Topic: Isabella Freedman Jewish Retreat Center

(A small number of) you are invited to join us for the chagim at Isabella Freedman

By Nigel Savage on September 9, 2020 in Holidays, Isabella Freedman Jewish Retreat Center, Nigel, Spirituality

Wednesday, September 9, 2020 | 20 Elul 5780 Dear All, These of course will be unique chagim. The shuls and rabbis are preparing hard, and now is a time to send love to every rabbi, to every cantor, to every leader of a minyan, to every leader of a shul. Elbow hugs to everyone. Our own pivot has been parallel. Having trialed small Covid-safe retreats at Isabella Freedman, we are now planning to do small retreats for the chagim. Normally, as you know, part of the essence of Hazon and of retreats at Isabella Freedman is a deep commitment to inclusive community. At Sukkahfest, for instance, there will typically be davening in many different flavors – “orthodox”; “trad egal”; “renewal”; “meditation” and so on. (I use quote marks because each word is only a short-hand and an approximation – often not a very good one – for the davening itself. C’est ca.) This time around – for capacity reasons – we are stacking, as it were, horizontally rather than vertically. So Rosh Hashanah and Shabbat Shuva/Yom Kippur will be liberal orthodox, led by Rabbi Avram Mlotek and Yael Kornfeld; the first yontef of Sukkot will be led by Rav […]

Two ways to feel better this summer (or maybe three)

By Nigel Savage on July 16, 2020 in Climate Change, Cycling, Isabella Freedman Jewish Retreat Center, Newsletters, Nigel, Reflections, Rides

Thursday, July 16, 2020 | 24 Tammuz 5780 Dear All, Wave upon wave of change and challenge. For the Jewish community, as for the world, there have been overlapping responses since early March. Understanding what this thing was. Changes in behavior, in what you could do, where you could go. A focus on kids, and on parents. A whole series of organizational pivots. Health and human services, people in need. Schools, and what should they do? Summer camps, and could they open? Funding challenges and choices and decisions. Then Black Lives Matter. (Just as the coronavirus didn’t come out of thin air, “BLM” is short-hand for four centuries’ of inequity that needs to be addressed.) I start with this because I want to reiterate a stark omission in this list of priorities. “The climate crisis,” which very few people, and very few institutions, have any bandwidth to think about right now, remains the defining – chronic, life-threatening – issue of our time. We care about the coronavirus because it threatens life and health, and because it challenges our normal life. And we care about BLM because we want to live in a world of equity and justice, and BLM makes clear that […]

Isabella Freedman: an update, and an invitation

By Nigel Savage on June 23, 2020 in Adamah, Farming, Food, Isabella Freedman Jewish Retreat Center, Newsletters, Nigel, Reflections

Thursday, June 23, 2020 | Rosh Chodesh Tammuz 5780 Dear All, I want to explain how and why Freedman has been closed, and also to invite you to join us for an “Isabella Freedman Getaway” – a 5- or 12-night stay at Isabella Freedman. An amazing opportunity to escape from the city – or wherever you are – and hang out in a beautiful place, with kosher food, space for kids, and great hikes, trails and trips nearby. And I’m delighted, separately, to share with you the launch of a Virtual Camp Isabella Freedman for adults ages 55+, for the week of July 6th – 10th; and to remind you that registration for our first ever cohort of Adamah At Home is now open. We hope and intend that each and all of these will be very special experiences. To learn more about each, click here for Getaways, here for Adamah At Home, and here for Virtual Camp Isabella Freedman. To explain how these three programs arose, I want to give an update on Isabella Freedman in the last four months. On February 25th, we set up a coronavirus task force. On March 3rd, I left Freedman after a superb and impactful Kenissa retreat led by Rabbi Sid Schwarz. And on […]

The launch of Adamah At Home, and thoughts about M4BL

By Nigel Savage on June 18, 2020 in Activism, Adamah, Farming, Food, Isabella Freedman Jewish Retreat Center, Newsletters, Nigel, Reflections

