God in the Wilderness Raised in a devoutly Jewish family and ordained at the prestigious Hebrew Union College, Jamie Korngold was following a fairly typical rabbinical path in the 1990s. She presided over Saturday services at an ornate syna- gogue in Calgary, where she lead a large congregation in songs, chants and readings. Still, she often found herself thinking about the people who weren’t there. “No matter how great my sermons were, I knew I wasn’t going to reach beyond the pulpit,” she recalls, noting that 70 percent of Jews are not affiliated with a traditional


“We are rediscovering food as a link between us and God,” says L. Shannon Jung, professor at Saint


Paul School of Theology… adding that many of


his students have gone on to start congregation community gardening programs in churchyards.


congregation. “I needed to meet the people where they are.” Today, she has no synagogue at all. Instead, through her rapidly grow- ing Boulder, Colorado-based Adventure Rabbi program, she leads brief Shab- bat services at a mountaintop warm- ing house at the Copper Mountain ski resort, before spending “a holy day” carving turns on powder-filled slopes with her congregants. For the Jewish New Year, she leads them on a hike to a mountain top, where they unroll a giant Torah and toss snow into a rushing stream to bid farewell to past mistakes and welcome new beginnings. At Passover, they—like their Biblical ancestors—gather in the desert, where she tells the story of the Jewish Exodus from Egypt during their hike to a strik- ing red-rock arch in Moab, Utah.


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“It was an experience like none


that I had ever had,” says Lori Ropa, 45, a lifelong Jew who attended an Adven- ture Rabbi Rosh Hashanah retreat with her husband, a Christian. “The opportu- nity to have a peaceful connection with God and with myself amidst all of that beauty really creates an intense expe- rience for me,” says Ropa, who now attends Korngold’s services regularly. “I go because I want to be there, not because I feel I need to.” Korngold’s God in the Wilderness:


Rediscovering the Spirituality of the Great Outdoors, includes a reminder that Moses had to hike across the desert and climb a mountain to receive the Ten Commandments. “The physical ex- ertion of the desert climb, coupled with the stark desert beauty, helped Moses to arrive spiritually and emotionally


in a place beyond internal chatter—a place often called awe,” she writes, suggesting that, regardless of one’s faith, the very act of experiencing awe (for example, over a beautiful sunrise or the life cycle of a tree in the yard) connects us with something bigger. “So, you spend much of your day in a cubicle… Get a spider plant, and watch the miracle of its growth on top of your file cabinet,” Korngold advises. “Change your route to work so that you can drive through a park.”


The Sacred Track For 58-year-old Warren Kay, Ph.D., a track coach and religious studies pro- fessor at Merrimack College, in Boston, the act of running represents a move- able sanctuary where mental clutter falls away and time seems to bend to


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