Where is God in this? Issues in the emergence of Jewish spiritual direction

"Where is God in This?" documents an early stage in the emergence of Jewish spiritual direction, a form of spiritual counseling that is being adopted and adapted from the contemporary form of a Christian practice that dates back to the Desert Fathers. The study discusses the reasons that growing numbers of rabbis and Jewish lay people have entered Christian programs for training in spiritual direction. It documents the ways that Jews are adapting the Christian model they have studied; explores their efforts at "translation," and examines the challenges they face in locating spiritual direction within Jewish tradition.;Unstructured interviews were conducted with fourteen Jews trained in the contemporary, contemplative model of Christian spiritual direction and with sixteen Jews who offer forms of discursive spiritual guidance without reference to the Christian model.;Using examples from the interview data, the study compares the practice of Jewish spiritual directors with that of other Jewish spiritual counselors. Key findings highlight these two groups of Jewish spiritual counselors' different understandings of the goals and focus of spiritual guidance, differences in the ways they make linguistic reference to the Divine, different attitudes toward spiritual development, and differential use of Jewish texts, tropes, and traditional spiritual practices. The extensive use of verbatim interview material provides scholars with interest in contemporary American Jews and Judaism with a rich set of examples of the way Jews are making sense of their religious lives.;Chapters Six and Seven place spiritual directors' and counselors' theological views and their incipient religious anthropology/spiritual psychology into dialogue with traditional Jewish religious sources. Chapters Eight and Nine highlight gaps in the various forms of spiritual guidance that have been examined (three different models of spiritual counseling are proposed in addition to the spiritual direction model) and point toward a more comprehensive model of Jewish spiritual direction that is rooted in traditional Jewish texts, tropes, and practices and that incorporates the contemplative and experiential modalities that have attracted Jews to spiritual direction.