The Shofar Project 5786

Waking Up for a New Year

August 12 – September 2, 2026

A FREE Four-Week Online Program from IJS for the Hebrew month of Elul

Kohenet Keshira haLev Fife, Rabbi Sam Feinsmith, Rabbi Miriam Margles, Rabbi Marc Margolius

Wednesdays, 8:00-9:00 PM ET, live on Zoom
August 12, 19, 26, and September 2

Course at a Glance

Let IJS help you prepare your inner life for the High Holidays with our free, four-week Jewish mindfulness journey. Guided by IJS faculty, this program invites you to use the call of the shofar to awaken your spiritual awareness through live weekly practices, contemplative text study, and meditations tailored to the core themes of Rosh Hashanah. This course is open to everyone from beginners to advanced learners.

It’s time for a spiritual reset – join the IJS community to “wake up” together in preparation for the Jewish New Year!

The shofar, which is traditionally sounded throughout Elul, the final month of the Jewish year, serves as an “alarm clock” awakening us from emotional, moral, and spiritual sleep and spurring us to reflect and reset our intentions. Join IJS faculty members throughout Elul for a FREE four-week program to immerse in key themes of the upcoming High Holidays, preparing your inner life for the New Year.

Course Description for this Free Program

Over four weeks, The Shofar Project this year will feature BRAND NEW materials, each week featuring a live practice session (Wednesdays) and written materials – including texts, meditations, and suggested practices – grounded in a key theme of Rosh Hashanah:

Week One, HaYom Harat Olam, Today, the World is Born, with Kohenet Keshira haLev Fife:

A week for connecting with the ever-present sacred power of renewal and change, engaging our imagination to dream and embrace new possibilities for ourselves and our world.

Week Two, Malkuyot, Cultivating Awe and Wonder, with Rabbi Marc Margolius:

A week for cultivating awe and wonder, and exploring that which we have been serving – and turning to serving that which might be more ennobling for ourselves and the world?

Week Three, Zichronot, Remembering and Releasing, with Rabbi Sam Feinsmith:

A week for remembering that we are always being renewed which can help us release old self-concepts that no longer serve us.

Week Four, Shofarot, Called to Mindful Action, with Rabbi Miriam Margles

A week for waking up to hope and attuning ourselves to what we are being called to, as we seek to make our vision of a new self and a new world manifest.

Save Your Spot!

Testimonials

The powerful role of the IJS faculty, resources, and community in helping me confront (with love and compassion) the most profound issues of life and death as I prepare for the High Holy Days. I never would have been able to prepare as well without this incredible support system.

Truly, all the courses are working together to enrich and deepen my life. Right now I am looking at staying present with the essence of my inner Divinity given me at birth.

Meet Your Instructors:

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.

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 Miriam Margles

Miriam has a long and rich association with IJS, having taught on various retreats and programs over the years. She joins the Institute as a Senior Core Faculty after over a decade as the rabbi of the Danforth Jewish Circle in Toronto. She is a graduate of the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College, an alumna of the Wexner Graduate Fellowship and the Jerusalem Fellows at the Mandel Leadership Institute. Miriam as a founding faculty member at the Romemu Yeshiva, serving as a fellow with the Rising Song Institute, co-founding Encounter – the award-winning educational program working toward informed, courageous and resilient Jewish leadership on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and recording her original Jewish music with the Hadar Rising Song ensemble.

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.