Mini-Grants & The Tooth Fairy: The Challenge of Balance

Week 1: Seattle – Spokane, WA

Previous Week: Seattle                                                                    Next Week: To Helena

Okanogan-Wenatchee National Forest

Come join the Hazon Cross-USA riders for Shabbat in Spokane!

• Friday, June 21st:
  • 6 pm – Enjoy a vibrant Kabbalat Shabbat and Maariv service led by our riders at Temple Beth Shalom
  • 7 pm – Services are followed by a vegetarian potluck Shabbat dinner. What could be better?
  • Rabbi Elizabeth Goldstein will be speaking and leading a discussion following the meal.

• Saturday, June 22nd:
  • Join the riders at various Shabbat services
    • Temple Beth Shalom – 9:30 am
    • Chabad – discussion at 9:30 am, services at 10:30
    • Congregation Emanu-El in Comstock park (29th Ave and Post St) – 10:00 am
  • 12:30 pm – Get to know our riders at lunch
    • Temple Beth Shalom
    • Chabad
    • Congregation Emanu-El potluck in the park

Join us on the road!

Experience the mobile Jewish community making a change
for a healthier and more sustainable world:
In Seattle for a one-day ride, from Seattle to Spokane for a week,
or any other section of our beautiful country!

Week 1 Journey (Sunday, June 16 – Saturday, June 22)

The riders will embark on their journey in the naturally rich and mountainous state of Washington on Sunday, June 16. They will travel through many diverse environments including the vibrant city of Seattle, the picturesque city of Soap Lake located at the Columbia Basin, and end the first leg of the journey in Washington’s second largest city, Spokane.

Along the way, they will visit many notable Natural Parks and Forests including Wallace Falls State Park and Okanogan-Wenatchee National Forest: Wallace Falls State Park  is located on the west side of the Cascade Mountains and features an incredible 65-foot waterfall and fast flowing rivers and streams. In addition, the riders will cycle through Okanogan-Wenatchee National Forest, an area that encompasses over 4-million acres along the east slopes of the Cascade Range. Hard to believe that the riders will experience all of this in solely the first week!

The week will be filled with great views, people, community, and experiences. If this ride sounds exciting to you, don’t worry! There is still time for you to join.

Week 2: Spokane – Helena, MT

Previous Week: To Spokane                                                               Next Week: To Miles City

Come join the Hazon Cross-USA riders for Shabbat in Helena!

• Friday, June 28th:
  • 6:00 pm- Shabbat services with the Helena and Bozeman Jewish communities in Guadalupe Hall, Carroll College
  • 7:00 pm- Community Shabbat Dinner: Vegetarian potluck
  • 8:15-9:00 pm- Teaching from Ellen Baumler about Helena Jewish community

• Saturday, June 29th:
  • 9:30 am- Shabbat services at Carroll College
    11:15 Text study led by Rabbi Ed Stafman of Bozeman
  • 12:00-1:00 pm- Enjoy Shabbat lunch with our riders

Join us on the road!

Experience the mobile Jewish community making a change
for a healthier and more sustainable world:
From Spokane to Helena or Helena to Miles City for one week,
or any other section of our beautiful country!

Week 2 Journey (Sunday, June 23 – Saturday, June 29)

And the ride continues…The riders say goodbye to Washington State and are off to Idaho and Montana. Montana is known as the home of the most beautiful untamed, wild, and natural features and parks (Yellowstone and Glacier) in the country. The riders take off from Pinehurst, Idaho and cycle through breathtaking natural forest and parks along the way including the Coeur D’Alene National Forest (above) and the National Bison Range. They continue on to Missoula, where they will visit Adventure Cycling, Free Cycles, and the PEAs farm (right). They end their jam packed second week in Helena, MT at Carroll College.

The week will be filled with great views, people, community, and experiences. If this ride sounds exciting to you, don’t worry! There is still time for you to join.

Skillshares & Swapping: Shmita Meets the Sharing Economy

At the core of many of the Shmita values is this sense that we do not own our resources; that, in fact, the resources we call ours are not our property at all. On the Shmita year, private lands become open as commons. Private harvests must be shared with the community. Even private stored foods must be opened to those in need. Food and land are no longer commodities on the marketplace. They no longer carry a price tag. And the people who lay claim to such land and food are transformed from private owners to community stewards, caring for communal property.

An emphasis is placed upon the community, beyond the private individual. Perhaps the Shmita year pushed the edge a bit, putting us all in the same position together, where we had to rely on one another, enter into true interdependency, to get by on a such a year. Hopefully, the values of this year framed all others in a way that kept the community threads alive and vibrant, so that there truly was a healthy village culture. And vice versa, so that the community actions and values of the six years between each Shmita helped realize the actual Shmita year as a celebratory time, rather than a ‘community’ burden.

