and the aspiration to reclaim the Jewish tradition (Azulay and Tabory 2008; Sagiv and Lomsky-Feder 2007).

Studies of these novel textual engagements highlight the study experience as a form of cultural performance. The learners’ sense of freedom regarding the text reflects a sense of sovereignty vis-à-vis tradition (Cohen and Eisen 2000; Illman 2019). This sense of autonomy underpins individualized readings, whereby the students reject, reinterpret, or reframe texts that conflict with their liberal and secular worldview (Guzmen-Carmeli and Rubin 2021). Other studies offer a critical perspective on these sites of learning. Sagiv and Lomsky-Feder (2007), for example, argue that the Jewish text study of secular Israelis serves as a site for the reappropriation of cultural capital, mobilizing it to reassert the waning cultural hegemony of the secular elites within the Israeli public sphere (Sagiv and Lomsky-Feder 2007).

The textual engagements of the JSR groups discussed in this paper reflect some of these features. JSR participants aspire to reclaim the tradition and spiritually renew it by returning to Jewish texts and reforming Jewish ritual. Like other individualized modes of Jewish religiosity, in which participants stress their liberty to choose their activities and meanings from a broad repertoire (Cohen and Eisen 2000; Illman 2019), the individuals involved in JSR projects celebrate their autonomy of choice by fusing Jewish ritual and textual traditions with New Age philosophies, non-Jewish spiritual techniques, and therapeutic culture. The notion of “the sovereign Jewish self”, coined by Eisen and Cohen in their seminal work, The Jew Within (2000), captures well the participants’ sense of freedom to pick and choose from different religious sources, including non-Jewish ones. Moreover, the ideal of individual choice reflects the hyper-consumerist nature of contemporary spirituality within various religious contexts, particularly under neoliberalism (Possamai 2017). Choice is the key to the neoliberal imperative for growth and transformation, allowing people to individuate themselves, to reveal their uniqueness, and to exercise control to get what they want from any situation (Schwarz 2018).

Grounded in contemporary religiosity’s preference for embodied spiritual experiences, JSR initiatives highlight the emotional and corporeal dimensions of religious practice (Ochs 2010; Weissler 2006). Even so, the study of Jewish texts remains central to their practice. Chava Weissler’s research on the North American Jewish Renewal movement, for example, demonstrates how members engage in “creative midrash (exegesis)” by producing artworks—paintings, sculptures, handwoven prayer shawls—that offer fresh interpretations of Jewish texts and traditions (Weissler 2007). Similarly, in the JSR, as in Jewish culture more broadly, text, ritual, and materiality are deeply intertwined (Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 2005).

In what follows, I examine the distinctive form of literacy cultivated by the JSR, which engages with Jewish texts both as a resource for spiritual growth and as a therapeutic tool. This literacy rests on two key elements. First, the careful selection of texts amenable to a “spiritual reading”; that is, texts rich in symbolic and psychological depth, which participants perceive as fostering spiritual development. Second, the enactment of these texts within settings of study and ritual, where they are performed—both individually and collectively—as a form of therapeutic practice.

5. The Jewish Text as a Resource for Spiritual Development

Scholarship on contemporary religion and spirituality shows that, under the neoliberal ethos, spiritual discourse emphasizes self-realization and personal growth, merging religious and therapeutic frameworks (Gauthier and Martikainen 2013; Simchai and Shoshana 2018). JSR participants share these concerns (Werczberger 2023) but, unlike New Age adherents who often reject institutional religion (Heelas and Woodhead 2005; Huss 2014), they remain within their tradition. Viewing contemporary Judaism as spiritually stagnant, they seek not to abandon it, but to renew it from within.

To do so, JSR turns to the Jewish textual canon and carefully selects the texts that lend themselves to ‘spiritual’ readings. Side-stepping canonical texts such as the Talmud or Midrash, JSR leaders turn to Jewish mystical/esoteric texts—i.e., Kabbalah and Hasidism, as well as ethical (Musar) ones. These texts are read a-historically and receive new interpretations that align with the participants’ spiritual, therapeutic, and neoliberal worldview. As such they are perceived as methods for promoting self-transformation and realization.

