REFLECTIONS ON POSTING AND TEACHING ADAR ALEPH 5784
I’ve now been teaching and posting on the website for just under a year and a half. Here are some reflections I’d like to share. I do this in the context of considering what my activities look like next year in 5785.
· I love coming up with interesting questions that deepen the conversation amongst those who participate. I like setting the context, and then inviting people into the conversation. One of the hard things about writing is always this sense that I have no idea how any of it is being received out in the ether.
· I’ve been very pleased with the direction of the writing. The overall project has always had two main foci. One focus is reimaging and reclaiming a certain kind of indigenous Judaism that focuses on us as beings embedded in the more than human world. I am hugely interested in right spiritual relationship with all beings, done through a Jewish lens because I believe that right relationship has to be done through some culturally specific context, and I am a Jew.
· The other focus in the project is to create beloved community and bring others along on the journey. After all, this isn’t about me, this is about us. On the one hand, there are twice as many unique visitors to my website, visits and page views than there were six months ago. To the 135 unique visitors last month, thank you. On the other hand, I’d like to interact more with this group. Right now I’m interacting with fewer than 10 people in a given month on the material. So if you are reading this, please share your response to anything I’ve posted. I will also say that I know that I am more comfortable not being particularly visible so maybe I’m doing something that keeps people from finding out and interacting with the material.
· I really like working with ongoing groups. This isn’t a surprise. Given the importance to me of beloved community to me, one offs are never going to be my thing because you don’t get to build community. I believe in the importance of incremental change as the only kind of change that really sticks.
· What I do isn’t for everyone, not even everyone interested in earth based Judaism. It’s a really different approach to reading Torah, it’s not monotheistic, it pays a lot of attention to things that most people don’t focus on and not as much attention to more typical foci such as interhuman ethics. It’s not for everyone, and that’s totally fine.
· However, the medicine I offer is for more people than I am currently reaching, that’s for sure.
In the upcoming months I’m going to reach out to see what you would like to see me do next year. Some of that concerns timing—should I be offering stuff on weekends or weeknights? Some of that concerns frequency. Would you commit to coming to something if it was once or twice a month instead of every week? Some of it surrounds the question of homework—would you be willing to do an hour a week on something outside of class time? I will also survey you on topics I might address. I can do spiritual questions derived from what is happening in the more than human world, either with secular or Hebrew months. This might be once or twice a month. You can see this on the website. https://earthbasedjudaism.org/monthly-cycle-program We can work on an elaborate program of discovering your true purpose through a Jewish lens. This could be presentations every other week and then discussion on the alternate weeks. https://earthbasedjudaism.org/program-introductions/djmi-blog Something new I have conceptualized but haven’t written is an examination of twelve common characteristics of archaic religion and how they play out in Judaism.
So again, thank you to everyone who has visited the website and read any part of it. Thank you to everyone who has participated in class. I’d love to hear from you—you can just email me what you are thinking.
Thanks
Jared