Thursday, June 18, 2020 | 26 Sivan 5780 Dear All, Isabella Freedman is closed as a retreat center, but the state of CT has reduced the minimum period for bookings, which now enables us – next week – to launch Isabella Freedman Getaways. If you’re interested in coming up and spending 5 or 12 days at Isabella Freedman – with three meals a day of (local, ethical) kosher food, in beautiful surroundings – look out for our email next week. We similarly had to take the very difficult decision to suspend the Adamah Fellowship for this summer – the first time since the program began, in 2003, when that has been so. But – but! – we’re now happy and excited to launch a new program: Adamah At Home. The program runs from July 6th to July 26th, and you can send in applications on a rolling basis from now through July 1st. It’s an exceptionally strong program encompassing practical skills, daily conversation and what we hope and intend will be a strong group. We’ll cover Jews ecological learning, garden mentorship, food systems and policy; also food choices, cheesemaking and regenerative farming. And we’ll also talk about structural racism in this country – […]

Perspectives

By Nigel Savage on June 3, 2020 in Activism, Hakhel Blog, Isabella Freedman Jewish Retreat Center, Newsletters, Nigel, Reflections

Wednesday, June 3, 2020 | 11th Sivan 5780 Dear All, I don’t feel like I have a lot of wisdom right now. This is hard. The lessons of Jewish history favor moderation, and striving to keep one’s balance. It is relatively easy for societies to become destabilized, and much harder to calm them down again. And yet, of course, we must also ask: what does “calm them down again” mean? In the sense that the protests are more than justified. Racism – personal, institutional, structural – has been wired into the fabric of this country since its very beginnings, an original sin for which there has been no systematic teshuvah. So this is a year’s rage, a decade’s rage, a century’s rage, and longer still, all boiling over. It is in the nature of being Jewish that we know what it is like to be an outsider, to be scared, to be an immigrant, a refugee, discriminated against. Many of us, most of us, grew up with that in our bones. And so it is unbearable to see persistent racism in this country, unbearable – after slavery, the civil war, a century of lynchings; after Goodman, Schwerner & Chaney… and Eric Garner… […]

Isabella Freedman Update and Summer Getaways

By Nigel Savage on May 26, 2020 in In the News, Isabella Freedman Jewish Retreat Center, Newsletters, Nigel

Tuesday, May 26, 2020 | 47th day of the omer, hod she’b’malchut Dear All, Normally at this time of year we share updates on our plans for a vibrant summer at Isabella Freedman. As we all know, this year is a different kind of year, and this announcement is a different kind of announcement. Covid-19 has changed how we will be able to gather for the foreseeable future. It has become increasingly clear that retreats are unlikely to be able to run with the same participation numbers and pricing that they have in the past, even as Covid cases have begun to fall. As a result, we will be cancelling all retreats through the end of 2020. But even as we cancel retreats, we are hard at work trying to ensure that other programs can still take place at Isabella Freedman. Our campus is beautifully located. We exist to serve our clients, to offer rest and renewal outside the city, and to do so in a way that nourishes and inspires people. We can’t do that, this year, with our traditional retreats. It may not be possible to do anything at all. But we are exploring whether we can enable at least […]

Wellness Retreat Resources

By Hazon on March 16, 2020 in Isabella Freedman Jewish Retreat Center

This email was sent to participants of the canceled Wellness Retreat. It has helpful resources that can be used by anyone during this difficult time. Dear Wellness Retreatniks, We’re sad that our time together has been postponed. In light of the current health crisis, it feels necessary and we are sorry to miss the opportunity to gather together. We were deeply looking forward to connecting and creating healthy resilient space together. Before we dive into some information and resources for you, just take note of where you are as you read this email. Take a moment to feel your seat on your chair, your feet connected to the earth, and invite breath fully into your body. At this time of heightened collective anxiety and fear in our world, it is vital to support our individual nervous systems by tending to our bodies, hearts, and minds. We’d like to offer some resources to best support your health at this challenging time, as this was what we were intending to focus on over the weekend: Dealing with fear or shock – from Rachael Brody: I wanted to offer a few simple resourcing tricks when you notice yourself in a state of fear […]

Why a Jewish Meditation Retreat?

By Hazon on October 11, 2019 in Isabella Freedman Jewish Retreat Center, Spirituality

by Rabbi Jay Michaelson Why do mindfulness meditation in a Jewish context? These days, there are seemingly endless ways to meditate: in secular contexts, like mindfulness-based stress reduction; in a wide variety of Buddhist communities; at yoga classes. So why do Jewish? It’s not because Jewish meditation practices are better, holier, or more effective than any others. Believe me, I’ve studied them for twenty-five years. There are some uniquely Jewish practices that can be helpful for some people – Rabbi Nachman of Bratzlav’s hitbodedut comes to mind – but in fact, Buddhist traditions, coming from a tradition which placed meditation at the center of monastic life for two thousand years, actually tend to be more fully developed than Jewish ones, which don’t. That’s why, at the Hazon Meditation Retreat, we tend to focus on Buddhist-derived meditation practices like mindfulness and open awareness, and blend them with Jewish practices like davening and Shabbat. But there are a lot of reasons to meditate in a Jewish context, whether you’re Jewish or not. Here are four. First, there’s a powerful cultural resonance. Whether Judaism is in my genetic DNA or not, it’s definitely in my cultural DNA. Jews have special joys and oys; […]

Summer Feature – Teva Educators: “Where are they now?”