Hasidic texts: In the JSR, Hasidic texts and Hasidism at large are the most significant source of inspiration for authentic Jewish spirituality, leading some scholars to refer to this movement as Neo-Hasidism (Persico 2014; Magid 2019). Attracting thousands of Jews in Eastern Europe, the late 18th-century Hasidic movement sparked a religious revival by emphasizing the ‘inner religion’ and transforming Kabbalah theology into psychology (Garb 2015; Margolin 2020). JSR focuses on specific Hasidic writings which embody psychological elements, such as the tales of Rabbi Nachman of Breslov; the writings of the Peshischa Hasidic dynasty; Mei ha-shiloah by Rabbi Mordechai Leiner of Ishbitz and Esh Kodesh by the Piaseczno Rebbe, Rabbi Kalonymus Kalman Shapira (Persico 2014).

JSR leaders employ these texts as a rhetorical device to legitimize the call for a Jewish spiritual renewal (Werczberger 2017). For instance, in a published article, Ezrachi uses a Hasidic story to illustrate how the historical Hasidic movement inspires contemporary renewal. In the essay, Ezrachi recounts a Hasidic story on the meeting between the Ba’al Shem Tov, the founder of Hasidim, and the Polna Rabbi, Jacob Joseph of Polonnoye. According to the story, the Rabbi of Polna became one of the Ba’al Shem Tov’s foremost disciples after hearing the Ba’al Shem Tov’s parable on a horse and carriage stuck in the mud. Ezrachi writes:

Part of the greatness of the early Hasidim was their ability to recognize the trapped situation that Judaism, under their leadership, had found itself in… One of the things that Hasidic thinking has given us is the ability to listen to the horses within us. However, as happened to the best ideas, Hasidism also became institutionalized. Still, what is clear to me is that if there is a key to the renewal of Judaism, it lies in the treasures of Hasidic-Kabbalistic philosophy.

(Ezrachi 1998, p. 59)

The Hasidic story is used here in a twofold manner. Firstly, it presents Hasidism as an ideal historical model for Jewish renewal. Ezrachi claims Hasidism was the answer to the religious-spiritual crisis in Eastern European Jewry at the end of the 18th century. Similarly, Jewish spiritual renewal can revive contemporary Judaism from its degenerated state. Secondly, he points to Hasidism’s psychological, inward turn, to underscore the historical precedent to JSR’s emotionalization of Jewish tradition and to authenticate its goal to reinvigorate Judaism and free it from the rabbinic scholastic-legalistic dominance.

Another example of this approach is found in the description of the course ‘Secrets of Hasidism’ held at the Bayit Chadash community:

The great teachers of Hasidism gave the Jewish people what the great Zen masters gave their students in the East: simple and profound teachings, precious spiritual tools, great secrets revealed in seemingly simple stories, and small hints inviting the person on a great journey inward, to themselves, to the Divine, and to listening to the unfolding story of their lives.

Here, Hasidic teachings are compared to the teaching of Zen Buddhism. This comparison serves not only to give Hasidism an exotic shine that might attract its New Age middle-class participants (Altglas 2014) but also to highlight the therapeutic potential within Hasidism. Like Zen stories, Hasidic stories are presented here as a means for individuals to explore their selves and to construct a new, therapeutically meaningful biographical narratives.

Kabbalistic Text: While Hasidim remains the leading resource for JSR, its adherents also pay much attention to studying Kabbalistic texts. These texts are perceived as the mystical and spiritual core of Judaism. Ohad Ezrachi, the leader of the Hamakom community, taught a year-long course entitled “Introduction to Kabbalah”; another JSR community, Navah Tehila, held a study group on the Kabbalistic book Sefer Ha-Yetzirah, and the contemporary Lev Lomed Ahava (lit. A heart Learns Love) initiative, led by Rabbi Yaakov Vershavski, offers a ten-session course on the core Kabbalist text: The Zohar.

JSR’s interest in Kabbalist texts mirrors the broader fascination of the general public in Kabbalah and Jewish Esotericism more broadly, and especially of neo-Kabbalistic movements such as the Kabbalah Center and Bnei Baruch (Huss 2007; Myers 2008). While traditionally, the study of Kabbalah is restricted to Jewish men over forty, these groups are all-inclusive and are open to women, young people, and non-Jewish individuals. However, in contrast to the neo-kabbalist groups mentioned above, in which the study of Kabbalah is focused exclusively on R. Yehuda Ashlag’s Ha-Sulam commentary to the Zohar, JSR initiatives embrace a variety of Kabbalist sources and commentaries of different historical periods and streams of thought.

