A pediatrician in Gallup blends yoga and Torah for New Mexico teens
In a converted adobe clinic off Route 66, a Jewish pediatrician has begun guiding teenagers through sun salutations before opening a Chumash. Dr. Rebecca Goldstein, who completed her residency in the same high-desert landscape that surrounds Gallup, has fused two traditions that rarely share a mat: the contemplative physicality of yoga and the textual discipline of Torah study. Her weekly gathering, held in a back room lined with anatomical charts and Hebrew posters, has quietly become one of the most unusual youth programs in the American Southwest.
For families watching from afar, whether in the leafy streets of Melbourne's Caulfield or the coastal avenues of Sydney's Coogee, the idea of a doctor doubling as a spiritual teacher may feel familiar. Across the Jewish diaspora, paediatricians are often the first to notice when a teenager is struggling with anxiety, body image or identity. Dr. Goldstein's response has been to fold those observations back into a curriculum of breath, movement and ancient text.
The crossroads of Route 66 and tradition
Gallup sits at a cultural intersection long before Dr. Goldstein set up her practice. The town grew as a railroad hub and trading post, drawing Navajo and Zuni traders alongside Anglo settlers and, later, Jewish merchants who arrived with the rails in the 1880s. A short walk from the historic El Rancho Hotel, the clinic occupies a building that once housed a dry goods store. The walls still carry the faint smell of pine resin and the weight of the Jewish history of the Santa Fe Trail merchants and pioneers, a story that Dr. Goldstein sometimes retells during the Torah portion of her sessions.
The teenagers who arrive each week come from varied backgrounds. Some are from Gallup itself, others travel from Window Rock and Grants. A handful are the children of doctors and nurses at the local Indian Medical Center, while others are the grandchildren of traders and craftspeople. Like the youth groups in Brisbane's Jewish community or Perth's small but resilient congregations, these teens are seeking something their secular surroundings rarely offer: a sustained conversation about who they are.
Yoga as a language of the body
The yoga portion of the evening runs for roughly forty minutes. Dr. Goldstein, who trained in Hatha and Yin styles during a year in India before medical school, designs sequences that mirror the Torah portion of the week. When the parasha speaks of exile and wandering, the teens might hold warrior poses for longer. When it speaks of rest, the sequence softens into floor-based stretches. The connection is intentional, though Dr. Goldstein insists it is never forced.
The benefits are measurable in the same ways Australian paediatricians have begun to document. Recent briefings shared through the Royal Australasian College of Physicians have pointed to yoga as a helpful adjunct for adolescents dealing with anxiety, sleep disruption and the lingering effects of pandemic-era isolation. Dr. Goldstein has watched the same shift in her own clinic: teens who arrive hunched over their phones begin to stand a little taller, to breathe a little deeper, after a few weeks on the mat.
For a doctor trained in evidence-based medicine, this matters. She keeps a notebook of observed changes, though she is quick to note that some of the most important shifts are the ones that cannot be quantified. A teenager who refuses to speak in a clinical setting might open up during a partner stretch. A young person who has never read a word of Hebrew might suddenly ask what the word nefesh actually means.
Torah as a mirror for growing minds
After the mats are rolled away, the group gathers around a low table for Torah study. Dr. Goldstein uses a translational approach, moving between the Hebrew text, the classical commentaries and her own reflections. She deliberately avoids the dry, lecture-style teaching that can alienate teenagers, instead asking questions that bridge the weekly portion to the lived experience of a sixteen-year-old in the high desert.
The curriculum has grown organically. One week, a teenager asked about the meaning of kavod, honour, and the discussion turned to how honour is shown in different families, from the matrilineal households of the Navajo Nation to the nuclear families in Albuquerque. Another week, the portion about the golden calf led to a frank conversation about peer pressure and social media, topics that would not be out of place in a youth group meeting in Adelaide's Glenelg or Sydney's Eastern Suburbs.
