Ariana Katz, the inaugural recipient of the 2016 Launch Grant, created “Kaddish,” a podcast about illness, death, and mourning in Jewish ritual traditions. Her work seeks to build an online community that “holds space at the intersection of life and death.”
At Rosh Hashanah, as we turn to new beginnings, we seek to repent—to do teshuvah—for what we have done wrong. And we can also affirmatively foster ourselves toward resilience—toward a thriving, loving outlook in spite of whatever challenges we encounter in life. In this video, I explore themes of resilience embedded into Jewish practice.
Important announcements from the Reconstructionist movement for Fall 2017
More and more I have come to admire resilience.Not the simple resistance of a pillow, whose foamreturns over and over to the same shape, but the sinuoustenacity of a tree: finding the light newly blocked on one side,it turns in another. A blind intelligence, true.But out of such persistence arose turtles, rivers,mitochondria, figs—all this resinous, unretractable earth.
—Jane Hirshfield
Examination of Rabbi Kelilah Miller’s papercut, “Human, Why Do You Sleep?”
An examination of Rabbi Me’irah Iliinsky’s artwork, “Heart of the Stranger”
Information about Rabbi Sheila Peltz Weinberg’s book
The lines of “inside” and “outside” are not always clear, as a second-generation American and Jewish convert attests.
Serving as central organization of the Reconstructionist movement
Training the next generation of groundbreaking rabbis
Modeling respectful conversations on pressing Jewish issues
Curating original, Jewish rituals, and convening Jewish creatives