In line with the prevailing trends in contemporary spirituality, JSR’s reading of Kabbalistic texts is psychological, translating Kabbalist theology and cosmology to the individual’s mental and emotional state. For example, the North American Jewish Renewal movement adopted a psychological interpretation of the Kabbalistic concept of ‘The Four Worlds’—Asiyah (Action), Yetzirah (Formation), Beriah (Creation), and Atzilut (Emanation) (Weissler 2011). According to R. Schachter-Shalomi, the movement’s late leader, and a former Chabad disciple, the Kabbalist structure of the cosmos is an allegory for human nature and the sacred embodied self. In Schachter-Shalomi’s psychological reading, the four worlds correspond to different dimensions of human existence: Asiyah refers to the physical body, Yetzirah to the emotional realm, Beriah represents intellect, and Atzilut refers to the spiritual dimension of the person.

This reading shaped a new style of Jewish prayer, based on dividing the prayer into four segments according to the Four Worlds model. The newly formed ritual emphasizes the embodied dimensions of the prayer by incorporating non-traditional practices such as chanting, meditation, and movement. In this way, the spiritual-psychological interpretation of the Kabbalistic myth becomes a basis for the reimagining of Jewish ritual as well as a means of legitimizing its transformation.

Musar texts: Recently, another genre of texts has become popular in JSR circles. These late 19th- and early 20th-century Musar texts (lit. ethics), undergird the emerging Neo Musar movement in North America (Levites, forthcoming; Magid 2019; Werczberger 2023). The Musar movement concentrates on rectifying an individual’s character through the amalgamation of psychology, ethics, and religious observance (Magid 2019). While Neo-Musar does not describe itself as an attempt at Jewish renewal, de facto and much like the other forms of JSR described here, it draws on Jewish traditional practices and texts to emphasize neoliberal and spiritual goals such as self-improvement and development (Werczberger 2023).These aims are accomplished through practices such as journal writing, group discussions, and text study.

In Levites’ ethnography of the neo-Musar movement in the US, she describes one such program run by the Institute for Jewish Ethics2 in which in addition to practices such as journal keeping and weekly peer-group meeting, the participants were also required to participate in substantial text study in the form of shiur, a weekly lecture and discussion about the core book, Mesilat Yesharim, the study of workbook; weekly text study in dyads, and daily individual Torah study (Levites, forthcoming). These text-based practices promote self-reflection and emotional management, offering the participants a therapeutic experience framed by a Jewish emotion pedagogy (Wilce and Fenigsen 2016; Werczberger 2023).

6. The Therapeutic Performance of Jewish Text

For JSR adherents, however, the true therapeutic power of the Jewish text is derived from its performance. These performances take place in sites of study and ritual, often involving the body, senses, and emotions. The second part of the ethnographic vignette of the study session of R. Nachman’s tale ‘The Lost Princess’, with which I opened this article, demonstrates this propensity well.

When the discussion on the broad meanings of the tale dwindles, the participants turn to interpret the viceroy’s awakening scene and his question, “Where am I in the world?” Ezrachi likens the viceroy’s experience to that of a person who wakes up one day to question the meaning of existence and, as a result, embarks on a spiritual journey. Suddenly, he is inundated with multiple possibilities: workshops, spiritual teachers, and festivals he must choose from. Moreover, the servant in the tale, says Ezrachi, represents ‘the mind’—structured and informative thinking. In the human psyche, the ‘mind’ is important for the initial stage of comprehending reality. It “helps us distinguish between the essential and the trivial”. However, the next stage of the search—when, according to the tale, the viceroy reads what is written on the handkerchief—is the emotional phase. At this point, the person must “learn through emotion: the heart, the pain, and the tears.” Reading through feelings, Ezrachi explains, means “knowing how to listen and read ‘the implicit’; to read the light.”