But either way, Shmita offers a meditation on what ownership means, what property means, and how we enter into such interactions with neighbors and friends. Do we accumulate and hoard, or do we freely share? Would we rather keep our resources private or make them available to the community? Does our wider community have the infrastructure, organizing patterns, and communication skills to make such sharing a successful practice, or would this fall into confusion and headache? What are some practices that we can begin to embrace today which will allow us to weave the fabric of community sharing in such a way that feels healthy and supportive to all?

In alignment with the Behar campaign to raise Shmita awareness on a local level, Hazon partnered with 7Seeds and Urban Adamah, to host a Shmita-inspired community sharing day on the urban farm site in West Berkeley, California. One aspect of the day was focused on hosting a money-free swap-meet. The premise was quite simple: We each have clothing, books, tools, electronics, etc, etc sitting in our closets and in storage that we hardly need anymore, if at all. How can we activate the networks within our community so that what would otherwise be wasted is instead being channeled to sources of need? And for those of us in need, rather than depend solely on the marketplace to meet our needs and requirements, how can we look towards community members to help us? The swap-meet creates a space in which a community can gather to support healthy exchange, in a way that we release what we no longer need and gathers what serves us. This doe snot happen in a one-on-one exchange. Rather, this is happening in the spirit of generosity: Not all who come have something to donate. And not all who donate will walk away with something that meets their need. The exchange is an offering to support community resource flow, knowing that the more healthy this flow is, the healthier the entire community will be. 

Similarly, such an energetic resource flow happens with information. Just as we can hoard and accumulate tangible, physical resources, we can accumulate information. We have grown accustomed to one pattern of information exchange, where information itself becomes a commodity. In this sense, we learn when we are in school, when we are in a classroom. And we pay a heavy fee for this. In another model, learning is happening at all times. And everyone in the community is participating: we are all teachers and students, sharing our curiosities, experience, questions and skills. Just as the food and land becomes a model for community sharing and the commons on the Shmita year, so does information and education. A skill-share allows for this to take shape, where we can all come together , free of charge, to share what we are most passionate about, as an offering to the community who would want to learn with us. On the skills-share at urban Adamah, community members came out to teach fermentation, hand sewing, compost making, keeping chickens in your backyard, beekeeping, basktery, cider making, and more!

Below are some pictures from the day:

Shmita Work Party: An Embodied Learning Model

The Shmita narrative is one that is founded upon great social ideals and values; as we begin to learn about the holistic, integrated models that Shmita is encouraging, the only way to really begin understanding this is to use the Torah texts as a springboard to action, to experimentation, to embodiment. Yes, there is clear value in learning for the sake of learning and understanding. But as the Rabbis famously ask, which is better: Action or Study? Study, they say, because it leads to action. Study is the first step into personally investing one’s self towards manifesting the values learned in their own personal and communal lives. 

The Shmita Work Party model is one that begins with text study and follows with a tangible action that directly relates to the values learned. In this way, the learning continues seamlessly into the action, and the words of the text take shape in active creations. For example, one key principle of Shmita is the fact that primary harvests during this year were based upon perennial and wild plants. In a learning session, texts which can be studied would include anything about Shmita harvests, tree planting from a Jewish perspective, etc…and then followed by actual fruit tree plantings. 

In our BEHAR campaign to raise Shmita awareness on a local level, one model which we offered was a Shmita work party. Funny thing is that Shmita, like Shabbat, creates a space for rest and release. But to get to this point, there is also learning and preparation to be done. Jewish Farm School, located in urban West Philadelphia,  hosted a Shmita Work Party as part of their Shtetl Skill Building Series. Here is a recap of their event by Cassie Pena of the Jewish Farm School:

Coinciding with Shabbat Behar, Jewish Farm School launched the Shtetl Skills Workshop Series, a program dedicated to reviving the traditions of Jewish homesteading. Shtetl Skills was developed with the intention of  introducing participants to Jewish agricultural laws, ancestral folkways, and contemporary ecological principles.  With this in mind, our sessions will focus on developing an abandoned lot in West Philadelphia with the intention of creating a community urban farm, skill development site inspired by Shmita.

Philadelphia, like most urban communities, is littered with unused land, creating unsightly, dangerous and wasted space that could have community value if cultivated. These spaces are typically owned by private individuals but left abandoned due to legal or monetary issues. Shmita tells us that at the end of seven years, ownership of the land is released and the land is to be enjoyed by all.  Philadelphia law tells us that land is released to the commons after three cycles of seven, or 21 years, if it is being improved by an individual or group of individuals.

