DAWN - program

May 16 - 17, 2021

Channels

DAWN will feature THREE concurrent streams of programming. Jump right in. Bounce from stream to stream. Explore the brilliant sessions. Build community in the chat. Here’s a taste: 

• What We Missed At Sinai: The mystics say that every soul that ever was and would ever be reunited at Sinai. Now, on the brink of reemergence, we find ourselves in the midst of another Cosmic Reunion. So, Reboot & LABA gathered the artists, musicians, writers, chefs and filmmakers of today to highlight what they have seen and shed light on where we are going.

• Ruth Revisited: The rabbis of the Jewish Emergent Network imagine their Cosmic Reunion with the characters from the Book of Ruth, the book we read on Shavuot, immersing themselves in those themes: interfaith marriage, caring for the poor, equity, environmentalism, grief and loss, altered states, and more. Ruth Revisited brings together rabbis, spiritual leaders, and special guests in a full night of conversation, song, study, movement, and ecstatic dance. 

• Sounds and Symbols: The ancient Hebrew on the scrolls is but one revelatory text. Music and movement is the “Torah” for the extraordinary musicians, dancers and artists that Reboot & LABA have united. At 10 PM we will feature “Eight Hours ‘Round Midnight,” an extended meditation by John Schott on Thelonious Monk’s immortal ballad. The piece, unfolding note by note, serves as a “text” for Schott to rabbinically interpret and comment upon.

A TASTE OF THE SESSIONS

Persian Rice Pudding Cook Along with Tannaz Sassooni In Iran, Shavuot is known as the festival of flowers, and in Shiraz, it falls at the moment in spring when the city's abundance of fragrant citrus trees transition from flower to fruit. We'll be making shirberenj, the traditional Iranian Shavuot dish of rice pudding, rich with clotted cream and flavored with orange blossom water. We'll also make a proper cup of double boiler Persian tea to keep us up through this all-night festival!"

Re-emergence from Grief and Loss: Embracing Healing and Wholeness Join Kohenet Traci Marx, Rabbi Jessica Kate Meyer, Chava Mirel, and Rabbi Rachel Nussbaum in a healing space of Torah and song. In this pandemic year that has brought us losses of all shapes and sizes, we will follow the arc of Naomi and Ruth's journey -- from loss and grief, through bitterness, emptiness and clinging, to a place of chesed and wholeness. We invite you to get comfortable and sing along, as we prepare ourselves spiritually for the cosmic reunion...

Coffeehouse with Daniel Sarah Karasik is a literary and musical performance that explores ruptures in our experience of time: the rich, full time of midnight reflections energized by coffee; the evacuated, fear-distorted time of the pandemic; the messianic time of Shavuot as the festival of receiving Torah, and the worldly time of Shavuot as a festival of harvests. Through song and spoken verse and prose, Daniel Sarah Karasik charts a course through these layered and varied experiences of time, and asks how we might arrive at beauty and justice in the time we have.

Sinai & Psychedelics: A Shavuot Conversation with the Jewish Emergent Network & Friends ft. Rabbi Amichai Lau-Lavie (Lab/Shul), Kohenet Aliza Rivka (Romemu), Jade Netanya Ullman (Romemu/MAPS), Rabbi Zac Kamenetz (Shefa Flow), Natalie Ginsberg (MAPS)

Utopia 1.0: Post-Neo-Futurist-Capitalism in 3D! is a twenty-minute cinematic expedition through Second Life, a largely abandoned virtual 3D world in search of utopia. Given the invitation to come build anything imaginable, what is it that we chose to create? The film poses questions many of us are now asking ourselves as we transition back into our pre-pandemic lives: Can we imagine a better world to return to? Can we create it?

V+1: A conversation with my Vaccine-Hesitant Best Friend Journalist and filmmaker Davy Rothbart has created V+1, an effort which asks vaccinated Americans to engage with their vaccine-hesitant friends. Here, he has a frank, loving conversation with Smurf Sanford, his "brother from another mother," about Smurf's reluctance to get vaccinated. They are also joined by activist Kristin Urquiza, founder of Marked by COVID, who has spoken stirringly on the national stage about losing her Dad to the disease.

Moses Zooms Her Shrink (with Jessie Kahnweiller and Nicole Delaney) Moses is freaking out. She’s stuck at Mt. Sinai waiting for God to deliver the commandments with a bunch of kvetching Jews. She zooms her shrink needing answers but like most shrinks, she just provides more questions….

That We Can See with Maxine Lee Ewaschuk During Shavuot we direct our attention toward the eternal echoes of a unique event. Playing with the polarity of hiddenness and revelation, we layer the media of the dancing body, textiles, music, and film and ask how each element helps us to see the others in a different light. A postmodern Israeli sage wrote: ‘The giving of the Torah is only possible when a person is ready to think about and experience the world differently, ‘to open up to a new way of being.” We ask ourselves what new pieces of Torah we can learn after another year of personal and global change. How do we change our approach to make a tikkun for what we have missed in the past?