Canada's Jewish Renewal movement is growing

With the three-week-long Jewish holiday season behind us, Ralph Benmergui, the well-known TV and radio personality—and former podcaster with The CJN—is still kvelling about the first-ever High Holiday services offered by Ha’Sadeh in Toronto. The new-ish, Jewish Renewal community welcomed 150 attendees for its Yom Kippur and Rosh Hashanah services in its debut season.

It wasn’t just a new beginning for Ha’Sadeh, but also for Benmergui himself, who was recently named as the new executive director for the Canadian branch of Jewish Renewal, ALEPH Canada. The movement is more popular outside Canada than inside—there are 50 congregations worldwide, including Vancouver’s Or Shalom Synagogue—but there are smaller Renewal communities in Canada without brick-and-mortar buildings that aren’t quite yet “congregations”, the latest of which is Ha’Sadeh.

Its participants join a worldwide movement whose goal is to reinvigorate Judaism by mixing traditional Orthodoxy with spiritual concepts such as meditation, inclusiveness and concern for the planet. Jewish Renewal was founded in the 1960s by some breakaway Chabad rabbis, including the late Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi, who spent decades in Winnipeg, and Rabbi Arthur Waskow, who just recently passed away on Oct. 20, 2025.

On today’s episode of The CJN’s North Star podcast, host Ellin Bessner sits down with Ralph Benmergui for a deeply personal conversation about why he took on this new job just weeks away from his 70th birthday, and how he hopes to grow the movement within his home country so Canadian Jews can live more meaningful Jewish spiritual lives.

Transcript

Rabbi Arik Labowitz: Everyone join us. (Strumming, chanting, clapping)

Ellin Bessner: That’s what it sounded like at the recent Yom Kippur Kol Nidre evening services earlier this month at Vancouver’s Or Shalom Jewish Renewal Synagogue. Worshippers got up from their seats and came up to the bima to light dozens of candles while their rabbi, Arik Labowitz, strummed the notes to a beautiful niggun on his guitar, a repetitive melody without words, popularized by Hasidic Jews as a way to elevate the soul to God.

Or Shalom is the oldest Jewish Renewal congregation in Canada and the only bricks-and-mortar one. Their regular programs include Chanting and Chocolate on Sundays, a musical Soul Shabbat Friday night service with dancing, and on Saturdays, vegetarian kiddushes are on the menu.

In Toronto this fall, for the first time, Jewish Renewal services were held during the High Holidays by a fledgling Ha’Sadeh community. They started meeting in the last few years in someone’s living room and then in a Quaker meeting hall in the Annex neighborhood. This year, they attracted about 150 paying worshippers. Their services featured singing and chanting and prayers, storytelling, movement, meditation, and being outside in nature.

Among the Ha’Sadeh worshippers was Ralph Benmergui. You’ll remember him as a broadcaster, author, and host of some of our past CJN podcasts, including Yehupetzville and Not That Kind of Rabbi. Over the years, Benmergui began to seek a different path to connect to his Judaism and was drawn to the way Jewish Renewal felt. If it sounds to you a little New Age vibe-y, well, that’s probably because the Jewish Renewal movement got its start during the 1960s when a former Chabad rabbi, the late Zalman Schachter-Shalomi, who spent 20 years in Winnipeg, created his own way to engage Jewish university students, first through Hasidic Ashkenazi Jewish mysticism, and Kabbalah. And then later, when he moved to the States, he incorporated modern practices borrowed from other faiths. Today, Jewish Renewal is more widely practiced in about 50 communities mostly in the United States and Israel. But Ralph Benmergui is hoping to raise awareness of it here at home. He was just hired to be the full-time executive director at ALEPH Canada, the Jewish Renewal movement’s Canadian alliance.

Ralph Benmergui: We’re the trip-hop end of Judaism. You know who we are? We’re the innovation factory for Judaism. We’re not a denomination, but we are into saying, “We’ll try this idea, try that idea.” As long as they’re about connecting, we’ll try the idea.

Ellin Bessner: Hello, I’m Ellin Bessner. And this is what Jewish Canada sounds like for Wednesday, October 22, 2025. Welcome to North Star, a podcast of The Canadian Jewish News and brought to you by the Ira Gluskin and Maxine Granovsky Gluskin Charitable Foundation.

