When the Walls Fall Down: Aleph Intelligence, Sanctuary for the Apocalypse, and Pour Out Your Woes
by Rabbi Nate DeGroot
Dear companions in love and justice,
All around us, the walls are crumbling. Perhaps you’ve felt it, too. On the Jewish calendar we are in the month of Tammuz, just over a week away from Tzom Tammuz / the Fast of Tammuz.
This fast day marks a series of calamities in Jewish history, including Moses shattering the tablets, the daily offerings in the First Temple being suspended, a Torah being publicly burned by a Roman general, an idol being placed in the Holy Temple, and the walls of Jerusalem being breached prior to the destruction of both the First and Second Temples.
Tzom Tammuz also kicks off a temporal corridor of grief known as The Three Weeks, leading us to Tisha b’Av next month.
When the walls fall down, it is vital that we lean into practices, study, ritual, and community to help us ordain our edges, make sanctuary in the cracks, and transform our grief into seeds of redemption and renewal. In the weeks ahead, we are thrilled to be offering three incredible and diverse opportunities for you to do precisely that:
Post Humanism & Aleph Intelligence
with Graie Hagans
Wednesdays, July 22nd, July 29, August 5th
7:00-8:30pm ET, Zoom
Register HERE
A three-part class exploring the consequences - good, bad, and expansive - of AI in a post-humanist and applied Jewish frame. This series offers us an opportunity to reconsider our relationship not just to AI, but to the bigger questions of what it means to be human in a world destabilized by such promiscuous technology.
Sanctuary for the Apocalypse
with Gabriel Meyer
Tuesdays, August 4th-September 1st
12:00-1:00pm ET, Zoom
Register HERE
A five-week sacred playshop co-creating sanctuary and spontaneous sacred community. Rooted in the prophetic ethical building blocks of justice, peace, love, and truth from the Hebrew tradition and other sacred nectars, this weekly drop-in space will utilize voice, movement, and guided meditations to serve as a sort of spirit medicine kit for these turbulent times.
Pour Out Your Woes
with Rabbi Ilana Sumka
Thursday, July 23rd, 2026
1:00-2:00pm ET, Zoom
Register HERE
A unique, participatory ritual in observance of Tisha b’Av, we will gather in synchronous community with people across the world to hear Eichah/Lamentations, write our own lamentations that we will dissolve in water, and pour out our woes, so that the water of our laments might catalyze seeds of personal and collective redemption. For this program, we’re experimenting with a digital/tactile “hybrid” ritual. If you register by July 13th, we will mail you a dissolvable strip of paper to use concurrently with others for this ceremony. If you register after July 13th, or you're based outside of the US, you may supply your own dissolvable paper, or any paper will do.
In this auspicious time, to leave the grief of this season, and the world, untended is to stop a powerful flow midstream, entrenching a spiritual blockage like a dam blocks water. On the other hand, to ride the current of this mourning portal and tap into the primal cycles of decomposition and new growth, death and rebirth, and destruction and creation that our tradition understands to be so critical, is to honor the spiral of time and transformation yearning to be in motion this time of year.
We have invited these three incredible teachers and friends of The Shalom Center to teach material dear to their hearts and spirits for just this time on the Jewish calendar, because we trust that the medicine they’re offering is medicine so many of us could use right now.
We hope you’ll sign up for one, two, or all three of these opportunities, leaning into the vulnerability, openness, grief, and possibility that presents itself when the walls fall down around us and the tenuous promise of redemption shimmers in the dancing embers.
With blessings,
Rabbi Nate DeGroot