The Berkshire clergy’s longest-serving leader will step down from the pulpit to focus on her spiritual listening practice

By Albert Stern / BJV Editor

Rabbi Barbara Cohen’s involvement in Jewish life in the Berkshires stretches back more than 40 years to a time when General Electric was central to the local economy, providing jobs and, indirectly, congregants families who joined local synagogues and sent their children to their respective religious schools.

Raised in the Conservative movement, Rabbi Cohen was involved first as a member of Knesset Israel in Pittsfield and became president of the local Hadassah chapter. She became interested in Jewish modalities that she felt she could not fully explore at KI as it was then constituted and moved to Temple Anshe Amunim, the Reform congregation just a few blocks away. There she served in numerous capacities such as cantor during the High Holidays, head of the religious school, and ultimately the spiritual leader of the congregation. For the last 20 years, she has served in that capacity for Congregation Ahavath Sholom in Great Barrington, a once-Orthodox synagogue started by cattle merchants nearly a century ago and that is now affiliated with Jewish Reconstructionist Communities.

Rabbi Cohen had to overcome numerous obstacles on her road to smicha in the Reconstructionist movement, including the prolonged illness of her late husband, Mark, and her own battle with breast cancer. She received her ordination in 2018, and the indirect path she had to take provided her with an unplanned for opportunity – she came across a learning cohort called Bekhol Levavkha: A Training Program for Jewish Spiritual Directors, a two-year course of study presented under the auspices of Hebrew Union College in New York City.

As Rabbi Cohen explained to the BJV in a 2018 profile: “It’s a modality of one-on-one engagement with a spiritual director to deeply explore one’s spirituality. [Spiritual direction] sacred listening, not problem solving. It offers the opportunity for people to be safely held by a director and explore their spirituality or lack of it, and their feelings about God.”  

Now, Rabbi Cohen is stepping down from the pulpit to focus on spiritual direction. She spoke with the BJV in June – our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Where are you at in life that is prompting you to make this big decision?

Well, it really is clear to me that I have at least one or hopefully several more chapters in my life to go forward. I'm 72 and do not feel in any way that I am tired of this spiritual work or want be moving away from being a spiritual leader and a rabbi. Being a pulpit rabbi, as many people would know or understand from being parts of communities, is a very complex and very engaging job. I've been doing clergy work since 1994. What I'm looking for is some space to explore more deeply one-on-one individual spiritual accompaniment. Nobody likes to call it spiritual direction anymore, because it sounds a little too pointing the way when, in fact, it's really more of an engaged spiritual listening and discernment together with a spiritual accompanier and a spiritual client. I also want some more space to be with my family, and it just felt like a time to step away from the pulpit. The congregation is in a great place, and looking forward to entering its second hundred years.

What have you learned so far from working with more one-on-one focus through spiritual direction?

People, in telling their stories, are already revealing the places that are helping them and places that are catching them up spiritually – that is, how they view the world. We're not talking about religious behavior, although that can certainly feed into a spiritual perspective, a spiritual journey analysis, if you want to put it that way. It's really in the listening and the reflecting back. As one does something for longer and longer period of time, you get better at it, hopefully. And patterns emerge and beliefs emerge and resistances emerge and the way in which we are educated, the way in which our families looked at the world. And again, not necessarily in religious observance, but was the world you lived in a five senses world? Was it a more complicated picture than that? And how it is that people are connected to their story and how their story keeps replicating itself in different circumstances? What can a spiritual journey? Anything from a reincarnational experience, if that's a subject that people are interested in to explore, or how it is that previous life experiences have created places where similar things have come up and how we look at them.

There is a way of looking at the wonder and marvel of things that have been right under our noses that can be very revelatory and certainly spark other inquiries. I've always known it for myself, but the training makes you a better listener. It makes you more sensitive to how people embody their stories – watching their gestures and really listening without having answers ready, just receiving. People want to tell their stories, and their stories hold the key. We are creating our own Torah every day and that Torah is as capable of being interpreted on the multiple levels as is the actual Torah. My hope as a spiritual companion is to be walking alongside and listening to a person’s story, realizing that words hold important clues, gestures hold important clues, and past behaviors and responses hold certain clues.

