Jewish Renewal

Dance as prayer and healing

Aliza Rothman is “passionate about bringing this kind of expressive dance and healing movement to others and into the world.” (photo from Aliza Rothman)

It’s a musical Shabbat at Or Shalom Synagogue. There are four musicians playing. The rabbi is singing and chanting prayers with the congregation and a woman is dancing. Her face glows.

Hasidic leaders like the Ba’al Shem Tov and Reb Nachman of Breslov emphasized the power of dance as prayer and healing – and Aliza Rothman is part of the Jewish Renewal movement that values these teachings. She sees dance as a form of expression and prayer.

“When I move, I feel better, more alive, more connected to myself, others, my body, my emotions, my life force. And I am passionate about bringing this kind of expressive dance and healing movement to others and into the world,” she told the Independent.

Rothman is an expressive arts therapist who has been teaching a Rosh Chodesh (New Moon) movement class at Or Shalom since she moved back to Vancouver in 2023. Dance is both her passion and her medicine.

After many years of classes and choreography, she found herself at a drum circle at a music festival. Moving to the beat, it became a kind of trance dance. Ever since, she has been drawn to free-form movement.

In her mid 20s, Rothman traveled to India and participated in dance meditations as well as trance dances. Her journey then brought her to live in Jerusalem, in 2000, where she attended a weekly class called the Boogie – a dedicated free dance space, a place to be yourself, to connect and be playful. She traveled around Israel to dance at music festivals.

Jewish Renewal and dance came together for Rothman “on a soul level” when she was in her 20s. She dreamed of becoming a dance therapist.

“I had just come back from India, where I spent a few years traveling and on a spiritual quest that involved dancing, art, yoga and other healing heart-opening practices,” she said. “When I returned, I remember dancing outside on my own, and Hebrew songs and prayers came to me as I moved…. Years later, they really merged, when I went back to Israel, and then when I started facilitating dance workshops in Berkeley, Calif.”

Rothman moved to Berkeley with her now husband – Rabbi Arik Labowitz, spiritual leader of Or Shalom – to get a master’s in counseling psychology and expressive arts therapy. She led Rosh Chodesh and Omer dance groups there for close to 20 years.

She is also an open floor movement teacher. She discovered the activity in the Bay Area soon after it had begun, founded by five teachers who studied under the late Gabrielle Roth.

“Open floor is a form of conscious dance – there are no steps to follow, there is no right or wrong way to move. We let the rhythm of the music move us. We teach, practise and embody core movement resources – it is a life practice.” explains Rothman on her website.

“We work with 10 core movement resources: pause, release, centre, spatial awareness, toward/away, contract/expand, vector, activate/settle, dissolve, as well as four hungers – solitude, connection, belonging and spirit. Open floor is movement therapy.”

Since returning to Vancouver from Berkeley, Rothman has established her own private practice.

“I work with individuals as a somatic/trauma/movement and expressive arts therapist,” she said. “I believe in the body’s wisdom and innate ability towards healing and wholeness. I encourage people to move with their range of feelings – dancing our grief, anger, joy.”

Dear G-d,
if only my heart would be
straight with You all the time,
I would be filled with joy.
And that joy would spread all the way
down to my feet,
and uplift them in dance.
Please, never let my feet falter,
release them from their heavy bonds,
and give me the strength
to dance, dance, dance.

– Rebbe Natan Sternhartz, student of Rebbe Nachman of Breslov (Likutei Tefillot I:10)

Rothman grew up in the Jewish Renewal movement. Her parents were some of the first members of what is now Or Shalom but, back in the day, it was called “the Minyan,” led by Rabbi Daniel Siegel and his wife, Rabbi Hanna Tiferet Siegel.

“It rotated between all of our living rooms,” said Rothman.

Rothman’s parents are Myrna Rabinowitz, stepfather Barry Rabinowitz and father Leo Rothman. Myrna Rabinowitz is widely known in the Vancouver Jewish community as a singer, including as a member of the band Tzimmes.

“My mom had a lot of music playing in our house and, when I heard music, I danced,” said Rothman. “I danced all the time as a child – putting on shows, dancing in my yard, etc. I grew up with a soulful musical Jewish connection at home, a heart-centred, joyful Judaism, which I found more of when I moved to Berkeley.”

This month, Rothman is leading outdoor dance on Tuesday evenings in Queen Elizabeth Park. She will be teaching another Rosh Chodesh dance group beginning in the fall and hopes to begin some small dance-based expressive arts therapy groups in the fall, as well. She also teaches classes online. She can be reached at alizarothman.com.

Cassandra Freeman is a freelance journalist and improv comedy performer living in Vancouver.

