Discover Your Torah: Preparing for Shavuot with Meditation and Poetry
2025-05-07 13:00 - 2025-05-21 14:30 (America/New_York) | Zoom
Wednesdays, May 7, 14 & 21, 2025
1:00-2:30 p.m. EDT
$150 for three sessions

Seven weeks after we celebrate Passover, the holiday of Shavuot arrives to mark the giving of the Torah. Torah, which includes the Five Books of Moses and other sacred texts, can also refer to the wisdom and insights gleaned from your own lived experiences.

In preparation for Shavuot, join us for a three-part series engaging in mindfulness meditation, poetry, and generative writing practices to explore themes related to Shavuot. This special collaboration between the Institute for Jewish Spirituality and Ritualwell brings you two expert instructors, Rabbi Dan Liben and poet and sound artist Elana Bell, as your guides. As we count the Omer and mark the weeks leading to Shavuot, find inspiration within community while creating your own meaningful kavannot (intentions) for receiving wisdom.

All sessions will be recorded and sent to participants. We encourage live attendance for you to get the most out of the experience.

Elana Bell is a poet, sound practitioner and creative guide. She facilitates artistic rituals and processes that support individuals and groups in accessing their authentic voice and alchemizing raw experience and emotion into artistic expression. Elana is the author of Mother Country (BOA Editions 2020), poems about fertility, motherhood, and mental illness. Elana’s debut collection of poetry, Eyes, Stones (LSU Press 2012), was selected by Fanny Howe as the winner of the 2011 Walt Whitman Award from the Academy of American Poets and brings her complex heritage as the granddaughter of Holocaust survivors to consider the difficult question of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In addition to leading her own embodied Creative Fire workshops, Elana teaches poetry to actors at the Juilliard School and sings with the Resistance Revival Chorus, a group of women activists and musicians committed to bringing joy and song to the resistance movement. She is also the founder of the Mother Artist Salon, a community dedicated to supporting mothers in their artistic practice. www.elanabell.com

Rabbi Dan Liben was ordained by JTS and is the Rabbi Emeritus of Temple Israel of Natick, MA. Dan began practicing Mindfulness Meditation at Elat Hayyim, where his teachers included Rabbis Sheila Weinberg and Jeff Roth, Sylvia Boorstein and Norman Fisher. That led him to the Institute for Jewish Spirituality (IJS), where he completed the Rabbinic Leadership Program (R4) and the Jewish Mindfulness Meditation Teacher Training program (Cohorts1 and 2). He taught Mindfulness Meditation for IJS Rabbinic Cohort 7, and served on IJS’s Board for six years. In 2017, Rabbi Liben completed Hebrew Union College’s Bekhol Levavkha, a two-year training program in Spiritual Direction. He is currently on the staff of Spiritual Directors offering Spiritual Direction to Rabbinical students at Hebrew College, Hebrew Union College, and the Jewish Theological Seminary.
