The Shofar Project:
Getting Real (Again) for the New YearA FREE Four-Week Online Program from IJS for the Hebrew month of Elul:
August 27 – September 17, 2025
Four Live Zoom Sessions
Wednesdays, 8:00 – 9:00 PM ET
Join the IJS community and our core faculty (Rabbi Jordan Bendat-Appell, Kohenet Keshira haLev Fife, Rebecca Schisler, and Rabbi Marc Margolius) for four weeks of Jewish spiritual practice to prepare for the Jewish New Year. We’ll come together throughout the month of Elul, which is traditionally a season of teshuva (return), to engage in deepened introspection, reflection, and practice leading up to the Yamim Nora’im, the Days of Awe between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur.
This year, back by popular demand, our teachings will be drawn from This is Real and You are Completely Unprepared, the contemporary classic by Rabbi Alan Lew, z”l.
Each time we revisit this book, it offers up something new, —as we return to reflect on the essential truths of our lives after a year of change and growth.
This free program features
- Four NEW weekly written teachings on themes drawn from This is Real, sent by email on four consecutive Sundays, starting August 24, Rosh Chodesh Elul. These teachings will include Jewish mindfulness practices, questions for reflection and journaling, and supplemental materials such as poetry and music.
- Four weekly live practice sessions (Wednesdays from 8-9 pm ET on August 27 and September 3, 10, and 17), each led by a different IJS faculty member, elaborating upon the week’s teaching, featuring meditation or other contemplative practice and small-group processing. Sessions will be recorded and available for those who cannot attend live.
- A recorded meditation by each week’s teacher that connects to the teaching and will help you deepen your practice at home.
- An opportunity to deepen your practice through chevruta (partner) study and practice.
Testimonials
“Rabbi Lew’s book is new to me this year, and I am finding it to be a wonderful companion during this time of Elul leading up to the High Holidays. Thank you at IJS so much for making this program available. I think that for the first time in my life I am not dreading the holidays and instead am looking forward to them, and appreciating the inner growth journey in this time before.”
Meet Your Instructors:
Rabbi Jordan Bendat-Appell
Currently at IJS, Jordan focuses on teaching Jewish mindfulness and text, planning and directing retreats, and leading the development of a new training program for advanced teachers of Jewish mindfulness.Jordan will also continue to share his expertise through online courses and on retreats, fostering mindful engagement with Jewish wisdom and tradition.
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 Core Faculty Member with the Institute for Jewish Spirituality, and also enjoys working with beloved, The Jewish Studio Project, Kirva, the Avodah Institute for Social Change, and the Jewish Learning Collaborative, among other national Jewish organisations. Additionally, she delights in serving as a shlichat tzibbur, life spiral ceremony/ritual creatrix, consultant, facilitator, teacher, liturgist and songstress. Her work in these realms is informed by her lived experience as a queer, bi-racial, child-free Jewish person, 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.
Rabbi Marc Margolius
Rabbi Marc Margolius hosts IJS’s online daily mindfulness meditation sessions and teaches Awareness in Action: Cultivating Character through Mindfulness and Middot, our online program in tikkun middot practice, integrating Jewish mindfulness with attention to core middot, character traits.
Previously, Marc served as rabbi at West End Synagogue in Manhattan and Congregation Beth Am Israel in Penn Valley, PA, where he pioneered a Shabbat-centered model of congregational engagement. He developed and led the Legacy Heritage Innovation Project at the Legacy Heritage Fund from 2005-2010, an initiative to promote systemic educational change in congregations around the globe.
Long active in social justice activism, Marc is a graduate of the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College and of Yale Law School and lives in New York City.
Rebecca Schisler
Rebecca is a meditation teacher, artist, and Jewish educator. A devoted contemplative practitioner, she has led groups and taught classes and retreats with Or HaLev, Wilderness Torah, Pardes, Stanford School of Medicine, Urban Adamah, Hamakom, and the Awakened Heart Project. She was previously the Director of Student Health & Well-being at Stanford University’s Hillel, and co-authored the Mahloket Matters Schools Curriculum with the Pardes Center for Jewish Educators. 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. Rebecca currently lives in the California Bay Area, where she maintains a lively studio art practice as the artist-in-residence at the JCC East Bay, loves to host Jewish gatherings of all kinds, and tries to lose herself among her neighboring redwood trees as much as possible.