Yesod
Foundations for Deepening Jewish Mindfulness Meditation
An opportunity to learn with two of the world’s leading Jewish mindfulness organizations.
A Ten-Month Online Program
January - November 2027
*Please be in touch with yesod@orhalev.org for any questions
Or HaLev and The Institute for Jewish Spirituality are delighted to bring you a unique program: Yesod: Foundations for Deepening Jewish Mindfulness Meditation.
Yesod, a ten-month online program, offers anyone with an established meditation practice a new, systematic, stage-by-stage approach to deepen your mindfulness meditation skills within an authentic Jewish spiritual framework.
Yesod is for anyone with an established meditation practice which includes:
At least one year of regular meditation practice
A desire and commitment to deepen and grow in your Jewish mindfulness practice
Participation in at least one week-long (6 days, 5 nights) silent mindfulness meditation retreat (e.g. Jewish, Buddhist, MBSR, etc.)
*See our upcoming Opening the Heart retreat - January 10-17, 2027 to fulfill this requirement before Yesod begins
*Please be in touch with yesod@orhalev.org for any questions about eligibility
Yesod is the First Year of the Three-Year Gates of Awareness Program
Gates of Awareness: Jewish Mindfulness Meditation: Deepening Practice & Teacher Training is a three-year program designed to support participants to deepen personal practice and develop their capacity and skill as teachers of Jewish mindfulness meditation.
Please note: Participants may take one, two, or all three years of the program. Admission to years two and three will be determined through an application process.
Year 1
Yesod: Foundations for Deepening Jewish Mindfulness Meditation
Yesod is the foundation (and is required) for the upcoming teacher training programs in Years 2 and 3 of the program. It is grounded in our belief that your ability to teach skillfully is determined by your depth of practice and understanding.
Year 2
Tiferet: Jewish Mindfulness Meditation Teacher Training
Tiferet will deepen your practice and understanding while training you in the practical pedagogical skills a leader and teacher of a meditation group needs, including giving meditation talks, developing lessons, guiding meditations, facilitating groups and more.
Year 3
Keter: Advanced Jewish Mindfulness Meditation Retreat Teacher Training
Keter will further deepen your practice and understanding while training you in the particular skills a retreat teacher needs, including meditation meetings with students, building and holding a retreat, advanced meditation practice instructions and more.
More about Yesod
Course Structure
There will be 20 live, two-hour online classes. Each class will be held every other week and will integrate texts, theory, and practice.
We will convene twice monthly and, in order to accommodate different schedules, will alternate meetings between Sundays and Mondays.
Sunday sessions: 12:30 – 2:30 PM ET
Monday sessions: 12:30 – 2:30 PM ET
Twenty guided video/audio meditations and teachings
An extensive curriculum of Jewish mindfulness texts
Continued learning outside of class
You will be matched with another participant and receive guidance for bi-weekly learning and practice with your partnerOne virtual Jewish meditation retreat
Sunday, June 27 – Friday, July 2, 2027Four day-long retreats deepening key aspects of practice and understanding on the following Sundays:
April 11, May 23, August 29, November 14: 10:00 AM – 4:00 PM ET
Monthly small group meetings with a mentor to enable more intimate learning and discussion and personalized instruction in the development of your practice
A discussion forum to encourage continued sharing and exploration outside of class
A certificate of completion in Jewish Mindfulness Training
*Please be in touch with yesod@orhalev.org for any questions
Your Commitment
Regular attendance at classes and virtual retreats
Viewing the video recording of any class you are not able to attend as soon as possible so you know the practice, instructions, and themes for the next two weeks
Text preparation for each class
Bi-weekly chevruta (partnered learning) to study assigned texts and do assigned practices, as well as reading assigned articles for class
Regular practice, 20 minutes a day in general
Attendance at monthly small group meetings (scheduled with your group and mentor)
Goals and Learning Outcomes
A systematic framework for the understanding and practice of mindfulness meditation and mindful Jewish living, based in core Jewish mindfulness texts and terminology
Key topics in Jewish mindfulness, including Jewish approaches to discovering our genuine sacred nature
Building a community of dedicated practitioners under the guidance of leading teachers in the field
Transformational applications, including:
Healing your relationship with body, heart, and mind
Integrating practices into your daily life
Applying meditation to address physical pain, as well as emotional and relational challenges
Developing greater calm and equanimity, and reducing stress, anxiety, and anger
Widening the heart to cultivate qualities such as love, compassion, forgiveness, gratitude, awe, and joy
Developing a wise and supportive relationship with desire.
