Here’s What Participants Have Told Us About How This Course Transformed Their Lives

Once you have finished 8 modules you may notice…

• Some of the eight traits (middot) have been easier for you to incorporate into your life than others. There is plenty of time to go back and focus on the ones you found more challenging. In fact, we encourage going back through all eight.
• You are learning which support tools are most helpful for you… is it humming a chant throughout your day; posting a “focus phrase” on your refrigerator or laptop screen; and/or checking-in with a practice partner three times per week.
• You’re becoming more skilled at noticing when you are about to go down a habitual path that is out of alignment with how you want to be in the world—and sometimes doing something different. (It takes practice!)
• You’re increasingly able to meet others (and yourself) with a deeper quality of love, compassion and acceptance.

Meet Your Instructors:

Rabbi Josh Feigelson

Josh was appointed Executive Director of IJS in January 2020 and became President & CEO in April 2022. He received ordination from Yeshivat Chovevei Torah Rabbinical School in 2005, and served for six years as the Hillel Rabbi at Northwestern University, where he also earned a PhD in Religious Studies. In 2011, Josh helped found and served as Executive Director of Ask Big Questions, an initiative of Hillel International, which won the inaugural Lippman-Kanfer Prize for Applied Jewish Wisdom. Prior to joining IJS he served as Dean of Students at the University of Chicago Divinity School. He is the author of Eternal Questions: Reflections, Conversations, and Jewish Mindfulness Practices for the Weekly Torah Portion (Ben Yehuda Press, 2022). Josh lives with his wife Natalie and their three sons in Skokie, IL.

Kohenet Keshira haLev Fife

Kohenet Keshira haLev Fife (she/they) sprinkles sparkles, disrupts expectations, and offers blessings wherever she goes. She serves as Founding Kohenet of Kesher Pittsburgh and is a Core Faculty Member with the Institute for Jewish Spirituality; she also enjoys working with Jewish Studio Project and Kirva among other national Jewish organisations. Additionally, she delights in serving as a facilitator, teacher, life spiral ceremony/ritual creatrix,  shlichat tzibbur, liturgist and songstress. Her work in these realms is informed by her lived experience as a queer, bi-racial, child-free Jewish person living with chronic illness, her belief that Book, Body and Earth are equal sources of wisdom, the quandaries she has encountered as a scholar of the Orphan Wisdom School, and her deep commitment to a thriving, liberatory Jewish future. Keshira received Kohenet smicha in 2017 and earned her BS (2000) and MS (2001) at Carnegie Mellon University. Though both the lands of the Osage & Haudenosaunee people (aka Pittsburgh, PA) and the Gadigal people (Sydney, AUS) feel like home, Keshira and her beloved have been in an extended period of travel since January 2023.

Rebecca Schisler

Rebecca is a core faculty member at IJS, where she directs young adult programming and created and steers the Shevet Jewish Mindfulness Community, a space for folks in or near their twenties and thirties to dive deep into Jewish spirituality and mindfulness practice in online and virtual spaces. Additionally, she creates and curates content for IJS social media and frequently teaches on retreats and multi-week online programs.

Rebecca is honored to serve on this faculty after years of leading groups and teaching classes and retreats with Or HaLev, Pardes, Wilderness Torah, Stanford School of Medicine, Hillel at Stanford, Urban Adamah, Hamakom, and the Awakened Heart Project. A student rabbi at ALEPH, Rebecca is passionate about integrating ancestral wisdom traditions with innovative approaches to personal and collective healing and liberation. She teaches Jewish spirituality as an embodied, holistic, and accessible path, with relevant and timely wisdom for all.

The instructors will support participants in cultivating their ability to respond to the world in a more grounded, skillful, and compassionate way, growing more conscious of habitual reactivity and learning to respond instead with wise words and actions. The program consists of seven modules with live sessions, guided meditations, chants/songs, poetry, music, and practical, accessible guidance for daily practice—all drawing from the traits of Lovingkindness, Gratitude, Wise Judgment, and more.

