Premeditated move

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This article was published 21/04/2018 (2819 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Inspired by meditation to seek ordination, Rabbi Alan Green plans to use his Jewish perspectives in the meditation capital of North America.

After 18 years as the senior rabbi of Congregation Shaarey Zedek, Green, 64, and his wife Chaya, a meditation teacher, will move this summer to Fairfield, Iowa, home to thousands of practitioners of Transcendental Meditation.

“Basically it will be a context where I can fulfil my dream of Jewish observance and study with the practice of Transcendental Meditation,” says the Los Angeles native, who came to Winnipeg’s former Beth Israel Synagogue in 1992. He has served at Shaarey Zedek, a Conservative congregation of about 1,000 families, since 2000.

Transcendental Meditation, or TM, a movement founded by Indian-born Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, promotes a style of meditation where the user repeats a silent mantra in order to relax and refresh the mind.

Green will be honoured with a retirement dinner on Thursday, a dance party Saturday and a community cantorial concert on Sunday at 2 p.m.

During his tenure, the clarinet-playing rabbi with a wide smile made a significant mark on the Wellington Crescent synagogue, the oldest Jewish congregation in Western Canada. He opened up membership to same-sex couples, established a cemetery where interfaith couples could be buried side-by-side and overhauled Shaarey Zedek’s High Holy Day and Shabbat services, synagogue president Lorne Weiss says.

“Rabbi Green has a great understanding of where the community is and where the congregation is in terms of acceptance and the willingness to change to make the synagogue more relevant,” Weiss says.

Green also spent considerable time explaining Judaism to other faith groups, inviting them into the synagogue and generally acting as an ambassador for the tradition in Winnipeg, Weiss says.

“As important as he was to our synagogue and our community, he was also very important to the interfaith community,” he says.

“When you have someone like Rabbi Green representing your community, you can’t do much better than that.”

He regularly spoke at meetings of the Tri-diocesan Bat Kol group, a Christian organization that studies Jewish scripture, and welcomed the group to the synagogue several times, Sister Bernadette O’Reilly says.

“He really has deepened the (Hebrew) Scripture for me and makes it come alive. He made the connection to our current times.”

And when Green invited three Roman Catholics into his cluttered, book-lined office to plan a joint study on Jewish-Catholic relations, he surprised them by asking them if they would sing a Hebrew song with him, recalls Greg Barrett, who helped organize the 2015 event at Mary, Mother of the Church parish.

“So there we were, two Roman Catholic priests, a Roman Catholic layperson and a Jewish rabbi singing together, and the melody rose in the rabbi’s study and went out over the administrative area of Shaarey Zedek,” Barrett writes in an email.

“It was a special moment and is a measure of the man — bringing people together in honour of our common God.”

Recognizing those commonalities has been an essential part of his ministry, says Green, ordained in 1991 by Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi, who encouraged him to engage in interfaith work.

“Zalman used to say he was a practitioner of a generic religion with a Jewish flavour and that’s exactly how I feel,” Green says.

“There’s generic religion and it has different expressions and what you have then is a tapestry of flavour that contributes to the colours and the richness of mankind.”

Green’s personal tapestry includes interwoven threads of Judaism and Transcendental Meditation, which he has practised since 1971, when he was a troubled 17-year-old during his last year of high school.

Introduced to meditation by friends, he felt peace and hope through the practice, and eventually was inspired to undertake rabbinical studies.

“Without meditating in the morning and in the evening, I never would have had the energy or patience to become a rabbi,” says Green of the job that requires being on call around the clock.

As much as he enjoys living in Winnipeg, he’s looking forward to relocating to Fairfield, where about 20 per cent of the 10,000 residents practise TM. He may serve as a chaplain at the Maharishi University of Management, as well as reading, teaching and studying, and maybe even picking up his clarinet again.

“As you drive into town, you can feel the waves of silence, you can feel your mind and body settling down,” he says about his new hometown, where he and his wife already have many friends.

“There’s an atmosphere of restfulness created by thousands of people meditating twice a day, very often in groups.”

brenda@suderman.com

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