Given the demographics of the Berkshires, I imagine you’ll be working with a lot of retirees, people who are coming to this beautiful place at a certain point in their lives where they're perhaps summing up, perhaps leaving behind a career that may have given them a lot of fulfillment or perhaps a lot of aggravation. What experience are people like that having as they come to a place like this?

Everything has a trajectory, and certain periods of life are more or less sensitive to one’s search for meaning. In the middle of our lives, we're busy, we're working. If we choose to have partners or raise families, sometimes spiritual goals or spiritual wondering are not necessarily uppermost in the mind. I find that the people who are coming to the Berkshires and people who are coming to see me are looking for meaning at a point in their lives that would naturally give way to it. First of all, there's more time, usually, in their lives to be thinking about big issues – existential questions are uppermost. People are facing illness, people are facing loss, people are facing personal challenges in their lives and trying to find some understanding or fabric that they are able to feel in their lives, not just random events, just flying at them. I think the demographic of the Berkshires is an excellent demographic for this exploration because it really does meet up with a time of life. The beauty of the Berkshire opens people to looking at nature and having their souls opened, even if they're not religious people or using traditional language. I think it's an excellent time of life to try to puzzle through some of what may have been questions that either didn't have anybody to ask before or didn't have time to ask or didn't have interest to ask.

Certainly, I'm not going to poke people and make them feel uncomfortable to have to answer questions that I want the answers to. One of the things we're told to watch out for in spiritual direction is not to be curious for the sake of our own curiosity, but rather to see what people are laying out about themselves and then go with that, to perhaps take things a little differently, and maybe then ask a question.

So – a historical perspective of Jewish life in the Berkshires in the time that you've been here. How have you seen it evolve? Where might be heading?

Over these 44 years, I have witnessed is a dissolving of boundaries, mostly in the last 15 to 20 years. For a good 25 years, at least, the Berkshires had a very insular concept of “congregations.” Early on, Hevreh didn’t exist, but certainly in the Pittsfield community, there was such a distinction between the two congregations (KI and TAA), both in their practices and in the way in which they held each other in different regard in terms of the intensity or in terms of the way in which the religion of Judaism was practiced. It was something that was very overt. Over the years, it has really come to be a much more cohesive.

There's more osmosis between, first of all, religious practices and ways of expressing Judaism. Plus, there is the willingness of the congregations to merge together, such as is represented in our Shabbats Across the Berkshires. I will say that I think Federation has had a lot to do with that, providing a nonspecific focus where that agenda could be generated. I think the world of Judaism has changed. I think Conservative Judaism has become less conservative, small “c,” and I think Reform Judaism has become less classical Reform. I think that that's a major factor in the way in which the Berkshires have started to become one Jewish community in sharing worship, in sharing pulpits, and in being part of community in a way that just didn't happen in the same way back in the '80s and '90s and even the early 2000s. Younger rabbis came in – and this is not in any way a judgment on the august and respected rabbis that were in pulpits back. But I think the younger rabbis had different kinds of training. Back in the early 2000s, it was almost the beginning of a golden age of community mutual cooperation, and the walls really started to come down.

Is that something that's continuing? Well, I think things are changing a lot. Certainly, the entrance of Chabad to the Berkshires has changed the personality of religious and communal involvement. There are a lot of choices. During the GE boom of the '60s and '70s, [congregations] left smaller buildings and built new synagogues. Let's just say the demographics have changed. When I ran the religious school at Anshe Amunim in 1994, I might have had 130 kids, plus 20 people on staff. That was a very, very different period in Jewish life in the Berkshires. Those younger people, many of them have drifted away, although some of them have stayed, and some of them are very prominent in our community.

But from the boom years of the people who were active and gave money and time and administrative support through their professions as doctors and lawyers and dentists and GE people and tradespeople in the Jewish community – those people are, for the most part, not here anymore. I think we can redefine ourselves, as Judaism has been so good at for thousands of years. The big edifices of 1960s Judaism are not what are necessary at this point. We have the possibility of great creative improvement and development, but that can be scary. I think that's where our community is now. We have a wonderful Federation that is a real foundation for the Jewish community. There are all sorts of changes. Who would have thought 50 years ago that there would be a Chabad Center in the middle of Lenox? It's a different Jewish world. What remains to be seen as how it evolves and how creative people can be.