Hazon Educational Library: Shabbat and Holidays

This program is a lesson on making grape juice from grapes. Participants will have the opportunity to discuss what makes grape juice holy.

Explore the landscape and tune into your spirituality by engaging with nature and self through song and silence.

This program was created as a non-traditional/siddur-based Zman Kodesh (sacred/prayer time) option on Shabbatonim or normal school days. The intention is to get students outside, moving/walking and connecting with each other and their environment by sharing their Jewish Journeys.

This program is an introduction to the intersection of Judaism and agriculture, woven through the experience of a Shabbat dinner with blessings, food, conversation Jews as a people of the land.

Included in this guide for synagogues are specific suggestions on how to schedule and promote a vegetarian Green Kiddush, a list of concrete ways to make it “green,” tips associated with each suggestion, and templates of educational signage.

This program is designed to engage families with young children with the holiday of Sukkot and the festival's connection to nature and the environment. Through stories, activities and arts & crafts, families will begin to develop a relationship to the rituals and traditions of Sukkot and think about their own connection to the natural world.

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

This program is an opportunity for families with young children to engage in the Jewish rituals and traditions surrounding the holiday of Rosh Hashanah. They will be able to meet families like themselves while spending the morning creating a meaningful and educational connection with a Jewish holiday.

This session activates participants with a philosophical framing of holiness in time and space using Heschel's The Sabbath. Participants then map out the holiday cycle and follow its path around the seasons, moons, solar cycle, and cardinal directions illuminating the layers of connection between the Jewish concept of time and nature's. This brainstorm then leads participants into chevruta to dive deeper into learning of the main harvest holidays using Waskow's Seasons of Our Joy. All of this sets participants up to make a physical representation of Jewish time in the form of a multi-layered calendar. This calendar will hang in our office and will be used as a teaching tool to help us orient visitors to what's alive in time, both Jewishly and environmentally.

This program brought members of the Jewish community together for a Shabbat dinner that highlighted local and ethically sourced ingredients while educating participants about issues of food justice in our city. The dinner included sharing stories, discussion questions, and conversations about ways to help promote equal food access. We partnered with a local food justice nonprofit to help facilitate the discussion and publicize upcoming partnerships between their organization and the JCC.