B’eyrot:

Taproot Community of Practice

Our Community of Practice is a community of wells – b’eyrot [בְּאֵרוֹת].

These b’eyrot a.k.a. Interest Groups are different access points and meeting places to connect with the living waters of Jewish tradition. Interest Groups are ways we can gather in community and nourish our learning. 

B’eyrot are designed to:

  • create continuity for Immersion participants; 

  • provide time and space for ongoing relationship tending;

  • offer avenues for intimate and focused learning;

  • and develop connections between Staff, Immersion participants, and Alumni.

Each b’eyr [באר] is convened by either a member of the Stewardship Team, a Taproot alumni, and/or a Cohort participant. 

Memorywork: Radical Family History & Anti-Racist Genealogy

An interest and support group exploring the practical and political dimensions of family history. We are sharing our discoveries, discomforts, and more, as we engage with the inheritance of our ancestry of blood, kin, and spirit. We are working with embodiment, artifacts, documents, and stories as methodologies of memorywork. As we work with these legacies, we are seeking to tell histories of assimilation and whiteness that both humanize our ancestors in a historical and cultural context while also reckoning with the moral and material harms they caused. Together, we are navigating both the emotional terrain of working with family history as well as the material dimensions of doing genealogical research, oral histories, and other forms of memorywork. We’ll share a two-hour meeting with an opening ritual and check-in, followed by parallel co-working research time and breakout rooms, and then close together with a council and conversation.

Jewish Magic Learning Lab…

An interest group experimenting with practices and teachings of Jewish magic! Together we will gather as Jews in reclaiming magical practices as divestment from oppressive cultural systems, tending to the correlation between loss of ancestral practices and adoption of oppressive practices for protection. We will explore the elemental, ecological, culinary, domestic, and celestial dimensions of Jewish magic. Through reflective process, collaborative text study, and hands-on practice, we will be revealing, retrieving, and reviving what has been lost, hidden, purged, obscured in the face of empire.

Embodied Kabbalah w/ Rabbi Diane

An overview of Jewish mystical traditions and embodied (i.e. movement-oriented) approaches to some of the concepts of traditional kabbalah, among them the Four Worlds, the Tree of Life (10 Sefirot), the Four-Letter Name, the 13 Attributes of Lovingkindness, and the Lurianic Creation myth. We’ll play with practices that illuminate these mystical images and, time permitting, study short passages from classic kabbalistic texts, including Sefer Yetzirah and the Zohar. Open to all, no prior experience of skill necessary!

Siddur Study: Understanding the Amidah

This interest group is a textual deep dive into and creative exploration of the weekday Amidah. Through SVARA-style teaching, chevruta learning, and whole group discussion, we will craft personal relationships and translations of the Amida. Join us to gain textual tools and intricate understandings of the weekday liturgy to be in choice with the Siddur, daily prayer, and your relationship to Hashem!

Introduction to Judaism a.k.a. w/ Rabbi Irwin

Information coming soon…

Jewish Liberation Study Group

This interest group will critically explore the history, mechanics, and manifestations of antisemitism to develop our analysis of how it is intimately connected to all other forms of oppression. Together we will break through the isolation, hold contradiction, develop and lean into our relationships with one another, and build our muscles as jewish ritualists, organizers, and leaders committed to the struggle for collective liberation.

Bodyminds as B’eyrot

In Bodyminds as B'eyrot, we will be using our lived experiences and those of authors, artists, scholars, and others as text in order to examine how we may show up in the world in the work of collective liberation in a way that is otherwise to the current crises posed in our world, informed by our experiences as otherwise in societies we inhabit. Our bodyminds are wellings-up of the Divine, each created exactly and precisely as they are, with care and attention, for our neshamot to grow, and as such we are pathways for prophecy, as we dive into the underworlds of aquifers as UnderTorah, feeling and examining the root systems of liberation and the cracked foundations of empire in order to dream another world awake. This b'eyr is about being bodies and being embodied, about our bodies as dwelling places of the Divine and our bones as resting places for our ancestors, about bodies that have healed harm and bodies that are in need of societal systemic shift to continue their healing. Most of all, this b'eyr is about our bodies as the sites of ritual and therefore simultaneously individual and collective tikkun, for generations before and generations to come.

Judaism, Land, & Decolonization

A resourcing space for navigating the complexities of Jewish diaspora and our situation in colonialism. Through story-sharing, reflection, and text study, we will follow the prayer of healing relationship to haunted histories of displacement, disconnection, and violence. In particular, this b’eyr will be guided by and referencing the “Diasporic and Decolonial-Aspiring* Jewish Land Tending Passover Zine.” We will support one another in understanding of and responding to asks of/for solidarity from the Indigenous communities on whose land we reside — acknowledging the diversity of and potentially divergent perspectives on settler allyship.  Together we will explore Jewish frameworks, practices, etc. on cultivating relationship to place, ecology, and land. For us, settler allyship includes rehabilitating capacities, sensibilities, etc. for relationship with the more-than-human world. Join us to learn with and from one another!