Join us for a creative, spiritual journey from Exodus to Revelation, with weekly workshops taught by rabbis, poets and spiritual leaders. Workshops include meditation, poetry writing and spiritual practices connected to the kabbalistic theme of each Omer week. This powerful time on the Jewish calendar will be used to journey toward individual and collective revelation.

Drawing from Christina Sharpe’s In the Wake, a book that interrogates Black history and raises questions of citizenship and responsibility "in the wake" of slavery and systemic racism, we will ask these same questions from a Jewish lens. Who are we in the wake of the Holocaust and the founding of the State of Israel? Has anti-semitism (or lack thereof) changed us? How can poetry offer us language to examine who we are as a religion, a nation, a people? Let's join together in this week in the Omer of Netzach (Endurance) and look at the poetry of both Black and Jewish poets, to talk about how to begin to form these questions for ourselves: how have "we" endured? Then let's write some poems together and see where our own work takes us.

Rachel Neve-Midbar’s collection Salaam of Birds has won the 2018 Patricia Bibby First Book Award and will be published by Tebot Bach Press. She is also the author (under the name Heimowitz) of the chapbook, What the Light Reveals (Tebot Bach Press, 2014.). Rachel’s work has appeared in Crab Orchard Review, Spillway, Prairie Schooner, The Georgia Review, as well as other publications and anthologies. She was recently a finalist for the COR Richard Peterson Prize, winner of the Passenger Poetry Prize and she has been nominated for The Pushcart Prize. Rachel completed her MFA at Pacific University in 2015 and is currently a doctoral candidate at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles.