• NHC's Summer Institute: July 29- August 4, 2024. Registration opens April 25th

    This year’s theme of עִיר מִקְלָט “Ir Miklat: City of Refuge” can be found in a small corner of parshat Matot-Masei (Numbers 30:2 - 36:13). It epitomizes how we want this year’s institute to feel: a space where both the individual and the community at the heart of the Havurah ethos can come together in a safe space to create something meaningful, where our connections are welcoming and inclusive, fun and exciting, relaxing and energizing, and insightful and spiritually significant for our diverse community of participants.

    The Core Team envisions Institute as our City of Refuge--a place that’s safe--this year more than ever. What is it YOU need refuge from? We welcome you to join us at Pearlstone Center for sanctuary and refuge, to renew and refresh, and to play, rest, create and learn with us!

Liturgist-In-Residence 2021: Introducing Devon Spier!

Devon Spier Trashing Platitudes, Recycling Fears: Ritualizing Humour and Irreverence in the Pandemic

 

Devon Spier is an author and visual poet theologian (proemologian), who weaves and teaches others to weave poems, prose and theology through digital images.

She is currently the most published author on Ritualwell.org and has resourced nearly every mainstream movement, network and denomination of Judaism to explore the intersections of hope and hopelessness, trauma and recovery, humour and doubt, loneliness and safe-keeping.

Specifically, her work has been consulted and published by the London School for Jewish Studies, the Reconstructing Judaism movement, Central Conference of American Rabbis (Reform), Liberal Judaism (UK), Jewish Women’s Archives, Hevria and Jewcer: The Leading Crowdfunding Platform for Jewish Causes, the City Museum of New York, Ben Yehuda Press, Repair The World, AVODAH: The Jewish Service Corps and most recently, the National Council of Jewish Women, which used her work to resource their members on solidarity with indigenous sovereignty and rituals for reproductive freedom.

An advocate for encounter across differences in the global religious community, Devon has been honoured with peacebuilding awards from the YMCA and Interfaith Grand River as well the Outstanding Achievement Award for a Religious Studies Major and the Peter C. and Elisabeth Williams Memorial Scholarship in Peace and Conflict Studies from the University of Waterloo.

In 2018, she was selected as the first Canadian rabbinic student to participate in the T’ruah Rabbinic and Cantorial Summer Fellowship in Human Rights and was blessed to intern through the Women’s Prison Association. She was also recognized by the Ontario Government as a recipient of the “Leading Women, Building Communities” award.

Devon is currently studying rabbinics at the Academy for Jewish Religion (New York).

The author of two bestselling books, “Heart Map and the Song of Our Ancestors” (2018) and “Whatever it is, gently: Quiet Meditations for the Noise of the Pandemic” (2020), Devon’s poetry conveys the possibility of a deeper listening to anyone who stands at the Jewish margins, whom she regards as the actual centre of Jewish life and spiritual practice.

Devon will be teaching four workshops throughout the two weeks: 

 

  • Workshop 1- Ritualizing Humour and Irreverence

Perusing an amusing array of panic-inducing news headlines, we’ll lean into fear, explore a year in this strange pandemic life and laugh about it. Turning our socially distanced habits and mediocre daily accomplishments (think: remembering pants) into poem, prose and monologue, we’ll create a tefilat covid (daily prayer) for the year that doesn’t seem to end. And with the company of ancestors Jon Stewart, Groucho Marx, Tiffany Haddish, Gilda Radner and Yehuda Ha-Nasi, come out of the drab and the dramatic with the very real wisdom of our dry but blooming lives.

  • Workshop 2- Reducing Panic

In this niggun-sharing, embodied workshop, we will experience prayer as breath and use singing and trauma-informed writing practice to experience both physical and psychic rootedness in our past and in our present. Talking out our life stories, we’ll greet the questions that ache at us and using neurological body awareness, we’ll use the words of “Elohai Neshama” (My Pure Soul) to not only start where we are but enhance who we really are by embracing all our conflicting and soothing parts of our lifespans and pandemic days for hopefulness of growth and transformation.

  • Workshop 3- Re-using Platitudes

In a safe and supportive environment, participants will share their social and societal anxieties and create their life verse, or a response to the platitudes and pleasantries that most trouble their complicated hearts. In this workshop, participants will be introduced to proemology, or the discipline of creating personal theology through digital images, in this case, a spiritual practice of responding digitally to the psalms. Through a guided host screenshare, individual participants will work with the facilitator to “nevi-meme” (a play on nevi’im or ‘prophets’) or create relevant Jewish social commentary on viral internet images of the pandemic. And together, participants will find a way to channel what existentially ails them into a force for what nourishingly anchors them.

  • Workshop 4- Re-cycling Fear (Capacity = 15)

This program will involve co-teaching how to make the infamous pandemic sourdough bread starter but with a guided meditation twist. By accessing the familiar comforts of bread-making, we will find the presence of heart, mind and body to cultivate our own futures and turn our fright into soul food. Please note that participants will be sent the bread recipe prior to the workshop and will be expected either to participate by making the bread with the workshop leaders or alternatively imagining bread making using their body to experience the process; either and both are most welcome and you are encouraged to participate as you are able.

Devon will be teaching (EDT):

Day- Tuesday, July 27 @ 1 pm

Day- Thursday, July 29 @ 1 pm

Day- Tuesday, August 3 @ 1 pm

Day- Thursday, August 5 @ 1 pm

Note- Devon’s workshop on August 5th has a capacity of 15.


Devon will be also offering davening on Tuesdays and Thursdays (both weeks) at 9 am EDT: 

7/27 & 7/29Finding the Hmm, Huh and Oh: Prayerobics and Jewish Morning Prayer Rhythms for Beginners
Dates: Tuesday and Thursday morning  (Week 1)
Duration: 9:00- 9:45 am
Description: Talking, singing and feeling our way through the Amidah prayer of the weekday morning liturgy, we’ll sift through our individual and combined life moments of ‘hmm,’ ‘huh,’ and ‘oh!’ and come back to our heart’s yearning despite the chaos unnerving. Bring Your Favourite Cup of Anything to start the day with friends and kind strangers. Every one is welcome, especially if you’ve never prayed or have always wondered ‘why?’ or  ‘how?’
8/3 & 8/5Post-Pandemic Prayer Clean or How to Add Some Shine to Your Prayer Time After the Last Year and Half AKA 400 Months of Your Life

Dates: Tuesday and Thursday morning (Week 2)
Duration: 9:00-9:45 am
Description: Have you ever had trouble finding the words? Amidst the haze of your zoom screen and still isolated life, take a welcome step toward the closeness of community and learn a bit of Eicha (Book of Lamentations) trope to lament the past behind and sing out to the glory of what you’re running toward and taking with you into the emerging not-pandemic days.


The NHC Liturgist in Residence is funded from the proceeds of L’chu N’ran’nah, an egalitarian traditional Bencher with an alternative edge, edited by  Barry Walfish, Mark Frydenberg, Aviva Richman, and Ben Dreyfus.
We thank the NHC community for supporting our work.

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