I'm blessed to consider Rabbi David Ingber both a teacher and a friend. I've spent the last two Yom Kippurim on retreats he co-led (here's my post about the 2005 retreat; here are posts about Shabbat Shuvah 2006 and Yom Kippur 2006.) And we cross paths fairly often at Elat Chayyim and Ohalah.

So it was a treat for me when I got to interview him for the ongoing interview series I'm doing at Zeek magazine. We had a fabulous conversation, which I've done my best to condense into a couple thousand words. Here are a very few of them:

"Our generation has a hard time with authority. In some ways it’s a healthy response to religious authoritarianism, but now we find ourselves in a postmodern age where autonomy is the highest value, and we're struggling to articulate what could possibly be the nature of an obligation. What could possibly ground a Jewish life?

"For me it's about having a spiritual practice. To know, 'I've given myself over to this discipline, and I have as my goal the opening of my heart. I trust that my heart will open more, the more I give myself to the practice...'"

Read the whole thing here in the new online issue of Zeek magazine: David Ingber: Shaping an Integral Judaism.

(And while you're there, don't miss Tucker Lieberman's piece Hearing Beneath the Surface: Crossing Gender Boundaries at the Ari Mikveh, and Richard Chess' poem Variations on a theme by Wiesel.)

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