Silent Meditation Retreats

with Rabbi David and Shoshana Cooper, Rabbi Naomi Hyman, Beth Resnick-Folk, and Eliezer Sobel.

Beginning in the late 90s, Eliezer teamed up with (the late) Rabbi David Cooper and Shoshana Cooper, to offer 7-Day Silent Meditation Retreats in a variety of venues on the East and West coasts, but primarily at the Elat Chayyim Jewish Retreat Center, which later moved and merged with the Isabella Freedman Jewish Retreat Center in Falls Village, Ct.

David was the author of many books, most notably the popular God is a Verb. He and Shoshana were the pioneers of a new branch of the Jewish Renewal movement in the United States that they called “Contemplative Judaism.” Having lived as Orthodox Jews in Jerusalem for eight years, as well as having participated in dozens of extended Buddhist meditation retreats, the Coopers blended both worlds into a beautiful program of silence, sitting practice, Jewish morning chant services and a celebration of the Sabbath, led by Rabbi Phyllis Berman. Their efforts single-handedly triggered a slow and eventually mass adoption of some form of meditation into Jewish services that is now quite common in most Renewal and other Jewish settings.

Eliezer’s primary role on the retreats was as a musician, accompanying and co-leading the daily morning prayers on guitar and keyboard, as well as leading group singing throughout the week. He also served as a small group facilitator, 5Rhythms® teacher, and Friday night story-teller. The Coopers and Eliezer led up to four of these experiences each year in the beginning, then reduced it to two, and finally, as David’s ordeal with Lewy-Body dementia progressed, they led only one per year until 2017, when he was unable to continue. In their final retreats, David and Shoshana were remarkably transparent and vulnerable as they openly shared with the retreat groups their ongoing internal process with David’s condition and rapidly fading mental faculties. Yet despite slowly losing much of his “executive function” as well as the ability to teach or lecture with confidence, David remained quite present and lucid in his “awareness of awareness,” the fruit of his long years of meditation practice.

Inevitably one person at every retreat would question the intensive Buddhist-style meditation practice being taught, demanding to know, “What’s Jewish about this?” Finally, one year a little voice piped up from the back of the room. A participant named Robin Rose declared: “WE ARE!”