Rachel Cowan, innovative rabbi, dies

Rabbi Rachel Cowan, a Mayflower descendant who converted to Judaism and became a leading innovator in three nontraditional movements in that faith — helping couples navigate the shoals of mixed marriage, designing “healing services” to comfort the sick and dying, and injecting contemplative practices such as meditation and mindfulness into religious life — died Friday at her home in New York. She was 77.

The cause was brain cancer, her family said.

Cowan learned more than two years ago that she had cancer, and her friends held twice-weekly services of songs, psalms and readings for her.

A flavor of that healing movement was evident in one service: In the middle of a meditation, according to Rabbi Lisa Goldstein, executive director of the Institute for Jewish Spirituality, a frail Cowan piped up, “You know, at my funeral I want you to sing ‘If I Had a Hammer.’ ” Her friends asked if she wanted to hear the tune at that moment; when she nodded yes, they broke out in song.

Cowan and her husband, Paul Cowan, a writer and reporter for The Village Voice who grew up with little sense of his Jewish heritage, were 1960s civil rights and anti-war activists who began exploring Judaism in their mid-30s.

They were never passive worshippers but became passionate movers in a Jewish revival on the Upper West Side of Manhattan that stressed intimate, egalitarian, smallgroup circles rather than large temple services.

At one point, their synagogue, the once grand but then crumbling Ansche Chesed, housed five small congregations, each with its individual approach to worship and no rabbi.