The Welcome Home Series

Planting the seeds from our ancient past in the soil of today’s world

Reconnect to Jewish Wisdom through our hands, hearts and soil

with Tali Weinberg and Sarai Shapiro
West Sonoma County locations | 4 Sundays March through June 2023
plus individualized 1:1 mentoring

Is the song of the earth calling you to listen? Are you longing for a deeper framework within which to explore the wonders of the natural world? Are you looking to explore the roots of your lineage and deepen your relationship to the earth-based origins of Jewish tradition? Are you feeling over-deviced and disconnected and know in your heart that there is another way to be / feel / thrive in your life?
If so, you have come to the right place and the right class!

DETAILS

dates, times, location

~ Four Sundays ~
11am to 5pm

West Sonoma County

Sunday March 12
Sunday April 23
Sunday May 14
Sunday June 4

+ 2 one:one mentoring sessions*

cost

$1300-$900
$850 early bird (before feb 1)
+ material costs as needed
~ installment plans welcome

Please talk to us if you need work-trade or reduced cost.

REGISTRATION: REGISTER HERE.

All are welcome to join -
We are committed to cultivating a safe container for all people, all bodies, from all walks of life and identities

* One-on-One Mentorship Sessions:   The uniqueness of this class is that it not only will empower you with general practices to deepen and expand your connection to the natural world, it also provides individualised mentorship that reflects the unique path, growing edges, aspirations, and healing/wholing trajectory that you are on.  Schedule two 1:1 sessions, either with Tali or Sarai, to focus on your personal growth and Jewish, earth connection practices at this time.  

The Welcome Home Series weaves together

Make a tallis (and or yameka) with natural dyes, and learn to harvest life-giving food and medicine from wild and cultivated plants. Get your hands into the earth as you plant a garden, save seeds for the next season, and learn many other perenniel and annual land tending techniques.

HANDS - work with your hands to create beauty.

Grow connections inside an amazing cohort of other people, and together explore true communication and co-aliveness with the more-than-human world through the practices of Hitbodedut, sit spot, medicine walks, plant sits, listening to the birds, and more. Watch relationship with your local bio-region blossom.

HEART - Cultivate heart-full relationships.

Learn about building soil and preparing beds for planting. Root into the foundation of life itself and discover new understandings of what it means that our lives come from the earth, to have emerged from the “Adamah”.

SOIL - Know and grow the soil that gives life.

Dive into the earth-based Hebrew calendar and explore ancient texts that offers instruction and guidance for living in balance and reciprocity. Dance inside of the Jewish cycles of time and discover teachings for how to live in greater balance with the seasons, the phases of the moon, and the celebration of the harvest.

SEEDS - Open and heal relationships with ancestors and Jewish lineage.

What folks are sayin….

“This course has been an incredible source of community, knowledge and reconnection to the earth and my Jewish lineage. During one of the most challenging and transitional and uprooted years of my life this course gave me support, exercises, and rituals I will take with me forever and helped me overcome huge obstacles”. ~ Gabrielle Ment

DURING OUR TIME TOGETHER WE WILL

  • Grow your connection to the cycles of the Hebrew Calendar

    • Jewish earth and agricultural based laws that encourage regeneration and balanced human/nature connection

    • Hebrew nature based Calendar

    • Tu B’shvat: mystical and practical connections to trees

    • Purim:  revealing the hidden, themes in the natural world that are embedded in Purim

    • Pesach:  from being lost in the wilderness to coming home in the -wilderness

    • Counting the Omer

    • Shavuot: bringing down your pesronal “torah”

  • Deepen your connection and knowledge with the more-than human world in your local watershed

    • Learn about wild listening and awareness practices through having a sit spot practice

    • Cultivate an ongoing dialogue with the earth through intentional nature wanders

    • Explore wild plant spirit and physical medicine - plant journeys, ethical harvest, medicine making

    • Renew connections with your local wild animal species 

    • Choose one local plant and animal species to apprentice to through this journey

  • Explore Permaculture topics such as:  

    • principles / observation and sector analysis 

    • preparing beds for planting

    • building soil fertility / compost

    • planting and seeding

    • fruit trees and perennial foods

    • seed saving and other propagation techniques

    • gardening techniques for saving water

    • preserving the harvest/ /food as medicine /ancestral foods

    • food as foundation for building healthy culture

In today’s political, social, economic, environmental and spiritual climate, we are faced with challenges and questions specific to this wildly unpredictable time, ripe with possibilities and potentials.  

