RA Convention 2022 Mishpahot

Title: Becoming Present with the Unscripted

Facilitator: Ed Reggi

Mishpaha Description: Borrowing from the art of improvisation theatre, Ed Reggi will guide the group through a series of theatre techniques. The three-day series allows participants to practice their communication and listening skills while reducing anxiety. The entire process creates a culture that promotes a free exchange of ideas while laughing and fostering group and self-care.  

Facilitator Bio: Ed Reggi is a lifelong storyteller who has the stories to prove it. Growing up in the Big Apple, Ed honed his acting by sneaking into NBC studios. He eventually attended a performing arts high school and completed his BA in Communications and BFA in Performance & Design. He then studied at Chicago’s historic The Second City, leading him to mentor with Paul Sills, its founder. While performing, Ed observed how his audiences craved the authenticity found in improvisational/unscripted theatre. That’s when he began facilitating small and large teams (of non-performers) about the gifts of improv. Today, his clients include nurses, clergy, bioengineers, and auto mechanics. Reggi teaches at Lindenwood University, Southern Illinois University-Edwardsville, Washington University School of Medicine, and the Center of Creative Arts (COCA) in St. Louis, MO. The principles behind improv were created by first-generation American Jew Viola Spolin--Ed’s most significant influence. Spolin wrote, “Play touches and stimulates vitality, awakening the whole person: mind, body, intelligence, and creativity.”

Title: Beyond Words: Reflecting Through Art

Facilitator: Bec Richman

Mishpaha Description: Visual art allows us to express, reflect on, and integrate our experiences when words alone cannot capture or articulate everything. In this creative process mishpaha, we will use materials to play and reflect on what has come up during the day, on what rests on our hearts. Using a facilitated process that integrates discussion, making, and reflecting, participants in this mishpaha will gain a tool for processing both during and beyond the convention.

Facilitator Bio: Rabbi Bec Richman (she/her) is a mama, soferet (scribe), Hebrew calligrapher, and potter who serves on the faculty of the Jewish Studio Project. Bec facilitates scribal arts workshops, community writing projects, and participatory Torah repairs in communities and schools around the country. Her pottery integrates hand-carved Hebrew lettering, and she creates custom ketubot with handwritten calligraphy. Bec is a co-founder of B’Yadeinu, a Jewish community art studio that integrates Torah, visual art, and music. A graduate of the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College and an alumna of the Wexner Graduate Fellowship, Bec lives in Cleveland Heights, OH with her partner and two kiddos. Bec’s artwork can be found at kotevetstudios.com.

Title: Conservative Rabbi and Justice Activist? Navigating the Complexities

Facilitator: Amy Eilberg

Mishpaha Description: There is a growing group of us within the RA working on social justice issues.  This work is deeply challenging, and perhaps especially so in the Conservative Movement (may this soon change!). In this mishpahah group, we will gather as a group of fellow travelers and comrades, passionate about the work of social justice, working under difficult circumstances.  Whether you are a veteran in this work or someone exploring it for the first time, please join us as we support one another in shaping our rabbinates to work for a kinder and more just world.

Facilitator Bio: Amy Eilberg serves as a spiritual director and teacher of Mussar.  Long engaged in social justice work, her current work focuses on efforts to dismantle racism.  She serves as the chair of the Anti-Racism Impact Team at her home shul and as the chair of the Racial Justice Subcommittee of the Movement’s Social Justice Commission.

Title: Enhancing personal prayer practice through mussar and hitbodedut

Facilitator: Cyndee Levy

Mishpaha Description: Explore how one might develop an enduring transformational spiritual growth practice through musssar with an emphasis on hitbodedut and personal reflection through journaling.  In addition we will discuss the value of the partnership of practice gained through the mussar vaad experience, with an emphasis on how to develop and facilitate a successful vaad.

Facilitator Bio: Cyndee Levy has served in leadership roles in Jewish Education in the St Louis Jewish Community. She has taught a wide variety of adult Jewish educational content throughout her career.  She became a certified Mussar vaad facilitator through The Mussar Institute and has facilitated vaadim for the past 8 years.  She has served as a faculty member and vaad facilitator The Mussar Institute Kallah, and has served as a member to the Board of Directors for The Mussar Institute. 

Title: Expressive Writing to Renew Our Spirits

Facilitator: Jennifer Russ

Mishpaha Description: On Sukkot, the book of Kohelet reminds us that there is a time for everything, yet rabbis are often hard-pressed to take adequate time for themselves. This workshop aims to help you reconnect with your personal depths through writing. Each session will include time to meditate or set a kavvanah, then you'll be given expressive writing practices to help you digest challenges, explore your personal thread, and anchor what is going well. There will also be time for optional sharing in small groups.

