The Details

Format: 90-minute sessions, online.

Timeline: Beginning summer 2026.

Registration: To be announced

No application. No cohort. No tradition required. Come to one session or several. Come as you are. No background reading necessary.

How It Works

Each session is built around a sourcesheet — a single page with three texts:

• A passage from Báyò Akomóláfé’s Selah (Ayin Press, 2026) — philosophical fragments that interrupt familiar thinking.

• A text brought by someone from their own wisdom tradition or practice — something they are still wrestling with. They are not performing. They are contributing material and then studying alongside everyone else.

• A text from the Hebrew prophetic and midrashic tradition — one of the oldest and most rigorous practices of sitting with what does not resolve. Teiku: let it stand. Jacob’s limp. Job’s whirlwind.

Participants study these three texts in chevruta — paired encounter guided by a specific prompt designed to surface genuine difference. Not discussion. Not debate. Close reading in relationship, with friction. The prompts carry the weight of the present moment: the questions we are actually living inside right now.

Each session ends with a fragment carried forward — one unresolved line to take into the week.

What This Is

Selah uses a method from the Talmudic tradition called teiku — structured inquiry where the refusal of resolution is not failure but method. Jacob wrestles the angel all night and walks away limping, not victorious. The rabbis preserve disagreement across centuries rather than flattening it into consensus. Job demands answers and receives a whirlwind.

This is not a Jewish program. It is a program that draws on Hebraic wisdom the same way it might draw on Sufi poetry, Buddhist practice, or Yoruba cosmology — as a living tradition with something specific and urgent to offer this moment. You come rooted in your own tradition, your own questions, your own practice. The texts meet each other in the room.

We share progressive values. We are also questioning whether the progressive framework itself has become its own kind of solutionism. Not anti-activism. The willingness to ask what comes after the moment when recommitment itself stops being enough.

Where This Comes From

Selah grows out of a conversation and a collaboration. In 2023, Rabbi Nate DeGroot and Báyò Akomóláfé published a Talmudo-poetic dialogue in Ayin Press’s Teiku column — an exchange structured by teiku, the Talmudic notation for disputes that must not be resolved. Báyò has long drawn on Hebraic tradition in his own work: Jacob’s limp, the Book of Job, the rupture at the beginning of creation. That conversation became the seed.

Adam Sher conceived and developed the Selah program from inside The Shalom Center’s Cohort Aleph — a yearlong inquiry into Jewish post-activism. Through Ayin Press, he also midwifed Báyò’s book into publication. His work with Báyò over many years — including Qarrtsiluni, a paraphilanthropic experiment in treating encounter itself as a form of giving — shapes the program’s conviction that the economic and relational structures of learning are not separate from the learning itself.

The Shalom Center, which hosts Selah, has spent fifty years at the intersection of Jewish wisdom and public life. Its founder, Rabbi Arthur Waskow, died in October 2025. Nate, as Waskow’s successor, and Adam, as a board member, are building Selah together — carrying that lineage forward by pointing it outward, into encounter with the widest possible room.