As a rabbi, Simcha Zevit is used to helping people. That’s not unusual for a Jewish spiritual leader.
What’s unique is the number of avenues that Rabbi Zevit has helped people through in her career.
Currently, she is the rabbi with the Narberth Havurah. She is also a leadership coach, working with executives, clergy members and more to help them reach their full potential.
In the past, she worked extensively as a chaplain, providing comfort for those with debilitating diseases. In her previous home of Cleveland, she started a nonprofit that brought Jews of different synagogues together for united programming.
As the rabbi of a havurah and not a synagogue, there are unique parameters that Zevit works within. A havurah, she explained, is more casual and less structured than a typical shul. The word havurah comes from the Hebrew word for “friend,” and members of the group see themselves as such. The Narberth Havurah doesn’t have a permanent building. Members gather in each other’s homes and in general communal buildings.
“Because we don’t have a building, in some ways, it makes it a real emphasis for us to create a sort of sacred space, mostly through our relationships and our connections with each other,” Zevit said. “Many of the people that are part of the Havurah are people that prefer a smaller, more intimate community that is focused on, of course, Shabbat and holidays and the Jewish cycle of the year — all the same kind of emphases as a synagogue would have.”
The job of a havurah rabbi is a bit different than that of their peers at a shul, but the spirituality is the same. One part that’s different is the level of input that the community members have and contribute. At Narberth Havurah, everything is a team effort, which only helps strengthen the connections between members.
Zevit moved to Mount Airy in 2014 and began at the havurah in 2015, making this High Holiday season her 11th with the community.
Zevit worked as a chaplain for about a decade, including at the hospital at the University of Pennsylvania. She said that people often ask her about the difficulties of the job, to which she is quick to tell them that it’s not easy, but that it’s exceptionally rewarding.
“People often say, ‘Oh, it must be so hard to be a chaplain,’ because I was in hospitals. I specifically worked a lot with long-term patients that had different forms of blood cancer, so people were there in the hospital for a long time, as opposed to [those with] a quick turnaround,” Zevit said. “It is hard — it’s emotionally hard, but it’s also incredibly beautiful.
You get to see the way that people take care of each other and that families take care of each other. The resilience of the human spirit, the way people rise to meet really, really difficult circumstances, and the ways that people turn to prayer and connection and deepen their experience of themselves and love in the face of death.”
Becoming a chaplain isn’t as simple as signing up — Zevit took a clinical pastoral education course that prepared her for the work. She said that the course taught skills that are transferable to plenty of situations, not just sitting bedside with those suffering from illness.
“The essence of the education for a chaplain is really the capacity to listen and to be fully present with people. Those are skills that, of course, translate to the ability to provide pastoral care in any number of situations, whether within my congregation or doing funerals or other life cycle events,” she said.
In her role as a leadership coach, Zevit works with those who are looking to expand their capabilities while in positions of high consequence. She is the program manager for a network of Jewish coaches across the country and in Israel that serve a variety of Jewish communities and organizations.
“It’s becoming much more of a widely used way to help leaders develop their leadership skills with people both internal within their organizations or oftentimes from outside of their organization. So they have somebody, a thought partner, somebody who can give them tools, somebody who helps them be accountable for their own growth,” she said.
While this work isn’t always explicitly religious, Zevit said it is spiritual.
“I think when we can work towards our own wholeness, body, heart, mind, spirit, then we have much more capacity to lead others,” she said.
For Zevit, a thoroughly Jewish life is the one for her. Whether it’s at the havurah, with a nonprofit, at the hospital or in a meeting room with executives, she looks to bring some spiritual clarity to those who need it.
this is a true testament to who rabbi simcha is and to what the havurah means to the community and its members