Enabling each of us to directly encounter the Divine.
The Gates of Awareness
The entire Gates of Awareness three-year program, as well as Yesod, the first year of this program, is built around four fundamental “gates” of awareness which we can develop in both understanding and practice.
The Gate of Love
Sha’ar HaHesed
This gate welcomes us into both our own and the world’s sacred essential loving nature. Through developing the ability to respond with softness, gentleness and loving acceptance to our experience, we learn to reduce our reactivity and meet challenging states of mind, heart and body with love and compassion.
The Gate of Joy
Sha’ar HaSimcha
This gate invites us to recognize the inherent goodness and delight of creation and ourselves. We shift from a habitual “what’s wrong mind” oriented to threat and protection, to a “what’s right mind” that enables playfulness and flexibility. We come to recognize that happiness is an inside job, available to us from within if we can release our preoccupation with reaching for something external to fill a void.
The Gate of Divinity
Sha'ar HaElohut
This gate orients us to divine fullness and teaches us to glimpse our sacred, non-separate nature and our natural luminosity. Showing up in the world more naturally and spontaneously we are more able to respond wisely to the suffering within and without and allow our wholesome qualities (e.g., love, compassion, wisdom, acceptance, etc.) to flow more freely.
Gate of Emptiness
Sha'ar HaAyin
This gate orients us to divine emptiness and opens up to us the profound vistas of the radically open and empty (ayin) nature of divinity and our soul. Grounded in this insight of boundlessness, wonder, joy, and delight spring forth, enabling a lighter and freer way of being in the world. We can show up for ourselves and others in an even more expansive, flexible, and unconstricted way.
Each gate prepares the ground for the succeeding gate and builds on the previous one. By moving through these gates of love, joy, divinity, and emptiness and circling back through them, participants will be taken on a progressive course of deepening in their awareness, manifested in both understanding and practice.
Meet our Faculty
Rabbi Dr. James Jacobson-Maisels
Rav James leads and directs the vision of Or HaLev. Ordained by Rav Daniel Landes, with a doctorate in Jewish Studies from the University of Chicago, he has been studying and teaching meditation and Jewish spirituality for over twenty five years. He was the founding Rosh Yeshiva of Romemu Yeshiva and has taught and innovated programs in Jewish thought, mysticism, spiritual practices and meditation at the Pardes Institute of Jewish Studies, Haifa University, Yeshivat Hadar and in a variety of settings around the world. He strives to integrate his study with his practice, and to help teach and live Judaism as a spiritual discipline.
Rabbi Sam Feinsmith
As Senior Core Faculty at the Institute for Jewish Spirituality, Rabbi Sam Feinsmith directs the Clergy Leadership Program and teaches on the faculty of a variety of IJS programs. Previously, he taught Judaic Studies at Chicagoland Jewish High School, Illinois, and the Heschel School in NY, where he spearheaded initiatives to foster teen spirituality, mindfulness, and wellness. He is a co-founder of Orot: Center for New Jewish Learning, a center for contemplative Jewish learning and living. He served as a Kol Tzedek Fellow for American Jewish World Service, volunteering in Cambodia with their Volunteer Corps.
Rabbi Dorothy Richman
Dorothy Richman serves as the rabbi of Makor Or: Jewish Meditation Center and is a founding faculty member of the Romemu Yeshiva, a six-week immersive program of spiritual study and practice. Dorothy’s work centers on the spiritual practices of Torah study, meditation prayer, and justice. She recently released an album of original songs, Something of Mine, largely based on texts from the Jewish tradition, available on BandCamp.