Jewish Renewal isn’t considered a new denomination of Judaism to replace the Orthodox, Conservative, Reform, or Reconstructionist streams. But many Jewish Renewal ideas and prayers have been incorporated by mainstream synagogues and congregations. And there are rabbis and spiritual leaders from Victoria to Regina to Ottawa and Montreal who affiliate. Ha’Sadeh’s Toronto Rabbi Aaron Rotenberg works at the Reconstructionist Darchei Noam but was recently ordained by Jewish Renewal. Beth Tzedec, a Conservative congregation, has Aviva Chernick offering Renewal-style spiritual Shabbats on the Floor, and Adath Israel in Toronto recently hired as Associate Rabbi Nava Meiersdorf from Jerusalem’s Renewal Shul.

Ralph Benmergui recently became ordained as a spiritual director with the Renewal movement and offers counselling and workshops on top of his new duties at ALEPH Canada. where he hopes to broaden the reach of the movement across the country. He joins me now from his home in Hamilton.

Congratulations and welcome back.

Ralph Benmergui: Thank you.

Ellin Bessner: How did this happen that you decided to, at a big year in your life, coming up to your 70th birthday, when many people are retiring at that age, you decided to launch into this new career?

Ralph Benmergui: I don’t really understand retiring. I’m not a workaholic, but I don’t understand retiring as a concept. It’s like, “Okay, thank you for your service, see you later.” And when you ask people how they feel about getting older, you don’t get a lot of really great answers because people feel like they’re not valued and their wisdom hasn’t been cultivated and they’re not being asked to be useful. So I’m always wanting to try to do something useful. And I’m just like you. I come from journalism and I’m just curious about everything, so why stop?

So in this case, oddly, I do a thing which is coming up actually, a Jewish Men’s Retreat in the United States. It’s an organization called Menschwork that I’ve been part of for a long time and we do JMR, Jewish Men’s Retreat. So this is the 34th year of JMR and if you’ve been to a Renewal service, you see that they’re completely different than what you’re used to. It’s much more of an embodied kind of spiritual experience. And I really was lamenting the fact that the energy, like, I play drums when I’m there, there’s chant, there’s meditation, there’s reinvigoration of what service is like and what all of that is about. And I just felt like I’m really bummed out that the largest Jewish centre in Canada, Toronto, has 186,000 Jewish souls in it and no Renewal. In the United States, Renewal is all over the place. It’s wonderful. So I was lamenting that.

So the person who was the executive director of ALEPH Canada, Reb Sherrill Gilbert, she’s in Montreal. So she wrote and said, “You know, I think we should have a talk.” I said, “Okay, I don’t know why.” And she said, “Well, I’m stepping down as the executive director. For me, it’s been a volunteer thing and I’ve got a lot of other things I’ve got to do, so I can’t keep doing it, but maybe you should do it.” And I laughed. And she said, “Well, I’m only half kidding. I think you’d actually be good at doing it. I think we could use you doing it.

I should back up and say, I am certified as a spiritual director through the ALEPH Ordination Program in the United States, which I did about 12 years ago. It’s a three-year program. It was wonderful.

So I see things in two ways. There’s spirituality and there’s religion. And what I find often in the brick-and-mortar of synagogue life in Canada and in many places is it’s religion, but the spirituality part isn’t as obvious and as vital. So spirituality to me is a relationship issue between me and myself, me and you, and me and this earth and this cosmos that we’re floating around in.

The biggest cohort of people right now is spiritual but not religious. And why is that? Because they feel that they’re not really connecting in an embodied way to their spiritual life. And what Jewish Renewal is about, it’s not a denomination, it’s a movement really, to reinject spirituality into what we do.

So I’ll give you a simple example. You can be in a synagogue and you know, and everybody knows the tune and you’re kind of in rote and you’re doing it. Ashrei yoshvei veitecha od yehallelucha selah. But if I stopped you in the middle of the song and said, do you know what you’re saying? Like in English, do you know what that is? They go, “No.”

So what we would do is take that and turn it into one sentence and do it in a slow, meditative way. Ashrei. yoshvei. Veitecha. Od. Yehallelucha. Selah. And do that for two or three minutes. And everybody, when it’s over, feels different because they’re connecting to an emotive mode of expression that really allows you to feel a connection.

Ellin Bessner: So this is more of a chanting and meditation, intentional, as opposed to doing the things you’ve always done and it still feels good, but you don’t really understand.

Ralph Benmergui: Yeah, so it is. But we also use the architecture of the services themselves. I mean, we do things that everybody knows, and we do things that kind of turn things upside down a bit so that you’re more awake about what you’re doing.

