The Jewish Experience Workshop approach is founded on the exploration of how Jews through-out history have coped with the challenges of life and their varying circumstances.

Through the curation of these lessons and development of structured experiences geared toward enriching the individual’s experiential vocabulary, the Jewish Experience Workshop hopes to enable participants to gain insight, meaning, emotional strength through their connection with the Jewish people.

The concept

Behind or underneath each biblical story, each prayer in the prayerbook, 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.

What ever 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 out 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.

Some possibilities

“What’s in your Jonah File?” -Keys to re-inventing ourselves – an experiential approach to teshuvah – a return to ourselves – a major theme of the High Holidays.
“Biblical Psychodrama” – innovative ways of experiencing biblical text
“Exploring Jewish opportunities in the adult life cycle” – towards overcoming the lack of ritual for adult passages for ourselves after bar/bat mitzvah beyond weddings and death -playing off of solomon’s attribution of being the author of Song of Songs, Proverbs and Koheteth.
Locating ourselves in Jewish Time – experiencing Jewish history through the prayerbook.

The concept

Some possibilities

“What’s in your Jonah File?” -Keys to re-inventing ourselves – an experiential approach to teshuvah – a return to ourselves – a major theme of the High Holidays.
“Biblical Psychodrama” – innovative ways of experiencing biblical text
“Exploring Jewish opportunities in the adult life cycle” – towards overcoming the lack of ritual for adult passages for ourselves after bar/bat mitzvah beyond weddings and death -playing off of solomon’s attribution of being the author of Song of Songs, Proverbs and Koheteth.
Locating ourselves in Jewish Time – experiencing Jewish history through the prayerbook.

the Jewish Experience Workshop is dedicated to the exploration, discovery and curating of the Jewish experience in order to develop programs that will enrich the lives and Jewish experience of its participants and those who would benefit from its activities.The Workshop follows a multi-faceted and multi-disciplined approach to Jewish history beyond Jewish denominations and traditional Jewish organizations. Its purpose is to enable individuals to find meaning and connection with the Jewish People through structured experiences geared to gain insight and emotional strength from how Jews through-out history have coped with their challenges

The Underpinnings of the Jewish Experience Workshop

The goal of the Jewish Experience Workshop is to provide offerings that enable participants to ‘experimentally’ enter into the experience of spiritual texts, traditions and historical moments without any pre-commitment to any ideology/theology. This experiential 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 how to enhance their own ability to enter into the vocabulary of Jewish experience, adding thereby to their individual storehouse of spiritual resources.

The Workshop benefits from the lessons of a number of Jewish born pioneers of experiential self-discovery including Viktor Frankl, Kurt Lewin, Abraham Maslow, Fritz Perls and Jacob Moreno, among others.

Among the offerings of the Workshop are small and larger group experiences dealing with personal growth, Jewish creativity, in-service training for Jewish professionals, and non-profit strategies for management for Jewish organizations.

From a Jewish historical perspective, the Workshop is guided by the teachings of Ellis Rivkin (1919-2010), professor of Jewish history at the Hebrew Union College. Rivkin lays out the goal of programs that foster Jewish identity: an 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.”

Further, Rivkin developed the proposal that: “one needs to feel free to explore Jewish history as data for decision making, not as already arrived at decisions. One must be made to feel trusting, so that one “does not fear that he will be stripped of his emotions if he becomes Maimonides and re-experiences his Judaism: he is not concerned less he abandon rational thinking because he temporarily re-feels the mystic fervor of Isaac Luria. He can be both the Vilna Gaon poring over the folios of the Talmud and the Ba’al Shem Tob who communed with all that is. He can do all this because he has grasped the fact that Judaism is the historical rendition of man’s groping with life and hence it has been as manifold, contradictory, and conflicting as that groping itself.”

Offerings of the Workshop

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, “experimentally” entering into Jewish historical and spiritual experiences 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.

Thus:

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 short hand 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 body work. Split Rock Thinking interweaves traditional interpretation technique 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 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 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.

Entering Moments of Our History as a Problem-Solving People

There is much to be learned from Jewish history: Despite great odds and powerful forces, the Jewish people has survived for thousands of years. During its historical experience it has mastered the art of change and continuity as its members have lived in both times of tranquility and times of crisis. It has survived among its many variations:

The transition from being a rural agricultural people to an urban merchant class, and expanding its horizons in the medical, scientific and intellectual field.
The transition from being a land rooted people to a people in exile from its homeland.
The transition from being “at home” and prosperous in countries from which it was then forced to leave under great duress.
Migrations to the new frontier of the American shores
The transition from being victims of mass destruction to being cultivators of the desert, being rebuilt as a people even as it converted the barren land to the biblical land flowing with “milk and honey”
The transition from being the “people of the book” to being masters of scientific and technological innovation

The ability of the Jewish people to survive and make these transitions is based on its being a problem-solving people with a flexible set of creative strategies that support both change and continuity.

These same creative strategies are available to organizations as they cope with their futures and their need to adapt to change.

Among the creative strategies that have supported the Jewish people in their response to changing circumstances, and the need for problem-solving have been:

The need to adapt to forced moves from the familiar to unfamiliar and even hostile surroundings.
The need to choose unconventional paths and livelihoods
A willingness to consider innovative approaches to problem solving
Attention to life cycles and seasonal cycles and their impact on lives
Teaching techniques for considering and analyzing multiple approaches
Learning from surrounding cultures and absorbing elements while maintaining Jewish continuity
Mastering new thinking and new technologies as they evolve
A willingness at times to break with tradition for the sake of continuity

All these challenges and creative strategies can be applied to an organizations strategic planning process.

Organizational Workshops

The Wall of Wisdom Building Experience

“Who is truly wise, who can learn from all others” Ethics of the Fathers. As a 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 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.

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, Mentor and multiple tour coordinator at the Santa Fe Opera, and led planning workshops for the Santa Fe Opera Guild

splitrock thinking

Creative strategies of a problem-solving and story-telling people

Jewish Experiential Workshops