by Rabbi Wendy Spears Over the course of many weeks, I was privileged to be in partnership with my dear friend and colleague Rabbi Jill Zimmerman as we planned and shepherded a one-day retreat for a Mindful Journey Through Shabbat a few weeks ago, over the long weekend celebrating the birth of the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr.The retreat was intended Continue Reading
Standing Up and Sitting Down For Our Lives (and for Shabbat)
By Rabbi Cindy Enger Rabbi Cindy Enger participated in our “Mindful Journey Through Shabbat” a few weeks ago. She wrote this upon returning home to Chicago. Her beautiful insights are not only about the total’s day experience and what it takes to “clear the space” to spend a day on retreat, but also about Rabbi Sheila Weinberg’s teaching about a Continue Reading
Mindfulness, Poetry, Prayer and Song to Open Hearts
At our beautiful all-day retreat last Shabbat, "A Mindful Journey Through Shabbat" we did a morning of chant/kavannah/music/silence. As leaders, we chose several key prayers (only a few) from the morning Shabbat service and went deeper into each one. For example, we started with Modah/Modeh Ani, which means "Grateful/Thankful am I" and offered a brief Continue Reading
Take A Snow Day (or even a Snow Moment)
There’s something about really bad weather (like blizzards) that are so freeing. No matter what your plans are, your meetings and appointments, if you can’t get out of the driveway, you have to stay put. You are forced to “stay.” You can’t will yourself forward when the Big Snow says, “I don’t think so.” (I still remember the great 1967 snowstorm of Continue Reading
Gifts everywhere
"Awe enables us to see in the world intimations of the divine, to sense in small things the beginning of infinite significance, to sense the ultimate in the common and the simple, to feel in the rush of the passing the stillness of the eternal." Abraham Joshua Heschel Anything that stops us in our tracks and helps us experience a moment of "wow" is a Continue Reading