Breaking new ground

Or Shalom’s Rabbi Hannah Dresner is both the first woman and the first Jewish Renewal rabbi to be elected head of the Rabbinical Association of Vancouver. (photo from Or Shalom)

“I grew up in a household of many amazingly powerful spirits,” Rabbi Hannah Dresner of Or Shalom Synagogue told the Independent. “My parents’ circle of friends loomed larger than life.”

Dresner has memories of playing ping-pong with Jesse Jackson, making paper dolls with Abraham Joshua Heschel and being read bedtime stories by Elie Wiesel. Her father, Samuel Dresner, was a rabbi and a renowned scholar of Chassidic thought. He was a close personal disciple of Heschel, who is widely regarded as one of the most important theologians and Jewish ethicists of the 20th century.

Dresner, herself an artist, dancer and academic for years before heeding the call to become a rabbi, walks softly and carries a big soul. Since coming to Vancouver to head Or Shalom after Rabbi Laura Duhan Kaplan stepped down from the pulpit to take on a role at the Vancouver School of Theology, Dresner has made waves by bringing a new range of creative programming to the shul. Events have included a dance troupe performing an interpretation of a Chassidic tale to live jazz music, a Shabbaton on Jewish wisdom about the afterlife, and guest Rabbi Benay Lappe teaching how to queer the Talmud.

Most recently, Dresner has again broken new ground in Vancouver, by being chosen head of the Rabbinical Association of Vancouver. She is both the first woman to hold the position and the first Jewish Renewal rabbi.

The Jewish Independent spoke to Dresner just days after she had convened her first meeting as chair. She said she was heartened to see that her election was a comfortable choice for the mainly male membership of the RAV – Rabbi Carey Brown is also a member – and an exciting opportunity for her to serve both her own shul community and the wider Vancouver Jewish community.

“I see this as a way for Or Shalom to be more visible as a legitimate part of the Jewish community of Vancouver, to bring our own sensibility to fostering kinship between rabbinic colleagues, and an opportunity for myself to serve the Jewish people,” she said.

So far, Dresner – who said she is very much still learning the ropes of the RAV – has innovated by introducing a session of group Torah study into the association’s meetings.

photo - Rabbi Hannah Dresner — Rabbi Hannah Dresner *(photo from Or Shalom)*

Dresner is known for combining traditionalism and progressive Judaism, including a commitment to “deep ecumenicism,” an openness to the wisdom not just of the different denominations of the Jewish community but the different religious traditions of humankind. This is what drew her to the Jewish Renewal movement founded by Reb Zalman Shachter-Shalomi. Renewal is known for its embrace of both traditional liturgy and observance and Torah study with feminist, ecological and ecumenical perspectives.

She said, “My job here [at Or Shalom] is to really nurture the historic members and create a space that is bold and fresh and open and willing to embrace our contemporary thoughts and needs, and to be truly inclusive; to nurture the old and to welcome and open as many portals as possible.”

Before becoming a rabbi, Dresner went to Barnard College to study dance and art then taught at the Ramaz School in New York. She went to graduate school at the University of Chicago and got her master’s in fine arts, becoming an exhibiting painter at a blue-chip gallery, with a career as a working artist while teaching in MFA programs. Her longest tenure was at Northwestern University for 10 years, where she was tasked with inventing new undergraduate courses across the arts.

When Dresner got married and had children, she felt the need for a prayer space tolerant of young mothers, a community in which to raise kids. She founded the Lomdim Chavura, which some quipped stood for “lean, mean davening machine.” The group met on Shabbat mornings and co-parented – they “birthed each other’s babies into life, and doula’d community members into death as well,” said Dresner.

“It was spiritual improvisation,” she said, noting that the chavura regularly gathered to experiment with new forms of expression. It was within that space that Dresner became interested in leadership and discovered davening and ritual as new spaces for her creative expression. She began seeing Jewish communal life as another way of being an artist in the world.

“Everything was woven together in our communal life,” said Dresner. “We made sukkot out of gourds or sunflowers. Ritual life was part of gardening, was part of cooking, was part of life and dance and art.”

Dresner said her discovery of the seamlessness of those things made her transition into the rabbinate very natural. “It is about translating those family expressions into a larger family,” she said.

Dresner had begun studying Chassidic texts while still an MFA advisor, to feed her soul and connect again with the spiritual milieu of her childhood. “We used to study the Sefer Ba’al Shem Tov every Shabbat afternoon,” Dresner said of her early childhood immersion, “and we sang niggunim until dark and then made Havdalah.”

Dresner’s study of Chassidus gradually blossomed into studying for the rabbanut. “I’m not really in rabbinical school,” she told herself. “I’m just taking these classes.”

