Healing & Hard Times

“Comfort, comfort My people, nachamu nachamu ami” (Isaiah 40:1). The prophet Isaiah offered these simple but profound words from God to the Jewish people after the Temple was destroyed and all hope seemed lost. For Isaiah, comfort existed in the belief that a better day was coming and in the certainty that good would triumph over evil. Today, many of us struggle to find meaning during illness, death, divorce, violence, and even natural disasters. While we may long for something as unwavering as Isaiah’s faith, few of us have that. So we search for tools to help us confront the truth of hardship and begin the process of healing. If we withdraw into our own private pain, ritual has the power to pull us out. It connects us with community—however large or small—and provides us with the hope, love, and wisdom others can offer. As we build new rituals for healing and hard times, Isaiah’s ancient words remind us that we can find great comfort among people and in actions that support and soothe, even if they don’t solve.

 

The Reconstructionist Network

Learning to Say "We": Writing Identity

In this immersion, we will reflect and expand on our personal experiences of identity, using writing exercises and in-depth discussions to think about, challenge, discover, explore, and experiment with different ways to identify ourselves, to consider how those ways connect us to and separate us from others, and how they represent and misrepresent aspects of who we are.

Four sessions, starting June 15th

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