The Taproot Immersion
The Taproot Immersion is mobilizing Jewish individuals as communal stewards of radical Jewish futures deeply rooted in ancestral wisdom.
We are inspiring and educating artists, organizers, cultural workers, ritualists, and changemakers who are looking to enrich and expand their leadership through creatively engaging with ancestral Jewish wisdom.
Our eight-month cohort program is an in-depth learning and healing experience designed for white-assimilated Jews who long for both a justice-oriented spiritual life and a spiritually-enlivened justice practice.
Together we are creating a container for emerging Jewish leaders to:
healing from histories of cultural disconnection and racial assimilation;
developing thriving personal practices and skills of communal ritual leadership; and
applying Jewish traditions to cultivate resilience, nurture community, and transform systems of harm.
The Immersion’s Intention & Strategy
The Taproot Immersion is for folx who yearn for access to Jewish learning, spiritual community, and politicized healing but are held at the margins of tradition.
The vision of the Immersion is to empower participants with an analysis of de-assimilation, with life-giving skills and spiritual resources, and with robust community connections. We want to enable a new wave of educators, activists, artists, and ritualists that our movement ecology needs. So the Taproot Immersion takes adult Jewish education from literacy to empowerment. Our program is ‘redistributing' the power often held in the rabbinate, investing in a different kind of community spiritual leadership – thus, Taproot is intentionally small and oriented around transformative depth rather than broad reach.
Why a Program for White Jews?
The Taproot Immersion is an educational and healing space for white anti-racists to deepen Jewish practice.
We are supporting white-assimilated Jews, and Ashkenazi Jews in particular, to do deep work around the spiritual and cultural loss that prevents us from being co-liberators in movements for racial and economic justice. Situating contemporary white Jews within an enchanted, evolving, and relevant spiritual lineage, we seek to meet the need for critically engaged and culturally informed white folks to show up in heartfelt and effective service for movements for justice. We are rooting in tradition in order to grow towards a future of liberation and flourishing. Because in the midst of climate chaos, ongoing racial injustice, the continued trials of the pandemic – not to mention the many other compounding systems of harm – we need networks of care and communities of resistance anchored by individuals resourced in nourishing lineages. Taproot seeks to meet this need by sustaining white Jews – organizers, teachers, creatives of all sorts – to embody a liberatory Jewish practice for themselves and by extension their kin and their communities.
Who could we be as white allies and political actors when our justice work is resourced by a robust and meaningful spiritual life? What could we offer when we as Jews with white privilege strengthen our own resilience and relationships – individually and collectively – through ancestral practices and cultural reclamation?
-
If you are a Person of the Global Majority and feel resonance with this offering and are wondering about avenues for your own and collective explorations, please reach out to our Taproot Leadership Team at taproot@commonweal.org. We will do our best to share about learning opportunities for Jews of Color and connect you with our partnered organizations. In addition, we welcome your conversation and any questions you have about how we can shape this work to deepen in accountability and solidarity with you.
The Immersion Curriculum
Our Worldview and Pedagogy
The Taproot Immersion is guided by a mystical framework that informs how we show up for prayer and ritual, how we approach textual study, and how we access personal and political transformation. Our faculty and facilitators are oriented, in particular, by the worldview of “The Four Worlds” – different, yet inseparable, planes of experience and modes of intelligence. We creatively work with these Four Worlds as a means to a holistic, trauma-informed, access-oriented Immersion:
Assiyah: We engage our bodies, our sensations, our somatic selves…
Yetzirah: We engage our emotions, our hearts, our evocative sensibilities …
Briyah: We engage our thinking, our connectivity, our analytical capacities …
Atzilut: We engage our soulfulness, spiritual senses, our energetic selves…
The Three Guiding Tracks of the Cohort Program
These three tracks weave in and out of our program – they are not linear, sequential, or separate. They are synergistic and mutually reinforcing. Like the different branches of a main taproot, these curricular areas are distinct yet a part of a whole. We follow these three guiding tracks as we delve deeper into the soil of Jewish tradition and nourish the growth of our spiritual lives.
Relationship, Mentorship, & Community
Through the Taproot Immersion, we seek to support white Jewish folks in reclaiming and rejuvenating their relationship to ancestral lineages, embodied selves, and spiritual traditions. We believe that such reclamation and rejuvenation happens through restoring relationships. Recognizing white supremacy as an inherently isolating and individualistic system of disconnection, we seek to address the deep and potent longing for belonging through intergenerational mentorship, spiritual friendship, and community care. For those adrift without meaningful connections to religious spaces, land-based calendars, and Jewish community itself, Taproot offers covenantal community as a necessary healing of the disconnections, traumas, and spiritual deficits of assimilation into whiteness. We seek to offer our Immersion Cohort consistent, caring relationships with mentors who are available for connection, attuned to their spiritual growth, and supportive of their aspirations. Moreover, the Stewardship Team frames and facilitates the various gatherings of the Immersion through our Community Covenant. Through these relationships as well as peer friendships and chevruta study partnerships, we aim to counteract the many disruptions of legacies, lineages, and generations, particularly in our Jewish, queer, disabled, and other marginalized communities, as we work towards futures of liberation and flourishing.
