Of All the Little Surprises

In my determination not to help at all during the transition of Moishe House OC from Laguna Beach to Costa Mesa I decided to break my ankle in two places, confine myself to a couch for six weeks or so, and have a bunch of metal installed in m body. This is the obvious solution to laziness. I mean really who enjoys packing up a house and moving, when I say “I will do anything to avoid moving.” I mean it.

I am writing this from a well worn patch of couch situated in the living room of our new house. Strewn about me are the necessities of daily life, IPOD, water bottle, crutches, pen , paper, and of course my laptop. My world is really small right now, and yet the community it holds is larger than I ever imagined. After the break I disappeared home for 3 weeks to recuperate, drawing on the support of family leaving my roommates to run the new MoHo. Now that I am at our new home, my wonderful roommates are helping me, I get to enjoy events from the couch perspective, we plan events together better than ever, and out turnout skyrocketed after with the location change.

I want to return to the community though, never before in my life have I sought out a strong network of support. Yet here I am on a couch, getting messages on Facebook, phone calls and emails from community members, the very people that make this organization thrive asking how they can help. When one member of the community is in trouble, we all help. I think that this simple idea of community helping its members is often forgotten, it is the original social safety net. At our house we have not missed a beat, participants are helping with breakdown of events, moving us in, bringing extra food for Shabbat, even though we are down one person (me!) we have ten more people to help out.

Honestly all of this sentiment is feeling rather maudlin, but the truth is had anyone asked me when I started here, “If you broke your ankle what would you do?”
I would’ve said “I have no clue”. During all my forced vacation time I’ve done too much reading, and one very talented author’s words bring me comfort right now,
“…we cannot possibly know what it is we’ve yet to make manifest in our lives…”.
I couldn’t have planned for any of this, Moishe House happened to me just as accidentally as my broken ankle. All I am certain of right now is that our house is going to keep going strong, and that we have a wonderful group of people around us that will make sure we are here for quite some time to come.

Parker
Moishe House OC

A Year? Wow!

I started Moishe about a year ago, and I feel like I have learned so much, it’s almost impossible to process it all. I have made a ton of new friends, discovered so much more of Chicago, and reconnected with and explored my Judaism. It has been an awesome, difficult, and breathtaking last year. And I am really excited to continue it all again!

I graduated from college a year ago, and I knew I was coming back to Chicago. Even though it’s my hometown, I was definitely nervous. Trying to bridge the gap between old and new friends felt a little overwhelming – old friends who hadn’t been in my life for years and new friends who I had yet to meet. Moishe House turned out to be the perfect solution to what I was facing. I was able to make Moishe House my home base and build (or rebuild) my relationships from there. I felt so safe in the space my roommates and I created, and I met tons of great community members, so my friendships just fell in place. I was able to bring my old friends from high school and my new friends from work into the community as well. One of my favorite things to see is all the people I care about most getting along and spending time together.

Being from Chicago, I have certainly seen my fair share of the city. But in a huge place like this, with a million things to do, you never feel like you’ve seen enough. Or you feel like you’ve seen everything and forget how much is out there. With Moishe House, I am constantly exploring new places and introducing newcomers to my favorite spots. Other people told me that they have returned home after college and felt like they didn’t belong. I, on the other hand, am rediscovering how much there is going on in this amazing city of mine.

I also wanted Moishe House as a chance to open myself up to reevaluating my identity as a Jew. I was never raised particularly religiously, and I didn’t get involved with Jewish activities on campus. However, when I graduated, I wanted to start exploring again. This year, I have gone to services, studied texts, learned about new holidays and met so many different kinds of Jews. Everyday I learn a new Hebrew word, and every month I learn a new tradition. A whole world has been opened up to me, and I can’t wait to see what else I learn this year.

I am thrilled that I get the chance to live here another year, so I can keep making friends, seeing new parts of the city, and finding out more about who I am as a Jew.

This is only my second blog for the Moishe House, but it feels like I've been here forever. The meetings, the phone calls, the constant planning it takes to make a communal house run smoothly have become so natural. I no longer have to remind myself to check our calendar foe the Moishe events we have planned for the week because I do it without thinking. That's what I'm loving most right now - the feeling that in this moment, the work that we do, couldn't be any other way.