Ellin Bessner: I want to pick up on what you said earlier about that because I read an article. The Toronto mainstream press did a beautiful piece about it, Toronto Today, and they interviewed somebody I know who’s the executive director of Mazon, Izzy Waxman, who goes to this synagogue, Ha’Sadeh. She told the journalist that while many people like these traditional services that they remember from their grandparents through the generations, and it connects them that way, gor her, who’s a 30-40 something Jewish person in downtown urban communities, she yearned for something different. But the article, Ralph, called them “New hippie Jewish congregation millennials Toronto.” So I’m wondering if that’s fair?

Ralph Benmergui: Yeah, I think it’s kind of a shortcut to try to capture something that’s authentic and sincere. I want to give an example of something that is interesting to me. So there’s kosher, right? For me, I’m a vegetarian, but when I used to eat meat, I was kosher in terms of following halakhic rules. But I did not buy kosher because to me, that just didn’t work. Because the second largest meatpacking kosher business in the United States, the guy who ran it, ended up in jail for being such an abusive, awful, horrible guy.

Ellin Bessner: Right! There was a whole bunch of stories during the pandemic.

Ralph Benmergui: Yeah. So why would I be thinking, oh, it’s kosher, at least it’s kosher? Instead, what Reb Zalman Schachter-Shalomi, who was the founder of Renewal, did, was eco-kosher. And eco-kosher is about having an ethical route to your food. “Am I buying food that is mass produced in factory farms with abused animals?” If that’s the case, it’s not kosher to me. So eco-kosher is reinventing the idea of kosher and adding the idea of a truly ethical framework and a sustainable environmental impact.

Ellin Bessner: So maybe tell us what “Santa God” is for you and how that just no longer works, when you came to that conclusion or that journey?

Ralph Benmergui: So what I was taught in Hebrew school was that there was a God and God had judgments and God had emotions and God would be wrathful and vengeful. But what I ended up with was God as a man with a beard, on a throne, with a “naughty and nice” list. Now, to me, that’s Santa Claus, that’s not God.

I once did a B’nei Mitzvah class at a synagogue where I asked these kids, “So I say, God. You say___?” And every kid had a different answer. One of my favourites though was this girl said, “It’s like walking into a mist and being surrounded by this mist. That’s really lovely.” And I thought, “Well, that’s just great.” So everybody has their own version of what God is. But I couldn’t accept God as Santa God anymore.

So what I really gravitated to was the idea of God as a verb. God is not a noun; it’s not a thing I can. In Judaism, God is unknowable. So why am I making him knowable or her knowable, or there’s no such thing as him and her? So what I live with is God as an action that you and I at this moment are part of 2 trillion galaxies, –not stars-2 trillion galaxies that we know of, and more stars in those galaxies than grains of sand on earth. So this is the humility with which I have to approach the idea of the Creator or creation.

And from there, everything that we’re doing is the action of being a small microcell in the body of this ever creative flow of the universe. It manifests itself in us in our desire to have children, in our desire to create art, in our desire to be useful. So you have a simple choice: You’re a microcell in the body of God. Of the universe. And you can either be a healthy cell or a cancerous cell. That’s your work. And sometimes on the same day you’re both. So that’s God for me.

Ellin Bessner: So what I’ve been learning about Jewish Renewal as I’ve been preparing to speak to you is that it has a lot of elements that are already in centuries, generations of Jewish tradition like the Kabbalah and mysticism and Hasidut. So it’s already legit, but perhaps there’s a bit of a stigma. Like I said before, they call you “Hippie Jews”, but that’s not necessarily fair. So maybe tell us a bit about some of these elements you kind of alluded to already–Meditation and Kabbalah specifically. What would we see in other services, for example, that we already know?

Ralph Benmergui: I remember I took my second son to the Jewish Men’s Retreat one year. So we’re going towards the sanctuary and I said, “Look, there’s guys who are going to get up and dance in the middle of this thing. I’m going to be playing a drum. You don’t have to get up and dance with somebody. Do whatever you want.”

So he went through the whole service. And it’s really letting go of your judgement and your rational self, which is what Hasidism is about, is about just becoming experiential as opposed to rational. Right? Rationalism has done some good things for Judaism, in my opinion, and some things that aren’t good in that it leans towards “Prove it”. So I’ve had people in my spiritual direction world that say, “Look, I don’t believe in God. I mean, prove God!” And I go, “Okay, prove love! You look for it your whole life. You want it in your life. You know when you don’t have it, it breaks your heart, it makes you happy. Prove that it exists. And you can’t. “

So it’s okay to stay confused. It’s okay to have a mystical aspect to your life. For me, it’s okay. That 50% of life for me is a mystery. And the other stuff is stuff we think we can prove and hopefully we can. Science to me is an articulation of what we used to call God.

