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Asked to sum up Jewish Renewal while standing on one foot, its local adherents offer varied recipes.

"It's joyful, it's lively, it's musical, it's full of movement, dance, visual arts, and the experience of prayer in community is accessible to everyone no matter how Hebrew literate they are or aren't," says Takoma Park artist-educator De Herman, 52, a member of Kensington's Temple Emanuel.

"It's a return to the past while looking to the future," says Mark Novak, 51, a cantor at Bethesda's Conservative Kol Shalom congregation, who cites the "electric personalities" of such renewal teachers as Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi.

"The illegitimate child of Orthodoxy and Reconstructionism," quips Robin Margolis, senior lay leader with Beth Shekinah, a small Renewal-style woman's group that meets mostly in the District's Dupont Circle area.

Renewal, says this baby boomer, combines "Orthodox mystical theology and Reconstructionism on social issues," such as gender equality, inclusion of gays and lesbians, and welcome of interfaith families.

Their answers are more than academic.

More than 60 area Jews are due to converge next week on the 11th biennial Kallah, sponsored by Aleph: Alliance for Jewish Renewal. Held on the East Coast for the first time in 14 years, the Kallah ‹ which has drawn some 700 people in past years ‹ is expected to draw a similar number to the campus of the University of Pittsburgh in Johnstown, Pa.

The gathering will feature workshops on such eclectic topics as "Entering Deeply into the Shema: Teachings and Practices," "Masterpieces of Jewish Mystical Song: Reaching for the Heights through Music," and "Jewish Sacred Dance," along with a full schedule of Jewish services.

Although small in relation to the four main streams of Judaism ‹ Orthodox, Reform, Conservative and Reconstructionist ‹ Jewish Renewal reaches thousands, estimates Aleph executive director Deb Kolodny.

She cites the 38 groups, 2,800-household strong, affiliated with Aleph; some 25 other nonaffiliated groups, with more than 2,000 households and more than 100 ordained rabbis, cantors and rabbinic pastors are also associated with Renewal.

Locally, there are two groups with ties to Aleph: the Am Kolel/Judaic Resource and Renewal Center in Rockville, with 140 dues-paying households, led by Rabbi David Shneyer, as well as Beth Shekinah.

"Jewish Renewal and Aleph have as our core mission the engagement of tens of thousands of Jews who are disaffected, alienated, disenfranchised," Kolodny says. "That means introducing people to Judaism, so they'll feel welcomed, honored and motivated to continue to live a Jewish life."

Silver Spring's Miriam Levy counts herself among those once lost to Jewish ranks.

Raised Reform, Levy fell away from her religious moorings after her father's sudden death, months before her bat mitzvah ceremony.

Years later, a 1985 retreat in New Mexico with Schachter-Shalomi sent Levy on a "spiritual journey," which became a return to her heritage.

"The approach to Judaism was a doorway for me into my own spiritual life and back into Judaism," recalls Levy, adding, "I had no idea there could be so much fun and joy in Jewish observance."

She left her career as executive director of a mediation center and began pursuing her interest in end-of-life counseling. For four years, Levy joined the staff at Elat Chayyim, a Renewal-inspired retreat center in Accord, N.Y.

Today, Levy says she prays at the Reform Temple Shalom in Silver Spring, teaches meditation at the Adat Shalom Reconstructionist Congregation in Bethesda and dips into purely Renewal activities such as the upcoming Kallah.

"To me, the ideal is that Jewish Renewal would bring more life and zest into all streams of Judaism," Levy said.

Renewal takes its theological underpinnings from such 20th-century theological giants as philosophers Martin Buber and Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, says Shneyer, one of Renewal's longtime champions.

Through his books on Jewish mysticism, Austrian-Israeli Buber illumined "the imminence of God in the world within nature, within all of us," says Shneyer, calling Renewal "Chasidism without the Orthodoxy."

Civil rights activist Heschel, says Shneyer, "understood that to bring God's presence into the world, you had to be involved ... by helping those in need, by addressing oppression, war and false values."

The Renewal movement bubbled up out of the ferment of the late 1960s, part of a search among some youth and young adults for ethnic roots, spirituality and authenticity.

"We didn't call it Renewal then," recalls Shneyer. "It was the chavurah movement, it was the Jewish counterculture."

Time was, Jewish Renewal had a home address in Washington, according to this veteran of the movement.

"Fabrangen was the Jewish counterculture center in 1971," said Shneyer, a co-founder with others. Despite these roots, the District egalitarian chavurah does not have formal ties with Aleph, Kolodny says.

In Shneyer's long view, Renewal is more than eclectic services with a mystical bent. It encompasses the "renaissance of the arts in Judaism" of the past few decades.

