j-lab – Searching the Jewish Experience for personal meaning, spirituality, and creativity

The j-Lab

J-Lab is an experimental and experiential laboratory offering Jewish Experience Workshops for all who are seeking more personal meaning, spirituality, and creativity from their own lives.

Why experimental and experiential? Experimental because as our lives and the world around us change, we are left with a sense that each of our days is an experiment. Experiential because structured experiences can offer us insight and awareness on intellectual and emotional levels.

Jewish Experience Workshops are opportunities to enter into aspects of Judaism and the Jewish historical experience as experiments in the search for personal meaning, spirituality and creativity.

J-Lab is based on the following principles:

• It is the Future that is holy and the uniqueness of the individual that is sacred.
• The Jewish Future will be strengthened by individuals who find solace and spiritual support for their uniqueness in Jewish communal activities
• Judaism is the repository of the human experiences of the Jewish people as individuals and communities seeking meaning in their lives.
• The search for personal meaning, spirituality, and creativity is most effective in the interactive group setting.

The Jewish Experience 

Behind or underneath each biblical story, each prayer in the prayer book, each ritual, and every life cycle event and period in Jewish history is a fundamental human experience or set of experiences. If we can allow ourselves to enter into that experience, no matter how apparently different or foreign it might seem from our own, we can gain perspective and enrich our own lives by expanding our experiential vocabulary.

Whatever one’s spiritual upbringing, “experimental” entering into Jewish historical and spiritual experience can teach us much about ourselves. Centuries of rich and varied experience can become creative resources we can “try on” to discover or rediscover important aspects of ourselves or the significant others in our lives.

The goal of the Jewish Experience Workshop is to enable  participants to ‘experimentally’ enter into the experience of spiritual texts and traditions without any pre-commitment to any ideology/theology. This workshop approach is based on the integration of Jewish Midrash -techniques guiding the search for contemporary meaning in the ancient spiritual texts – with the insights and experiential techniques of educational and therapeutic innovations.

Through the use of structured exercises and imagery, guided fantasy, and role-play intermixed with traditional Midrashic principles, participants learn techniques to enhance their ability to enter into the vocabulary of Jewish experience, adding thereby to their own storehouse of spiritual resources.

Initial Offerings:

The Split Rock Thinking Experience – Strategies from a problem-solving people

“Just as the hammer splits the rock into many pieces, so a problem can be approached from many points of view, strategies and methods” (paraphrase of a Talmudic passage) Split Rock Thinking is a fundamental creative strategy that supports and is a shorthand for a myriad of methods we can use to understand our Jewish Historical experience, i.e. Words, poetry, music, photography, film, dance drama, structured fantasy/imagery, dream, and bodywork. Split Rock Thinking interweaves traditional interpretation techniques with experiential methods to both better understand aspects of the Jewish people’s life coping skills and explore one’s own life situation.

The Living Midrash Experience-

Living Midrash is a mixture of traditional methods, dream-work, “here and now” therapies, and psychodrama, with Hebrew scriptures and rabbinic tradition being viewed as part of our collective consciousness and thereby benefiting from these various ‘experiential’ approaches. Such openness to the collective consciousness enriches our own individual consciousness-expanding our own spiritual resources.

The Jewish Ethnotherapy Experience – Making sense of your Jewishness!

Jewish Ethnotherapy is a two-fold approach: That of assisting the individual Jew to develop a positive image of himself or herself as a member of the Jewish people, and that of providing the individual with specific knowledge of their resources within the historical experiences of our people that he or she might find as supportive tools toward further self -discovery.

The Jewish Prayer in Slow Motion Experience

This is an experience of Jewish worship as an environment for encounter with self and one’s experience of God achieved through membership in a purposeful community. Structured as an interactive participatory exploration of traditional prayers with the emphasis is on being a member of an experimental prayer group in a trust-building communal setting. Previous knowledge of Jewish prayers is not a requisite.

To Life! -Lechayim! – Reinventing ourselves

Adult life, especially around retirement and or relocation, does not come with a user’s manual. The question each of us must ask and answer for ourselves is how can we achieve a meaningful life that will lead to our welcoming each day as a blessing? This workshop explores various roadmaps for personal self-understanding and meaningful goal-setting including that of the biblical Jonah, the Song of Songs, Proverbs, and Ecclesiastes -each work attributed by tradition to the wise Solomon at progressive stages of his life.

You and Your Significant Other – Creating a Celebratory Experience

Relationships between significant others are valued within the Jewish tradition and our contemporary Jewish community. Whether for those walking the traditional path of Jewish significant others (to be) blessed by clergy and by state, LGBT couples, couples of mixed religious backgrounds, or couples wishing to somehow mark their relationships, this program builds on the Jewish notion of the sanctity of the individual, the creation of a significant other relationship contract honoring the uniqueness of each other, and the affirmation of the relationship witnessed by others.