Ancestral Healing & Lineage Tending
To re-establish a personally nourishing and politically relevant Jewish life entails grappling with our histories of belonging and disbelonging in relation to Judaism. As a cohort of white-assimilated, predominantly Ashkenazi Jews, we will reflect on and reckon with the harm our ancestors endured, the harm our ancestors caused, and the ways our ancestors resisted and persisted along the way.
We are feeling the gaps and gifts of our lineages – bloodlines and family stories, as well as cultural inheritances and mythological figures, ancient ancestors of Torah alongside the artifacts of our grandparents. We are contacting and engaging these histories in the service of our spiritual formation and political transformation with the understanding that personal, collective, and ancestral healing are intertwined.
In the Taproot Immersion, the beginning and basis of our learning is an embrace and engagement with our spiritual woundings and longings. We seek to acknowledge, support, and contextualize these woundings and longings – whether they are facets of assimilation, familial traumas, and/or expressions of deep religious histories. Through collaborative ritual experiences, shared scholarship, peer relationship building, and individual mentorship, the Taproot Immersion seeks to make conditions for ancestral healing possible.
Personal Practice & Prayer Apprenticeship
The Taproot Immersion supports the cultivation of a deeply personal relevant spiritual practice. We orient and mentor Cohort Participants within a diversity of prayerful modalities and customs. With the guidance of our Rabbinic Faculty, Cohort Participants will explore a vibrant array of somatic, liturgical, earth-based, and artistic approaches to Jewish life.
In embrace and encouragement of expansive notions of the divine, we will explore what prayerfulness is for each of us – what the textures of holiness are for us, how song and chant impact us, where religious spaces open us and where they inhibit us… Through collaborative ritual spaces, text-study, seasonal resource bundles and more, we will bring ourselves to tradition and ask it to meet us: transforming it as it transforms us.
We will co-create a supportive environment for cultivating an enlivened relationship to prayer, liturgy, and devotional life. Because the Immersion is full of both formal and emergent learning – we apprentice the wisdom sourced from each other alongside the direction offered by Faculty. The Taproot Immersion is guided by a pedagogy of dynamic transmission – educating and empowering individuals in their Jewish lives through an ecology of peer, mentor, and community relationships.
Ceremonial Action & Ritual Leadership
At its core, the Taproot Immersion is cultivating space for folx to answer the call to creative service. We are endeavoring to create the conditions for prophecy – a supportive environment and formative relationships that enable folx to expand beyond themselves, visit their deep intuitions, access connection to the Divine, and become vessels of a transformative power for liberation.
We are preparing participants to answer with the skills and presence that our calamitous times require. Throughout our season together, we endeavor to resource Cohort Participants in their creative and cultural and political work in the world – their sacred action, however it is expressed. The Taproot Immersion is connecting emerging Jewish educators, activists, artists, and ritualists to the mystical, magical, queer, and justice-oriented elements of tradition.
As Jews with white-priviledge we are resourcing ourselves in tradition in order to open its transformative possibilities for the sake of justice. What could Torah, liturgy, the lunar calendar, and various ritual practices mean for us individually and collectively when refashioned in accessible and liberatory directions? How could they equip us in our engagement with movements for Black liberation, Indigenous sovereignty, and the flourishing of the Global Majority?
The Immersion Structure & Components
An Eight Month Program From Solstice to Solstice
The Taproot Immersion program runs from Winter Solstice to Summer Solstice and encompasses a number of concurrent, seasonal elements. Beginning with our signature in-person Opening Retreat, the program unfolds through a series of virtual Learning Circles and Study Sessions designed to grow community, dive deep into the flow of the Jewish calendar, and explore the themes of our curriculum. These bi-monthly Zoom meetings take place at the time of each emergent New Moon and each expansive Full Moon – monthly New Moon Beit Midrash focus on shared chevruta learning, while Full Moon Shiur are led by our rabbinic faculty. In addition, each cohort member meets monthly for individual sessions with a personal spiritual mentor from the Taproot Mentorship Circle to enrich each participant’s immersive experience. Alumni-led affinity spaces and special sessions every other month with visiting faculty round out the Immersion, which culminates with an in-person Closing Retreat, a virtual follow-up gathering, and final mentorship sessions.