Facilitator Bio: Jennifer Russ is a writer from St. Louis. She spent many years in California, exploring a range of psycho-spiritual practices for healing after sustaining the early loss of her parents. Jennifer studied English at Yale and holds an MFA in Creative Nonfiction from Pacific. She has taught creative writing and has worked as a copywriter for clients in the fields of spirituality and wellness. She enjoys working with those who are experiencing grief or other impactful life challenges.

Title: Lean into the Suck

Facilitator: Mark Lee Robinson

Mishpaha Description: We have all seen how growth and even new life arises from the crises we encounter in life.  Nevertheless, when conflict arises, we flinch.  Having experienced transformation in the past doesn't give us courage in the present.  In this conversation we will take a close look at what allows for transformation, and what we can do to reliably nurture it.

Facilitator Bio: Rev. Dr. Mark Lee Robinson is an ordained minister in the United Church of Christ, the Executive Director of the Center for Creative Conflict Resolution, and a pastoral psychotherapist who has worked with high conflict relationships.  He has also consulted with Jewish and Protestant clergy through his program Integral Support for Pastoral Excellence and as an individual consultant.

Title: Listening at the Well: Embodied Spirit-Care for Deep Wellness

Facilitator: Lizzie Salsich

Mishpaha Description: What do you need to be well?  Where is Spirit calling YOU right now?  Where are you depleted?  Where are you full?  Where in your life do you need to listen more deeply?  What do you need to give yourself in order that you can show up fully for your life and call?  These are some of the questions that will guide our small group practice during Convention.  Our time together will include embodied meditation and gentle movement practice, self-inquiry and reflection, small group sharing, song, and ritual.  Come, listen deeply, and be renewed.

Facilitator Bio: Lizzie Salsich is a ritualist and group facilitator with over ten years’ experience guiding folks skilfully and compassionately into their bodies and hearts via song, ceremony, and somatic practice. She teaches restorative yoga classes locally and guides ritual and ceremony for community celebration, renewal and wellbeing.  She also hosts circles for group spiritual direction and walks with individuals as they follow their own thread of inner unfolding in relationship to the Divine.

Title: Preserving Torah, Preserving the Self - Sensory Load/Sensory Overload

Facilitator: Cheryl Peretz

Mishpaha Description: How is Torah a sensory experience? What does it mean to see the meaning, feel the presence, or hear the voice of God? As we think about the moments at Mount Sinai, our tradition tells us that the people heard that which is usually seen and saw that which is usually heard. In this group, we will examine the multi-sensory experience of receiving Torah as told through our tradition and the spiritual confusion and clarity that comes through our own seeing, hearing, feeling, and touching.

Facilitator Bio: Since 2001,Cheryl Peretz has served as one of the deans of the Ziegler School, teaching, counseling, advising and programming. In addition, she has served as a pulpit rabbi and has been a High Holiday guest rabbi. She teaches the broader community through in-home study groups, Adult Education, and world-wide scholar-in-residence programs. Known for listening compassionately to facilitate insight and meaning in times of transition, Cheryl has developed a reputation for guiding personal and professional development. She also brings experience from her MBA and years of corporate experience in marketing, creating safe space work environments, vision and planning, organizational leadership, personnel supervising, budget and finance, and staff/board development, consulting with both rabbis and congregations to create healthy, productive relationships.

Title: Shamati, Dabarti

Facilitator: Susan Leider

Mishpaha Description: Process your day in a confidential, safe and relatively intimate setting. Modelled on the Institute for Jewish Spirituality Clergy Leadership Program and inspired by Parker Palmer's teachings, Core Group offers a place, without fixing or advising, to share struggles, articulate insights, savor moments of blessing, and generally be “heard into speech” regarding the truth of your experience.

Facilitator Bio: Rabbi Susan Leider is a leading West Coast voice in the Jewish and multifaith community. At Congregation Kol Shofar, she was the first woman to serve as senior rabbi at a Northern California Conservative congregation, and the first woman to serve as Associate Rabbi at Temple Beth Am, Los Angeles.

A graduate of the Institute for Jewish Spirituality (IJS) Clergy Leadership Program, she leads IJS virtual daily meditations, which reach over 200 participants, was a guest instructor for the IJS virtual Shofar Project and collaborated with Rabbi Jonathan Slater in the Open My Heart: Living Jewish Prayer, Waking Up to Blessing podcast.

