Alan Lew, brought meditation to Judaism, dies

[SedesDomi]

San Francisco, CA (USA) – Rabbi Alan Lew, who helped cultivate a spirituality bridging Judaism and Buddhism and left a legacy of social activism in the Bay Area, died unexpectedly Monday while visiting the East Coast.

Lew, 65, apparently died while on a jog, said Rabbi Micah Hyman, who leads Congregation Beth Sholom, the Richmond District synagogue from where Lew had retired and was still rabbi emeritus.

“It’s a huge, huge loss,” Hyman said. “In our community, the wave of shock is just beginning to take effect.”

Lew’s coming of age as a Jew actually happened as he sought to deepen his Zen Buddhist practice. Disillusioned by the Judaism he’d experienced as a child, Lew was considering becoming ordained as a lay Buddhist priest, according to a 1995 interview that was published in the J., a weekly newspaper serving the Bay Area Jewish community.

But he found himself unable to sew a priestly garment while on a retreat in the 1970s at Tassajara, a Zen center in Carmel Valley.

As he meditated on that resistance, Lew told the J. that “there was some sense of conflict between my being ordained as a Buddhist with my being Jewish.” It became a turning point, leading Lew toward Judaism, and ultimately to rabbinical school.

In 1991, Lew became the rabbi at Congregation Beth Sholom, a Conservative synagogue where he would broaden the definition of Jewish practice and include meditation. There is a meditation room at the synagogue.

“He taught us that the meditation that was part of our heritage,” said Marilyn Heiss, 54, a member who meditates. “He learned his meditation from Zen, but made it an integral part of Jewish practice.”