Nati Passow, Jewish Farm School’s Executive Director, and Joshua Boydstun, Reconstructionist Rabbinical College student and Jewish Farm School Rabbinic Intern,  began our first session with a group of 12 students in Talmudic and modern law text study central to land possession and the legal rights of squatters. Learning and discussion was followed by digging into the the lot. Together we prepared garden beds, tore down a fence and planted native species for food and beautification. The day closed with a communal plum tree planting.

Future Shtetl Skill Workshops will build on the principles of communal sustainability inherent in shmita and permaculture. Over the spring, summer and fall this space will be transformed with intention and openness. Of course, when improving land owned by someone else we are open to the risk of repossession. We hope, however, that in an effort to improve our communal space we are reigniting healthy, sustainable Jewish values and greener, harmonious urban communities that will one day be shared by all.

Exploring the ‘Shmita Council’ Model for Your Community

During the Behar campaign to raise Shmita awareness on a local level, one of the models we suggested was to organize a community leadership council. The goal would be to gather together community leaders, such as Rabbis, educators, activists, directors of businesses & non-profits, etc to explore Shmita from the perspective of local needs, resources, and challenges. What would Shmita look like specifically for our own community’s social and economic landscape? For our own community’s educational institutions and community organizations? As community leaders, what specific role might we each take to support this shift towards Sabbatical values? What tangible golas can we reach for, and in what timeframe? 

Guided by Jakir Manela, the Pearsltone Center hosted such a council for the region surrounding Baltimore, Maryland. Here is his recap for the event, which they referred to as a ‘Shmita Summit’:

On Sunday April 28^th, Pearlstone hosted our first Chesapeake Shmita Summit, drawing together a select group of local Jewish leaders to learn about Shmita and think strategically together about how its values can be manifest in each of our organizations and throughout our local communities.  It was a wonderful conversation, with deep Jewish learning lead by Rabbis Baruch Rock and Nina Beth Cardin—Rabbi Cardin focused on the Shmita verses in Tanakh while Rabbi Rock took an unconventional approach, identifying three Shmita themes and principles within the work of Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook.:

1.  Scales of interplay and the need to localize: Shmita can be thought of on a national or even international scale, but the essential step is to start in your own backyard

2.  Tension between groups: Shmita levels the playing field, whereas otherwise there can be great tension and animosity between various socioeconomic and/or spiritual classes in our society, such as affiliated vs unaffiliated, farmer vs professional, etc

3.  Strengthen what already exists:  Shmita does not obligate us to form new spiritual or ethical values, rather it is a framework for synthesizing so much of what we already know to be right and true.  This should be integrative work, not redundant.

After learning the Torah of Shmita, the group brainstormed together all the different things that could unfold in our community as part of the Shmita year.  The following are some areas of Shmita we explored together, and ideas that we came up with:

-Exploring further the historical nature of Shmita—what actually happened in ancient Israel every 7^th year?  Partnering with local Jewish Museum to create a Shmita exhibit perhaps.

-Highlighting poverty, hunger, and food relief efforts as part of Shmita.  Organize the largest food drive ever in our community.

-Engaging high school students of the local region by studying various kinds of utopian societies, including the concept of Shmita, then trying it out for a few days of the year throughout the school.

-Establish an incubator greenhouse and tool library in the heart of the Jewish community, bringing people together to collaborate in starting seeds and sharing gardening resources

-Take down fencing that separates two very large adjoining conservative synagogue properties, unifying them into one traversable campus at least during the Shmita year.

-Promote local Shmita Lawns—pereniallizing the outdoor spaces of own yards.

-What could our organizations give away for free?  Or thinking about it a different way, what if synagogue kiddush luncheons were not sponsored, and instead everyone brings double the prior year (only in dry goods that store well).

Emerging from all these wonderful ideas came the vision for several large events both leading up to and during Shmita, all located in major central Jewish public spaces (JCCs, Pearlstone, and other more secular space perhaps too). One such vision is for the next Behar gathering:

2014 Shabbat Behar: 2^nd Annual Chesapeake Shmita Summit.  Aiming to promote widely, with the morning focusing on Torah learning around Shmita and the afternoon all about community organizing with outside experts in the realms that Shmita is most closely related to.  For example, we would partner with a local event called Barterfest to begin brainstorming ideas for a Shmita Barterfest, and/or work with the MD Food Bank to begin identifying pieces for a massive community wide food drive.  Also we would invite the Bmore local currency leaders to do a training on how that might be incorporated throughout the Shmita year.

After all this learning and brainstorming, we went outside to plant a perennial bush (hazelnut) in our orchard.  And as we planted, we coined a new Shmita greeting—just as you say “Good Yontif” on chag or “Shabbat Shalom” on Shabbat, what if we said “Tishmateinu B’yachad” on Shmita?  It means, “Let us release, together”.  Maybe not perfect but a start!