Rabbi Nicolas L Behrmann, Director, and Jewish Experience Curator

• Ordained Rabbi, leader of congregations as well as local and regional educational organizations
• Led organization development, business process improvement, and strategic planning workshops in corporate, state government, and non-profit settings.
• Managed multi-million-dollar information technology projects within global corporate and state agency settings.
• Provided independent verification and validation consulting for multi-million-dollar information technology projects including state taxation and election systems.
• Led staff development, communications, family life, personal growth, and life cycle, as well as Biblical theme-based psychodrama workshops in a variety of settings.
• Developed and presented a variety of multi-media experiential events.
• Led leadership development programs and communal fundraising campaigns.
• Docent at the Santa Fe Opera, and led planning workshops for the Santa Fe Opera Guild

Future Topics to be explored

Organizational Workshops

The Wall of Wisdom Building Experience

“Who is truly wise, who can learn from all others” Ethics of the Fathers. As the first step in an organization’s process improvement, and or strategic planning initiative, this workshop evokes input from participants toward building a “Wall of Wisdom”. During the experience, the various inputs are then gathered into meaningful target groupings for further deliberations. The emphasis is on a non-judgmental collection of ideas, suggestions, and wishes that could be then combined into various subsequent action plans.

The Halakha of Project Management Experience

Halakha usually referenced as Jewish law is based on the notion of “halach”, Hebrew for walking or going, i.e. how we are to go down the ritual path. The workshop will introduce participants to the “halakha of successful projects” Intended for non-profits, including synagogues and Jewish organizations, this experience will help specify outcomes of sponsored programs, assist in the structuring of results-based activity, and volunteer efforts.

Enhancing the Volunteer Experience

“And you shall partake and be satisfied and express thankfulness” (Paraphrasing a biblical verse) This workshop deals with the recruitment, “care and feeding”, responsibility satisfaction, and effective management of the non-profit volunteer.

From organization or program goal-setting specificity to realistic task definition to training and volunteer promotion, the emphasis is on volunteer appreciation, appreciation of the talents and interests of the individual, and the organization’s appreciation expressed to its volunteers. 

A Future and a Hope

“For I know the plans I have for you, declares the Lord, plans for welfare and not for evil, to give you a future and a hope.” Jeremiah 29:11

The Future is Holy

 

“It is not the past that is taken as holy; the past is nonexistent, living on as relics and in the human imagination…It is the future that is holy” (Rabbi Alvin Reines)

 

“To see the future as holy, therefore, is to understand its divine sanction and inevitability. It means, at the very least, to be open to its image, to listen to its whispers, to heed its plea for life. Beyond this, the holy attitude toward life calls us to action, to communication and dialogue with its onrushing possibilities.” (Rabbi Alvin Reines)

To be Jewish is to be open to the Future:

“To cherish individuality,  to seek out novel possibilities, to enrich oneself through exposure to varied and exotic cultures and to prefer to risk subjective anxiety than to be secure within age-old objective constraints – to be all these is to be Jewish.” (Rabbi Ellis Rivkin)

 

Our Future is in our past

 

the individual who “recognizes that Judaism has been the manifold expression of human beings struggling and wrestling with their human problems, and he therefore can enter into the thoughts and feelings of each historical moment and come forth enriched.” Rabbi Ellis Rivkin

 

 

 

 

  

“If he is to survive, man must be both innovative and adaptive.    He must draw from the richest wealth of experience available to him and must never be bound to existing formulas for solving problems.” (Christian theologian Harvey Cox)

J-lab – an experimental Jewish search for meaning, spirituality and creativity

J-lab – Experimental searches for contemporary Jewish Identity, meaning, spirituality and creativity.

j-lab – a Jewish experimental search for meaning, spirituality and creativity.

Uniqueness  is that it is an experimental, non-synagogue program; synagogue members discount

Participants will be more effective members of their synagogue communities.

Uniqueness also in the NLB initial and founding leadership…

Personal assessment – aptitudes;  sefirot characteristics

Resources and subject matter experts – Linkedin

Personal, intrapersonal, interpersonal

Acceptance of one’s Jewishness

Adult Life Cycle – works of Solomon

Ayekah – where do we start

Being Holy – being in relationship – a workshop in celebrating, and negotiating?

Jewish Prayer in slow motion

Effective in the workplace

 – im ein kemach ayn torah – without sustenance there can be no spirituality. Counseling in career re-invention