Learn more about the Immersion…
-
The Taproot Immersion begins and ends with multi-day in-person retreats. These song-filled, prayer-focused, convivial and educational gatherings are integral to the program. On the retreats, we will experience a rich array of elements: we mark the seasonal thresholds of the Immersion, cultivate our covenantal community, experiment with Jewish ritual together, immerse in the abundant teachings of Rabbis, and savor the joy of learning from one another. Our Opening Retreat is on the ocean bluffs of Bolinas, California for the Winter Solstice and our Closing Retreat is in the juniper desert of Albuquerque, New Mexico for the Summer Solstice.
-
Each Full Moon between the Opening and Closing Retreats, the Immersion Cohort will convene with our Rabbinic Faculty two-hour long call. These monthly virtual gatherings include interactive ritual, seasonal teachings, and reflective time. In previous iterations of the Immersion, we’ve experienced temple drag performances, somatic tefillin instruction, a tour through the siddur, festival ritual planning, and more. Our Rabbis will guide us through these gatherings as we progress through and deepen into through the three curricular themes: ancestral healing, personal practice, and ritual leadership.
-
Each New Moon between the Opening and Closing Retreats, Cohort Participants will come together with their peer study partner, a chevruta. These one-on-one meetings will be an opportunity to deepen in connection, reflect on the curriculum, and share practices with one another. The Stewardship Team will facilitate and support these Beit Midrash gatherings as chevruta partners meet in breakout rooms. The friendship, accountability, and spiritual witness of these chevruta partnerships are in service to Taproot’s commitment to relationship building as an essential element of cultural renewal and de-assimilation.
-
Complimenting the Moonthly calls, we will be joined by Visiting Faculty every other month. Our roster of Visiting Faculty will offer intensive workshops on each of the three curricular themes. Last year in the Immersion, we had a workshop focused on intervening with ancestral patterns of survival that collude with whiteness; a workshop on somatics as both a component of anti-racist practice and Jewish spiritual practice; and a training on trauma-informed ritual leadership and spiritual care. These auxiliary courses bring in inspiring and instructive perspectives to the Immersion curriculum.
-
Rabbinic mentorship and spiritual direction are central to the Immersion’s approach of cultural renewal and spiritual activism. Throughout the six month arc of the Immersion, each cohort participant engages one-on-one, once-a-month with an experienced spiritual director. After the Opening Retreat, the Stewardship Team will pair cohort participants with a Mentor from our Mentorship Circle. These consistent, intimate, self-directed relationships are an essential part of the Immersion experience: Mentors support folx in the Immersion through reflection on the curriculum, cultivating personal practices, exploring the Jewish calendar, and other personalized direction.
-
Cohort Participants will be invited to attend and co-create interest-based affinity spaces. With support from the Stewardship Team, these interest groups are auxiliary spaces to explore emergent learning and maintain ongoing connection. In previous years, there have been interest groups exploring family-history and genealogy, the liturgy of the Amidah, embodied Kabbalah, Ashkenazi folk magic, and more. These collaborative, peer spaces create continuity between our monthly virtual gatherings and offer opportunities for shared learning complementary to the Immersion curriculum.
Dates & Details
Kislev: Preparatory Month
Tevet In-Person Opening Retreat
Tevet-through-Sivan: Program
Sivan In-Person Closing Retreat
Tammuz: Integration Month
Program Dates:
Immersion Lunar Calendar:
11/26 : Opening Virtual Call
12/13- 12/19 : In-Person Opening Retreat
12/31 : Tevet Virtual Call
1/14 : Beit Midrash
1/28 : Shvat Virtual Call
2/11 : Beit Midrash
2/25 : Adar Aleph Virtual Call
3/10 : Beit Midrash
3/24 : Adar Bet Virtual Call
4/7 : Beit Midrash
4/21 : Nisan Virtual Call
5/5 : Beit Midrash
5/19 : Iyar Virtual Call
6/2 : Beit Midrash
6/19 - 6/24 : In-Person Closing Retreat
7/7 : Closing Virtual Call
Application & Registration
Tuition, Sliding-Scale, and Our Way with Money
We are asking Cohort Participants to contribute $1250-5000 to make the Taproot Immersion possible.
The Taproot Immersion is a prayerful and relational offering — and it is our aspiration that our engagement with money be coherent with our deepest intentions for cultural healing and collective liberation.
As we formalize and deepen our focus on supporting white Jews in a multiracial movement, we hold a commitment to invite and support white Jewish folks across their many other identities and experiences — geographies, class backgrounds, abilities, etc. As part of our commitment to nurturing access, Taproot operates through a sliding-scale tuition for the eight-month program. Tuition includes room and board expenses for the opening and closing in-person retreats; travel expenses are not covered though travel stipends are available as needed.
In commitment to right livelihood for our Faculty and Staff, to compensation for our accountability partners, and to acts of reparations, we ask for participants to register at the highest possible level. This helps to reduce barriers to access for all, covers a portion of the costs of running Immersion, and enables our commitment to redistribute at least 25% of all programmatic income to partner JOCSM organizations.
