Lab/Shul is honored to welcome Avraham Efal to our team, and allow him to introduce himself in his own words.

So much uncertainty. So much at stake. Every vote counts. Every mask. Every kindness. Every breath. It’s easy to feel lost, alone. “Nothing depends on you.” My Zen Buddhist teacher Bernie Glassman, founder of Zen Peacemakers, told me once in one of our visits to Auschwitz-Birkenau.

Wait, what? These words return to me today as I bear witness to everything that the world is facing today. So much uncertainty. How could nothing depend on me?

I grew up in Israel to secular parents. We recited kiddush around my maternal Hungarian grandparents’ shabbat table, but I had little interest in spirituality, Judaism, or their death-defying stories of evading concentration camps. I served in the IDF as a criminal investigator. I fielded injuries, soldiers’ suicides, petty crimes, smuggling of arms and claims of violence towards Palestinians.

As a student at Bezalel academy of art and design in Jerusalem, I scored an exchange program scholarship to the School of Visual Arts in NYC. It was love in first sight. After graduation, I stayed in NY and lived the life as an illustrator, artist and designer. I pursued a personal art project and a deeper calling, and backpacked through Japan. Finding fundamental refuge in Zen Buddhism, I was attracted by the arts and simplicity of practice & conduct: train your mind, realize selflessness, and serve. I lived in an American Zen monastery & temple for four years, practicing intensive meditation and studying sutras and manuals. I still dream with gratitude of my time there.

Reading of a Zen master, who happened to be a Jew, and conducted multi-faith, multi-national ‘Bearing Witness’ retreats in the death camps where my grandparents’ families were killed –I  heard another calling still. It was in Poland that I met Bernie. We traveled to Bethlehem, the Bahamas, Bosnia and more – for the next few years, I served as his attendant and we traveled the world. He integrated spiritual practice, global perspective, social engagement, play, entrepreneurship, with deep faith in Not Knowing, Bearing Witness, and the actions that rise from these two. Bernie was a teacher and friend and much fun to be around. I owe him a debt of gratitude.

For four years I served as the executive director of Zen Peacemakers International. Every year, we returned to Auschwitz for that retreat. New Native American relatives I made through the bearing witness programs in South Dakota got me wondering – to which tribe do I belong? Who are my people? A new voice answered. One that was asking for a white Shabbat shirt, and rejoiced in chanting, from the kishkes, prayers in my own mother-tongue.

I followed that voice to Aleph Rabbinic and Cantorial program to pursue the teachings and practices of my own ancestors. And, to a Shabbat night in Brooklyn, where I had sat among the crowd with many of you. As part of the service, the rabbi invited a refugee from Africa to speak. I took notice. I let the Rabbi cut in line to the bathroom and on Rabbi Amichai’s way out I said shalom.

I am excited to join Lab/Shul as a rabbinic fellow. “Nothing depends on me,” reminds me that I am not doing anything by myself. Now, I am responding to the calling to partner with you in the experiment of our lifetime. Showing up as allies to our fellow creatures and elements of this Earth, to each other and our Native American, POC, and queer siblings.

We are tasked to train our mind, master empathy, and uproot prejudice and systematic normative supremacy. All this, while weaving our own unique stories of widely diverse Jewish experience, with those of the nations and peoples of the world, in the one Great Story of Humanity that has stewarded this planet for millenia. We are tasked to learn from and heal our ancestors so we can become the next ones to those who follow, reinvigorate what we call our tradition with accountability, relevance and inclusivity, and celebrate with bold and life-affirming creativity. 

Jewish mystic sources refer to it as Ein-Soff, the Infinite. In Lakhota, Native Americans say Wana – ‘here and now!’ Buddhists call it Nothingness. Could it be that this Nothing truly depends on me, on you, on us, because ‘it’ is not other than you and I and this great Earth? Here and Now? Our breath. Never apart.

I am grateful to have found Lab/Shul and all of you as partners in this great task. As our ancestral calendar moves into the darkest time of the year and celebrates the miracle of light without and within, I am grateful to have mine reflected in yours. May this light, our shared attention and care, be blessed, grow to a nurturing fire of connection, may it ignite sparks of inspiration and creativity, may it rise up as a burning guiding column of direction and hope.

With Love,

Avraham Rami Efal