The image of the handkerchief stirs the participants, who quickly offer a variety of interpretations of its symbolic meaning, drawing on both personal associations and broader cultural references. The discussion grows lively. Ezrachi, however, perceives the exchange as a digression that does not advance the group’s spiritual objectives, and announces, “I feel we have scattered,” before strumming notes on the guitar to gently redirect the conversation and restore focus. “I suggest,” he said as the guitar notes echo, “that each of you try to recall your handkerchief of tears… Sometimes we choose to disregard the handkerchief of tears, and instead keep listening to the servant—that happens every day… It is not a given that you will read the handkerchief, even if it is in your lap…”

This ethnographic scene offers several insights into JSR’s modes of textual engagement. First, the formal aim of the lesson is to familiarize the students with the Hasidic text, in this case, the tale by Rabbi Nachman of Breslov. The choice of this specific genre is undoubtedly rooted in R. Nachman’s tales’ complex symbolism and psychological insights (Green 1979; Mark 2015). Ezrachi’s suggestion that the tale describes a spiritual quest allowed the students to read the text psychologically and draw on its rich symbolism to weave personal spiritual-biographical narratives. Under Ezrachi’s encouragement, the study session became a space for emotional sharing. The participants shared personal stories of pain, sorrow, and joy. Theses emotional expressions formed the basis for a spiritual experience.

Likewise, when I asked one of my interviewees about his experience in the study sessions of his community, he told me: “It is not that I necessarily learn something new in every lesson… but it is the process of growth and development I go through during the learning.” In other words, the participants perceive the study of texts in instrumental terms—as an emotional technique aimed at personal growth and transformation. Like the students in the Secular Yeshiva described by Guzmen-Carmeli (2020), participants in the JSR regard the religious text and its study as a means to an end. However, whereas the focus in the Secular Yeshiva was primarily on identitarian issues, the emphasis here is on spiritual development.

Understanding spiritual search as a process of self-realization and emotional growth underpins the third dimension of the study session. Ezrachi’s interpretation of the tale presents spiritual seeking both as a condition of human existence and as a model for the quest itself—one that begins with the intellect and culminates in emotion and the body. In Clifford Geertz’s (1973, p. 94) terms, the notion of spiritual search functions here not only as a “model of” reality but also as a “model for.” Guiding participants to reflect on their own journeys, Ezrachi emphasizes the psychological dynamics of such seeking, thereby charting a pathway for how the quest should unfold.

When I asked my interviewees about this sort of text-based therapeutic experience, one of them, a former member of Bayit Chadash community told me about his experience during an immersion ritual in the Sea of Galilee. During the ritual, which took place in a Yom Kippur community retreat, Rabbi Gafni narrated a Hasidic story. In the tale, an Eastern European Jew followed the instructions of his Hasidic Rabbi and performed an atonement for a sin he committed against a woman to whom he was once betrothed and had deserted right before their marriage ceremony.

Here is what Amir, my interviewee, told me:

I remember three years ago on Yom Kippur, before the mikveh [ritual immersion], he [the Rabbi] told a very powerful Hasidic story that had a massive impact on me… [he] took the story to a place where we could go back in time. We have some traumatic events in our lives; a traumatic event where we really failed, where we feel we harmed someone else, ourselves, and distanced ourselves from ourselves. In the mikveh, inside the water [we returned] to that moment [and did] the atonement. Like the way he [the hero of the story] returned to do the rectification. There was something powerful in this connection… the strength…to connect the story’s topic to emotion. To touch the painful places… I did it for myself about a specific event.

Amir describes a particular moment in which a Hasidic story sparked a reflection on an emotional injury he had experienced in his past. He carries out the Rabbi Gafni’s suggestion to “go back in time” and reflects on “a traumatic moment of failure”—a moment in which he harmed another, which also constitutes harm to oneself. He testifies that there was “much strength” in doing so. Interestingly, in the tale, the moral imperative to atone for past sins is directed toward the other. According to the tale, the hero atones for breaking his betrothal vows by giving charity to a bride under her wedding canopy. Amir, however, describes that in the immersion ritual the demand was to rectify and heal an emotional injury within oneself. In other words, the moral obligation presented in the tale is transmuted to a therapeutic tool for self-healing. The practice of storytelling for pedagogical, religious, and therapeutic purposes is well-documented in many religious traditions. Christian priests, Buddhist monks, Hindu gurus, and Hasidic rabbis use storytelling to teach their followers a religious lesson (Narayan 1993). JSR’s creativity lies in its psychological self-centered interpretations of Jewish texts and its merging of traditional ritualistic and textual elements to foster self-development and healing.

