Journey Into the Unknown: Chapter 7
Journey Into the Unknown
Chapter 7 | March 2026
February arrived with cold mornings and a full heart. The past two months brought me into rooms — literal and metaphorical — where something real was happening: people in relationship, people doing the work, people holding complexity with care. This newsletter is an attempt to hold it all together, even when it doesn't neatly fit. Maybe especially then.
HONORING, CELEBRATING, RECKONING
Black History Month is not a footnote. It is an invitation — to celebrate culture, accomplishments, and people in full. To learn, again and more deeply. To reckon with what has been built, what has been taken, what has survived.
I find myself thinking about emergence — a concept adrienne maree brown writes about, and my colleague Gamal J. Palmer explores and embodies. Emergence is the way complex systems arise from simple interactions. It is the way movements are made. It is what happened during the Civil Rights Movement, during Reconstruction, during every gathering of people who decided their lives were worth more than what the world offered them.
This month, I want to hold that. Not as a lesson for one month a year, but as an orientation — a constant leaning toward what's emerging, what's rising, what's being built even now. What I am learning, and unlearning, especially about the relationships between Blacks and Jews over time, thanks last week especially to Dr. Marc Dollingerand Ilana Kaufman.
TOWARD CONNECTION, NOURISHMENT, & THE WORK OF LIBERATION
I had the gift last month of participating in the Brick by Brick Fellowship, hosted by the Jewish Liberation Fund at the beautiful Pearlstone Retreat Center. And I came home changed — not in a dramatic, bolt-of-lightning way, but in the quiet, cellular way that happens when you've been truly nourished.
What struck me most was the power of connection. Not networking. Not transacting. Real, slow, vulnerable relationship-building among people who are doing justice work from a Jewish lens and showing up with their whole selves. The retreat widened my network, yes — but more than that, it deepened my understanding of what movement-making actually requires: trust, time, and the willingness to be in genuine community.
The experience also validated something I've been building through Gather's own work. The Chavurot model — democratized, cohort-based learning and leadership rooted in Jewish wisdom — isn't just a program design. It's a philosophy. When you put people in ongoing relationship, when you return to each other week after week, month after month, something accumulates. Resilience. Depth. A shared vocabulary for change, compassion, empathy.
The retreat reminded me: this work is relational. Always. Strategy matters, but relationships are the infrastructure.
I returned feeling nourished in a way that made me more present — for family, for collaborators, for the vision. That kind of renewal is not a luxury. It is part of the work.
ADAR, PURIM & THE WAR IN IRAN: JOY AND FEAR IN THE SAME BREATH
We are in the month of Adar — the month our tradition calls the happiest of the Jewish calendar. When Adar enters, joy increases. Purim came and went: costumes and noise-makers and the wild, carnivalesque inversion of everything that tried to destroy us.
And yet. There is a war in Iran, Israel, the whole of the Middle East. There is fear in the Jewish world, and fear in the Iranian world, and civilians caught in the middle of histories and powers and decisions they did not make. The joy feels complicated. The fear, and anxiety, is real.
I keep coming back to the frame of Both/And. Not as a spiritual bypass, not as a way to avoid the weight of what's happening, but as a refusal to let either truth cancel the other. We can sound the grogger and grieve. We can celebrate Purim, a story about a people who survived against impossible odds, while acknowledging that right now, other people are also just trying to survive.
The Purim story itself doesn't shy away from complexity. Esther is afraid. Mordecai is strategic. Haman is a cautionary tale about unchecked power. And the Jewish people are saved, but the story is not simple. It never is. We are not asked to resolve the complexity. We are asked to hold it — fully, honestly, with both the grogger and the grief.
WE THE PROCESS: CREATIVITY AS ESSENTIAL PRACTICE
On March 1st, I joined (and co-chaired!) the Jewish Studio Project's 10th anniversary celebration: We the Process. I have been thinking a lot about why this matters so much right now.
Krista Tippett, Susan Magsamen, Bayo Okumalafe — thinkers and practitioners across very different traditions — all point to the same truth: creativity is not decorative. It is not a reward for when the serious work is done. It is the serious work. Art-making heals. It calms. It helps us process the tumult, bear the uncertainty, move through change without being shattered by it.
We are born creative. Every child knows this. At some point, many of us are taught to forget. JSP, for 10 years now, has been in the business of remembering. Ten years of helping people return to something essential in themselves. It was an incredible celebration, of art, music, joy, and we raised $500k to power the next 10 years of Jewish creativity and possibility!
HERE LIES LOVE: HISTORY IS REPEATING ITSELF
I've been absorbed by Here Lies Love — the extraordinary musical by David Byrne and Fatboy Slim about Imelda Marcos and the Filipino People Power Revolution. It is joyful and devastating in equal measure. It is disco and dictatorship. It is people finding the courage to reclaim their streets, their country, their lives.
And it is impossible to watch without thinking about right now. The parallels are not subtle. History is, as they say, not repeating — but it is rhyming loudly. When the music plays and the crowd rises, you feel it in your chest: ordinary people, extraordinary courage, the precariousness of democracy, and the stubborn human resistance.
