Read more of Kim Lawton's interview about the Jewish Renewal movement with Jewish Theological Seminary professor Neil Gillman:

You can study and emphasize the mind, or you can do a lot of good things and observe God's commandments. I think those two forms [of Judaism] were dominant, and the renewal movement comes along and says, "That's not what God wants primarily. [What] God wants primarily is passion, is feelings, is the heart." This renewal movement is a reaction against a Judaism that was excessively intellectualized.

The classic liberal Conservative synagogue was perceived as not providing much warmth, not leaving room for feeling, meditation, more spiritual dimensions of Judaism. I think this renewal movement has come along and has picked up on this need and has attracted a lot of people who were unhappy with the range of options offered to them by the modern synagogues and modern services of worship.

Judaism is a very complicated religion. [There are] many ways of articulating what you believe God wants. The primary modes [in the] early 20th century were the intellectual and the behavioral. God wants the mind, God wants you to think, God wants you to study. For the behavioral, God wants you to do a lot of good things, perform a lot of rituals. Along comes this renewal movement, and [it] says, "That's not at all what God wants. Above all what God wants is the heart, what God wants is feeling, what God wants is passion." The services of worship that were available, the options that were available just did not leave much room for that. Worship services were perceived as being cold; the synagogue was unfriendly. There was not much room for people who wanted to sing, to dance, who wanted to meditate. This renewal movement has come along and said, "That's primary. We are going to give you ways of expression." People flocked to that; many people flocked to that, and it drew a lot of people back into Jewish life that would never have come in otherwise.

There is a synagogue, for example, that has a Friday night kind of service where most of my students go and where they sing their way through the entire service, and it's very popular. It happens to be an Orthodox synagogue, but that's kind of irrelevant because [the] students are not necessarily Orthodox. [They] want a service to sing.

Throughout the country there are synagogues that have, maybe once a month or once a week or twice a month, a singing service with musical accompaniment. The entire service is sung from beginning to end, and that's becoming very popular. Synagogues use this because if people come into the synagogue for that kind of service, maybe they will come back for other things. It has become a draw, and rabbis around the country have now been sensitized to that, and they incorporate that into their programs and worship in ways that they never did 25, 30 years ago.

This renewal movement is, in a sense, a revival of the more mystical, the more Hasidic forms of Jewish worship which really never died, which were observed in a much more narrow framework in those synagogues that were expressly part of the Hasidic movement. In the Conservative, Reform, and certainly Reconstructionist movements, this is now widespread and incorporated into synagogues all around the country. This goes back to 17th-,18th-,19th-century forms, largely in Eastern Europe, where Hasidism was very popular. The Jews of Western Europe, German Jews, Ashkenazi thought that those Hasidim were deranged and that this was a total distortion of Judaism, and they condemned it and refused to honor it. It was those Western European forms that got themselves transferred to America. That's why I've called this renewal movement a reaction. It's a reaction against what originated in Western Europe and was a much more intellectualized and behavioralized kind of Judaism, which was expressly rejecting the Eastern European Hasidic and mystical forms until a generation ago. Some young American Jews rediscovered the fact that, "Hey, there is this Hasidic and mystical tradition that our parents and grandparents had rejected but that's fun, and it's attractive and it meets our needs in a way that the synagogues that the Western European Jews transplanted into America did not."

Jewish mysticism was influenced by Oriental forms. Kabbalah, from its origins, had traces of Oriental influences that were transplanted and Judaized. The lines between these renewal forms and much more overtly Buddhist forms of religious expression -- that line has been blurred, to the dismay of some Jews but to the delight of others.

In Judaism there are no strong authority figures, no pope. Jews, certainly in America, have the freedom to go wherever their instincts take them, and eventually some of these forms will hold. Others will not.