Looking back into our recent history, we see the impacts of colonialism, displacement, and genocide and the legacies of pain, uprootedness, and disconnection that they have left in our world.  Looking at the current global story, we see the widespread instabilities created by social inequality and climate change and the massive scale of extinction that is manifesting in the disappearance of countless species every day at an alarming rate..  As we look forward, we know that the systems that have gotten us here will not bring us towards the world we know, deep down, is possible.  As we collectively educate ourselves, strategize, and mobilize, where do we look for ways that can hold us in these times, to allow generative life-ways to emerge as a true alternative to the current dominant system?  

One place to look is towards the 1000s of years before modernity and massive industrial growth, towards the life sustaining practices and sacred laws that were practiced and given by our own ancestors, and by the ancestors of the planet.  

As a Jewish lineage, we have been blessed by the courage and fortitude of our ancestors who, through much peril, held tight to the Hebrew lineage, weaving and growing Jewish traditions from one generation to the next.  This story is an old one, one which begins in a time when we were nomadic desert dwellers, which was passed on to many generations of farmers, and that finally lands us in o this moment in history -  where most of the Jewish community is urban dwelling.. 

The time has come to gather and water the seeds left by our ancestors and cross pollinate this wisdom with the post capitalism permaculture, deep nature connection and emergence movements in order to re-member what it means to be Human, carrying the wisdom of Jewish tradition, into this next chapter on earth.  

ABOUT YOUR WELCOME HOME SERIES GUIDES

 Sarai Shapiro (she/her) Refer to Sarai’s bio HERE

Tali Weinberg, R.Ac (she/her)


Tali practiced traditional Chinese Medicine at the Madrona Integrative Health clinic on Salt Spring Island, BC and today works as Director of Community Programs with Wilderness Torah, a leading Bay area earth-based Jewish organization. Tali is a healer, a farmer, and a cultural worker who is passionate about the intersection between village mindedness, just culture, food system resiliency, earth medicine, and personal liberation. Over the past 15 years, she has worked as farm manager and educator in the context of rural farming/leadership internships such as the Adamah fellowship in the Berkshires as well as co-founded and designed the Urban Adamah farm in Berkeley, CA back in 2010. She has mentored and empowered numerous fellowships and community members with knowledge about food sovereignty and resiliency. She became a seed saver and advocate after working with Salt Spring Seeds back in 2008. Her journey led her into the study of permaculture for 2 years as an intern at the renowned Bullocks Permaculture Homestead on Orcas Island, WA as well as serving as the intern coordinator for their well known internship program. She helped to coordinate and co-found the Tel Sheva Desert Medicine Learning Site through the organization BUSTAN in the Negev desert, working with Bedouin project partners to create a traditional medicine sustainability site rooted in Bedouin traditional knowledge around plant medicine and natural building. She coordinated a Permaculture Design Certification in partnership with Permaculture Action Network in Berkeley and has also taught numerous workshops pertaining to sustainability including seed saving, soil building, fermentation, grafting and fruit tree propagation, and co-taught an Introduction to Permaculture course at Seattle University. She founded the FB group Resiliency Rising Permaculture Group through which she curated a practical online class series on various topics pertaining to regenerative earth culture. Recently Tali practiced raditional Chinese Medicine at the Madrona Integrative Health clinic on Salt Spring Island, BC and today works as Director of Community Programs with Wilderness Torah, a leading Bay area earth-based Jewish organization.