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(JTA) — Jonathan Omer-Man, a rabbi and pioneer in Jewish meditation whose assembly with the Dalai Lama in 1990 was described in Rodger Kamenetz’s best-selling e-book “The Jew within the Lotus,” died on Tuesday. He was 89.
Omer-Man was a part of a delegation of Jews, together with rabbis of assorted denominations, who went to Dharamshala, India as a part of an interfaith dialogue with the exiled chief of Tibetan Buddhism. Kamenetz’s 1994 e-book centered largely on rabbis and Jewish thinkers like Omer-Man who have been seeking to infuse Jewish apply with strategies and insights drawn from Japanese religions, and maybe perceive why many younger Jews have been drawn to traditions apart from their very own.
To that finish, Omer-Man was additionally the founding father of Metivta, an egalitarian, nondenominational Jewish neighborhood based mostly in Los Angeles that emphasizes studying Jewish texts and meditation. Omer-Man rooted his classes and strategies in Jewish mystical traditions, together with the Kabbalah and the teachings of Hasidic masters.
“There have all the time been Jews who adopted a conventional mystical path, and there’s by no means been a rabbinic consensus,” he advised an interviewer in 2004. “All there was is ‘our group versus their group.’”
Born Derek Orlans in Portsmouth, England in 1934, Omer-Man spent years engaged on a kibbutz in Israel earlier than his legs have been paralyzed by polio. He moved to Jerusalem the place he discovered varied jobs as an electrician, a instructor and within the publishing trade earlier than he was captivated by the examine of Jewish mysticism in his mid-30s.
He obtained a non-public rabbinic ordination from Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi, the founding father of the Jewish Renewal motion, and in 1981 he moved to Los Angeles, the place he was invited by the Los Angeles Hillel council to arrange an outreach program for “religiously alienated Jews” — particularly these taken with faiths like Hinduism and Buddhism.
“He labored for quite a few years on a one-on-one foundation,” Kamenetz wrote in “The Jew and the Lotus.” “Jonathan had struck up a dialog with some Jewish children from Los Angeles. After they heard that Jonathan would quickly be opening a college of Jewish meditation, they instantly signed as much as examine with him.”
Omer-Man was one of many founding academics of the Institute for Jewish Spirituality, a company based in 1999 that develops and teaches Jewish religious practices together with meditation, yoga, Torah examine, music and niggunim, or the singing of wordless melody. He was the writer of a number of essays, brief fiction and verse, and taught and lectured extensively,
Omer-Man, who resided in Berkeley, California, was married to Nan Gefen, a fiction and nonfiction author. Their blended household has seven kids and 10 grandchildren. The household not too long ago welcomed a great-grandson.
“Persons are very a lot into bringing extra enjoyable into Judaism,” Omer-Man advised Kamenetz in “The Jew within the Lotus.” “However enjoyable will not be pleasure. Pleasure is ecstatic information with all components of 1’s being, an built-in manner of understanding. It’s actually a quest.”
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