Ritualwell Open House – September 14th

Hosted by Hila Ratzabi & Adva Chattler

Explore Ritualwell’s online learning offerings at our open house days! Enjoy a taste of our faculty’s inspiring teachings with short, 30-minute sessions. Free and open to all.

Open House sessions schedule:

11:00 a.m. EDT, Leslie Contreras Schwartz: “Poetry as Prayer: Writing the Personal through Invocation”
Poetry can be a conduit to exploring how our own lives connect to a sense of the Divine. We will explore how poets can examine the personal using aspects of prayer in their work. We will study poems that act as prayer or relate to prayer by Jewish writers, and take home a prompt to start our own personal prayer-poem.

11:30 a.m. EDT, Rabbi Daniel Raphael Silverstein: “Returning to our Deepest Selves: Lessons on Teshuvah from Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook”
Teshuvah is sometimes understood as “repentance,” but a more accurate translation would be “return.” Join us to explore perhaps its most important aspect: the journey of returning to our most authentic selves. Together, we will learn and reflect upon our responses to heart-opening teachings about teshuvah from the great twentieth-century poet and mystic, Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook.

12:00 p.m. EDT, Trisha Arlin: “Truth and the Talking Donkey” 
What is truth telling? In parashat Balak, it’s a talking donkey (and his passenger), and these days, in shul, sometimes it can be the liturgist and the poet. We will examine the relationship between truth and prayer, and ask: What does a good talking donkey need to be their best self?

12:30 p.m. EDT, ADVOT Info session
Curious about ADVOT@Ritualwell, our year-long cohort for ritual innovators, poets, and liturgists? Hop into an info session to ask your questions and learn more about this dynamic, online, Jewish creative community!

1:00 p.m. EDT, Amy Gottlieb: “A Taste of Story Magic: Short Story / Life Story”
How can a very short story contain the magnitude of a life story? We’ll dip into a brief short story by Grace Paley, dissect its magic tricks, and talk about how time is an invisible thread running through all good fiction. At the end of the session, I’ll offer an inspiring prompt for sketching a short story / life story of your own.

2:00 p.m. EDT, Ayeola Omolara Kaplan: “Dreaming up Olam Shalem: Creating a World that is Whole”
Explore the creative relationship between Jewish spirituality and the practice of using art to build a holy society with Ayeola Omolara Kaplan, a Black, Queer, and Jewish artist. Our conversation will inspire a collaborative artwork that Ayeola will begin sketching during the session and share with participants the following week. This experience will model a playful way to engage in Jewish spirituality that you can practice whenever you need to recharge your sense of hope and possibility. The collaborative art piece will serve as a reminder of the divine world we aspire to create together.

These sessions will not be recorded.