Beloved Garden

After the Blossom year, our leaders are firmly planted in Beloved soil and are invited into continued connection through communities of practice, community conversations, ongoing coaching and mentoring, organizational and operational support, and our annual in-person gathering.

  • These CoPs are intended to bring folks together in affinity by interest, and to provide a place to think about shared challenges and find peer support. They’ll meet six times between November 2024 and June 2025:

    Artists for Social Change facilitated by Rena Branson: The Artist Community of Practice will gather to connect about what we're currently grappling with and wanting to work on, followed by parallel creative time to be in our own independent play and practice. We'll come back together at the end to share anything we feel moved to share and close with a song!

    Not a Start-Up Anymore facilitated by R’Miriam Geronimus: Some of us have been doing this work for several years now, and the questions we're asking and the support we need are different than when we were new at this. We will come together to support each other at this more seasoned stage. Led by Miriam Geronimus, we will create this group together to meet our needs, but it will likely include a combination of big picture and granular tachlis questions. In our first meeting in November, we will get to know each other and design the format and scope of the group.

  • In the spirit of continuing the rich community conversations that began at our most recent retreat, Beloved will be convening three sessions each on the following:

    Embodied Memory & Belonging -- Palestine, Israel, and our Expanding Spiritual Leadership facilitated by ara oshin: in this Community Practice Experience we will come together to traverse a path of honest engagement. we will give space to what emerges including fear, regret, anger, confusion, willingness, power, sensitivity, and the sparks of divinity that reveal themselves to us, together. With the support of somatic methods and trauma healing oriented facilitation, we will explore the ways our personal and communal histories shape our connection to the land of Palestine and the State of Israel. we will practice willingness to explore our questions and growth edges on this topic as we deepen our capacity as spiritual leaders to be in relationship with emerging realities and spiritual needs.

    The Messiness of Leadership facilitated by R’Noah Rubin-Blose:  Continuing our session at the Beloved retreat, these conversations will be a lab where our lives and work are the materials for sacred experiment in how to be Jewish spiritual leaders who share power, as we seek to create pockets of olam haba inside of olam hazeh. Bring your questions, challenges, and insights from your experiences of the messiness of practicing leadership in community! Drop in for one of these conversations, or come to all of them.

  • Facilitated by Asher Edes, this quarterly gathering is intended to provide an opportunity to connect, reflect on the season past, and set intentions for the season ahead.

  • In Spring 2025, Shula Pesach will facilitate a small group of beloveds will have the opportunity to join a Spiritual Formation circle, which will be facilitated by Shula Pesach of Q2. Details of this circle are still being developed and more information will follow in late Fall.

Garden Facilitators

  • Rena Branson

    Rena Branson (they/them) is a Jewish composer, ritual leader, and educator who uplifts personal and collective healing through song. They are the founder and co-director of A Queer Nigun Project, which organizes singing events for LGBTQIA+ folks and sends audio content to people in the Jewish community who are incarcerated. Rena recently released “Love Is the Ground,” their first album of original music. Learn more about their work at renabranson.com

  • Rabbi Miriam Geronimus

    Rabbi Miriam Geronimus (she/her) received ordination from the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College in May 2021. She is the founding rabbi of the Cleveland Jewish Collective, a progressive Jewish community in Cleveland, Ohio, that is rooted in relationship. She is committed to cocreating a community that reflects and celebrates the diversity of the Jewish people and fellow travelers. She draws on experience working with queer folks, interfaith families, and people with disabilities.

  • ara oshin

    ara (they/them) is a multi-disciplinary artist and facilitator who explores the somatic integration of the conceptual edge between inner world and outer body.

  • Rabbi Noah Rubin-Blose

    Rooted in Durham, NC, the homelands of the Occaneechi Band of the Saponi Nation, Noah Rubin-Blose (he/him) went to rabbinical school in order to resource his home community. He is a dreamer and listener, maker of queer ritual, teacher and facilitator, a builder of interfaith coalitions, a lifelong participant in Southern movements for racial justice, and a student of Jewish ancestral wisdom. He is passionate about building non-hierarchical structures for communal life, and once built and co-ran a cooperative bakery from the ground up. He is a student at the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College, a fellow with SVARA: A Traditionally Radical Yeshiva, and author of the cookbook Making the Table: Vegetarian Recipes to Nourish Community. He is a white Ashkenazi and Italian American, trans and queer, Southern Jew, and he loves the ocean.

  • Asher Edes

    Asher Edes (they, etc) grew up in Chicago, put down roots in Minneapolis, and currently lives on Cherokee land in North Carolina. They collaborated with Alexander Grace Vickery to create Shmita Hives, an exploratory journey of Jewish time cycles. Asher is an organizer of Yesod Farm+Kitchen, where Jewish farming is a practice of collective liberation. They bring that project a longstanding interest in cooperative homes and workplaces. Asher likes being outside, dreaming in community, and engaging with art as a process. They’re inspired by disabled and trans survival and resilience. Asher holds a BA from Hampshire College and is studying in ALEPH’s Earth-Based Judaism Program.

  • Shula Pesach

    Shula Pesach (they/she) is a community ritualist, public astrologer, and trans theologian. Shula lives as a white settler on Nipmuc Land, and traces their ancestry from diasporic Ashkenazi Jewish peoples from the Danube and Dnieper watersheds. They are neurodivergent, working-class, chronically ill, and transgender, with citizenship and education privilege. They serve movements for collective liberation through their work with Weaving Earth Center for Relational Education and as the Program Director for Taproot. Shula is an apprentice of bird-language, the tarot, and stretching strudel dough. Shula also goes by Solace, Shlomo, and Salomé.