American Jewish History

In September 1987, Paul Cowan, the celebrated Village Voice writer, memoirist, and activist, was diagnosed with leukemia.¹ He died in September 1988, days after turning forty-eight.² After his death, Cowan's wife, Rachel, then a rabbinical student at the New York campus of Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, the Reform movement's seminary, gathered with friends and colleagues around her dining room table. They lamented that there were few Jewish spiritual care resources available for those facing serious illness and their families.³ At the time, there were well-known Christian models of spiritual healing services and other non-Jewish, spiritually-based healing rituals. But the relevant Jewish communal resources were limited to Jewish hospital chaplains, a few Jewish hospices, rabbinic visits for seriously ill congregants, and the traditional practices of bikur holim (visiting the sick) and communal prayers for the ill.⁴ Rachel Cowan and this group of Jewish feminists who had been gathering at her home recognized a widespread hunger for Jewish communal resources devoted to spiritual and physical healing, especially outside of medical contexts.

Cowan and her circle identified this spiritual need at the very moment that gay and lesbian Jewish communal leaders in California were themselves developing new rituals and language to support spiritual healing in a community ravaged by the AIDS crisis.⁵ Unbeknownst to [End Page 605] Cowan and her friends, in Los Angeles in October 1987, Debbie Fried-man and Rabbi Drorah Setel, two feminist innovators deeply connected to Judaism's Reform Movement (and then romantic partners), revised one of the core Jewish prayers for ill people—the Mi Shebeirach ("The One Who Blesses") prayer for healing. At the time, the prayer was rarely used in Reform communities. These two women, both then immersed in the AIDS crisis and the gay and lesbian Jewish community, re-wrote the traditional Mi Shebeirach as an egalitarian, empowering, and spiritually contemplative song for use in communal settings. And just five months before Paul Cowan's death, Yoel Kahn, a young gay rabbi working at Congregation Sha'ar Zahav—a gay and lesbian synagogue nearly 3,000 miles away in San Francisco then being decimated by AIDS—had created a model Jewish healing service.⁶ Indeed, Jewish healing services based on Kahn's model, and this new Mi Shebeirach prayer for healing, both coming out of lesbian and gay contexts, would transform not only the nature of personal prayer, but also the very visibility of illness, spiritual healing, and the body in liberal Jewish communities.

Within overlapping feminist and gay and lesbian Jewish communities on either side of the country, mourning, loss, and gay communal solidarity set the stage for the elaboration of new forms of Jewish healing rituals. Gay, lesbian, and feminist Jews in California met the AIDS crisis with new forms of prayer and ritual, while in New York, the newly ordained rabbis Rachel Cowan and Nancy Flam, along with Rabbi Susan Freeman, the feminist activist and journalist Ellen Hermanson, and the novelist Nessa Rapoport continued their conversations around Cowan's dining room table.⁷ These women envisioned new Jewish spiritual support resources for the ill; along with trainings for clergy, social workers, and medical professionals. They also imagined advocating for research into health and spiritual healing and developing new liturgy and rituals centered on the spiritual needs of the ill, their loved ones, and their caregivers in a Jewish context. Out of these conversations, the framework for what would later become the National Center for Jewish Healing (NCJH) emerged. By the mid-1990s, dozens of newspapers and magazines profiled the national Jewish healing movement that Cowan, Flam, Freeman, Hermanson, and Rapoport had sparked.⁸ This high-profile media coverage and word of mouth helped move the healing movement into the [End Page 606] mainstream of Jewish life.⁹ By 1995, the NCJH had trained hundreds of rabbis and other Jewish leaders on their innovative rituals, liturgy, and program ideas.¹⁰ These included the new Mi Shebeirach song and a complete healing service modified by Nancy Flam and others but based on...