Rabbi
mixes faith with surfing
By Alexis Kindig
On-line Forty-Niner
Rabbi
Nachum Shifren loves to surf. But when he
sees a wave, he doesn’t just see a chance
to indulge in his hobby; he sees spiritual
truth and a chance to make the world a better
place.
He shared his insights with a small group
of students in the University Interfaith
Center Tuesday afternoon.
Shifren, a Malibu native, has been surfing
since the mid ’60s. He has surfed all over
the world and is dedicated to the surfing
lifestyle and what he calls the “aloha spirit”
— a spirit of sharing and simplicity that
he encountered in Hawaii in the ’60s.
More recently, Shifren, 51, has come to
see surfing as a window to spirituality
and as a means to affect change among inner-city
youth.
Shifren describes himself as being nearly
an atheist in his earlier days, but had
an epiphany while attending graduate school
in Germany in the early ’80s. On a train
from Hamburg to Hanover, Shifren said he
was assigned a seat next to an elderly former
Nazi.
Unable to switch seats, Shifren said he
sat and listened to the man talk about his
experiences with the Nazis for five hours.
Listening to the old man, Shifren said,
“I wondered why I wasn’t more into who I
was.”
Shortly thereafter, Shifren sold his surfboards
and his car and moved to Israel. He served
in the Israeli army and received a degree
in combat fitness training. He eventually
wound up in a rabbinical seminary, and was
ordained a rabbi in 1990, according to his
Web site.
Since his spiritual conversion, Shifren
said he sees deeper meaning in surfing.
He finds paralells between Jewish mysticism
and his favorite activity.
Surfing is a connection with a primordial
power, he said because of the fact that
water has not changed — all water on earth
is the same water that has always been here.
“A wave that breaks in Japan, its component
parts eventually end up all over the world,”
he said.
Shifren now lives in Venice with his wife
and four children, and is a Spanish teacher
at Dorsey High School. He uses surfing as
a tool to improve the lives of his inner-city
students. He says that surfing allows students
to see that they are not at the center of
the universe and that there are forces much
larger than they are.
“It’s all about attitude,” Shifren said.
“It doesn’t matter what you have; you can’t
take it with you.”
Shifren is in the process of making a documentary
film, titled “Surfing and Soul,” about teaching
inner-city teenagers how to surf. It will
be distributed to schools as an educational
tool. He also has an appearance in a surfing
movie called, “Stepping into Liquid,” which
is planned for release next summer.
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