Come witness and join a conversation
between Reb Judith Goleman and Basha Hirschfeld

The phrase “tikkun olam” means to repair the world.  It points to the human responsibility for fixing what is wrong with the world.  It is connected to the Kabbalistic teachings which say that God poured out the  qualities of kindness and truth into vessels which could not hold them and they broke into an infinite amount of pieces, so that shards of holiness are scattered throughout the world and in each of us,  and our job is to put the pieces back together. The way we can do this is through "acts of loving kindness." 

There is also the famous saying “You are not required to finish the work, yet neither are you permitted to desist from it.”   This is from Pirkei Avot or “The Ethics of the Fathers” (sometimes called “The Sayings of the Fathers”), a collection of wisdom from the Jewish Talmudic sages. This saying is attributed to Rabbi Tarfon, who lived and taught 2,000 years ago.

The Mahayana path of Buddhism points to everyone being in the same boat and interconnected, which means that none of us can get enlightened (wake up to what is) until we all get there. So the path of the Bodhisattva asks each of us to think of others, and put others before ourselves until all have attained enlightenment. 

How are these two paths related?  Join Reb Judith and Basha in a conversation about the similarities and differences between the two.

Rabbinic Pastor Judith Goleman, MFT, is a chaplain and also has a private practice in individual and couple counseling. As teenager she fell in love with the joyous tales of the Hasidic Rabbis of the 18th century, who saw God as the deep nature of everything in Creation (including us in our true potential). As an adult she encountered this spirit in the Jewish Renewal movement, and was ordained as a Rabbinic Pastor in this spiritual approach. It also informs her psychotherapy practice.

Barbara (Basha) Hirschfeld has been a student of Buddhism for over 25 years, and of Judaism all her life. She is one of a few lucky students of Ani Pema Chodron and through her of the Shambhala lineage, as first taught by Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche. She teaches meditation in the North Bay at various venues and owns and runs a retreat space in west Sonoma County called “Open Sky Retreat Space.” Her favorite thing is to bring together the two wisdom traditions, and to explore how her Buddhist training can inform her Jewish faith.