Mitsui Collective – To create a national fellowship and a national convening of Jewish embodiment educators that will train Jewish educators to integrate Jewish embodiment into their work.

How do you define Jewish embodiment?

Embodiment writ large is our way of being. It’s how we are formed, how we move through the world, and what we express through our actions and behaviors.  Jewish embodiment is both rooted in and an expression of Jewish wisdom, identity, spirituality, culture, and values. In practice, Jewish embodiment cultivates the experience of Jewish life and learning through bodies, using modalities such as movement, music and song, breathwork, artmaking, prayer, and ritual. Jewish embodiment helps us to more fully align our actions with our intentions, to better understand ourselves and others, and to build communities of wholeness and belonging. 

Can you give an example of how Jewish embodied practice has changed a Jewish education setting?

“Embodied chevruta” is a core Mitsui principle mirroring the classic partnership-learning modality for studying Jewish text. Practicing with a partner is powerful. It both shapes and guides the learning, and cultivates the skill of being in partnership itself. In workshops for Jewish educators, we explicitly share our common progressions for embodied chevruta learning as a realtime “noticing and naming” pedagogy. Educators then reflect on how they might apply the experience back in their own educational settings. We’ve had many educators share that this has deeply changed how they think about and utilize partnership learning, from play-based experiences to traditional chevruta text study. 

What is something unexpected you’ve learned from practicing Jewish Embodiment?

Recently I was demonstrating practices for a group with a co-facilitator I’d just met, and I was blown away at how quickly we were able to move into a trusting partnership. More often, developing that kind of trust is a slower process, yet no less enjoyable. Embodied chevruta enables us to encounter the full uniqueness of every person with genuine depth and connection.