BERKELEY, Calif. (RNS) — Like many fast-growing organizations, Chochmat HaLev tracks new relationships utilizing buyer relations administration software program. Brittany Berman, Chochmat’s “neighborhood weaver,” logs newcomers’ pursuits and schedules digitally generated follow-ups. After assembly somebody in particular person for espresso, Berman connects them to no less than one different particular person at Chochmat.

“If somebody meets you and asks you to mirror in your expertise, then there’s an opportunity to make that means,” mentioned Berman. “And as soon as that means is made, then there’s extra buy-in.”

The method is important for sustainable development, mentioned Chochmat’s board president, Estee Solomon Grey, who spent years working within the tech world.

One of many keys to Berman’s work, too, is the small-group meetups she organizes, in addition to occasions reminiscent of intergenerational Shabbat dinners. Whereas it has a large constituency amongst its tech-world neighbors, with quite a lot of non-Jewish members, Chochmat HaLev is a Jewish Renewal synagogue. 

At a time when loneliness has been described as an epidemic — not least, some say, due to how our tech isolates us — Chochmat HaLev has been utilizing expertise’s method to creating connections between folks to construct neighborhood.

“This constructing is infrastructure,” mentioned Solomon Grey, gesturing round her within the courtyard of Chochmat, a former Baptist church within the tiled-roof Spanish colonial model. “However there’s one other complete form of infrastructure that’s the relational infrastructure,” she provides, “which is a material, a mesh of relationships through which you’re residing collectively, co-creating collectively.”

Chochmat’s method has been working, nearly tripling its membership to 350 since 2022, a lot of them youthful folks with ties to Silicon Valley and to Burning Man. Provided that attendance has declined throughout the broader U.S. non secular panorama (although current knowledge reveals that has leveled off) and the pattern towards disaffiliation with volunteer teams of all types, from non secular establishments to Elks and, famously, bowling leagues, Chochmat is an outlier.

Near sunset on a February Friday, folks of all ages crowded the sidewalks in a residential nook of Berkeley for Chochmat HaLev’s Kabbalat Shabbat service, welcoming the Sabbath with songs. Many attendees had been sporting some mixture of flannels, beanies, yarmulkes, Okay-95 masks or puffer coats. Packing into the synagogue, for the subsequent two hours they joined in a dance-filled, ecstatic worship service drenched in Jewish mysticism.

Zvika Krieger, the neighborhood’s non secular chief, addressed the roughly 300 folks sitting in chairs or standing across the fringes of the room. “Whether or not you encounter the divine by singing and dancing and prayers, possibly by knowledge textual content and moral knowledge, possibly by silence and meditation, or possibly it’s a battle with this complete concept of God altogether, you’re so welcome right here at Chochmat HaLev, and you’re in good firm,” he mentioned.

When the music started, low at first, the power within the room additionally constructed regularly. As melodies from the strings and voices swelled, then accelerated, folks leapt from their seats, grabbing one another’s palms and dancing alongside the perimeter of the sanctuary. Afterward, members gathered within the courtyard for a potluck, or oneg, and lingered late into the night.

“I by no means would have imagined that I’d wish to spend my Friday nights at a Jewish occasion,” mentioned David Steuer, a 56-year-old raised in a Reform Jewish neighborhood in Wisconsin who joined Chochmat in 2022. “It feels miraculous. I actually stay up for coming right here.”

Krieger, a 41-year-old, queer, sex-positive rabbi with prior expertise at Meta, TikTok and the U.S. State Division, isn’t any small a part of the success of Chachmat since being employed three years in the past. He helped revive the synagogue’s lengthy historical past of ecstatic dance and launched the OpenLev program — soulful coworking time all through the synagogue, free for members, with a prompt donation of $36 for nonmembers. This system intersperses the workday with meditation, yoga and Jewish rituals for issues like celebrating milestones or grieving job loss.

He additionally employed Berman, who facilitated dialog teams on matters reminiscent of Israel and Palestine, all as a part of nurturing a close-knit non secular neighborhood that’s additionally deeply embodied.

“We’re in a loneliness epidemic proper now,” mentioned Krieger. “Persons are hungry for connection, and there are additionally a variety of non secular seekers who’re searching for that means, searching for function, however conventional organized faith has rubbed them the fallacious manner, or it’s simply stodgy or sterile or too conservative for them.”

RELATED: The unconventional, irreverent and inclusive faith of Burning Man

Rabbi Ron Wolfson, writer of “Relational Judaism: Utilizing the Energy of Relationships to Remodel the Jewish Group,” agreed that individuals are a extra highly effective draw than programming or liturgy. “As great as a non secular service may be, and I’m positive the worship companies at Chochmat are implausible,” he mentioned, “the underside line is, folks will come for a program or perhaps a worship service, however they’ll keep due to relationships,” he mentioned.

He added that Chochmat’s development methods match a playbook embraced by many profitable Jewish communities within the final decade. Certainly, Wolfson identified, Chochmat’s small teams and its welcome to the unaffiliated echo the ways of Rick Warren’s Saddleback Church, a multicampus evangelical Christian megachurch in Orange County, south of Los Angeles.

“Rick’s mantra is all the time, if a brand new particular person can really feel related to 5 to seven different folks, shortly, they’ll really feel like they belong,” mentioned Wolfson.

At a current coworking session on the synagogue, a therapist, knowledgeable clown and improvement director had been among the many 30 or so adults in attendance. Krieger provided a blessing for overcoming author’s block, inviting attendees to the touch the sanctuary’s ark (the place the Torah scrolls are saved), then open its doorways as an emblem of opening a portal to creativity, inspiration and “birthing power.”

