Our Story
Rabbi Shimon ben Yoḥai says:
“Come and see how beloved the Jewish people are before God. As every place they were exiled, the Shechina – the Divine presence - went with them.” - Babylonian Talmud Megillah 29A
Every one of us is beloved, worthy of Divine accompaniment. We express belovedness with each other by emulating the Shechina and accompanying & supporting one another through our complex lives of joy and sorrow, triumph and trial, exile and homecoming.
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Explore Beloved’s Story
Mission
Beloved supports and nourishes open-hearted spiritual leaders as they create and sustain new spaces of sacred belonging. Our Beloved leaders have a vision for a world they want to cultivate; we are here to help them bring that vision to fruition.
The spiritual leaders we support are inspired by the ancient Jewish wisdom of communal life at a more intimate scale, such as the minyan or the dinner table. These leaders cultivate in-person and virtual spaces where people go to be understood, nurtured, enlivened, connected, loved, & not alone.
The Beloved Methodology
To strengthen our leaders and their projects, Beloved offers:
Practical administrative and financial support; skillbuilding.
We support leaders by offering substantial operations assistance for their projects, including communication & donation platforms, executive & fundraising coaching, bookkeeping, and discounted fiscal sponsorship. We also offer training in the skills of starting and sustaining an organization including budgeting, fundraising (individuals and foundations), community organizing, constituency building, and communications.
Emotional, spiritual, & communal nourishment.
We nourish leaders by convening and deepening robust communities of practice, where we offer one another peer support, share big ideas & struggles, and build collective power to transform North American Jewish life.
We practice our methodology through:
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Beloved Roots
PERENNIAL
At Beloved, we offer wrap-around organizational support, such as fiscal sponsorship, trainings, mentorship, accounting, bookkeeping, and more. This support is part of our practice of providing spiritual leaders and their projects with individualized care and attention just as they do for those they serve.
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Beloved Seeds
ANNUAL · JANUARY — MAY
7-session skills-based workshop series for all Blossoms and a wider audience. We offer support and learning around the skills you need to get your project off the ground in as helpful and not-overwhelming a way as possible.
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Beloved Blossom
ANNUAL · STARTING NOVEMBER
Our year-long cohort-based journey designed to propel our leaders & their projects forward with mentorship, learning, access to resources, and peer-to-peer support.
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Beloved Garden
PERENNIAL
After our year-long journey, leaders are invited into continued connection with their community of practice, ongoing coaching & mentoring, ongoing organizational & operational support, and an annual in-person gathering.
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Beloved Collaborations
PERENNIAL
Beloved partners with organizations, denominations, and seminaries to create Seeds workshops and Blossom cohorts for their leaders.
In a Beloved world, each of us recognizes ourselves and each other as reflections of Divinity, worthy of attention and care, as beloved. No one will be other because we will know we belong to each other, the earth, and our Source. Our communal spaces will reflect this deep belonging; our example of love for each other will help grow our world into an abundant garden of love.
The most precious gift love offers - the experience of knowing we always belong.
- bell hooks
Our unique position in the North American Jewish landscape
Jewish legacy institutions, such as Federations, JCCs, camps, and synagogues, provide a deep sense of stability and continuity in our North American Jewish landscape. Even as these well-resourced, legacy institutions continue to serve large swaths of active Jews in America, many people are seeking different entry points and pathways to live their Judaism.
In this age of deterioration of trust in institutions (in general and in our Jewish community), the DIY movement has emerged as a much more flexible, open-source, non-hierarchical alternative in North American Jewish life. Yet, in addition to the success of peer-led, accessible models like Moishe House, One Table, Haggadot.com and At the Well, there is still a need for learned spiritual leaders who can guide people in Jewish traditions, rituals, and learning.
Our Beloved leaders strive to honor what is best about the legacy and DIY approaches. They are building creative, flexible, responsive projects imbued with a core understanding that Judaism is best when practiced in loving, accountable community. Our leaders offer care and inspiration, steeped in Jewish wisdom, to their people.
Beloved’s organizational model also incorporates the strengths of both legacy and DIY models. We are building a strong, decentralized network of spiritual communities inspired by fractal patterns found in nature. Fractals are created by repeating a process over and over in a feedback loop so that small individual organisms can be replicated at a large scale, like a dandelion whose seeds have blown away and root in new soil. Each Beloved project can maintain an intimate, relationship-driven space while the larger Beloved impact will grow organically, leader by leader, community by community.
“Beloved allows me to be the kind of rabbi I want to be, and build a community I fully believe in. The work is hard, but the experiences, spaces and relationships that are created are priceless. When I was figuring out how to get started, the support Beloved provided was huge. I could take a leap with someone holding my hand, and for that, I am eternally grateful! ”
“The cohort meetings are a highlight. It is such great learning to hear about all different communities and projects, all in different stages. I find the conversations open, thought-provoking, and supportive. A game-changer for me was the conversation around “who do you serve?” I had been struggling through language around age demographics, and through this conversation realized but I could think about serving souls that are yearning for meaning. That is only one example of how the different way of thinking introduced at Beloved has helped me understand that I want my community to be a different kind of Jewish space. ”
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Our Values
Image of God
Our north star is that we are each made in the image of God. We value each other simply because we are not for what we can produce. We are called to practice this radical notion for ourselves & our beloveds, and strive to imprint its far-reaching implications onto everything that we do.
Listening
We strive to listen well to ourselves & our Beloveds. Such deep listening sits at the center of creating authentic experiences of belonging.
Small is all
What we practice at the small scale sets the patterns for the whole system. The spiritual growth we are seeking & offering for ourselves & our beloveds have profound effects on our world.
Beauty
We hope to inspire awe and gratitude through turning our attention to the beauty of art, music, food, space, and the natural world. We aspire to live our lives as if we are creating a work of art.
Embodiment
We emphasize embodied spiritual practice, such as singing, meditation, and movement, especially because much of Jewish religious life has over-emphasized intellectual knowledge at the expense of heart-soul-body experiences.
Leaderful
We hope to cultivate leadership of all kinds, at all levels so that our beloveds thrive in reciprocal relationships.
Liberation
We believe that Jewish liberation and the liberation of all people are intertwined. We are committed to building communities that counter oppression in all its forms.