And now that we've found our rhythm, we can play within the structure we've developed. We know we need to have two Shabbats and a happy hour every month, but we're getting more creative and exploring outside of ourselves. We choose events that we aren't sure how our community will react to - trial and error each month, so we continue to grow and improve.

In addition, from the beginning, as we are all driven by social justice, we've wanted to incorporate that into our house. What I once thought might not work with our community and its needs has become an intrinsic part of our house's mission statement. Adding a short discussion about modern slavery to our kosher for Passover Shabbat was natural, and for me, deepened the experience.

So we have found our way, and we must continue to push ourselves, but it is really our house now.

Raychel's First Quarter at MoHoCle!

As the newest resident of Moishe House Cleveland and having only lived in the house for three months, I have to say that every day is a learning experience filled with both surprises and challenges!

I came to be a member of Moishe House Cleveland after being turned on to the idea of "intentional communities" last summer. I've been an active participant of this community since it began developing. Over this past summer I visited communities that were income sharing and economically self-supporting with a self governing form of democracy and a model that emphasizes personal responsibility and a good work ethic. The piece that was most lacking for me in these communities was the Judaic aspect. As a Jewish intentional community I believed Moishe House to be the best of both worlds.

While I didn't expect that living at Moishe House would be like living in either of the communities I visited, I've found it quite different from what I had expected. It's been quite an adjustment learning to live with three other people, and sometimes I feel like I'm still in the adjustment period. I've learned, through both my research on communities and through first hand experience at Moishe House that some of the most important things for a community of this nature to be cohesive are organization, communication and respect. May we all be so lucky as to have cohesive, and organized homes, filled with communication and respect. May we all have shalom bayit!

Rachael - MHSS - Ethiopian Shabbat

This past Shabbat was a nice solid first for MHSS (& was awesome besides!): greater-community-co-ordinated, Ethiopian Shabbat :

One of MHSS's most active, enthusiastic, present community members, Roey, co-ordinated December's monthly Open Shabbat (davening in our living room, kiddush / motzi / homecooked dinner, talking & laughing & staying as long as you want -- even till the following evening, as some regularly do). He wanted to focus on the Ethiopian Jewish community: Ethiopian-Jewish culture and struggles, history and background, ritual and identity; to bring knowledge and understanding of this segment of our people into the "standard" MHSS community through our popular (my favorite!) monthly MHSS-hosted Shabbat.

In addition to the regular reasons I get excited for MHSS Shabbats, I was especially looking forward to this one because:
1. An MHSS community member was excited for a specific program to happen -- and made it happen!
2. Through this event, (thanks to Roey!,) MHSS was provided the opportunity to reach out to and embrace (or at least connect with) a subset of our culture, a community who is yet a stranger in our midst; establish connections; and bring us together -- all of which I hope leads to continued communication and collaboration between our communities -- or, even more honestly, I hope Roey's efforts were received by the local Ethiopian-Jewish people as warm and gracious and inviting; and, now that people know we are here, that they will come to our home and will invite us to share in their Jewish and Ethiopian lives as they currently live (through organizations in which they are active, or even less formally).

More than educate the MHSS masses, Roey's Ethiopian Shabbat connected MHSS to the D.C.-area Ethiopian-Jewish community, fusing, infusing, expanding our two communities, our bases of outreach, by bringing us together, by giving us a chance to collaborate and socialize with one another. Roey's efforts to reach out to the local Ethiopian-Jewish community in order to bring his vision to fruition served to introduce our communities to one another and created a portal of dialogue and partnership, the potential results of which I am very excited.

To Roey, I offer once again a huge Yasher Koach, Mazal Tov, and Thanks!

I hope other MHSS community members will follow Roey's example and live the reality we share with people regularly: that we are here as a community resource, that we are (or at least can be) more than that which results from the combined energies and desires of just the MHSS residents.

And, I say, once again: Thanks, Moishe House. =D

MH Chicago's Outreach Efforts

We have been surprised by the number of new people that show up to our Shabbat dinners every time. It seems that people hear about them through our email list, and we have gotten many newcomers to our Shabbats that way. Those are the events where we have the most turnout, probably because Friday nights are when young Jews most want to celebrate their faith, but do not have another space to practice. For events that we hold during the week, like happy hours, we get fewer people. We have discussed why that is, and we believe that people are shyer about coming to smaller events and are also busier in the middle of the week. However, we are developing a solid group of repeat attendees—people who came to one event, such as Shabbat, and have come to lots of other events after. We have found that these people are often new to the city or had been actively looking for a Jewish community, so that when we reached out to them, they felt welcomed and excited to come back again.

