"You shall be holy, for I the Lord Your God am holy." All of Jewish religious life can be understood as the pursuit of holiness. One of the ways in which Jews are taught to become holy is by imitating God's attributes or middot. Too often, though, we are told to be holy rather than how to become holy. Learning and engaging with spiritual practices that train us to cultivate and to express godly attributes is essential.

The central spiritual practices, or Core Practices, that the IJS teaches and asks participants to engage in are Torah Study, Prayer, Mindfulness Meditation, Yoga, Spiritual Direction and Retreat.

The spiritual practices that the IJS emphasizes are taught and practiced in order to increase God-consciousness and in order to cultivate godly attributes such as faith, equanimity, joy, humility, and truthfulness. When we engage in spiritual practice, we may experience feelings of impatience, disappointment, frustration and boredom. Working with spiritual practices includes encountering resistance, negativity, confusion, loss of intention, and the capacity to return to our intention and resolve.

The experience of God is an ongoing process, supported by practices, informed by our tradition, nourished through contact with and awareness of the practices, thoughts and traditions of others. We have a shared commitment to the possibility of devekut—the experience of oneness, which we experience as oneness with God.

The pedagogical philosophy of the program is that the teachers are also seekers whose goal is to share insights and to create an atmosphere of trust where participants can risk sharing their own spiritual and professional struggles, their ideas and beliefs, and expand their vision of the kind of leaders they yearn to be. Few of the participants have any other place of safety for such conversation and learning. This integrated learning program provides the students with practices to help them maintain their ability to be reflective rather than reactive, to listen well, to be more patient and open-hearted with their congregants and others in their lives, to be more daring in speaking from their convictions, and to feel closer to God than they have been able to do previously.