New Haven Independent

That’s because yoga as a Jewish spiritual practice is alive and well and twisting and turning at the Joseph Slifka Center for Jewish Life at Yale.

For the second year in a row, Slifka offers a different kind of High Holiday service this week and next: a “Yoga and Meditation” services. Unlike at Reform, Conservative, or Orthodox services, worshipers leave the suits and ties or dresses at home — and bring those Jewish leotards instead.

It turns out that yoga has plenty in common with the themes that mark the so-called High Holidays, or Days of Awe.

Slifka Associate Rabbi Lina Zerbarini presides over the High Holiday yoga/meditation services with movements from the yoga tradition accompanying each of the elements of the Jewish liturgy.

Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year celebration, begins Friday night and runs through Sunday afternoon. The comes Yom Kippur, or the Day of Atonement, eight days later. Zerbarini’s Slifka-sponsored services will take place at the Yale’s Afro-American Cultural Center, 211 Crown St. (For info about services call 432-1134.)

“I praise God with all my bones,” said Zerbarini (pictured) as she participated, by way of preparation, in one of Slifka’s twice weekly yoga classes. The classes are taught by Virna Lisa Steele, who will co-lead the High Holiday services with Zerbarini.

For five years Slifka has offered yoga, among other activities like drumming, as a kind of postlude to follow each session of prayer. On the holidays prayer services, can, uh, stretch from morning until late afternoon and be physically very demanding.

Many yoga practitioners, said Zerbarini, don’t connect to the traditional liturgy. She saw it as a natural step to fashion an entire service where movement not only inflects but quite literally embodies the prayers was a natural one. In her view many of the themes in yoga are close to Jewish tradition, both in substance and style.

Take, teshuvah, the Hebrew word that captures the main theme of the holiday. The word is often translated as repentance. The etymological root is “turning,” which elides into re-turning, or repentance, Zerbarini pointed out.

Through yoga’s bodily turning and twisting, Zerbarini said, “We’re literally turning as in teshuvah.”

A yoga service intersperses well-known yogic postures like the mountain or the extended child pose or other held movement with the liturgy. All Jewish prayer, Zerbarini pointed out, including the most traditional, involves movement.

The inspiration for the insight was the prayer of a woman, Hannah, as recounted in the First Book of Samuel.

To overcome her barrenness Hannah prayed so fervently, with her lips moving — and perhaps doing the now traditional swaying or davening movements — that Eli the high priest thought her drunk.

She wasn’t. She defended herself well and was rewarded with becoming the mother of the Hebrew tribes’ first prophet, Samuel, who went on to anoint the first king of Israel, Saul. The rest is, as they say, Jewish history.

So it all derives from prayer that involves the body as well as consciousness of the breath, which is another point of contingency between yoga and the holidays’ themes.

Zerbarini’s specific theme for Rosh Hashanah morning will be the creation of Adam as described in the Genesis text, “And He blew into [the creature’s] nose the breath of life.” The Hebrew word for breath and for soul are almost identical.

The whole approach to yoga is to stretch but not stress, Zerbarini said. The same is true for the Jewish approach to prayer, especially on the holidays.

“We are pure and yet aware of our limitations. Yoga is the same. In a pose we might say we strive for strength and softness, effort and ease. We say, ‘I’m a sinner’ and [also] a little less than the angels.”

You do with your body what the liturgy says: “Stretch and grow, but not too much because you don’t want to hurt yourself.”

Mausner, a Yale junior studying anthropology, was sold. He said that in his experience “a traditional service drags but the yoga [service] is focused.” He was at last year’s first yoga service, and well remembers holding long poses during the blowing of the shofar. He’ll be going back for more.