Your donation will be tax deductible in the US to the extent allowed by the IRS.
To make a tax-deductible donation by wire transfer in the US, please contact:
Avrum Lapin, North American Representative
Toll-free: 1-866-830-3321
Email: schechter@thelapingroup.com
To make a tax-deductible donation in Israel, please contact:
Dina Gudai, Israeli Representative
Phone: 074-7800643
Email: dina@schechter.ac.il
Please mail your check to:
The Schechter Institutes, Inc. (a 501(c) 3 tax exempt organization)
Box #3566
PO Box 8500
Philadelphia, PA 19178-3566
Attn: Mr. Avrum Lapin, North American Representative
Toll-free: 1-866-830-3321
Email: schechter@thelapingroup.com
Please indicate the donation is "for your joint Schechter Institutes program."
Checks should be made payable to the Jewish Theological Society of Canada and mailed to:
Jewish Theological Society of Canada
c/o Camp Ramah in Canada
3845 Bathhurst St., Suite 310
Toronto, ON, M3H 3N2
Phone: 416-789-2193, ext. 2139
E-mail: accounting@campramah.com
Please mail a check to:
The Schechter Institutes
Attn: Dina Gudai, Finance Department
PO Box 16080,
Jerusalem, 9116002
Israel
For assistance, please call Dina Gudai at 074-780-0643 (8:00 AM – 3:00 Israel time Sunday through Thursday).
Your donation will be tax deductible in the US to the extent allowed by the IRS.
To make a tax-deductible donation by wire transfer in the US, please contact:
Avrum Lapin, North American Representative
Toll-free: 1-866-830-3321
Email: schechter@thelapingroup.com
To make a tax-deductible donation in Israel, please contact:
Dina Gudai, Israeli Representative
Phone: 074-7800643
Email: dina@schechter.ac.il
Please mail your check to:
The Schechter Institutes, Inc. (a 501(c) 3 tax exempt organization)
Box #3566
PO Box 8500
Philadelphia, PA 19178-3566
Attn: Mr. Avrum Lapin, North American Representative
Toll-free: 1-866-830-3321
Email: schechter@thelapingroup.com
Please indicate the donation is "for your joint Schechter Institutes program."
Checks should be made payable to the Jewish Theological Society of Canada and mailed to:
Jewish Theological Society of Canada
c/o Camp Ramah in Canada
3845 Bathhurst St., Suite 310
Toronto, ON, M3H 3N2
Phone: 416-789-2193, ext. 2139
E-mail: accounting@campramah.com
Please mail a check to:
The Schechter Institutes
Attn: Dina Gudai, Finance Department
PO Box 16080,
Jerusalem, 9116002
Israel
For assistance, please call Dina Gudai at 074-780-0643 (8:00 AM – 3:00 Israel time Sunday through Thursday).
Psychodrama: How to successfully cross the Red Sea and other obstacles in Life
Shalom, my name is Ziva Bracha Gidron and I am head of the Pyschodrama Program at Schechter. I would like to say something about very short about the parashat hashavua, parasha Be’shalach.
But I will connect it to psychodrama and to one of the concepts that I wrote about in my doctorate thesis about: the concept is caring opposites and unity of opposites.
In parashat Be’shalach, God is finally saying to Moses that he can take B’nai Israel (The children of Israel) and he is standing in front of ים סוף Yam Suf (The Red Sea) and he tears the Red Sea in two, he can split it, and B’nai Israel can pass.
This is a miracle!
We all know what Rambam (Maimonides) says about miracles. A person, בטח (certainly) a Jew, can’t stay and wait for a miracle to come. He is participating in the miracles that God wants to bring him. So this is the way that Judaism sees faith. Faith is not something like in the Greek mythology that comes up from somewhere or connects to people that we depend on. We can create our own faith even if faith is in crisis, like we had this year in the war in Israel.
What I want to say is when the people of Israel are standing in front the sea, they are terrified, they are really terrified. They have all kinds of anxiety and fear that each person can have when he is confronting something that he does not know what it is.
But, really what makes B’nai Israel, people that can cross the sea, is their faith in their leader and mostly their faith in God that they can pass and they can pass safely.
So how can a person or a group of people or a nation that is becoming a nation, Am Israel, really face crisis or something that they do not know what it is but they feel that in this faith they are participating in a miracle? They are going to cross the sea that God split into two in order for them pass and then he will make the sea to be a great sea again and all the Egyptians will be drowned in the sea.
How can they really do this thing when they are in the middle or the end of a crisis? Like we are now in Israel.
Actually what is going on is that there is a Nachshon ben Aminadav (Nachshon son of Aminadav, a leader in the Tribe of Judah, is referenced in the Talmud and Midrash as being the first of B’nai Israel to jump or enter the Red Sea) who is jumping in first because he really believes, inside of him, that if God promises him something that he will cross safely the sea, it will be OK.
But he had to do the road (path). He had to do the road and he had to believe.
This is what we all do, and in psychodrama, we really have a stage where each person in a group of psychodrama has his own sea that wants to be split, that he can cross all kinds of obstacles, or crises or even dreams and beliefs that he wants to reach and to fulfill. Usually he faces fear and anxiety.
The idea that we have inside of us, the possibility to create our own miracle, and the idea that God is here, and we are nation that God promised to us that he will be here in any time – in good times and in bad times – means that we can cross and be safe again.
SHAVUA TOV FROM SCHECHTER
image: shutterstock
