When the leaders of Chochmat HaLev recall founding the meditation center 10 years ago in a warehouse on Eighth Street in Berkeley, one memory is constant: water.
“Waterlogged” is one of the first words to come to mind for co-director Avram Davis. Nan Fink Gefen, the other co-director, agrees: “When it rained, water came through the roof. Water also rose from the floor. There was water from top and the bottom.”
But that was 10 years ago, when they met in a rented space. The Chochmat HaLev that recently celebrated its 10th anniversary is a very different place today.
The idea for Chochmat HaLev (which means “wisdom of the heart” in Hebrew) began at a series of living room meetings in 1993.
“A large group of people who were from various synagogues and Jewish organizations got together to have a conversation about Jewish spirituality and meditation,” said Gefen.
While those conversations were interesting, they never really got anywhere. Finally, Davis took it upon himself and began organizing Jewish meditation classes at St. John’s Presbyterian Church in Berkeley, calling the program “Thirteen Gates.”
The response was great, said Gefen, and she and Davis soon decided they wanted their own meeting space.
“We were touching something that people were hungry for,” she said. “It was a very exciting time because people kept flocking to us, hearing we were this very funky place.”
After renting the Eighth Street warehouse for several years, the center bought a former Baptist church on Prince Street in 2000. It has since become a home for the center, which now includes a meditation garden in its courtyard. Also that year, it hired an executive director, Richard Andler, who is now part of the decision-making process, along with Davis and Gefen.
“Eighth Street was intense and so exciting because it was the beginning, but now we’re much more established,” said Gefen. “We’re less experimental in some ways, and we have a home, so people are attached to it.”
Chochmat HaLev was never designed to be a synagogue. Meditation with a Jewish bent was supposed to be the primary focus, and to its leadership, it still is.
In fact, the center has become one of the country’s leading institutes in Jewish meditation. It launched a three-year teacher training program in 1999, and its first class graduated in 2003. While many participants have been local, some have participated as long-distance learners by listening to taped lectures, allowing Chochmat’s presence to be known far outside Berkeley.
However, in Berkeley, word has quickly spread about Chochmat HaLev’s Shabbat services — considered joyously raucous to some, “ecstatic” to Davis and to others. Kabbalat Shabbat services usually feature a whole lineup of musicians, including several female vocalists, a bass guitar, guitar and two drummers. Sometimes there are horns and a violin as well.
Davis hopes to expand the kind of worship that has taken off at the center through outreach, sending Chochmat musicians out into the community to meet with other congregations. Ideally, he would love to see Chochmat-influenced communities spring up around the country.
“Whether it’s Conservative, Reform or Orthodox, we’d like to help people within the parameters of their own situations to let Judaism blossom,” he said.
He said there are a handful of spiritual epicenters where Jews are reinventing the religion. “Chochmat is one of the points of energy around that.”
Davis said he continually is surprised by people around the country who have heard of Chochmat.
“When we began, we were this little thing that nobody could figure out who we were,” said Gefen. “Berkeley is kind of off-the-charts by some people who don’t live there, and there’s this feeling of hippies leftover from the ’60s or whatever.
“But we’ve been really diligent in training people and bringing meditation to people in a really professional way.”