Secular Synagogues and Online Judaism
This week’s post is by Rabbi Denise Handlarski, the creator and spiritual leader of the online community SecularSynagogue.com.
The goal of Secular Synagogue community is to explore how Judaism can be an enriching force in your life and, in turn, make you a more kind, just, and effective force for good in the world.
The Wellfont of Overflowing Love
This week’s post is by Rabbi Andrew Hahn, who has pioneered Kirtan in the Jewish world, offering communal call-and-response chant concerts and meditation seminars around the world.
Kirtan (also known as Bhajan) is a form of chant developed in India to heighten participation, communal feeling and ecstatic communion with the divine.
Return to the Land; Return to the Tradition
This week’s post is by Rabbi Justin Goldstein, the Scholar-in-Residence of Yesod Farm+Kitchen, a small regenerative farm and educational space, in Fairview, NC.
Yesod Farm+Kitchen is a community space dedicated to regenerative agriculture, earth-based Jewish living, and growing relationships across difference.
Examining Values at a Start-Up Shul
This week’s post is by Rabbi Sherril Gilbert is co-founder/co-spiritual leader of Montreal Open Shul and Executive Director of ALEPH Canada.
Montreal Open Shul dedicated to creating and celebrating innovative and inclusive opportunities for contemplative and experiential Jewish practice, life cycle rituals, learning, community building, and social change. ALEPH: Alliance for Jewish Renewal is a trans-denominational approach to revitalizing Judaism.
Increasing Jewish Engagement through the Arts
This week’s post is by David Franklin, exhibit curator and co-founding creator of Jews, Rock and Roll Film and pop-up exhibit.
Jews and Rock and Roll is about an immigrant generation seeking to reinvent themselves who wind up transforming America.
Jewish Life Through a Disability Lens
This week’s post is by Dr. Shana Erenberg, co-founder and Executive Director of Libenu in Chicago, Illinois.
Libenu provides housing, vocational training, recreational programs, and respite services for children and adults with disabilities.
Relevance and Resonance on a Spectrum of the Universal and Particular
This week’s post is by Rabbi Jessy Dressin, Director of Repair the World/Baltimore and continues to serve as a community rabbi with a unique lens to next generation behaviors and identification.
Repair the World Baltimore was founded in 2013 to mobilize Jews and their communities to take action to pursue a just world.
Merging Career Advancement and Jewish Wisdom
This week’s post is by Bradley Caro Cook, Ed.D. is a social entrepreneur, civic leader, and Jewish educator. He strives to bring equity, inclusion, and universal Jewish wisdom in all of his community building endeavors. He currently serves as the executive director of CareerUpNow.org, chair of The City of Beverly Hills Entrepreneurship Incubator, and director of Growth Exponential.
Growth Exponential is a tech company pioneering growth hacking methodologies for nonprofits.
Arts and Culture: For a Transformational Jewish Community
This week’s post is by David Chack, faculty at DePaul University/Chicago in Holocaust Theatre and Performance and Theatre of Identity including Jewish cultural theatre. and Producing Artistic Director of ShPIeL-Performing Identity in Chicago and Artistic Director of Bunbury-ShPIeL Identity Theatre Project in Louisville, KY.
ShPIeL is a performance incubator and producer from a Jewish root for today’s transcultural world.
The Tribe: Families Living Jewish Values Through Community
This week’s post is by Arinne Braverman, the Founding Director of The Tribe and the President of From Strength to Strength and Executive Director of Returning the Sparks.
The Tribe: a Jewish values-based, experiential education program for families with Jewish children in kindergarten through second grade…
Becoming Shomrei Adamah: Guardians of the Earth
This week’s post is by Arielle Aronoff of Teva Learning Center in Falls Village, CT.
The Teva Learning Center fundamentally transforms Jewish education through experiential learning that fosters Jewish and ecological sustainability…
Creating Community Through Jewish Cohousing
This week’s post is by Roger Studley, founder of Urban Moshav in Berkeley, CA.
Urban Moshav is an ambitious project: we aim to create “Jewish cohousing” communities around the United States. These communities will function like archetypal villages,…
Lifting Up the Voices of Women
This week’s post is by Talia Liben Yarmush, co-founder of Achayot: Sisterhood of Jewish Women Writers.
At its foundation, Achayot is built on the principles of wisdom/chochma and community/kehilla. Recognizing the rich legacy of Jewish text and tradition, with a desire to incorporate this legacy into our own writing …
The Emerging Jewish Community: A Riotous Forest of Life
This week’s post is by Rabbi Ariel Stone, Rabbi of independent Congregation Shir Tikvah of Portland Oregon and the convener of Portland Interfaith Clergy Resistance.
The first word that caught my eye in Jewish Megatrends: Charting the Course of the American Jewish Futurewas on the first page: rethinking. My congregational work has focused upon the need…
Weaving Community in Philadelphia
This week’s post is by Miriam Steinberg-Egeth, managers of manages two community networks, the Center City Kehillah and the Board of Rabbis of Greater Philadelphia. A community is like a puzzle. Each piece has to have its place among all the others for the project to work. An individual piece on its own is not […]
A Judaism for Flourishing
This week’s post is by Rabbi Ben Spratt, the Senior Associate Rabbi of Congregation Rodeph Sholom in Manhattan. I begin with a belief that is neither new nor radical: the purpose of Judaism is fulfillment and flourishing, personally and globally. Maimonides made this claim in his Guide for the Perplexed, saying that the whole of […]
Building a New Community from Scratch
This week’s column is by Lauren Spokane of the New Synagogue Project, an emerging Jewish community in in Washington, D.C. The four propositions laid out by Sid Schwarz are clearly reflected in the community we are building in the Washington, DC region through the New Synagogue Project (NSP). Here is how each proposition shows up in our […]
Seeing Jewish Portals through Israeli Eyes
I am an Israeli, working in a progressive, Reconstructionist Congregation for two years as a shaliach. My goal is to bring to American Jews some of the rich culture that is part and parcel of Israeli life outside of Orthodox circles. But my presence in America also exposes me to the way that American Jews […]
Purpose and Community: Building Blocks for True Spirituality
Mekor Shalom focuses on two of the four propositions that Rabbi Sid Schwarz sets forth in Jewish Megatrends: Charting the Course of the American Jewish Community. About community/kehilla, Rabbi Schwarz writes that “the Jewish community must offer places where people can find support in times of need, communal celebration in times of joy, and friendships to […]
Co-Housing: Taking Congregational Life to the Next Level
Temple Bnai Israel in Northeast Connecticut has been involved in a “visioning process” for the last several years about how to “to formulate the best way to sustainably foster and serve the Jewish community in North East Connecticut (including the non-Jewish participants in that community) for the coming several decades.” We launched this process in […]
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