In Sacred Response-Ability, you’ll learn how to access and practice seven core character or “soul” traits (middot), each of which builds upon and integrates those which precede it:

1. 1. 1. Loving connection (Chesed)
      2. Setting wise boundaries for yourself and others (Gevurah)
      3. A balanced self – taking up appropriate space and time (Anavah)
      4. Energetic response – so you can get started and keep going (Zerizut)
      5. Gratitude (Hodayah)
      6. Righteousness – developing your capacity to do what is appropriate and just (Tzedek)
      7. Trustworthiness (Emunah)

Meet Your Instructors:

Rebecca Schisler

Rebecca is a core faculty member at IJS, where she directs young adult programming and created and steers the Shevet Jewish Mindfulness Community, a space for folks in or near their twenties and thirties to dive deep into Jewish spirituality and mindfulness practice in online and virtual spaces. Additionally, she creates and curates content for IJS social media and frequently teaches on retreats and multi-week online programs.

Rebecca is honored to serve on this faculty after years of leading groups and teaching classes and retreats with Or HaLev, Pardes, Wilderness Torah, Stanford School of Medicine, Hillel at Stanford, Urban Adamah, Hamakom, and the Awakened Heart Project. A student rabbi at ALEPH, Rebecca is passionate about integrating ancestral wisdom traditions with innovative approaches to personal and collective healing and liberation. She teaches Jewish spirituality as an embodied, holistic, and accessible path, with relevant and timely wisdom for all.

Here’s What Participants Have Told Us About Learning with Rabbi Dr. Erin Leib Smokler

Meet Your Instructor:

Rabbi Dr. Erin Leib Smokler

Rabbi Dr. Erin Leib Smokler is the Director of Spiritual Development at Yeshivat Maharat, where she teaches Hasidism and Pastoral Torah. 

Erin earned both her PhD and MA from the University of Chicago’s Committee on Social Thought, and her BA from Harvard University. She was ordained by Yeshivat Maharat.

Erin previously served as Assistant Literary Editor of The New Republic magazine, and her writing has appeared there, as well as in The New York Times Book Review, The Jewish Week, and other publications. Her collection, Torah in a Time of Plague: Historical and Contemporary Jewish Reflections (Ben Yehuda Press) received the 2021 National Jewish Book Award in Modern Jewish Thought and Experience.

Register Now

IJS is pleased to offer this course at three tuition levels.
We encourage you to pay at the highest level you can, which will enable more students to participate.

Reduced Level

$

Curriculum Overview

This course will include partner and small group exercises to practice speaking with intentionality, authenticity, compassion, and aliveness.

Week 1: Cultivating compassionate inner dialogue

Week 2: Strengthening relationships through mindful speech

Week 3: Strengthening relationships through mindful speech, continued

Week 4: Expressing our authentic hearts through prayer

Week 5: Becoming a vessel for divine inspiration 

Meet Your Instructors:

Danny Cohen

Danny graduated from the Wharton Business School at the University of Pennsylvania and has pursued the study of Torah and wisdom in a variety of yeshivot and institutions in Israel, the U.S., India, Nepal, and Mexico. He has trained across a variety of modalities of psychotherapy (Hakomi, Organic Intelligence, AEDP, Primary Attachment Therapy, and currently NARM) and transformative change work, and has been practicing meditation since 2009. Danny has been exploring and practicing Nonviolent Communication since 2010, training with some of the leaders in the field- Yoram Mosenzon, Miki Kashtan, and the late Robert Gonzales and Robert Maoz Krzisnik. Danny is a long time student of mystic and trauma healing pioneer, Thomas Hübl, and graduate of his Timeless Wisdom Training.

Register Now

IJS is pleased to offer this course at three tuition levels.
We encourage you to pay at the highest level you can, which will enable more students to participate.

Reduced Level

$

Meet Your Instructor:

Rebecca Minkus Lieberman

Bio

• Shema – Listening with attunement, without judgment
• Re-iyah – Seeing and accepting our grandchildren and adult children as they are
• Shavat va’yinafash – Finding self-care moments of rest and renewal
• Ahava – Opening the rich complexity of grandparent love
• Hitchadshut – Seeing the everyday through the lens of holiness

Dr. Jane Sherwin Shapiro

Founded in 2014, Orot was started by a group of passionate Jewish educators committed to redesigning the paradigm of Jewish learning and opening up the well of Jewish wisdom to all. Orot creates programs which foster the wellbeing of individuals, families, and communities. Orot’s programs provide opportunities and offer tools for meaning-making, nourishment, and refuge using personally resonant and accessible Jewish teachings, practices, and experiences.