While our email list, our Facebook events, and other technological forms of communication have brought us new people, we have found that word of mouth is the most powerful tool for getting people to become a part of Moishe House. People have repeatedly told us that a friend told them about the last house, and they decided to check it out. And the people who we draw in come back with friends who in turn come to another event. Our friends from around Chicago, coworkers, and acquaintances make up a big part of all our events, too, which just reinforces to us how our chatting about our positive experience with the Moishe House can lead to new participants. We are going to try in the coming months to mimic some of the other houses’ expansive Facebook groups, but we will continue to rely on good, old-fashioned people-to-people networks that have, so far, produced the best results.

springtime is coming in boston

springtime in boston means that the frigid, up and down winter is leaving for several months and will allow the other extreme of hot mid-summer temperatures in a few months. its true four-season territory up here.

there've been shifts of passover clean-ups galore around moishe house boston over the past few days. teams of 2-3 people have come every day to clean, straighten, purchase food, and tomorrow to cook second seder meal for the house. its certainly the cleanest ive ever seen the house. its been an incredibly show of organization, teamwork, and a desire to be a part of a community ritual (we couldnt allow everyone that wanted to come to the seder to come). its also a sign of warmer weather.

we're also running a series of bike mechanics workshops to get people up and on working bicycles. there's been a tremendous amount of interest to get back on the road (for commuting and recreation) but also to learn the tools to sustain one's own bike so as not to need to rely on a bike shop for maintenance. itll be a fun and team-building activity for the community.

and our winter csa's shares have been running for a few weeks now (partly a result of the local foods tu bshevat seder in february). the produce is a mix of local conventional and not local/organic. but its been an amazing way to reconnect to food in the off-season. given that, we're all excited for warmer weather and farmer's markets.

last summer the community was fairly quiet. to some extent i imagine the same will be the case this summer, with a focus on the outdoors and working on some ongoing projects that the house has established.

which all leads me to the question: is colder weather a harbinger of community building? if so, what does this mean? and given that summer is also a time of being out of town for students and young professionals, how can communities find ways to engage community members during the summer?

building community and changing the food system: off to monterey for a conference on the day

so im off to the hazon food conference in monterey, ca on thursday (a jewish conference on christmas--brilliant except for folks who celebrate both!) to connect/learn/share about moishe house boston's food justice campaign in the context of the larger jewish food movement. crazy that there are 600 people passionate enough about this issue/challenge to make their way out to california, and im one of them.

as context, mh boston has recently embarked on our food justice campaign, a project aimed to educate/organize/build excitement about the importance of supporting local, sustainable agriculture given the negative consequences of conventional ag on the environment, but more pressingly on people (see info on agriprocessors and discussion about kashruth and jewish ethics). in particular, we'll be running a local farm/jewish community tu b'shevat seder as well as educational seminars at congregations around the greater boston area (and beyond?). we've joined together to watch king corn, and have built amazing community and connections on the way folks connect to and around food, justice work and jewish values/culture. weve started conversations with mh providence regarding sukkoth activities and would love buy-in/brainstorming with other houses about local food/food justice-related work youve been a part of.

a marvelous handful of folks from our community will be off to monterey this thursday for this 4-day, intensive and community-building conference in monterey. we plan to build excitement around our campaign, learn what other communities have done, build relationships, and have a great time. aliza wasserman, an organizer and community leader at mh boston, will be doing a seminar around the farm bill and work done around the country to organize for more equitable distribution of funds away from conventional subsidies. and we'll come back pumped for our campaign and to the scores of amazing people that want to work on building our jewish community via this project.

while ive only officially resided in mh boston for a bit over three months, its been incredible to see how a community group like ourselves can really do exciting and engaging work in a way that a c3 non-profit tends not to--and i find the root of that in the relationship being built, the deeper motivations around wanting to build a community together and the respect we all share with each other. a much different experience than my day job, where community building, relationship building and a sense of belonging is much more sparse. here here to community.

sounding off.