If contributing on this sliding scale isn’t accessible to you, please be in touch with our Stewardship Team.
Application Process
Applications are closed… Click here to be updated on next year’s program!
-
The Immersion is for those who are looking to enrich and expand the capacity of their spiritual presence, ritual facilitation, and embodied practice through engaging with ancestral Jewish wisdom.
We understand ‘emerging Jewish leaders’ in a wide and expansive way: educators, free-lancers, parents, artists, songleaders, organizers, herbalists, cultural workers, ritualists, changemakers, and more. The Taproot Immersion is for folx who yearn for access to Jewish learning, spiritual community, and politicized healing but are held at the margins of tradition.
We hope you will join us in ‘redistributing' the power often centralized in the rabbinate – together we can cultivate and restore a diversity of expressions of community spiritual leadership.
-
‘White-assimilated Jews’ are Jews with positionality to and the privilege of whiteness. The term intentionally complicates ‘white-Jews’ to both foreground the historical process of racial assimilation and to acknowledge the particular experience of Jews the social hierarchy of whiteness.
As white anti-racists, we believe it is vital to recognize and reckon with the structural privileges, moral perils, and political possibilities of whiteness. And as Jews, we believe it is necessary to hold an analysis of anti-semitism and Christian hegemony. As ‘white-assimilated Jews’ we uplift the opportunity and obligation to examine how cultural assimilation functions to both uphold racial injustice and Jewish oppression.
We understand race is a social construct with historical context and material consequence. In the structure of white-supremacy and settler colonialism in the United States of America, the nature of whiteness has adapted, accommodated, and evolved. The demographics of who has been determined as ‘white’ and who has benefited from proximity to ‘whiteness’ have shifted throughout history. Communities of Jews immigrating from Europe and settling Turtle Island fit into this history through racial and cultural assimilation – in a variety of different ways and and in particular geographies, these European-descended Jews were conscripted into and colluded with whiteness and the social hierarchy of anti-blackness.
The Immersion is inspired by the deep longing of white-Jews alienated from their cultural roots and assimilated into the structures of dominant culture. We see the valency of cultural renewal as an approach to direct these personal and political longings towards flourishing and liberation as a part of a multicultural movement for racial justice. We are proud to be supporting white-assimilated Jews in reclaiming Jewish heritage as both a source of meaning in their everyday lives and a relevant force in their political work.
-
“Taproot has shown me what politicized healing can look at feel like. Through teachings, mentorship, song, and co-created ritual I have nourished a deeper relationship with my lineage, jewish time, communal spiritual life, and social justice organizing. I am learning/remembering jewish technologies and practices that help me honor the journeys of my ancestors while discerning new ways of being and world-building that can help heal the wounds of whiteness and bring about the liberated future we know is possible." - Alexis Eisenberg (Detroit, MI)
"Taproot has helped me reconnect with the Jewish community and find new ways of incorporating spirituality into my life, which I so needed at this time. Honestly, Taproot really has been such a blessing to be a part of and I'm sure that this past year would have been much more difficult without this community." - Alison Ramer (Sausalito, CA)
“Simply put, I have never encountered a community like Taproot. The stewards and visiting faculty offer an incredible depth of wisdom on Jewish history and practice that is relevant and intelligible to Jews of many different observances and backgrounds. Taproot has offered me unparalleled access to Jewish self exploration, connection to ancestors, and a community of justice-oriented peers to experiment and connect with. I am so grateful to have a Jewish community where I'm invited to show up as the very fullest version of myself.” - Miles Meth (Boston, MA)
"Taproot is exactly what I was looking for in my Jewish growth journey as a queer trauma steward and holder of space. The embodied, emergent, reflective, relational web of this process and community has offered such gifts in the work of divesting from white supremacy through investing in the lifegiving possibilities of ancestral technologies in my personal practice and healing work with others. I now see myself existing/contributing/dancing in the Jewish tapestry in a way I'd always hoped to--in a way that I hadn't been able to yet. I am blessed by this process and through these connections to people, traditions, and models of radical queer land-based Jewishness." LB Moore (Springfield, MA)
“It’s hard to describe how much the Taproot Immersion means to me. It’s the learning/dreaming community I’ve been longing for all my life, but didn’t know I needed it, or wasn’t ready for it. We found each other at the perfect moment. Taproot is bringing me home to myself, to my ancestors, to my work in the world ~ in ways that transcend language/analysis. Taproot is healing my relationship with learning ~ an absolutely precious relationship that was ruptured by academia. Taproot is resourcing me creatively and politically, through an ongoing personal/collaborative practice of d’vekut ~ cleaving to the divine. Thanks to the deep support, connection, teachings, and magic of this immersion, there is a unique and radical sense of possibility blooming in my soul.” - Jo Roberts (Nashville, TN)