Dresner was eventually ordained as both a rabbi and mashpia ruchanit (spiritual counselor). She has been two different kinds of CLAL fellow, in the Rabbis without Borders and Clergy Leadership Incubator programs.

During her rabbinic studies, Dresner was close with Daniel Siegel, the founding rabbi of Or Shalom, and she was excited when a job opening arose at the synagogue. “Coming here to the congregation that he founded had a lot of meaning to me and I had a lot of respect for Laura, the previous rabbi, as an intellectual as well,” said Dresner.

In 2001, Dresner had gone to Berkeley with husband Dr. Ross Andelman to focus on integrating their families. They made a deal: she had left her dream job and moved for him, and he would repay the favour after the kids had graduated high school. Once Dresner was ordained as a rabbi with ALEPH, Andelman, who is known in the Or Shalom community as “the rebbetz” (a play on the traditional name for the rabbi’s wife, rebbetzin) was true to his commitment and left his job as medical director of a county mental health system in Northern California to come here. “He’s a man who acted on his feminism,” said Dresner.

One of Dresner’s first calls to public duty as head of the RAV came on Oct. 28, when she led the vigil remembering the victims of the Pittsburgh massacre, which claimed the lives of 11 Jews.

Matthew Gindin is a freelance journalist, writer and lecturer. He is Pacific correspondent for the CJN, writes regularly for the Forward, Tricycle and the Wisdom Daily, and has been published in Sojourners, Religion Dispatches and elsewhere. He can be found on Medium and Twitter.

Or Shalom hosts ALEPH tour

The Or Shalom board of directors with Rabbi Hannah Dresner, second from the left in the front row. (photo by David Kauffman)

Most Jews would agree that usually rabbis do the bulk of the talking and congregants the listening. That’s been reversed for the Listening Tour currently underway among rabbis of ALEPH: Alliance for Jewish Renewal. The tour is making 13 stops in North America, as well as listening via video and Skype to Renewal communities all around the world. On March 25, the tour stopped in Vancouver, where it was hosted by Or Shalom.

Rabbis Rachel Barenblat and David Markus, ALEPH co-chairs, have embarked on the tour to hear from the breadth and depth of the community, including those not technically affiliated with the Renewal community but “aligned in method, intention and heart.”

“Every stop on the ALEPH: Jewish Renewal Listening Tour is different, and every one has been amazing in its own way. But I suspect that our weekend in Vancouver may stand out in memory as one of the most memorable experiences in a year-plus of remarkable experiences,” wrote Barenblat on her blog, the Velveteen Rabbi.

“Maybe that’s in part because we traveled such a very long way to be there. Maybe it’s in part because we were visiting such a storied community, one of the largest and longest-standing Jewish Renewal communities in the world. Maybe that’s in part because the people at Or Shalom welcomed us with such open hearts.”

“When ALEPH decided to go on a listening tour, it initially was to take the pulse of the Jewish Renewal movement, but it has come to mean for us and for stakeholders in the broader renewing of Jewish life so much more than that,” said Markus. “There is a yearning in Jewish life today that reaches through all the denominations … we are seeing a global consciousness arise about the need to reconnect Jews with the heart and soul of tradition, to experience the riches of spiritual life, and to address emerging social and ecological challenges.”

photo - Rabbis David Evan Markus and Rachel Barenblat, co-chairs of ALEPH: Alliance for Jewish Renewal — Rabbis David Evan Markus and Rachel Barenblat, co-chairs of ALEPH: Alliance for Jewish Renewal. *(photo by David Kauffman)*

Markus explained that Jewish Renewal has grown organically, and was not created on the basis of strategy or design. “The time has come,” he said, “to introduce an element of design.” How should the Renewal movement take its rightful place in ecosystem of Jewish life? What does Jewish life need now? How to meet the needs of millennials? Summing up, Markus said, “How are we relevant for the 21st century and beyond?”

Speaking of the tour in a recent Or Shalom newsletter, the congregation’s spiritual leader, Rabbi Hannah Dresner, wrote, “They were here to gather information for their own discernment as they shape the next iteration of the ALEPH: Alliance for Jewish Renewal. But we had a bit of our own agenda, and that was to speak and hear the stories, challenges and hopes of Or Shalomniks for the flourishing of our home community and for our collective and personal senses of belonging, contentment and inspiration…. I listened very carefully, and my heart ached with the poignancy and beauty of the nostalgia, the hurts, the longings and the aspiration I heard spoken.”

On the Friday evening, the visit commenced with davening, followed by dinner, after which those gathered heard some of the origin stories and histories from Or Shalom’s almost 40 years of existence, starting with the early years as a chavurah in Rabbi Daniel Siegel and Rebbetzin Hanna Tiferet Siegel’s living room.