With Avodah, she co-led a session for clergy to centralize justice in their 2022 High Holy Day offerings.  She is a leader on the Clergy Council of Roots, a unique network of Palestinians and Israelis living in the West Bank.  Following an RA clergy visit to Whitefish, Montana in the wake of antisemitic trolling and threats to the Jewish community, she helped to found "Love Lives in Marin." She is also a past board member of the Industrial Areas Foundation, the nation's largest network of local faith and community-based organizations. 

An RA Executive Council member, she also serves on the Joint Placement Commission and participates in the RA Groups on Racial Justice and Progressive Zionists.

She was ordained by the Ziegler School of Rabbinic Studies. Together with her husband Jeff, they are parents to Jessie, Sarah (Max), and Talia and new grandparents to Norah Sage.

Title: The Theological Masks that Rabbis Wear

Facilitator: Ira Stone

Mishpaha Description: Rabbis wear masks. Everyone does, to some extent, but for the Rabbinate it is a necessity. But masks, though they can protect us, can also be dangerous. They can force us to maintain our outer selves even when our inner selves have moved on. This can occur under a variety of circumstances, but for Rabbis one of the most pernicious is the theological mask: needing to represent theological and spiritual positions on the outside that have become problematic on the inside. This group will try to identify and encourage sharing of the masks we wear around these issues and offer possibilities for aligning our inner and outer realities through an acquaintance with more contemporary theologies drawn from thinkers like Emmanuel Levinas as well as from the larger theological tradition and the literature of Mussar read through the lens of these theologies.

Facilitator Bio: Ira F. Stone is currently the director of the Center For Contemporary Mussar. He was Rabbi of Temple Beth Zion-Beth Israel in center city Philadelphia from 1988 until 2014.  Before coming to Philadelphia he served as spiritual leader of Congregation Beth Shalom in Seattle, Washington for nine years.  Rabbi Stone is a graduate of the University of California at Santa Barbara where he received a BA in Religious Studies.  He attended the University of Judaism in Los Angeles and graduated from The Jewish Theological Seminary of America in 1979 with a Masters of Hebrew Literature and was ordained as a rabbi at that time. Rabbi Stone has written articles on theology and rabbinics for various journals including Conservative Judaism, Wellspring Journal, Middlebury College Magazine and Kerem His first book, “Seeking the Path to Life” was published in 1992 by Jewish Lights Publishing.  His second book, “Reading Levinas/Reading Talmud” was published in 1997 by The Jewish Publication Society.  His new book, “A Responsible Life: Mussar As A Spiritual Path,” was published by Aviv Press in the Fall of 2006. His commentary om the classic Mussar work Mesillat Yesharim was published by JPS in 2010. His latest book written with Dr. Beulah Trey was published in 2019 by IUniverse is In Search of the Holy Life: The kabbalistic roots of Mussar.

He has also published poetry extensively in various journals and is the author of collections such as Sketches For a Book of Psalms, The Really Perfect Poems Has an Infinitely Small Vocabulary, and most recently, Toward Eighty.

Rabbi Stone served as lecturer in the Department of Philosophy at the Jewish Theological Seminary and adjunct and visiting lecturer in Modern Jewish Thought at the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College. 

Title: Time for Listening & Compassion/TLC

Facilitator: Heather Altman

Mishpaha Description: You’re invited to listen with compassion to yourself and with your colleagues. In our sessions, you will cultivate the capability to notice what’s moving around and within you, to breath and stretch attention and compassion toward yourself, and how to be present to your own mind, heart and soul.  Together we will practice witnessing and honoring the divine in others, which will give you the precious opportunity to speak in a space where peers listen with compassion, acceptance, and grace. We will try some breath work, contemplative practice, meditation and gentle movement with the intent of creating a calm and peaceful place for connection and sharing.

Facilitator Bio: Rabbi Heather Altman created Tefilla Yoga and Rav Yoga and has been teaching contemplative spiritual practice for 22 years. Heather uses psychotherapeutic modalities for working with trauma, healing the nervous system, attachment patterns and play therapy in work with families with children with severe behavioral issues.  She is a yoga instructor, Spiritual Director, and Somatic Experiencing Practitioner (in training). Heather is especially attuned to the lgbtq community, domestic violence survivors, addictions, and clergy colleagues, and strives to be anti-racist and inclusive.