By Hazon on July 5, 2019 in Education, Isabella Freedman Jewish Retreat Center, Reflections, Teva

As we begin approaching Teva’s 25th Anniversary, we will be spending the summer months featuring former Teva Educators who were once Teva students. They are from different Teva seasons and have different stories, experiences and memories. Enjoy the walk down memory lane with us! Neshama Sonnenschein came to Teva as a student with Solomon Schechter School of Manhattan in the 4th grade. She returned as a Teva educator for the Fall 2017 and 2018 seasons and is currently the Teva Education Coordinator. Neshama, left, as the worm during Resource Revolution What do you remember about Teva as a student? Which moments/memories/stories stand out? I have a few memories that stand out to me from being a Teva Kid. The first is that I took a packet of butter one morning and realized that I didn’t like it, so I went to an educator and asked what to do with it. They patiently, and without judgement answered that the butter can be scraped off from the packaging and put into the psolet bucket and the packing could go in the trash. I remember thinking that my question and action had value, even if I was adding to our psolet for that meal. The […]

Ms. Isabella Freedman’s Yahrzeit

By Hazon on May 30, 2019 in Isabella Freedman Jewish Retreat Center, Reflections

By Arthur Kurzweil 92 years ago, on the 23rd day of Iyyar, 5687, corresponding to May 25, 1927, Ms. Isabella Freedman was relieved of her earthly duties. Let us take the anniversary of her death as an opportunity to remember her life – which she devoted to performing acts of loving kindness. Ms. Isabella Freedman was a generous philanthropist. She was particularly devoted to the cause of young Jewish women, as reflected in her leadership roles in the Jewish Working Girls Vacation Society, the Widows’ Mothers Fund Association, as well as The Inwood House, a residence and counseling center for unwed teenage mothers. Our Jewish Retreat Center, named in her honor, was incorporated in 1893 as the Jewish Working Girls Vacation Society, of which Ms. Isabella Freedman was a founder. The Society provided free or highly subsidized country vacations for young Jewish women who worked all year in the city. It was established “to assist worthy Jewish working girls of small means to spend their summer vacation in the country, in the process aiding their physical development.” Ms. Freedman was also a devoted member of the Temple Emanu-El in New York City. She was a member of its religious school […]

One Water, All Lives: Teva Over Greenland

By Hazon on December 31, 2018 in Isabella Freedman Jewish Retreat Center, Reflections, Teva

By Mike Tintner 2018 Teva Educator On the plane flying from Moscow to New York City, returning from Israel, I had the chance to bless. After standing up for the first time in hours on the long flight I stumbled to the window, where I saw a spectacular sight. For as far as my eyes could see was white. Below me were the glaciers of Greenland I have seen so many times on the news and in documentaries. I met someone wearing a black kippah journeying from Israel to New York for his sister’s wedding. We talked about the blessing of beauty, Maaseh Breshit, and proceeded to say the full Hebrew blessing. I told the Orthodox appearing man about my work teaching the connection between Judaism and nature to kids at Teva. As I said these words I wondered what he must think. First: There is such a program? Second: What qualifies you to teach this? The truth is I was the one judging myself. I usually am proud of my work and sometimes I struggle to explain it. In my 107 seasons on Earth, I have witnessed a lot. I have been part of the movement of water protectors […]

Big News: Extending the Adamah Farm & Increasing Capacity at Isabella Freedman

By Nigel Savage on December 14, 2018 in Adamah, Isabella Freedman Jewish Retreat Center, Newsletters, Nigel

