Vika Krieger

Basically, there was this community in Berkeley that was started 30 years ago.

It's called Chochmat Halev, which means wisdom of the heart.

And it started as a Jewish meditation center.

And it was a bunch of what we call boo-Jews.

Buddhist Jewish people?

Yes.

Okay.

Which there's a sizable population of Bujus, of Jews who were just like, oh, Judaism is really not spiritual enough for me.

I'm going to go to Eastern religion.

Even though Judaism has a pretty long lineage of meditation and mindfulness practice, it was never mainstream in Judaism.

It's certainly not in modern history, but there are practices that you can go back to.

There was this movement of folks who wanted to reclaim mindfulness and meditation and contemplative practices, and so they created this center.

But it's been around for about 30 years and it's slowly evolved into being more of a traditional synagogue.

Don't tell anyone.

Where they have prayer services and bar mitzvahs and weddings and things like that.

Yeah, synagogue adjacent.

Well, yes.

And like what I, I promised myself when I, when I went to rabbinical school, but even more so when I took on this job, I promised myself that I would not have a rabbi persona, that I would not have like my rabbi persona and my like friend persona or like private persona.

I know so many people who are in spiritual leadership who live sort of these double lives.

Yeah.