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Our Mission:
Ohalah brings together rabbis and cantors
from a wide spectrum of the Jewish people to participate in the transformation
and renewal of Judaism and the Jewish people. OHALAH provides a network of
collegial support as well as opportunities for sharing in all areas of Jewish
learning, life and practice.
We seek to reawaken a vibrant Judaism that encounters the
mystery we call G-d and that takes as its pillars prayer and meditation, sacred
study and creativity.
We are committed to tikkun olam, which encompasses healing the
earth; struggling to create a society that places at its center not the methods
of greed, but love and caring; and bringing about the full participation and
empowerment of every human being, especially those previously excluded.
Our roots are in the teachings of our ancestors and in the
continuing self-disclosure of the Divine. Through study of
Torah and prayer, we seek G!ds help and guidance in our work and in our lives.
As clergy we are aware that our actions affect others in our
communities. We, therefore, expect our members to maintain in their personal and
professional lives the high ethical standards established by OHALAH.
We respect and honor a diversity of Jewish expression in our
membership and activities. We believe that we, together with all other forward
looking Jewish leaders, are participating in the evolution of the role and
function of the rabbi as a spiritual and religious leader.
Ohalah Annual Conference
Each year we gather for a four-day conference open to OHALAH members and
qualified non-members. The conference is co-sponsored by YESOD-OHALAH-CLAL and
ALEPH (or YOCA for short).
Rabbis, cantors, rabbinic pastors and student clergy are welcome at our annual
conference.
The conference program features:
-Inspirational and alternative davenen & meditation
-Lectures with questions & answers
-Presentation & discussion in small groups
-Small group sharing of tovot v'tzarot
-Ohalah members meeting
-Meeting of committees & affinity groups
-Kosher milchig meals
-Shuk selling books, CDS, tapes & tallitot
-Side-splitting comedy show by the Kosher Hams where the joke is on us all
-Schmoozing, singing & sharing
Photos from our 2003 conference can be viewed here.
The theme for our 2005 conference will be "Reb Zalman's Tool Kit: Applications
and Innovations from across the Denominations"
from a
New Generation"
"Best
Practices and New Developments in the Renewal of Judaism"
Web site guidelines:
All submissions
are welcome so long as they are composed by an Ohalah member, do not appear
elsewhere and are consistent with the policies below. On occasion technical difficulties may make it
impossible to post a piece and the author will be notified. Be sure to note in
the subject headline of your email: Submission for Rabbi Craft. Email
submissions to volunteer web site coordinator, Rabbi
Goldie Milgram.
Photos which document your
event are welcome too, please send as scanned files. Also music - send lyrics,
scanned sheet music, and sound files, whatever of the three you have. And art,
send as bitmap or gif files. Please do not send word processed files as
attachments, embed content in message instead.
1. Ohalah members in good standing may post one piece per month--up to five
pages per piece. All postings should be your original writing with proper
citations. If you are quoting large amounts of a copyright protected text,
please obtain permission to use the quote before submitting the piece. To keep
our site "reader friendly," please keep paragraphs short.
2. Paste your piece into the body of an e-mail for submission. To avoid virus
and downloading problems, attachments will not be accepted. We don't yet have
the capacity to post Hebrew. Therefore submit all Hebrew in transliteration.
3. Please submit materials you are comfortable being seen by the broadest
possible audience as most sections of our website will be open to the Internet
public.
4. If you want to include a piece of your writing which is on another website,
please send an abstract and a link and we will post both. We prefer not to post
pieces in their entirety which are available elsewhere on the web.
5. All submissions are subject to approval and editing by our website manager
who will use Aleph's 18 principles and Ohalah's mission statement as guidelines
for her decisions. Appeals from and questions about site submission or design
decisions may be submitted to the Rabbi-Craft Committee by contacting its Chair,
Rabbi Michael Ziegler at MHZiegler@aolcom.
All committee decisions are final.
6. Submissions will be acknowledged with notice of whether it will be posted or
whether it needs to be edited prior to posting. You are welcome to suggest a
website location for your piece, but the final decision about where it will be
displayed is subject to the site committee's discretion. The content and layout
of the web site may be revised around the time of our annual conference. Most
pieces will be removed at that time to make room for additional postings. Such
removals will be made without notice.