We look forward to Shmita’s unfolding here in the Chesapeake region.  Questions or comments?  Contact jakir@pearlstonecenter.org

Two-Day Israel Ride Option

We are happy to offer an option for those living in Israel to experience a part of the Israel Ride. Please note that we cannot easily transport your bikes since you are leaving or joining in the middle of the Ride. All half-ride fees include a two-day hybrid bike rental.

Register Here

Jerusalem to Mashabei Sadeh

Join us in Jerusalem for orientation on Tuesday, and experience two incredible days on the road, from Jerusalem to Ashkelon and then into the northern Negev. We will help arrange transportation back to Jerusalem on Thursday night.

October 29 – 31
Registration: $275
Fundraising: $1200 for those living in Israel, $1800 for tourists

Debt Forgiveness as a Foundation for Society

מסע האופניים של מכון הערבה וחזון

מסע האופניים של מכון הערבה וחזון הוא הזדמנות מעולה עבורך לחוות את היופי של ישראל ממושב האופניים שלך. יוצאים להרפתקה עם קהילה ייחודית ומגובשת המגייסת כספים לשני ארגונים מלאי השראה: מכון הערבה וחזון. הצטרפו אלינו לחלק מהמסע או למסע מלא של שבוע מירושלים עד אילת, באחד משני המסלולים המוצעים כאן

השתתפות ברכיבה “הכל כלול”: לינה, שלוש ארוחות ביום, שתיה וכיבוד בהפסקות בדרך, ליווי מקצועי, טכנאים, ליווי רפואי צמוד, ועוד

  להרשמה לחץ כאן

 מירושלים למשאבי שדה

רכיבת כביש במשך יומיים מדהימים, מירושלים לאשקלון, ולאחר מכן לנגב הצפוני. אפשרות זו כוללת יום הכנה חוויתי בבית מלון בירושלים הכולל סיור בעיר העתיקה, רכיבת הכנה ברחבי ירושלים, פיקניק ותדרוך מקיף, וכן הסעות חזרה מצפון הנגב לירושלים בסיום הרכיבה

29-31 אוקטובר
$עלות הרשמה: 275
גיוס כספים: 1200 $ לישראלים או מי שגר בישראל, 1800 $ לתיירים

מסע מלא: מירושלים לאילת

לחוות את הרכיבה המלאה עם מעל 100 רוכבי אופניים. רכיבה מירושלים עד אילת כדי לחוות את הארץ כפי שמעולם לא ראית, ממושב של האופניים שלך. המסע המלא כולל יום הכנה בירושלים, שבת קהילתית נעימה ומשמעותית במצפה רמון, ותחבורה חזרה עם תום המסע לתל האביב- בטיסה- או לירושלים- באוטובוס

29 אוקטובר – 5 נובמבר
$525 :הרשמה
גיוס כספים: 2500 $ לישראלים או מי שגר בישראל, 3600 $ לתיירים

Associate Director of Communications and Institutional Advancement at Mechon Hadar

Associate Director of Communications and Institutional Advancement

Mechon Hadar is an educational institution that seeks to empower a generation of Jews to create and sustain vibrant, practicing, egalitarian communities of Torah learning, prayer, and service. Visit www.mechonhadar.org for more information. The position requires someone who is well-organized, strong on follow-through and relationship-building, creative and a quick learner.

Main Responsibilities Include:

• Responsible for drawing people to Hadar’s programs, in collaboration with senior staff, through creative communications (this includes effective and creative use of email, Hadar’s web page, Facebook, Twitter, flyers, posters, etc.).

• Manage the process of upgrading Hadar’s website (with assistance from outside consultants).

• Be the organizational “data keeper” who manages our email lists, donors lists, and all data related to fundraising, so we can more effectively make people aware of Hadar’s activities.

• Help plan and run events and programs for major donors and prospective donors.

• Manage regular communications with our supporters – including mailings, mail merges, thank you cards, etc.

Qualifications:

• Familiarity with and strong commitment to Mechon Hadar’s mission.

• Experience managing website and communications projects is a plus.

• Superb writing abilities; journalism experience is a plus.

• Strong knowledge of social media and other web based technologies.

• Able to perform with grace and humor under pressure.

• Well-organized, detail oriented and fierce about deadlines.

• Computer savvy – experience with Excel, Quickbooks, Donor Perfect and Constant Contact are a plus (but can also be learned on the job).

• Hebrew proficiency/Jewish literacy a strong plus.

This full-time position offers a competitive salary and benefits.  Please submit resume and cover letter to communications@mechonhadar.org.