Shabbat, Havdalah, & Jewish Holidays

About The Series

The world needs Shabbat and Havdalah now more than ever. We bring the ancient Jewish practice of Shabbat and Havdalah around the world, through multidisciplinary events, retreats, and collaborations–where we explore the ideas and values behind Shabbat and Havdalah and how they offer a radically unique approach to contending with social, political, and personal challenges.

Selected Past Events

SHIUR (Mid)Summer Shabbat Retreat

June 23-25th, Utrecht Countryside

How to “effectively retreat?”

Does the extravagance of contemporary retreat & festival culture - with obscene expenditures on high production value and “wow” vip experiences undermine the very transformation that the participants seek?

Can lo fi experiences maintain a higher fidelity to the values and goals we seek?

We explored these questions and more on our SHIUR (Mid)summer Retreat…

Our retreat started in town, then we went not thousands of miles away to a tropical beach or mountain, but a short drive into the local countryside. We turned off our phones and didn’t see them until the end of the retreat. We embraced the alterity of Shabbat by dedicating ourselves to unique Shabbat activities that we could not easily categorize—all of which involved repurposing of the “normal” towards the “utopian.”

Realizing the utopian within “normative” life & with our own innate tools was our goal.

Our learning was not for mastery of knowledge, identity or community building— but for its own sake (lishma).

We liberated ourselves from the pressures of achieving “take-aways” or “results” and instead enjoyed the paradise of dwelling in sweet discourse, body, movement and more.

At the end of our retreat, we had our final discourse back in the city.

This underscored: 1) the significance of grounding back within society and not being dependent on disconnected spaces and 2) whilst we are surrounded by the normative, we can still maintain the utopian light we kindled on our retreat…and maybe the fire will spread!