Hazon Educational Library: Group-building

Everyone has things they stand for and qualities they value. Grounding ourselves in the Biblical texts about Tribal flags the Midrash there, we will use flags as an opportunity to think about what symbols we can use to describe ourselves and what we value. Participants will learn about themselves and get to make their own flags that serve to unify what they stand for with where they came from.

This program is an activity meant for a Shabbaton retreat to get people ready spiritually for shabbos and invoke deep questioning.

In this lesson we explore waste as a concept, how nothing really ever goes away. We learn about the Jewish value of ba?al tashchit which helps us remember that being wasteful is a bad policy and has always been understood as such. And lastly, instead of dwelling on the problem of landfills or the environmental impact of using too much energy, we learn how to use two technologies that help us circumvent the often wasteful systems in which we live. We will play games that help us think about linear versus cyclical systems, we will explore cob, an alternative method for building our world with resources sourced in our own backyard, and we will build a compost pile and meet the Ba?al Tashchit Heroes that help divert tons of organic matter from the landfill. We are teaching in this lesson about closed loop systems and we are doing it in an embodied way.

This program draws from the strength of our ancestors and the robustness of Jewish tradition, while preparing for a wilderness challenge.

An hour-long program designed to explorer Heschel's philosophy of Radical Amazement. It is a lower-energy, discussion-based program that benefits from a garden or similarly beautiful location.

This program offers an alternative to a traditional Tisha B?Av program (where participants typically learn about the destruction of the first and second temples). In this program, the instructor uses an age-appropriate book as a jumping off point to teach about an important Jewish figure who was responsible for the construction of the first temple. Hands-on activities then explore the themes in the book and allow participants to discover JOFEE connections and take-aways.

This program is an opportunity for families to celebrate Tu B'Shvat through learning about local ecology, connecting to nature, and understanding the essence of this Jewish holiday on a community hike.

Through this activity, campers will be able to walk goats to pasture, learn a melody to Psalm 23, and relate shepherding goats to shepherding humans (through social norms).

The participants will reflect on their personal experiences with 'good' and 'bad' education. Participants will practice learning by making their own personal connections to things and by allowing themselves to notice without making assumptions or conclusions. The participants will read texts about Jewish laws, practice making their own connections, and in teams will create short experiential programs about the texts for each other. Participants will express when and how to apply these methods in educational settings and casual settings.

The idea behind this program was to bring Purim to life in the middle of summer- a completely unexpected and ridiculously silly idea.The main goal for camp programming is always have fun, but just beneath that is our responsibility to educate our campers and create connections between Judaism, social justice, environmentalism and help them discover who they are (and who they want to be) in this big wild world. This program offers space for all of this! Campers will be split into small groups and have to overcome challenges placed before them, just like Esther did many years ago and begin to think about how they honor themselves, how they care for those around them, and how they stand up for what they believe in.