13th Annual TBZ Women’s Retreat
Sunday, March 2, 2025
For 13 years, TBZ women have come together to celebrate the experience of living Jewishly as women. This year, we celebrate our Bat Mitzvah! Our sessions will feature elements of the Bat Mitzvah experience, including the party, with kirtan and dance opportunities provided by Shemot Shelah, festive food by Chef Ariella Darsa Amshalem, as well as the creative and stimulating offerings you’ve come to appreciate, which will follow the spiritual outline of the tefillah (prayer) service. Participants will have the chance to study texts in chevruta (with a study partner) followed by Rav Claudia, Rav Tiferet, and Rav Leah offering a “D’var Torah” on the meaning of those texts to them. Whether it’s your first time or your 13th time, we hope you join this multigenerational celebration of womanness, set during International Women’s Month!
Sign up here by Sunday February 26th. (For TBZ Members only)
Click the links below for more info
8:30am Davening with Rav Claudia & Rav Leah (prayer) (MultiAccess, Sanctuary)
9:00 Sustenance Break (light refreshments) (in-person only, Community Room)
9:15-9:45 Hachanah: A Beit Midrash Experience. (MultiAccess, Community Room)
Participants learn preparatory texts together with a chevruta (study partner) before the rabbis offer their thoughts on the texts
9:45-10:30-Divrei Torah: HERStories (MultiAccess, Community Room)
Rav Claudia, Rav Tiferet & Rav Leah share their teachings on the texts groups prepared in the previous preparatory session.
10:30-Break
10:45-11:30 Celebrating Presence in Body
We often don’t notice the miracle of our bodies until we have a problem! Together, let us marvel at what our bodies can do now, with no judgement about what they cannot do and gratitude for what they could do in the past. Your options for celebration are:
Meditation, a contemplative practice, helps strengthen our ability to respond wisely to this complex life and world. As we practice this challenging discipline together, we continue to cultivate compassion, loving kindness, joy, and wisdom. All levels of meditators, beginners and experienced, are welcome!
TBZ Member Nancy Lipman is a Guild Certified Feldenkrais® teacher and an Acupuncturist, who, for over 30 years, has supported people to feel better and move with increased ease and energy. She practices in Cambridge and Roslindale.
Nefesh: Soul Dance with Allison Tallis (Sanctuary)Nefesh is a guided improvisational movement practice that engages somatic awareness to facilitate personal growth, emotional well-being, and collective healing. We enter in gently, followed by a deeper, more visceral exploration, and we end in deep relaxation. Understanding the body holds our inherited epigenetic patterns and our present, we work with the body to release, untangle, and create new neural pathways towards integration.
Allison was named one of 2015 United States Presidential Scholar’s, most influential teachers by the United States Secretary Department of Education. Allison served as the Department Head of Movement, Dance and Devising, where she also taught movement at the Professional Performing Arts School of New York City. In her role as National Healing & Wellness Consultant & Practitioner for the Joyful Heart Foundation, Allison co-developed and led programs, workshops and retreats for survivors of sexual assault, domestic violence and child abuse and the healers working on the frontlines of trauma, addressing vicarious trauma.
Allison currently teaches at Down Under Yoga School in Boston. Allison completed her Kundalini Yoga Therapy Certification module 1 and Level 1 Trauma Resiliency Model certification. In addition, Allison has a certification as a historical trauma specialist and as an Integrative Somatic Trauma Therapist.
11:30-11:45 Break
11:45-12:30 Creative Soul Expressions: Taste-a-Long with Ariella Darsa Amshalem (Community Room)
Taste your way through the land of Persia, the land of Queen Esther with other notable contemporary Jewish Persian women who are authors, activists, artists, professors and the work they have done to bring the issues the Jews of Iran have faced over the last hundred years to light.
Ariella is an American-Israeli Chef and Chef Instructor whose grandparents came from Istanbul and Izmir, Turkey to New York City in the 1920s. Sephardic Jewish cuisine dominated and blessed her grandmother’s kitchen, where as a young girl Ariella watched biscocchos, bourekas, fiveyos, fritadas, and roscas form like magic in her grandmother’s hands.
12:30-1:30-Lunch, catered by Ora Catering (in person only, Community Room)
1:30-2:30 The Torah of Identity
Ritual. Practice. Joy. These are central aspects of Bat Mitzvah. They’re also at the heart of the writing process. Join Jordan Namerow for a writing workshop to engage with the complexity of your life by accessing language for what you love, what you fear, and what you value. Together, we’ll engage in timed writing exercises in response to prompts and explore how we can cultivate a daily writing practice to free the writer within each of us.
Jordan Namerow is a feminist writer, strategic communications professional, and facilitator. With nearly 20 years of experience, she is passionate about helping teams and leaders deepen their impact at the nexus of storytelling and social change. Much of her work centers on helping women, girls, and LGBTQ people elevate their voices and claim their power to make the world more equitable for everyone.
Jordan earned a Bachelor’s in Sociology and Women’s Studies from Wellesley College, a Master’s in Strategic Communications from Columbia University, and an Executive Certificate in Facilitation from Georgetown University’s Institute for Transformational Leadership. She was awarded the Schusterman Fellowship for Jewish leaders and serves as the Board President of Mayyim Hayyim: Living Waters Community Mikveh and Education Center.
From Jacob pretending to be Esau to that closeted queen, Esther, from Tamar’s dressing up as a cult prostitute to Joseph’s coats and tales and Moses raised a prince of Egypt, identity deception is ubiquitous in the stories we tell about ourselves. Anticipating Purim, we will talk about texts of identity masquerade and ask about their implications for who we are, and who we aren’t.
Lori Hope Lefkovitz is the author of In Scripture: The First Stories of Jewish Sexual Identity (Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2010), which was named a finalist for the National Jewish Book Award in the category of Women’s Studies. Her awards include a Fulbright professorship at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, an academic fellowship at the Philadelphia Association for Psychoanalysis, a Woodrow Wilson dissertation fellowship in the Women’s Studies Division, and a Golda Meir post-doctoral fellowship at Hebrew University. She was the founding director of Kolot, the Center for Jewish Women’s and Gender Studies at the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College, where she held a chair in Gender and Judaism, and is the founding executive editor of the website, ritualwell.org. Professor Lefkovitz holds a BA from Brandeis University and an MA and PhD from Brown University. Her books include: Shaping Losses: Cultural Memory and the Holocaust (with Julia Epstein), Textual Bodies: Changing Boundaries of Literary Representation, and The Character of Beauty in the Victorian Novel. She is widely published in the fields of literature, critical theory, and Jewish feminist studies, serves on editorial, professional, and community boards, and lectures widely in academic and Jewish contexts.
2:30-3:30 The Simcha (joy): Shemot Shelah Kirtan (Multiaccess, Sanctuary)
Shemot Shelah is a Jewish kirtan band offering Hebrew call-and-response chanting with feminine and non-binary names for the Divine. Kirtan is a devotional practice that opens the heart and paves the way for states of bliss and peace. At the peak of each chant, our style of kirtan closely resembles the long-lost Jewish women’s practice of aynraysn, crying out, or literally, tearing down, and gives participants the opportunity to call out to the Divine from the depths of their hearts.
Storytelling plays a part in each event, as storyteller Anna Sobel brings to light historical women’s practices that relate to our form of chanting. Every time we sing together, we highlight a specific woman from Jewish history, tell her story, and invite her in.
3:30-3:45 Closing Circle (Multiaccess, Sanctuary)