Ellin Bessner: Even Albert Einstein said there’s no coincidences. That’s God giving you a zetz, right?

Ralph Benmergui: Yeah. So it’s a hard thing to explain because it’s not about explaining.

So we did the service and we come out and I catch up to my son and I go, “So what’d you think?”

He goes, “That was nuts.”

And I said, “Good nuts or bad nuts?”

He said, “No, good nuts!”

And I said, “Why?”

He said, “Because I wasn’t self-conscious anymore. Everybody was doing what they were doing and everybody was committed to being sincere.”

And that’s, I think, the big thing that really attracts people is that you can hide behind being well dressed in a synagogue. And Reb Zalman at one point said, “Look, for a lot of people, what it’s been reduced to is stand up, sit down, stand up, sit down. Here’s the song or wonder when kiddish is. I’ll look at my watch. The cantor singing very beautifully. I’m not. “

Look what happens at High Holidays. Tons of people show up for a day or two and, God love them, because through the money they pay, they help fund the synagogues. But that’s about it. If you’re Orthodox, great. Everybody shows up because you have to. But the rest is a search for more meaning.

So there’s a lot of buried diamonds in Judaism of the mystic approach that got buried by the European rational approach, right? And then you ended up with a much more scholastic kind of rabbinate where it was really about knowing and knowing and knowing, instead of experiencing, experiencing, and experiencing.

Ellin Bessner: You know the old joke of every week, Schwartz and Goldberg go to the synagogue, they talk to each other, and they go to kiddush. And the rabbi asks them why. “Why do you go to shul?” So Schwartz says, “Well, of course, I talk to God.” But Goldberg says, “Rabbi, I go to talk to Schwartz, right? “

And that’s why I go. I talk to my friends. I’m in community. Since my son was killed, I don’t really get the whole God thing anymore. That’s my personal journey on it. It has no meaning for me. I like being there, hearing the shofar and hearing the sermons and stuff. But, I mean, that’s my journey.

Ralph Benmergui: Everybody has to go through their spiritual journey. And I think that with spirituality, there’s a high tide and a low tide. Sometimes we’re nearer to high tide and sometimes we’re quite far and distant from a belief in any of the ideas and ideologies and dogmas. But for me, being a Jew is a complicated issue in and of itself.

I mean, I clearly know that I am the only Sephardic Jew to be the head of ALEPH.

They used to say to my parents, “You don’t speak Yiddish.”

And my father would say, “Well, it doesn’t really come handy in North Africa to speak Yiddish.”

So I have that to deal with in my Jewish identity. There was no Moroccan Hebrew school when I was a kid. We had a synagogue, but no Hebrew school. So I went to Beth Shalom and I lived in Forest Hill, in the last street in Forest Hill, on Marlee Avenue.

I was a Sephardic working-class kid in an Ashkenazi nouveau riche neighborhood. And yet I learned to swim with the Ashkenazim. I married an Ashkenazi. I mean, to me, I had to find ways to make jokes about it. You know, Ashkenazi’s the food you eat. It’s all beige and it starts with a K. So for me, there’s identity issues for everyone and over-identifying with certain aspects of yourself. Part of meditative spirituality is to let go of the idea of clinging and grasping.

Renewal borrows from the great traditions of the world. And those are the kinds of things that I love to play with. But there have been years when I come into Yom Kippur and I’m miles away from my duty, as it was the year before. But it’s a shifting thing that I let go of.

I love to play with the time and the space in between those things. You know, dance between the raindrops of that kind of thing and just enjoy them.

Ellin Bessner: That was my Dad’s inscription on his gravestone. That was his motto: dancing between the raindrops.

Ralph Benmergui: And that’s what you gotta do. You just gotta go, “Okay, look, I’ve no control over any of this. There’s no rhyme or reason to what is just and what is unjust. I only have control over my kavanah, my intention. And these are the kinds of things in Renewal that we really focus on. Bringing some of that non-duality from the Eastern philosophies into Judaism.

Ellin Bessner: This year, many pulpits had rabbis preaching about the situation in Israel, Palestine, Israel, Gaza. And I’m wondering, is Jewish Renewal for people who are more left-wing or progressive? Would people who are centre or right find a home, I guess?