Meet Your Instructor:

Rodger Kamenetz

Rodger Kamenetz is an award-winning poet, author and teacher. Of his 13 books, his best known is The Jew in the Lotus, the story of rabbis making a holy pilgrimage through India to meet with the Dalai Lama. His account of their historic dialogue became an international bestseller, prompting a reevaluation of Judaism in the light of Buddhist thought. Now in its 37th printing overall, The Jew in the Lotus is a staple of college religion courses. The New York Times called it a “revered text.” A PBS documentary followed, and a sequel, Stalking Elijah, was awarded the National Jewish Book Award for Jewish Thought. Kamenetz’s Burnt Books, in Schocken/Nextbook’s Jewish Encounters series, once again crosses boundaries, between literature and religion. It begins as a dual biography of Franz Kafka and Rebbe Nachman, who each asked his best friend to burn his books. It ends with Kamenetz on his own pilgrimage to Kafka’s Prague and to the rebbe’s grave in Ukraine.

Born in Baltimore, Rodger Kamenetz has degrees from Yale, Johns Hopkins and Stanford. At Louisiana State University, he held a dual appointment as a Professor of English and Professor of Religious Studies and founded the MFA program in creative writing and the Jewish Studies minor. He retired as LSU Distinguished Professor and Sternberg Honors Chair Professor. He lives in New Orleans where he now devotes himself to his work with clients who seek spiritual direction through dreams.

Components of the Challenge

Daily Content

• Feb 10: Blessings
• Feb 11: Listening
• Feb 12: Compassion
• Feb 13: Awe (part one)
• Feb 14: Awe (part two)
• Feb 15: Joy
• Feb 16: Return
• Feb 17: Celebration and Next steps

Meet Your Instructor:

Rabbi Sam Feinsmith

As Senior Core Faculty at the Institute for Jewish Spirituality Sam directs the IJS Clergy Leadership Program and serves on the faculty of Gates of Awareness, a training program for aspiring teachers of Jewish mindfulness meditation. He is one of two lead teachers for our online course on the fundamentals of Jewish mindfulness meditation, The Gift of Awareness, and has written the IJS year-long Hasidic text study offering for a number of years running. After close to fifteen years teaching contemplative practices grounded in mindfulness to teens and educators, Sam originally came on board at IJS to develop and direct the Educating for a Jewish Spiritual Life Program, which brought these practices to hundreds of Jewish day- and religious-school educators and their students.

Mindfulness-Based Practices for Self-Awareness & Emotional Regulation

• • Pause from the urgency, overwhelm, and isolation of needing to constantly respond, strategize, solve, and support.
  • Learn how our brains and bodies respond to the specific triggers of antisemitic rhetoric and behavior.
  • Strengthen nervous system regulation; develop greater capacity to be present with and metabolize intense and difficult emotions rather than react or blow our pain onto others;

Jewish Spiritual Practice

• • Explore Jewish wisdom, mindfulness-based Jewish spiritual practice to cultivate inner stability, vitality and spiritual grounding; deepen the middot (Jewish spiritual qualities) of clear perception, equanimity, curiosity, compassion, and resilience.
  • Engage in contemplative prayer and song, ritual, and spiritual wisdom from a range of Jewish sources to draw on the inheritance of ancestral Jewish strength, creativity, joy, moral courage, love, and community.
  • Explore ways to integrate insights and practices into our communities.

Meet Your Instructors:

Rabbi Caryn Aviv, PhD

Rabbi Caryn Aviv serves as Rabbinic director at Judaism Your Way in Denver, CO. She’s a recovering academic in sociology and Jewish studies, and (mostly) formerly anxious Jew. She creates spaces, rituals, and practices that offer safety, healing, equity, compassion and justice for Jews, our loved ones, friends, and allies.  Caryn recently published Unlearning Jewish Anxiety: How to Live with More Joy and Suffer Less (Monkfish, 2026).  

Meet Your Instructors:

Karen Frank

Karen Frank has been a congregational nurse to several synagogues in New Jersey and a facilitator for Wise Aging since the early 2000s. Additionally, she, Rabbi Rachel Cowan z”l, and Dr. Linda Thal trained over 600 facilitators for the Wise Aging program nationally. She ardently believes that participating in the program encourages equanimity, mindfulness, and contentment in the aging process. Her work as a pastoral care nurse, Wise Aging facilitator, meditator, and Jewish Spiritual Director meld beautifully to assist people in aging, confronting disease, and coping with the challenges of our time.

Karen holds degrees in psychology, nursing, and certification in Jewish Spiritual Direction. She lives in Denville, NJ, is widowed, and is the mother of four adults.

Meet Your Instructor:

Anya Kamenetz