Interfaith Connections

Cooperating congregations:

St. Mark’s Episcopal Church, 1725 North New Hope Road, Raleigh, NC 27604
Rector Lorraine Ljunggren
www.stmarks-ral.org

West Raleigh Presbyterian Church, 27 Horne Street, Raleigh, NC 27607
The Rev. Dr. P. Joseph Ward
www.wrpc.org

Yavneh is honored to be supported by cooperating religious congregations that provide us with worship, gathering, and study space.  The members of our sister Christian congregations are welcome to share in our activities, and Reb Raachel and her clergy colleagues offer learning opportunities for one another’s communities on an ongoing basis.

One of the kavanot, the intentionalities, of our community, is to respond to the challenge of overcoming the historic hostility between faiths, primarily between Judaism and Christianity, but also to be open to learning from and growing spiritually with teachers and adherents of all faith traditions.

In the delicate process of God-seeking, there is no way to overestimate the centrality of the experiential.  Each of us shares in a holy obligation to open our minds, hearts, and souls to the Reality of God and to the reality that God loves diversity, nearness, and surprise.

Deep ecumenism requires us to accept the consequences of divine Oneness: One is One and One is All, and the One invites us to bring the reality we affirm in our prayer into the routine of our lives.  

As Reb Zalman has long taught, limiting ourselves exclusively to traditional images of divinity, or only to those images inherent in Jewish tradition, may constrain and hobble our spiritual evolution.

At Yavneh, we offer our service to binyan ha-Malchut, the building of the Kingdom, the domain of the Shechina, the indwelling Divine Presence.  In this way, we help expand the God-field to which we connect through our yearning for ever more abundant life, a yearning that we share with YHVH, the One Who Will Be. 

We recognize the process of spiritual evolution as interactive, unbounded by denomination, and unpredictable.  Choosing to participate in it, we accept that it implicates us to the service of universal well-being.  When we open our hearts to the movement of Divinity, the Presence manifests as it will and dwells in the form of its own deepest need.  V’asu li mikdash, v’shchanti b’tocham, "if they make me a tabernacle, I will dwell among them" (Exodus 25:8.).

Deep ecumenism neither minimizes our attachment to Judaism’s spiritual understandings, nor compromises our personal and communal religious practices.  If ecumenism has a boundary, it’s in the realm of practice, at the point where we sense something damaging to the spiritual immune system, something that calls into question for us the integrity and beauty of Jewish teaching. 

In our forms of worship and practice, Yavneh draws deeply from the well of Jewish tradition, pulling forward into the new paradigm of our lifetime that which is most nourishing and fulfilling.

Yavneh welcomes you to enter our mikdash, the portable tabernacle/laboratory of our spiritual exploration, and join us in setting the course of Jewish creativity for coming generations—just as the teachers and students did in the first Yavneh academy, 2000 years ago.