Updates & new programs - Breathing life into love!
Friends,
It has been a while since I last wrote to you! Over the past 6 weeks, a lot has happened in the life of The Shalom Center.
First, Cohort א is off and running! We’ve had two virtual meetings and we’re convening next week for an in-person immersive. Cohort members are helping to co-create both our regular meetings and this convening and the process has been quite energizing and fun. I’ll look forward to reporting back after the convening.
Second, I spent a powerful week at ALEPH’s Kallah. I had the honor of co-facilitating an Emergent Leader Incubator of 24 young Renewal-connected ritual weavers and community practitioners. Supporting such an amazing group was deeply rewarding and Kallah in general was fantastic. I especially enjoyed connecting and reconnecting with so many amazing friends, teachers, and extended community members, including some of you reading this! Getting to immerse in such meaningful and earnest Judaism for a week was a real treat for me. I hope to write more about my experience there as a whole at some point, but it was definitely profound for me to be at my first Kallah, having grown up in Jewish Renewal, now in this role at The Shalom Center, supporting a cohort of emerging Renewal leaders. Especially coming off our Renewing Judaism series.
Add in some family time and summer travel, plus a whole bunch of other balls in the air moving Shalom Center work forward, and it’s been a busy time.
And like all of us, I have been experiencing a tremendous amount of cognitive and spiritual dissonance, trying to build and grow new projects, initiatives, and ideas while the world is so utterly devastating.
Just last week I was on a call with a group of Jews, Palestinians, and global peace activists called Satyam Homeland, when a Palestinian person living in Gaza reported to us in real-time over Zoom that a close family friend had just been killed at a protest. The conditions of forced starvation in Gaza are unfathomable, as our board member, Rabbi Becky Silverstein, reflected on last week and as many of our friends and colleagues, including our board member, Rabbi Mordechai Liebling, protested earlier this week. You may have also seen reports of the murder of Awdah Hathaleen, a beloved peace activist in the West Bank who was known as a dear friend and comrade by many in our broader anti-occupation ecosystem. And this is not to even mention the horrors happening in the US. The level of grief and heartache all around us right now is wrenching. The death spiral, numbing beyond belief.
How heavy does our Jewish calendar feel right now, as we conclude the Three Weeks and enter into Tisha b’Av tomorrow night?
And yet, our tradition says that somehow, unthinkably, our redemption is born from these fires of despair. Like the serotinous seed that only bursts when it’s engulfed in flame, perhaps it takes an extreme level of grief and exposed brutality and crumbling walls for us to really shake loose into a different place. That, at least, is our prayer.
And from that prayer, our tradition responds with a revolutionarily simple reply: love.
Tu b’Av - or “Yahhhh b’Av,” as Arthur likes to call it, invoking the Breath of All Life, the Divine Yahhhh as a truer name for the holiday - arrives six short days after Tisha b'Av and serves as a love portal for transformation and enlivening possibility. The holiday, a bursting forth of redemptive interconnectedness.
Out of pain and destruction, we’re instructed to breathe life into love. And that’s exactly what we’re trying to do here at The Shalom Center.
Over the next few weeks, we will share with you a number of new programs. Each has been curated for this moment, to serve as a journey of discovery, care, connection, and possibility.
The first program we’re excited to share with you is a Yahhhh b’Av online gathering with Reb Arthur, Rabbi Tamara Cohen, Arlene Goldbard, and Cantor Linda Hirschhorn in partnership with ALEPH. Please read more about it below and register right away! The program is happening next weekend, on Sunday, August 10th, and it will be sure to nourish our hearts at a time when we’re holding so much.
In the coming weeks, keep your eyes out for additional program announcements and opportunities to learn, listen, and love together.
With deep care and blessings during this transition from mourning to comfort,
-Rabbi Nate