7. We want to include posthumous postings of our members who have passed away.
If you have a piece by Rabbis David Wolfe-Blank or Jason Gaber which are not
copyrighted, feel free to submit them. If they are copyrighted, please obtain
permission prior to submission.
8. If your membership in Ohalah is terminated or called into question for any
reason, including non-payment of dues, articles you have submitted may be
removed from the website without notice.
9. Send your submissions to
RebGoldieM@aol.com. Submission of a piece to that e-mail address constitutes
acceptance of these guidelines.
10. The targeted readership of this website is rabbis and cantors. If you have
material which is too elementary for rabbinic and cantorial colleagues, but
which you think would be valuable to a broader Jewish audience, we recommend
ReclaimingJudaism.org, a site of applied Jewish spiritual practice funded
through grants from Hadassah and Nathan Cummings Foundations.
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ALEPH:
Alliance for Jewish Renewal
STATEMENT OF
PRINCIPLES
We of ALEPH: Alliance for Jewish Renewal strive to open ourselves to
awareness of the sacred in all of existence. We strive to create Jewish
paths of prayer and meditation, study, communal life--practice, and
public action that embody this outlook.
We see ourselves in a crucial position at these times of paradigm shift
and are committed to help develop a spirituality through which Judaism
can transform itself to continued viability in the service of tikkun
olam -- the healing and balancing of this planet. Together we affirm
principles and values that flow together from the Four Worlds of Being,
Knowing, Relating, and Doing:
In the world of Atzilut, Being:
1. We are committed to the search for a deeper and higher understanding
of the spiritual realities in our lives and of our cosmic purposes.
2. What/Whom the traditions experienced as transcendent God we meditate
on and worship in ways that honor both the tradition and our intuition
as to how we are addressed by that God in the present.
3. We see the human spirit and the Divine as one evolving process that
calls upon us all for the interaction we call Godwrestling ("Yisrael")
and "Gathering the Sparks."
4. We intend to open ourselves to the transformation of consciousness
and action that is resulting from our living in a time when the Feminine
is emerging.
In the world of Beriya, Knowing:
5. In the sacred texts of the Jewish people and the writings of Jewish
spiritual teachers of previous generations we find enormous wisdom and
insight that draw on Eternal truth and continue to have great potential
to aid human beings in their quest for personal growth, empowerment, and
healing -- as well as those elements that are historically limited and
need to be transcended. We will study, teach, and make accessible these
texts and writings with all those who wish to encounter them, wrestle
with their content and meaning, and decide what to draw on and what to
leave behind.
6. Among our guides to interpretation of Torah are the Prophetic,
Kabbalistic, and Hassidic traditions as they are now being transformed
in the light of contemporary feminist spirituality, process theology,
and our own direct experience of the Divine.
7. We are committed to consult with other spiritual traditions, sharing
with them what we have found in our concerned research and trying out
what we have learned from them, to see whether it enhances the special
truths of the Jewish path.
In the world of Yetzira, Relating --
8. We are committed to foster a safe environment for spiritual growth in
which what we are learning about the human psyche and spirit is honored,
and through which we enable the self to embody the Presence.
9. Our communities strive to be collective and egalitarian in leadership
and decision-making.
10. Women and men are full and equal partners in every aspect of our
communal Jewish life.
11. We recognize respectful and mutual expressions of adult human
sexuality as potentially sacred expressions of love, and therefore we
strive to create communities that include and welcome a variety of
constellations of intimate relationships and family forms -- -among them
gay, lesbian, and heterosexual relationships as well as single
life-paths.
12. We will reach out toward including all who seek but have not yet
found a spiritual home in the Jewish community or a satisfying
connection to the Jewish people and its traditions and teachings.
In the world of Assiyah, Doing:
13. In order to heal the world, we seek to re-balance the power
relationships among human beings and all other species and aspects of
the Earth, as well as among races, peoples, faith-communities, classes,
genders, age groupings, and other human groups so that each can live in
shared peace and dignity. We will ourselves treat with respect and
open-mindedness those who belong to other peoples and walk other paths
than our own, even if we feel compelled to oppose their actions in the
world. These efforts we view as integral to Jewish spirituality and
action.