Dr. Goldstein is careful to position Torah not as a rulebook but as a library. Her teenagers learn to argue, to question, to find the places where the text seems to contradict itself, and to sit with that tension. In this way, the study hall functions less like a synagogue classroom and more like the Socratic seminars favoured in progressive Jewish schools in Melbourne's inner north.
Why a healer reaches beyond the clinic
Pediatricians are trained to treat the whole child, but the constraints of modern practice often reduce that vision to fifteen-minute appointments and a rotating menu of referrals. Dr. Goldstein has spoken openly about the frustration of writing prescriptions for anxiety in teenagers she barely knows. Her evening sessions, which she runs without insurance billing or Medicare-style rebates, are an attempt to practise the kind of preventive, relational medicine she was taught in theory.
This is a tension familiar to many Australian general practitioners, who have watched bulk-billing rates fluctuate and argued for longer consultations. In both countries, the gap between what paediatric training recommends and what the healthcare system rewards can leave doctors searching for creative outlets. For Dr. Goldstein, that outlet happens to be a yoga mat and a stack of chumashim.
The program also reflects her sense of obligation to a community that has sustained her practice. Gallup's Jewish population is small, perhaps a few dozen families, and most are intermarried or newly observant. The teenagers are often the only Jewish students in their schools, a situation that mirrors the experience of Jewish teens in Hobart or Darwin, where the next minyan might be a thousand kilometres away.
What the teenagers take home
Parents report subtle changes. One mother described her son, previously reluctant to attend synagogue, asking to host a Friday night dinner for his friends. Another spoke of a daughter who had struggled with disordered eating finding a healthier relationship with her body through yoga and the Torah portion on the soul. Dr. Goldstein collects these stories carefully, treating them as data points in a larger research question she hopes one day to publish.
The teenagers themselves, when pressed, describe the sessions in plain language. One said the breathing helps before exams. Another said the stories help before fights with parents. A third said she likes being in a room where no one is checking their phone. None of them use the language of spirituality or tradition, but their descriptions echo what researchers in Melbourne and Auckland have found when studying community-based youth programs: belonging is built in small, repeated acts of shared attention.
A useful way to see how the Gallup model differs from more conventional offerings is to place the two side by side.
| Element | Traditional youth group | The Gallup gathering |
|---|---|---|
| Setting | Synagogue classroom or hall | Clinic back room with yoga mats |
| Physical practice | None or optional warm-up | Full weekly yoga sequence |
| Textual study | Pre-planned by educator | Tied to the weekly parasha |
| Group size | 15 to 30 participants | 8 to 12 participants |
| Cost | Membership or synagogue fees | Free, run on a volunteer basis |
| Healthcare link | Separate from medical care | Led by a practising pediatrician |
Lessons for communities far from the desert
The Gallup experiment is small, but its blueprint is portable. A paediatrician with yoga training, a modest space, a weekly Torah portion and a group of curious teenagers is not a large capital investment. The model could be adapted in Jewish communities from Bondi to Boulder, from Caulfield to Crown Heights, wherever a doctor is willing to think of healing as something that happens on a mat as well as in an exam room.
For those considering a similar program, Dr. Goldstein offers a few practical observations she has refined over three years of weekly sessions. The following notes are drawn from her own experience and from conversations with educators running comparable programs in places as far apart as Tucson and Tel Aviv.
- Begin with the body. Teenagers are more willing to enter a room for movement than for text. Let the yoga lead and the Torah follow.
- Tie the sequence to the parasha. The connection gives the physical practice meaning and the textual study a steady rhythm.
- Keep the group small. Eight to twelve teenagers allows for real conversation and safer stretching, with enough trust to ask hard questions.
- Train in trauma-informed yoga. Many teens carry burdens that are not visible in a standard intake form, and the mat can surface them quickly.
- Build a relationship with a local rabbi or educator. Even a confident teacher benefits from a partner who can add depth, accountability and halachic clarity.
Looking ahead, Dr. Goldstein is drafting a short curriculum guide she hopes to share with other paediatricians who might want to try something similar. The first concrete step, she suggests, is to invite two or three teenagers to your home for a Friday night dinner, ask them what they are actually struggling with, and listen.