Registration is Closed!! Stay tuned for info on how to join the virtual Sing Back on August 22
From Seed to Song is an outdoor gathering for people looking for vibrant, radically inclusive Jewish communal singing. We’ll create a collaborative, supportive, safe gathering where we can fully immerse ourselves in song — hearing our voices with others and learning alongside community. Everyone is welcome to learn, to practice and to lead songs.
Located at Just Roots Community Farm in Greenfield, we’ll cultivate conscientious relationships with place. For thousands of years, Jews have been a people of the land. We have been exiled and dispossessed, yet we still hold earth-based wisdom in our traditions and in our bones; to recover what we’ve lost, we thankfully have prayer and song to guide us. Simultaneously, we anchor in awareness that Pocumtuc, Nipmuc, and Abenaki ancestors and their living descendants continue to pray, sing, and honor this land where we now reside in diaspora. Seed To Songsupports us in revitalizing Jewish cultural practices, as well as in cultivating right relationships and understanding ourselves within a matrix of colonizing and decolonizing peoples.
Workshop Overviews
Sunday July 18, Tisha B’Av:
On this holy day in Jewish time, we honor and grieve our Jewish experiences of exile and the loss of our sacred anchors in place. We also honor and grieve the experiences of displacement and loss of the people whose homelands we currently reside within. We feel the tension between being Jews in diaspora with a torn umbilical cord to our own sacred places, and being occupiers in others’ ancestral homelands where their assaulted cords remain tethered. Tisha B’Av invites us to dwell in this complexity. Through liturgy, song, and storytelling, workshops provide opportunities to explore our places in a matrix of colonized and colonizing peoples. In community, we dive, we learn, we heal.
Tisha B’av Song Leaders include: Rabbi Andrea Cohen-Kiener, Simcha Halpert-Hanson, Rabbi Lee Moore, Camille Robertson, and Cara Michelle Silverberg.
Sundays August 1 and August 15:
- Songs for Right Now is an opportunity for participants to teach songs that are present in their minds and hearts in a supportive and facilitated song circle.
- Land & Place explores Jewish cultural practices for connecting with land through song, ritual, and prayer.
- Healing explores pathways towards tikkun (repair) through themes such as healing from personal ailments, assimilation, or systems of violence.
Song Leaders on August 1 include: Itai Gal, Simcha Halpert-Hanson, Camille Robertson, and Cara Michelle Silverberg
Song Leaders on August 15 include: Simcha Halpert-Hanson, Ryan O’Donnell, Cara Michelle Silverberg, and Justin Sundell-Thomas.
Lunch from Stone Soup Cafe in Greenfield will be provided on all workshop days. Workshop fee also includes a beautiful songbook provided at the culmination of the series, for the Virtual Community Sing.
The Virtual Community Sing will take place August 22, 4-5:30 PM. Please visit its dedicated event page for more info.
Covid Safety: This event takes place outside. We are not requiring participants to wear masks while singing. We will have a section of each workshop that is masks + social distancing for folks who would feel more comfortable being spaced further apart and surrounded by other people who are wearing masks. We ask you that you be respectful of others’ social distancing needs as we navigate this phase of the covid 19 pandemic.
Find us on Facebook at: https://www.facebook.com/events/329056405475141?event_time_id=329056405475141&ref=newsfeed
Hosted by Temple Israel Greenfield and Brattleboro Area Jewish Community.
Major funding provided by the Harold Grinspoon Foundation.
Funding for this program was provided by the Jewish Endowment Foundation of Western Massachusetts.