14. We believe that the healthy expression of Jewish people requires a
vital self-governing Jewish community in the Land of Israel (which in
our generation has taken the form of the State of Israel); Jewishly
vital, varied, and creative communities in many places throughout the
world; and a continuous and open-hearted interchange between all these
communities. We will try to embody such connections in our individual
lives and in building the networks of our communities.
15. We welcome with surprise and excitement the discovery that God's
will for our generations of Jews is that we learn to live in what we
understand as the Land of Israel face to face with our cousins the
children of Abraham and Hagar through Ishmael. We support every effort
to do so in mutual recognitions of each other's right to freedom,
self-determination, security, and peace --- as part of our own share in
the task that all peoples face in this generation, of learning to share
in peace and freedom the great unboundaried earth.
16. We intend to treat with respect other Jews and other Jewish
communities whose approaches to Jewish life differ from our own, even if
we feel compelled to oppose their statements or their actions.
17. We are committed to applying all of these values and principles to
the renewal and revitalization of our personal and communal ceremonies,
liturgies, rituals, life-paths, and spiritual practices, and to our
processes for collective decisions-making and collective actions.
18. We will help in the formation of communities based on these values
and principles.
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Ohalah Member Discussion Lists
Goal:
Ohalah's e-Mail List is maintained for the benefit of our members to
enhance and enrich our rabbinate through sharing Torah, midrash, agaddah,
and praxis. This list aspires to create a dialogue about the spiritual
enrichment of Judaism across a broad spectrum of rabbis and cantors who
are united by an interest in this work. Your creative sharing and deep
questions are welcome.
Also, we will use this list to share information about Ohalah events and
projects and to conduct Ohalah business from time to time. When votes on
major Ohalah policies are taken up, these will be posted here and e-mailed
separately to Ohalah members who choose not to participate on this e-mail
list.
To post: Send your e-mail to ohalah@shamash.org. Read the policies
that follow before posting. Please keep 2 pages as the maximum posting
length.
Caution: Please remember that whatever you post will go to
everyone on the list. When you receive a post from the list, it will look
like it is coming from an individual. If you click on reply, your
response will go to that individual. If you click on reply all, then your
response will go to the whole list.
Please enrich our list by posting
- Personal Sharing
(mazel tov, request for prayers, condolences, requests for resources),
- Praxis including Torah, midrash, agaddah, prayer, rituals and
all forms of religious practice, thoughts and ideas. (This can be
excerpts from your sermons, talks or articles, or something you write
especially to share with our list.)
- Announcements about job openings, books, tapes, or CD's, events,
opportunities and resources.
We ask that personal sharing and praxis be your own writing. (Including
quotes in your writing is welcome.) Announcements can be your own writing
or forward of the writing of others.
Please do NOT engage in the following on this
list:
- No political discussions
- No local or world news, no forwarding of articles from newspapers,
journals or the internet (However, you are welcome to post a couple
of sentences about an article, journal or website and give us to source
for where to find it.)
- No profusion of postings
- No putting others down
- No hal'vanat panim If someone misquotes or mistranslates a source,
write them off list with your guidance. If you receive an off list
correction, we encourage you to review the matter, look up the source and
post your appreciation along with the correction.
- No rechilut or lashon hara If you have a complaint or criticism
of another member, contact Ohalah's President.
- No Solicitation of Funds but you are welcome to post an
announcement that you are collecting funds for something and who to
contact to give or get involved.
Personal postings please: Many members of this list are leaders in
Aleph, Aleph's projects (including Ohalah) or sister organizations. To
avoid confusion about "what's official", we ask for the following:
If, in your capacity as a leader, you post to our list, please indicate at
the beginning of your e-mail, the organization on behalf of which you are
writing.
When you post all other e-mails, please write on your own behalf.
When you read an e-mail, please assume the views and teachings are
personal unless it states otherwise at the beginning of the e-mail.
Informational Tags Only Please
You are welcome to attach "tags" with your name, congregation or
institution, location, website, etc., but please do not include forms for
subscription or donation in your tags.
N'varekh et Ma'ayan Raz, borei minei Yehudim.
OHALAH Board of Governors 5763 |
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