In the last example, traditional text and ritual were creatively fused to create a new text-based therapeutic ritual. This ritual occurred in a Yom Kippur (Day of Atonement) workshop which took place in Rabbi Ezrachi’s home in in the North of Israel, following the disintegration of Hamakom community. This time, the text was not Hasidic but liturgical, inspired by the traditional Hatarat Nedarim (annulment of vows) ceremony, customarily held on the eve of Rosh Hashanah (the Jewish New Year). In the workshop, the Rabbi led the participants in a reformulated ritual in which they read parts of the traditional Hebrew text aloud and then discussed various “unkept promises” they had made to themselves and others. The participants were then asked to go again through the text and ask for forgiveness—from themselves and the individuals they may have hurt. In the dramatized role-play, the participants “confessed” their vows—i.e., their negative emotional patterns—in front of the group, which acted as a religious court (beit-din). By the performative utterance of the words “All is annulled, all is forgiven”, the court unbonded the petitioner and forgave their “sins”. Like self-help groups, the group’s role was not to pass judgment but to listen and forgive. Thus, new therapeutic meanings were given to the text, serving as a basis for emotional sharing and spiritual development.

7. Conclusions

This article examined the case of Jewish Spiritual Renewal (JSR) to shed light on the evolving landscape of Jewish textuality shaped by spiritual, neoliberal, and therapeutic discourses (Simchai and Shoshana 2018). While JSR emphasizes embodied experience, Jewish texts and their study remain central to its spiritual practice. In line with other contemporary forms of Jewish spirituality, JSR treats Jewish texts as valuable insofar as they facilitate personal growth and self-transformation (Werczberger 2023). This is accomplished through the selective performance of texts—particularly from esoteric traditions such as Kabbalah, Hasidism, and Musar—that are reinterpreted through a psychological lens to generate “emotional literacies.”

These findings engage and extend several theoretical paradigms in the study of contemporary Jewish life, the anthropology of religious texts, and the scholarly field of Contemporary Spiritualities. First, JSR exemplifies the rise of the “sovereign Jewish self” (Cohen and Eisen 2000), whereby the individual self becomes the primary arbiter of meaning in relation to Jewish identity, belonging, and practice (Illman 2019). JSR rejects traditional structures of Jewish authority—rabbinic, legal, and textual—and turns inward to uncover personal and therapeutic meanings. Significantly this approach does more than authorize individual choice: it inverts traditional Jewish hierarchies of knowledge. Whereas in classical Judaism ritual performance is text-driven, in JSR textual study is constrained and shaped by the pursuit of therapeutic experience, which determines both what is read and how it is studied.

Second, by focusing on this distinctive case of Jewish spirituality, the study highlights the complex interplay between text and ritual in contemporary religiosity. Scholarship on Contemporary Spiritualities tends to emphasize embodied, therapeutic, and ritual-driven practices (McGuire 2007), often downplaying textual engagements. My findings suggest that in text-centered religious cultures such as Judaism, even highly experiential forms of spirituality remain textually anchored, pointing to the need to contextualize these phenomena within specific traditions. Moreover, while much scholarship posits a binary opposition between intellectual/institutionalized study and embodied/experiential practice, JSR shows how these modes can coexist and even co-produce meaning.

Third, the results illuminate the therapeutic potential of sacred texts in deinstitutionalized forms of religiosity. Studies of traditional healing rituals have shown how the language of sacred texts operates as a medium—whether through recitation, performance, or embodiment (Klassen 2006; Tambiah 1968; El-Tom 1985). Extending this insight to contemporary settings, my findings demonstrate how textual recitation and performance in JSR catalyze processes of self-exploration and healing, fostering experiences participants regard as both personally transformative and spiritually meaningful.

In sum, this study underscores the enduring importance of texts in contemporary, deinstitutionalized forms of Jewish devotion. Further ethnographic research—particularly, participant observations in settings of Jewish textual study in Israel and North America—could enrich our understanding of the dynamics of emotional literacies. Comparative studies across cultural contexts could likewise offer a more nuanced account of how different communities mobilize sacred texts as resources for meaning, healing, and spiritual growth. Ultimately, such explorations reveal how sacred texts do not merely preserve tradition, but actively participate in the ongoing re-creation of Jewish tradition, shaping ever-new pathways of meaning and for being Jewish.