By Nigel Savage Thursday, December 13, 2018 | 5 Tevet 5779 Dear All, With strong active staff and lay involvement, and support from Project Accelerate, Hazon’s board earlier this year signed off on a new master plan for Isabella Freedman. Isabella Freedman is a place that touches people’s lives individually and strengthens and thickens Jewish institutions. Through Adamah, Teva, the Hazon Food Conference, and our other national retreats it has had a profound impact across the American Jewish community. As Jessica Haller, one of our senior board members, says, “there are some places that do some of the things that this place does, but there are no other places that do all of the things that this place does.” So the master plan is critical not only to Isabella Freedman and Hazon but also, in fact, to the future of the American Jewish community. Isabella Freedman is a place where magic happens – but we need to increase capacity; we need to improve the quality and range of our accommodation and meeting space; and we also need more land to be able to grow our flagship Adamah program, and to enable us to use the land itself more lightly and more carefully. Happily, we believe that […]

Turning Yom Kippur into Action

By Hazon on September 26, 2018 in Holidays, Isabella Freedman Jewish Retreat Center, Spirituality

Dear friends — If you’re like me, you probably spent some of your Yom Kippur last week thinking about how to better live up to your ideals — how to be kinder, more just, more in touch with the sacred. Well, here’s an advertisement for how to put that resolution into practice. Having spent twenty-five years exploring spirituality, therapy, meditation, medication, self-help, human potential, sacred sexuality, entheogens, and a dozen or so paths to the holy, I think that meditation retreat has been the single most effective tool in the never-finished project of becoming more alive, more awake, and more invested in pursuing justice. I’m sure this isn’t true for everyone, but it has definitely been true for me and for many of the “spiritual friends” and teachers who have inspired me along the way. In my experience, no awesome spiritual state, no study, and no political action can transform the mind and heart the way that meditation does — and no amount of daily meditation can do the work of a multi-day meditation retreat. That’s true whether you’re suffering and looking for healing, or comfortable and interested in doing more with your one, precious life. Contemplative neuroscience has now […]

Why Do We Wander? | D’varim HaMakom: The JOFEE Fellows Blog

By Hazon on July 13, 2018 in Adamah, Animals, Education, Holidays, Isabella Freedman Jewish Retreat Center, Jewish Intentional Communities, Jewish Texts, JOFEE, JOFEE Fellowship, Reflections, Resources, Shavuot, Spirituality, Weekly Parsha

by Eliezer Weinbach, Isabella Freedman Jewish Retreat Center, Hazon Parshat Maasei Earlier this year, Isabella Freedman hosted a Moishe House retreat called “Wandering Jews.” Led by New York Times contributor Eli Reiter, twelve people in their twenties and thirties got together to discuss their experiences and wisdom regarding travel as a Jewish person. They discussed things like kashruth and shabbat observance while abroad. The question is: Why bother? When the Torah lists all the stages of the journey through the desert, as per the text from Numbers above, it really does discuss each part. All forty-two stages, in fact! The question is: Why bother? God commands that when the Jews do finally enter the land, they are to travel three times a year to Jerusalem. Wasn’t the journey to the land long enough?! Why bother?! Travel is hard. Sitting at home is easy. Hiking is hard. Watching Netflix is easy. Adventures change you. Inaction keeps you the same. Wandering is change. On a very basic level, you are moving from one place to another. But it’s so much more than that. I could quote Emerson on “roads less traveled” or Kerouac on basically anything, or any of the myriad formulations regarding […]

To Kvetch or Not to Kvetch? | D’varim HaMakom: The JOFEE Fellows Blog

By Hazon on May 31, 2018 in Climate Change, Education, Food, Isabella Freedman Jewish Retreat Center, Jewish Texts, JOFEE, JOFEE Fellowship, Reflections, Resources, Spirituality, Teens, Topsy Turvy Bus Tour, Weekly Parsha

by Frances Lasday, Teva, Hazon Parshat Behaalotecha What strikes me most about this week’s parsha, Behaalotecha, is the kvetching. The parsha (Torah portion) spends an entire chapter retelling several instances where the Jewish people complained endlessly. So, what can we learn from this? As an outdoor educator who works with children, and who supervises other educators, I too encounter whining. What interests me most about this parsha are the descriptions of the different ways in which Moshe and G!d react to their cranky people. I think that there is a lot to learn from how Moshe in particular, as leader, caretaker, and educator of the Jewish people, responds to the incessant whining. Before I go any further, full disclosure: I am totally a whiner. I get cranky, and I express it in ways that I am not always proud of. So I get it. I can’t imagine it was easy to wander aimlessly through the desert for 40 years, and there were probably lots of things to be cranky about. But, in Behaalotecha, the Children of Israel’s complaining takes on a whole new level. “The people took to complaining bitterly before Hashem and the Lord heard and was incensed.” […]

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