Title: Spiritual Arts Lab

Facilitator: Scott Slarskey

Mishpaha Description: Principles of the educational philosophy of constructionism will provide the fertile compost of our journey towards both gaining perspective on our more emergent challenges and reconnecting with our own and each others' senses of purpose. In our endeavors to practice deep listening--both to ourselves and to others--we will float through fields of song, briefly find our seats in the halls of the beit midrash, and play in the studios of the visual arts, creating what Seymour Papert described as "objects to think with"--precisely the kinds of artifacts that I hope will express some of truths which may not be as easily expressed by the words most readily available to us.

Facilitator Bio: Rabbi Slarskey Graduated from Clark University with dual majors in Philosophy and Ancient Civilization as well as a minor in World Religions. He has taught in state parks, juvenile detention centers, supplemental schools, JCCs, and colleges.  Since ordination as a rabbi through American Jewish University’s Ziegler School of Rabbinical Studies, Scott has worked as Jewish Educator at the Jewish Community Center of San Francisco, as the Upper School Principal of the Solomon Schechter Day School of Greater Boston, and currently serves both as a national mentor with the Legacy Heritage Teachers’ Institute for the Arts and as the Director of Jewish Life at St. Louis's Saul Mirowitz Jewish Community School. He is married to Rabbi Tracy Nathan and proud father of high school senior Hanan Nathan-Slarskey.

 Title: Sacred Emptiness

Facilitator: Robert Pelley

Mishpaha Description: Sacred emptiness is the spaciousness that is always present. The Sun always shines, even when it’s cloudy  We may experience this in different ways. This will be an opportunity to explore ways that we experience sacred emptiness, practices we use to develop that awareness and the impact it has on our lives.

Facilitator Bio: 

Bob was named after an episcopal priest and raised to be a priest, though never attended seminary. He has been in the field of counseling since 1985.  He worked in higher education for 11 years, first at Colorado College and then Elon College (now Elon University). 

He left higher education to pursue his interest in private practice and in 1997 his practice was merged with Alamance Regional Hospital where he worked in the pastoral care department and served as the director of the employee assistance and counseling program.  During the 11 years a ARMC he sat on the leadership team of pastoral care, provided consultation to over 50 businesses, taught group dynamics and marriage and family therapy to their adjunct program with The Graduate Theological Foundation, served as a counselor and provided supervision for a staff of 6 master’s level therapists.  

Following the death of his wife, he left North Carolina to move closer to family in the Midwest and served as the Program Director, senior clinician and therapist for a large nonprofit, Care and Counseling for two years.  He attended the Graduate Theological Foundation for 4 years, before deciding not to complete his coursework and dissertation.   Fearing the disappointment of his mother, he came home and made his announcement that he would not pursue the priesthood, his mother replied, “that’s ok honey, you’re already a priest.”  To this day it has been one of the greatest blessings he has received.   

Since 2008, Bob has been in a full time private practice in the Clayton and Kirkwood areas.  Bob very much enjoys his life with his wife of 14 years, Janice’ and spending time with his three grandchildren.  He is an avid runner, cyclist, hiker, skier and traveler.   For more information go to his website: www.bobpelley.com 

 

Title: Energy & Embodied Soul Care

Facilitator: Erin Duffy-Burke 

Mishpaha Description: In your work, life, spirituality and calling, how are you really?  How is your body?  Your heart?  Your mind?  Your soul?  The YOU of you?  In this small group time, we’ll have space to listen– to our own energetics, to the Spirit moving within us and among us, and to one another.  Through simple embodied spiritual practice, we’ll touch into the actual energy of things– in our body-heart-mind-soul beings, in our day to day lives and work, shared in community.  You’ll listen in to what is most needed now– a deep breath, a moment of reflection, an inner listening, a collective sharing, an awareness, a connection, an inspiration, perhaps a shift or change.  Together, we’ll ground into the nourishment and never-ending life force that sustains it all.  

Facilitator Bio: Erin Duffy-Burke is a minister, mover and midwife of the soul. She has been interested in spirituality and all things human & Divine for as long as she can remember. Her work is at the intersection of spirituality, embodiment and social justice. She especially loves holding space for deep listening and meaningful connection. Her training comes from the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, California, and over twenty years of experience teaching, facilitating, ministering and companioning others on the path of soul. She currently serves as an independent interspiritual minister, spiritual director, birth doula, writer and embodiment facilitator. Erin resides in the Dutchtown neighborhood of St. Louis with her partner John and their two dogs, Connell and Lupe.