By Ariel Wyner The Rabbis had told us the night before that we had three conventional choices for Shabbat morning tefillot: a Reform service, an Orthodox one, and a Conservative one. In addition to these three davening alternatives, we were also given the option of going on either a nature walk or a run around […]
By Kevin Wolf “Some people tell stories to put people to sleep, I tell stories to wake people up.” -Rebbe Nachman A grand story has tremendous power to spark one’s imagination, yet a simple story can truly enrich one’s life. At Bnei Akiva camps during “slow shira” (slow singing to conclude Shabbat), someone tells a […]
By Aviva Symons During Shabbat afternoon of the Nachshon Opening Conference, I was able to take a step back to see the bigger picture of this phenomenon that is Shabbat. Learning from texts and one another, we were able to deepen our own understanding of how each of the overarching movements of Judaism practice Shabbat, […]
By Gabby Deutch Recently Nachshon got to hear from Zeev Ben-Shachar, director of Israel education at Jerusalem U, an organization that creates films “with the goal of making young Jews feel proud of being Jewish and emotionally connected to Israel,” according to its website. Zeev followed other conservations about Israel with Israeli writers Etgar Keret […]
By Raya Seidman For our Friday night pe’ulat erev during the Opening Conference some of the fellows put together a fascinating exercize: a values ranking activity. The activity required us to split up into groups of three or four, and each group received roughly fifteen slips of paper. Each slip of paper stated a value; […]
By Madeline Budman You don’t need another blog post telling you how politically fraught, emotionally charged, and overall complicated the State of Israel is in 2017. Chances are, the geopolitics of Israel are already very much on your radar. Whether you’re on the far right, the far left, or in some complicated in-between like me, […]
By Aaron Torop What actually happened at Sinai? How do these questions impact the way we think about Jewish theology today and the role of the movements in Judaism? We elevated these questions and others during Cohort Three’s Opening Conference at Rabbi Zeff's Shabbat afternoon session called “The Ideology of Movements.” Throughout the hour-long session, […]
By Ari Weinstein During our opening conference in Shefayim, we had the opportunity to learn about the founding of Tel Aviv with Jamie Salter, a Jewish educator and Israel tour guide, whose educational lens presented Tel Aviv as the “first Hebrew city.” The label of Tel Aviv as a Hebrew city, rather than an explicitly […]
By Sam Weiner On February 1st, Cohort Three of the Nachshon Project traveled to the Shalva Children’s Center to hear about the incredible services they offer to individuals with special needs and to explore their brand new facilities. As a counselor for the special needs program at Ramah Wisconsin the past couple of summers, I […]
By Eliana Kahan Sunlight slowly enters my window and my eyes open. I mumble birkhot hatorah, the daily blessings on studying Torah, as I make my way downstairs and across the sunny dried out winter Israeli landscape to the chadar ochel of kibbutz shefayim. Coffee. I breath in the warm scent and sneak the cup […]
