6 Tuesday sessions:
October: 6, 13, 20, November: 3 & 10 | 9 – 10:30 a.m. PST – Virtual
Tuesday, November 17 | 6-8:30 p.m. PST – In-person
Healing Story Circles: Rebbe Nachman Tales
October 6 @ 9:00 am - 10:30 am PDT
Zoom + Bay Area
Healing Story Circles: A New Learning Opportunity
At a moment of intersecting crises, join us for an adventure into deep and creative Jewish learning. Stories are the lifeblood of Jewish learning and Jewish stories offer guidance for navigating life’s complexities and cultivating hope, empathy, and courage. The dialogue between text and lived experience leads to unexpected and deeply relevant insights.
Event Details
For centuries, wisdom tales have carried our deepest beliefs, ethical questions, and spiritual insights across generations — with imagination, delight, and an invitation to deeper exploration. Jewish stories offer guidance for navigating life’s complexities and cultivating hope, empathy, and courage.
Adamah SF (previously Wilderness Torah) have long brought Jewish tales and land-based, arts-and-text learning to adults, educators, and families across the Bay Area — from B’naiture’s wilderness rites of passage to seasonal gatherings across the state. Now we’re offering a new learning opportunity: Healing Story Circles, exploring the Tales of Rebbe Nachman (c. 1806–1810) — a teacher who turned to the fields and forests to pray in solitude (hitbodedut), and whose tales have captured the imagination of authors, scholars, and artists ever since.
The Tales are like fairy tales (Maasiyot) in form, inviting learners to bring their own interpretations — informed by the text, personal experience, and current concerns. They hold themes of wandering and seeking, wild and domesticated, crisis and loss, reunion and joy found in darkness. They can be studied with real rigor, drawing on classical Jewish ideas from TaNaKh, rabbinic literature, and kabbalah — yet they resist single interpretations. Associations to childhood memories, a recent hike, a film, a political moment are all welcome. The dialogue between text and lived experience leads to unexpected and deeply relevant insights.
Most sessions will meet on Zoom, with one gathering outdoors around the campfire, to ground our study in the land itself. In keeping with Rebbe Nachman’s own practice of prayer and reflection outside.
Jewish Educators will love this program!
Recommended donation: $180
Max participants: 15 (waiting list after that)
This program requires an application. Preference will be given to Jewish educators and community builders that can commit to all the sessions.
Educators & Bios:
ARIEL BURGER is the author of the Publisher’s Lunch Club book, Indie Buzz Book selection, and National Jewish Book Award winner, Witness: Lessons from Elie Wiesel’s Classroom (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt). He is the founding director and senior scholar of The Witness Institute, whose mission is to empower emerging leaders, inspired by the life and legacy of Elie Wiesel. He is an author, teacher, and artist whose work integrates spirituality, the arts, and strategies for social change. An Orthodox-trained rabbi, Ariel received his PhD in Jewish Studies and Conflict Resolution under Elie Wiesel.
A lifelong student of Professor Wiesel, Ariel served as his Teaching Fellow from 2003-2008, after which he directed education initiatives at Combined Jewish Philanthropies of Greater Boston. As a Covenant Foundation grantee, Ariel develops cutting-edge arts and educational programming for adults, facilitates workshops for educators, consults to non-profits, and serves as scholar/artist-in-residence for institutions around the U.S. In 2019 Ariel was chosen as one of the Algemeiner’s Top 100 people positively influencing Jewish life today. When Ariel’s not learning or teaching, he is creating music, art, and poetry.
Over the past five years, through the Illuminate project, Rabbi Ariel Burger has brought Jewish tales, storytelling workshops, and integrated arts-and-text modalities to over 7,000 adult learners and educators across the country. This work focused on a range of story-based (aggadic) materials, and practices for personal storytelling and storytelling for social change. We led groups of educators, and of adults in synagogues and communities across the US. We used stories as the basis for moral leadership training for diverse groups through the Witness Institute. The results were striking, especially regarding learners’ responses to The Tales of Rebbe Nachman (c.1806-1810), which have captured the imagination of many prominent authors, scholars, and artists.
ITAMAR COHN has joined Adamah’s Wilderness Torah team with a deep passion for empowering youth through initiatory experiences in the wild. He is inspired and excited to add reconnection with ancestral earth-based wisdom and practices to this work.
Itamar spent 10 years with Outward Bound California as Lead Instructor, Course Director, and Trainer. In his last position, he served as Head of Pedagogy and Instruction for a sustainability education startup in Israel called Halom Hadash (New Dream).
In a previous life, Itamar co-founded the EcoME Center, an educational center in the West Bank, bringing together Israelis, Palestinians, and internationals to practice and research connections between personal, social, and environmental peace work and sustainability. Since 2013 he has been part of creating an Ecovillage in the North of Israel, called Adama, where he has lived with his wife, Ilana, and where his daughter, Sequoia Levia, was born in a humble yurt.
Itamar holds a Bachelor’s in Outdoor Education from Trinity University College, Wales, and a Master’s in Peace and Conflict Management from Haifa University, Israel.
Over the last 3 years, Itamar has studied the Rebbe Nachman tales with Rabbi Burger on several occasions and has personally experienced the power of these tales to awaken us into the dream state.