Ralph Benmergui: Yes. I think it’s really important that we don’t conflate Judaism and Zionism. For a lot of people who I know, their Judaism withered on the vine. They never really delved into the intricacies and possibilities of Jewish thought and Jewish action and Jewish practice, any of that.

But when it came to Israel, they strongly identified with Israel. So what ended up in a lot of synagogues is, the things that you raise money for is to keep the air conditioning and the heating going, and Israel. And we grew up, you and I, in a generation where before our generation, there was no Israel.

You know, I was in a meeting at a synagogue where a young man had been there on October 7th, and he came home and they were having a meeting about what place does Israel have in his congregation. And the young man said, “Without Israel, Jews will not, we cannot survive.” And the rabbi, God love him, had the presence of mind to say, “Well, we kind of made it this far, so far, without it, this is the first time we’ve had it.”

Gwynne Dyer did a documentary series for CBC years ago on war, and he started one of the episodes with standing on the Golan Heights and goes, “One of the problems of having a country is that you have to be willing to kill for it. “And I never forgot that. And when I went to Israel the first time and I went to the Kotel and I looked at this thing and I thought, you know, I kind of felt like it was idol worship. It’s a bunch of huge bricks and people are willing to die for it, all kinds of people. And people are praying into it and sticking paper into it. And we’re not supposed to do anything that shows idol worship in any way as a religion. So that’s dicey territory.

But it’s challenging because I’m open to all of it. I’m open to part of myself that gets downright chauvinistic about Israel. I’m open to the part of myself that says nationalism is a disease.

Every human being is sacred. Sacred. Not “We’re sacred and they’re animals.” Every human being is sacred. And we have to continue to push into the other person till we find that sacred spot, even if they’ve buried it so far down that they don’t see it.

Ellin Bessner: One thing I want to end before I ask you with my final question is, you know, we’ve heard a lot about October 8th Jews where they were divorced from the synagogue. Er, not divorced, because that seems like an active decision, but more like lost, or they gave up on it or whatever. And then as soon as October 7th happened, they were seeing people go bake challahs at the synagogue, go for prayer services. Have you seen Renewal being part of that whole re-interest in spirituality and community, whatever flavour it is from people?

Ralph Benmergui: I would say that spirituality and community, absolutely. Partisan politics of any kind, all of those conversations, I haven’t heard them or seen them.

To be a Jew is an interesting privileged minority in North America. And now they find themselves in a place where the relationship that Jews have to Israel itself over these last two years, going now into its third year, is one that I find interesting, because I know a lot of people used to be able to just look at the pavement and keep walking when there was an invasion in Gaza and just go, yeah, some people got killed. All right. You know, if they’d stop making trouble, we’d stop making trouble and all of that.

This time is different. So that’s a whole different conversation, but it’s not. It’s one for JSpace, it’s not one for Ha’Sadeh, it’s not one for the Jewish Renewal communities of Canada. What we’re trying to do is bring people to a place where they have a spiritual centre that they can work on and that they can bring that kavanah, relationships with themselves, with people, and with this planet.

Ellin Bessner: All right, quickly. Reb Zalman was famous in Winnipeg and elsewhere for wearing a rainbow tallit. Do you wear a tallit? And if so, is it a rainbow one or what?

Ralph Benmergui: It’s a white and black traditional Sephardic tallit. And we would never say tallis in a Sephardic synagogue, tallit. Right. That’s my next goal, is to get Sephardic Jews in North America to come to Renewal. And believe me, it’s a long bridge.

Ellin Bessner: Well, if you watch Modi, it sounds much more exciting to be a Sephardic person. He always says his thing where Ashkenazim, you know, are so boring. “Gud Shabbes”.

Ralph Benmergui: No, no. We’re the R&B of Judaism. That’s all I know.

Ellin Bessner: Love it. Listen, I want to wish you only good things and it’s been an honour to talk with you.

Ralph Benmergui: I agree.

Ellin Bessner: I really, really appreciate it.

And that’s what Jewish Canada sounds like. For this episode of North Star, brought to you by the Ira Gluskin and Maxine Granovsky Gluskin Charitable Foundation.

To learn more about Jewish Renewal and where to find programs and services, just go to the links in our show notes. Our show North Star is produced by Andrea Varsany and Zachary Judah Kauffman, with Michael Fraiman as the Executive Producer. Our theme was by Bret Higgins. And thanks for listening.

Show Notes

Canada’s Jewish Renewal movement is growing

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