Rachel Brodie
Jewish Milestones
Telephone: 510-559-3636
Email: show
Rachel is a Jewish educator who specializes in adult and family education. She teaches Jewish literature, history, and ethics at a wide variety of Bay Area institutions. What fills most of Rachel’s days and head, is her work with Jewish Milestones, the nonprofit she started 4 years ago. Jewish Milestones is all about making rituals and ceremonies like bar mitzvahs, weddings, funerals, or 40th birthdays, new home dedications, and 1st day of school rituals personally meaningful and authentically Jewish. Rachel also facilitates many non-synagogue-based Jewish lifecycle rituals and is not a rabbi (she doesn’t even play one on television).
From Eternity to Here
How to Make Havdalah... Meaningful
How-To,
Ritual & Prayer
The ancient ritual to ease the transition from Shabbat into the rest of the week is brief, but dramatic and delightfully sensual. Replete with themes of boundary setting, the pull of materialism and the place of spirituality, and even a recipe for anxiety management, havdalah has the potential to become resonant and powerful in the lives of many modern Jews. If you’ve ever been curious about the meaning of the words, the props and the actions, then you won’t want to miss this session.
Crowns of Glory on Graying Hair
Acknowledging Aging
How-To,
Ritual & Prayer
The Torah offers us advice on aging, laws about the treatment of elders and a variety of images of some of the best-known characters in their “golden” years. Through a close reading of the stories of Sarah, Jacob, and King David, we will extract life lessons for ourselves and our aging loved ones. Then we will look at how some of those ideas have begun to play themselves out in new rituals created to acknowledge the process of aging and other means of celebrating our later years.
The Old Made New and The New Made Sacred
Creating New Jewish Rituals
How-To,
Ritual & Prayer
Drawing on her experience designing and facilitating rituals, as well as working on Jewish Milestones—the nonprofit organization she co-founded that serves an educational resource for Jews seeking support in creating meaningful Jewish lifecycle rituals—Rachel will share some case studies in ritual innovation, “best practices” in ritual creation, and arrange for follow-up discussion of personal situations that require more time to unpack than is allotted in this session.
Rosh Hodesh: It's About Time!
Ritual & Prayer,
Torah & Text
Good time management – the Jewish way – involves taking time on a regular basis to reflect on leading a balanced life. Find out how Rosh Hodesh—celebration of the new moon/month—can restore us as individuals and as families in our often fast-paced and busy lives. Through text study and discussion rediscover this most “timely” of holy days.