“I actually like the concept of attempting to convey divine into work, and never compartmentalize a lot,” mentioned Allyson Greenlon, a more recent member who started attending Chochmat after lengthy hiatus from Judaism. “I began a job across the identical time I began coming right here, and that job’s been exhausting,” she mentioned. “I need to withstand my life circling round my job.”

Ben Poretzky, a 32-year-old with a background within the company world who started attending in 2022, partnered with Krieger to develop the idea for OpenLev. Poretzky mentioned individuals recognize the “mild co-regulation” that comes from working alongside others, and the “sacred co-snacking” that happens through in-depth chats on the snack desk.

A number of individuals have reported discovering roommates, work connections and even romantic companions by OpenLev, and the idea has grown so standard that it’s spawned imitators as far-off as Brooklyn, New York.

Chochmat’s development has come amid the flurry of layoffs within the Bay Space, and Krieger famous that former tech sector employees have misplaced not solely jobs, however their sense of belonging. “What would possibly it’s prefer to have a neighborhood that’s resilient, in order that in the event you both get fired otherwise you depart your job, you don’t lose all your pals? Your workday neighborhood will be fixed whilst your work life adjustments,” he mentioned.

Krieger mentioned he’s not serious about main a mega-synagogue. He hopes to cap the Kabbalat Shabbat companies at their present dimension — 300 folks looks like the proper quantity to have the ability to know who you’re praying with, mentioned Krieger — maybe including extra companies. Nor does he need, he says, to be placed on a pedestal as a “guru.”

That self-awareness, specialists say, may make Chochmat’s acceleration sustainable long-term. “There’s all the time a masked fragility, even in rising congregations,” mentioned Mark Mulder, director of city research at Calvin College and co-author of the guide “The Church Should Develop or Perish: Robert H. Schuller and the Enterprise of American Christianity.” “So long as you may have cash coming in, so long as you may have a charismatic particular person, so long as you may have the proper constituency in your space, there’s a stability. However in the event you lose a kind of three legs of the stool, even these fast-growing locations can collapse fairly shortly.”

Longtime members level out, nonetheless, that innovation is a part of Chochmat’s DNA. Based within the Nineteen Nineties by Rabbi Avram Davis and Tikkun journal co-founder Nan Fink Gefen as a meditation heart that educated Jewish non secular leaders, it fused Japanese non secular practices with Jewish mysticism and dance. A 2010 Ahead article dubbed its prayer companies “a Jewish rave.”

 “After they began it, it was, ‘How can we take all the very best elements of the loopy, ultra-f–ing Orthodox and embrace it in our Berkley world?” mentioned Shoshana Phoenixx, who has been a part of Chochmat for the reason that Nineteen Nineties. “Let’s smoke a variety of dope and drink a variety of slivovitz and educate meditation.’ So, I acquired wasted each Shabbat for the primary 10 years of Chochmat on the rabbi’s home.”

Its anti-institutional legacy lives on in members preferring to name it a “non secular neighborhood,” relatively than a synagogue, an edge supported by newer, youthful members and, they declare, its rabbi.

“Zvika introduced in youthful folks he knew, and the households are again,” mentioned Andrew Utiger, a former Catholic lay pastor who served as Chochmat’s first non-Jewish board member. “It’s all the time been an incredible neighborhood. There’s simply been totally different iterations.”

A 2020 Pew Analysis Middle examine that Wolfson cited confirmed that solely 35% of Jewish People report residing in a family with no less than one formal member of a synagogue. Whereas that proportion varies by location, mentioned Wolfson, communities like Chochmat, which heart Judaism however welcome members with a variety of beliefs, really feel approachable to the big proportion of unaffiliated Jews.

That’s very true within the wake of what many within the Jewish world are calling “the surge,” the anecdotal inflow of curiosity in Jewish non secular life for the reason that Hamas assaults on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. The surge has been palpable at Chochmat, the place greater than 100 new members have joined for the reason that warfare broke out.

A type of members is Solomon Grey, the board president, who’s half-Israeli; within the days after the assaults, she skilled what she described as “smithereens of consciousness.” Lengthy skeptical of synagogue membership, when she walked into Chochmat’s sanctuary doorways for the primary time in October 2023, she encountered a room full of people that had been bodily engaged and spiritually current, and her physique “went quiet.”

“There’s an openness and seriousness of connection and motion and being on this collectively that I’ve not seen anyplace earlier than,” she mentioned.

Krieger is cautious to notice that its neighborhood is related, however not of 1 thoughts. Chochmat explicitly welcomes all views on Israel and Palestine, for example, and Chochmat’s leaders imagine that being in neighborhood with these you disagree with is a non secular apply. Krieger delivers brief sermons or drashes that function pro-Palestinian and pro-Israel views, and the congregation shaped an eight-week, 10-member dialogue group with opposing views on the disaster.

Krieger has additionally added a pause in the course of the full of life Friday night companies, inviting folks to pair up and mirror on that night time’s instructing, in addition to post-service potlucks, “Ask Me Something” classes and talks on matters reminiscent of polyamory and psychedelics.

“It’s not about finding out texts and non secular observance of rituals. It’s about being in relationship with different folks as a manner of connecting with the divine,” mentioned Krieger. “And deep relationship just isn’t one thing that simply occurs on the sidelines; it’s one thing that you simply truly should foster and domesticate as a non secular apply.”

RELATED: In Chicago, one congregation finds fealty to Israel insupportable