On the Shabbat, there were diverse sessions of listening at which different segments of the community were invited to speak and be heard. Younger members of the community expressed their desire for open, free dialogue, deep ecumenicism and freedom from xenophobia; members of the community who felt marginalized had a chance to tell their stories; elder members spoke of their desire to keep the best of Or Shalom alive and their anxiety to pass the torch to the next generation. Many other voices were heard, and the rabbis listened. “By being listened to,” Markus told the Independent, “people feel empowered to do the work that this era demands.”

Dresner was particularly moved around finding solutions for those who feel marginalized. “What can we do to optimize a young mother’s spiritual experience when she comes to shul with very small children?” she asked. “And how can we create a cohort for her? How can we offer community to individuals who remain single as couples form and begin to have babies? What will it take to go beyond friendliness in developing a deeper queer consciousness?”

The weekend unfolded over what Barenblat called “meetings and meals and meetings over meals,” including a trip on Sunday to the Vancouver vegetarian institution that is the Naam restaurant.

The Vancouver leg of the tour wound down Sunday evening, and so came to an end the ninth stop the rabbis have made so far. “It’s an honor and a privilege,” wrote Barenblat on her blog, “to get to sit with people and hear their yearnings and hopes for what ALEPH and Jewish Renewal might become.”

Matthew Gindin is a Vancouver freelance writer and journalist. He blogs on spirituality and social justice at seeking her voice (hashkata.com) and has been published in the Forward, Tikkun, Elephant Journal and elsewhere.

Welcoming new rabbi

Rabbi Hannah Dresner wants “to come to know my congregation and the culture of Jewish Vancouver, to understand what the needs are and draw from our great tradition.” (photo from Rabbi Hannah Dresner)

Vancouver’s Congregation Or Shalom welcomed Rabbi Hannah Dresner as its spiritual leader this summer, recruiting her from Berkeley, Calif., where she was working part-time for Congregation Netivot Shalom, teaching niggun and meditation, and traveling broadly to hold spiritual retreats.

Dresner, a mother of three who grew up in Springfield, Mass., was ordained in January 2014 and worked previously as a visual artist and professor of fine arts. At Northwestern University, she taught painting and visual aspects of directing for graduate students in theatre direction.

“My artwork has always had a spiritual content, but I felt I needed further enrichment in developing the content of my work,” she said of her decision to seek ordination in the Jewish Renewal movement. “I began to study, got caught up in the study of Chassidic texts and became very enchanted with the imagery and worldview. I see the resultant shift of my professional energy to the rabbinate as another aspect of being an artist. I’m building my life as a work of art, and this is just another way of reaching people in a more direct manner.”

Her spiritual leadership at Or Shalom comes at an important time, she added, because it follows the recent death of Zalman Schachter-Shalomi, the founder of Jewish Renewal. Dresner has tremendous respect for the congregation’s founding rabbis, Daniel Siegel and Hanna Tiferet Siegel, and for Laura Duhan Kaplan, the rabbi who stepped back just over a year ago. “I consider them to be visionary people and I feel like, because of its strong rabbinical leadership in the past, Or Shalom is a community that’s primed and ripe for learning – head, heart, body and spirit,” said Dresner, who took over the congregation’s spiritual leadership from Louis Sutker, rabbi during the transition period.

Dresner grew up the child of a Frankfurt-born mother with an Orthodox background, and a father from the American Midwest, from a highly assimilated family. “Ours was a hybrid family that embraced an observant culture and engaged in a lot of social activism,” she noted.

She plans to develop Or Shalom’s musical davening program and Shabbat observance, to strengthen its b’nai mitzvah program, and to present varied adult education programs “that reach out not just to enrichment of our intellects but also offer points of entry that are more heart-centred.”

This fall, there is a midrash program on women in the Bible, beginning with the character of Tamar. Another new program is on spiritual eldering. “It will begin with a life review and talk about an evaluation of our lives, looking to the end of life with the perspective of wanting to live into our very fullest selves,” she said.

Dresner is also planning a davening laboratory where congregants can learn parts of the liturgy and practise their davening skills.

“As a rabbi, I think about Judaism as a treasure chest that speaks to all our human concerns,” she reflected. “I want to come to know my congregation and the culture of Jewish Vancouver, to understand what the needs are and draw from our great tradition – halachic, agadic, liturgical and Chassidic – in answering our real, current, human questions and concerns. I think these are very deep wells of wisdom that remain alive if we keep them alive.”

Lauren Kramer, an award-winning writer and editor, lives in Richmond, B.C. To read her work online, visit laurenkramer.net.