On a recent afternoon, Rabbi Hanniel Levenson and his congregation floated on their boards in the sea off the eastern tip of Long Island, waiting for the big one.
The rabbi caught a wave. “I was just cruising it, hanging out,” he said yesterday. “It wasn’t a big wave at all but I surrendered to the ocean.
That’s another very important spiritual teaching. There is such strength in surrender.”
Rabbi Levenson’s surfing services began this summer, as part of an effort to reach a younger generation. His synagogue, The Jewish Centre of the Hamptons, had long sought to marry worship and religious teaching with the chief pre-occupations of their holidaying congregation, by holding Friday night Shabbat services on a nearby beach.
Rabbi Levenson conceived of more aquatic services while teaching Hebrew to a class of pre-teen boys who were preparing for their bar mitzvahs. Two of his pupils hailed from California, where they were keen surfers.
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Convinced that an essential element of the teaching process lies in agreeing to be taught by ones pupils, the rabbi asked them to take him surfing. These sessions grew from “a handful of kids and some adults” into floating congregations.
Although point breaks and longboards do not appear in the Torah, the rabbi noted that Moses had parted the Red Sea as he led the Israelites from Egypt. “The word Egypt in Hebrew is mitzrayim, meaning narrow place,” he said. As they escaped there were “huge waves on either side,” he said. “To a certain degree, when we get to go surfing we are re-enacting this escape from narrow places. When we get out onto the ocean and see the vastness of water we know we are all in this together.”
He also thinks that seeing “a spiritual leader with his shirt off” could prove a valuable lesson too. After a summer on the waves, Rabbi Levenson, 32, who previously worked as an acrobat at the Metropolitan Opera, and as a yoga instructor, is quite a proficient surfer. And he now owns a wetsuit.
“Being in the water all year round, that’s a game changer,” he said.