Instead of conceiving the American Jewish community as a series of concentric circles with a small core of real Jews at the center and surrounding rings of increasingly marginalized people, we must begin to see our community as a woven tapestry with many contemporary colors threaded across the long strands of tradition and history, creating vivid patches of activity. Developing the Spiritual Dimension of Judaism Obviously there are many approaches to promoting spirituality. One method, for instance, is to find people who are at a point in their lives when the need for spirituality is most obvious. Another is to identify groups of people who have found the Jewish community inhospitable to their spiritual searches, and to show them that there is not only room for them, but benefit in continuing their quest on a Jewish path. And a third approach is to work with core institutions, like synagogues and religious schools, to help them become stronger communities and sources of religious inspiration.
Illness often challenges the patient to seek a connection with religion.
Those who are seriously ill and their families and those who are grieving are often deeply comforted when they are connected with traditions and rituals and when they are nurtured by caring people. The Jewish community should mobilize resources to reach out to them in a much more comprehensive fashion than they currently do. The Jewish Healing Center, working locally in San Francisco and nationally in New York, provides both direct services to ill Jews and their families and training for the Jewish professionals who need guidance in providing them with deeper, more effective counseling and teaching. The San Francisco center, Ruach Ami, has created bi-weekly services of healing that bring together Jews who are facing serious illness and their caretakers for an hour of prayer, singing, study, and fellowship. They have conducted spiritual support groups for women with breast cancer and HIV positive men.