Indeed, Shneyer's leadership in the Jewish Folk Arts Society goes back to the 1970s.

Along with 10 others known as the Kosher Kitchen Collective, he also helped run a Jewish restaurant in Silver Spring's White Oak area from 1975 to 1978. Meanwhile, this minyan of idealists lived together in a house that is now home to the modern Orthodox Woodside Synagogue-Ahavas Torah congregation, Shneyer relates.

At one time, he recalls, Fabrangen, the folk arts group and the kitchen collective mulled starting a Jewish Renewal-style camp and retreat center. As a pilot effort, they rented land in Warrenton, Va., he says, dubbing their property Kfar Out, in a play on the Hebrew word for village.

Today, a younger generation has discovered Renewal. Aleph board member Holly Taya Shere, 29, grew up a Reform Jew and dabbled in Wiccan and neo-pagan practices as an adult.

"Through Jewish Renewal, I learned that honoring the earth, honoring the divine feminine, honoring the cycles of the moon ‹ all these things are present at the core of Jewish tradition," says the Silver Spring woman.

Shere will be co-leading a Havdalah service at this month's Kallah.

Once seen, in the words of Elat Chayyim executive director Bennett Nieman, as "flaky," "New Age" and "fringy," Jewish Renewal seems to draw fewer barbs from others in the Jewish community than in times past.

Indeed, its hands-on religion is percolating into mainstream synagogues, he says.

"You can witness the effect of these practices of experiential Judaism in many congregations: the feeling of bringing God into the sanctuary, not just talking about it," Nieman says.

Some 1,600 to 1,700 people visit the Elat Chayyim retreat each year, he notes, and the Washington-Baltimore region supplies the third largest number, after New York and Boston.

Most visitors to the retreat center belong to Reform or Conservative synagogues, says Nieman.

Joe Wielgosz, 26, who grew up Reform in Bethesda and Kensington, is one of its 28 residents.

Elat's Webmaster, Wielgosz sees himself as among others in his generation seeking a spirituality in their own religious roots.

"What got me engaged was integrating the ways we live and think in the 21st century and Jewish spiritual traditions," he says.

Judith Dack, a Bethesdan who often teaches yoga at the center, touts Renewal as the reason this formerly secular Jew is learning Hebrew and studying Torah today.

"It's changed my life," Dack says. "How do we make a Jewish path inviting, accessible and useful? That's, I think, what Jewish Renewal does."

In the Washington area, that path seem elusive at times. It crops up in events such as the Kallah and draws crowds to local visits by Renewal teachers such as Rabbi Shefa Gold or Hazzan Richard Kaplan.

Looking up the movement in any phone book is apt to prove fruitless, suggest its local followers.

"There isn't really an address for Jewish Renewal," says the District's Roni Posner, 56, an Elat Chayyim board member who affiliates with the Capital Kehillah. "The role that Jewish Renewal can play ‹ not only for my baby boomer generation but for younger people ‹ is a return to synagogues and a strengthening of their synagogues."

Local rabbis contacted for this story describe Renewal as an adjunct and a fount of innovation for congregational life, but flag some concerns as well.

"Much creative music and liturgy has emerged from the Renewal community and found its way into Reconstructionist and other congregations, and we are the stronger for it," says Rabbi Fred Scherlinder Dobb of Adat Shalom.

At Congregation Ahavat Israel-Chabad in Fairfax, Rabbi Sholom Deitsch cites "no requisite" for immersion in Chasidism, the Jewish mystical tradition that undergirds both Renewal and Chabad.

But he cautions that study of Kabbalah poses risks for those who do not bring a sense of Jewish context to their learning.

"If you're going to delve into these things without a proper background, there's a danger to that: ... misconstruing the intent, using it as pop Kabbalah," Deitsch says. "It's like trying to see football or baseball without knowing the rules."

But Hazzan Sunny Schnitzer, of the independent liberal Bethesda Jewish Congregation, sees Renewal as a "neo-Chasidic" trend that serves much the same function as the 18th-century movement.

"What Jewish Renewal is trying to do is, I think, what the early Chasidic masters were trying to do, which is to make Judaism accessible to those who are not necessarily learned or steeped in the tradition," says Schnitzer, using the door of "ecstatic experience."

On the other hand, he voiced approval that its acolytes are turning to more Jewish text study "to lend gravitas to Jewish Renewal."

For his part, Rabbi Ethan Seidel, of the District's Tifereth Israel Congregation, sees Renewal as one path toward deeper Jewish involvement. Indeed, he backs his congregant Novak's choice to pursue the rabbinate through Aleph's seminary-without-walls.

"It's not my Judaism, but neither is Orthodoxy, Reform or Reconstructionism," said this Conservative rabbi. "I still support all these flowerings of Judaism. I see them all as servants of God."