ABSTRACT
I was a rabbi who had fled congregational life, returned to Columbia to get a PhD, and was working full-time as a clinical psychologist when I met Stephen Gilligan. The location near the Continental Divide, high in the Colorado Rockies, might well have been a metaphor for the divisions within me. Stephen, then twenty-eight, was coleading a hypnosis workshop. I needed all the trance I could get to navigate the rapids of an exquisitely painful divorce. That we would become beloved friends was unimaginable to me. An even greater bonus was Steve’s developing Self-Relations, a model of human “being” that by inviting “them” in enabled me to reclaim fully the estranged religious half of my identity and then to fashion a [Both/ And] relationship so that I am now at one and the same time [rabbi⇔psychologist], with both parts interacting with each other in a respectful, loving, sometimes tumultuous relationship. Affirming both, at the same time, I realized how the Self-Relations concept of the relational self is not only rooted in our Jewish foundational myth but also ever present in the centuries of biblical and postbiblical insights and learning that comprise our Jewish inheritance. The playing out of a covenantal sacred relational dynamic involving human beings, their nature, and the Divine is at the core of what Jewish tradition is about. In recent years a major focus of my work has been being a “sponsor,” witnessing in Jewish tradition the presence of relational thinking, naming it where it appears, and blessing it.2 Self-Relations concepts provide a framework, rationale, and methodology for inviting in the multiple “selves” of each of us, as well as our relations to all others of our
species and to the Holy and Bountiful One. This book is heir to a long history of our tradition’s witnessing, naming, and blessing the very best aspects of the environment in which we live, bringing them into relationship within Jewish life and thought, into a loving, respectful [I-You] relationship.3
