Program Description
Sunday December 27 – Monday December 28
Do you want to know more about how to bring powerful spiritual experiences to your students? Would you like to learn how to translate your own spiritual practice into successful educational initiatives? Would you like to understand the place of spirituality in Jewish education today and learn from experienced teachers who have been successfully teaching Jewish spirituality in a variety of educational contexts?
Come and join us for an extra day intensive on bringing Jewish spirituality into our educational settings. Coupled with Awakening the Divine: Pardes Jewish Spirituality Retreat, this extra day will enable you to take your transformative experiences on the retreat, and your other spiritual experiences and exploration, back with you into your educational setting. Learn from leading educators in the field in one of two tracks:
- Educators who work with children, especially day school educators
- Educators who work primarily with young adults, particularly Hillel professionals and student leaders.
This intensive is unique in that it directly follows your intensive retreat experiences and therefore brings you straight from your own transformation into an exploration of how you can facilitate other’s transformation. Working directly with your own insights and experience from the retreat combined with the practical, focused nature of the intensive, means that you will have concrete approaches and embodied understanding –rather than theory alone–to bring to your work as an educator.
Starting the morning of Sun. Dec. 27th with the completion of the Awakening the Divine: The Pardes Jewish Spirituality Retreat we will continue until early afternoon the next day giving ourselves over 24 hours to continue to deepen our practice and to take our practice with us into our educational settings.
Cost: $200
A limited number of significant scholarships are available for both tracks. Please contact meira@pardes.org for details.
Staff
Yael Shy is the Senior Director of Global Spiritual Life at New York University, and the Founder and Director of Mindful NYU, the largest university-based mindfulness initiative in the country. An original co-founder of the Jewish Meditation Center of Brooklyn and a graduate of the Institute for Jewish Spirituality’s Jewish Meditation Teacher Training Program , Yael has taught and written about Jewish meditation and mindfulness at universities, synagogues, rabbinical schools, and community centers around the country and globe for the past seven years. In 2010, she was named by the Jewish Week newspaper as one of the “36 under 36” Jewish changemakers transforming Jewish life.
Rabbi Dr. James Jacobson-Maisels teaches Jewish thought, mysticism, spiritual practices and meditation at the Pardes Institute of Jewish Studies and in a variety of settings around the world. He is the founder of Or HaLev: A Center for Jewish Spirituality and Meditation (orhalev.org/) and has been studying and teaching meditation and Jewish spirituality for almost twenty years. He received his PhD in Jewish Studies from the University of Chicago and strives to integrate his study and practice and to help teach and live Judaism as a spiritual discipline.
Rabbi Sam Feinsmith has been a leader in the field of integrating Jewish spiritual practice into Jewish education for over a decade. Co-founder of Orot: Center for New Jewish Learning, he is currently developing a mindfulness and SEL curriculum for teens, and consulting to the Institute for Jewish Spirituality on developing a national program to integrate Jewish spiritual practice into Jewish day schools and camps in the service of mind-body wellness, social and emotional learning, and revitalizing Jewish life and authentic religious experience.
Larry Schwartz has been studying and practicing mindfulness in a Jewish and Buddhist context for over 15 years at the Institute for Jewish Spirituality and the Barre Center for Buddhist Studies. He has been teaching mindfulness in public schools and Jewish days schools for the last 5 years in NYC and at
Romemu. Larry is the Chair of the Institute for Jewish Spirituality and is very involved in Impact Investing.
Rabbi Shuli Passow has over 15 years of experience as a Jewish educator and communal professional. She has taught Torah, yoga, community organizing, and Judaism and social change throughout the Jewish community, including Jewish Funds for Justice, Isabella Freedman Jewish Retreat Center, Bronfman Center for Jewish Student Life at New York University, and Yeshivat Hadar. Shuli currently serves as Director of Community Engagement at Congregation B’nai Jeshurun in New York City.