Zac Newman
Zac is Or HaLev’s Program Director. He teaches, leads our curriculum, and mentors other teachers. He trained to teach mindfulness through the Centre for Mindfulness Research and Practice at Bangor University. Prior to his role at Or HaLev, Zac was the Community Director of HaMakom, the UK-based Jewish meditation organisation. Zac is a long-standing student of religious studies and psychotherapy. He is a rabbinical student in the ALEPH Ordination Program, and he is continually interested in how we can realize the wisdom of our tradition and the goodness of our lives.
Rabbi Carrie Watkins
Carrie is a practitioner, organizer, and teacher of Jewish meditation. Carrie received Rabbinic Ordination from Hebrew College and has been teaching meditation and mindfulness for the last nine years - to startups, on silent retreats, for teenagers on backcountry trips, in pubs, in her living room, and in other peoples' living rooms. A systems thinker with a Master in City Planning from MIT, Carrie is attentive to the ways meditation and mindfulness can bring healing both our own internal systems and to the communal, societal, and ecological systems of which we’re a part. Carrie has a certificate in Integrative Somatic Trauma Therapy, completed Or HaLev's three year Gates of Awareness: Jewish Meditation Teacher Training program, and is currently part of the Institute for Jewish Spirituality's Marbeh Fellowship: Cultivating Senior Jewish Mindfulness Teachers.
Introductory Classes
| Date | Topic |
|---|---|
| January 31 | Introduction: Goals, Path & Practice |
| February 8 | Inherent Divinity |
| February 21 | Four Worlds of Kabbalah: Four Foundations of Mindfulness |
Sha'ar HaHesed
| Date | Topic |
|---|---|
| March 8 | Sha’ar HaHesed (Gate of Love): Introduction |
| March 21 | Texture of Practice: Creating An Inner Environment of Softness and Kindness |
| April 5 | Walls, Aversion, & Radical Acceptance |
| April 11 | Day Long Retreat: Softness & Textures of Practice |
| May 2 | Ta’avah: Treasures, Desires, Clinging |
| May 17 | Teshukah: Wholesome Desire/Passion |
| May 23 | Day Long Retreat: Aversion & Desire, Feeling Tones |
| June 7 | Body of Love |
| June 21 | Finding Safety, Stability and Support. Trauma Sensitive Mindfulness and Related Aspects |
Sha'ar HaSimcha
| Date | Topic |
|---|---|
| June 27-July 2 | Week Long Retreat: Hesed, What's Right Mind, Concentration and Joy & Bliss |
| July 11 | Lo It Was Very Good: What’s Right Mind and What’s Wrong Mind |
| July 19 | Trust and Faith |
| July 25 | Wholesome Mind States: Joy, Gratitude, Equanimity |
| August 23 | Cultivating Meditative Joy |
| Aug 29 | Day Long Retreat: Pleasure and Wholesome States |
| September 12 | Tikkun haMiddot: Cultivating Virtue |
Sha'ar HaKedusha
| Date | Topic |
|---|---|
| September 20 | Seeing our Genuine Nature |
| October 4 | Awakening from the Trance of Unworthiness |
| October 25 | Shabbat: Releasing the Manager |
| November 7 | Awareness as Divinity, Ourselves as Awareness, Ourselves as Divinity |
| November 14 | Day Long Retreat: Gate of Divinity |
Conclusion
| Date | Topic |
|---|---|
| November 22 | Concluding Class |
Class Schedule
Choose your rate
At Or HaLev, we believe in the spirit of generosity as an essential part of practice. We also acknowledge that financial abilities differ for everyone and we strive to make this class accessible to those who wish to participate, regardless of ability to pay.
Please consider paying at the highest rate that you are able to. Your generosity will help in supporting Or HaLev's activities and in growing our community.
Supporter
cover your cost and support scholarship students to also take the course.
Friend
Covering the cost of the course
Base
A subsidized rate
of the course.
Scholarship
Enables a scholarship for those who cannot afford the course.
Extra scholarships beyond the automatic scholarship price will be distributed on an individual basis by application
*Please be in touch with yesod@orhalev.org for any questions
Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion
IJS bases its work upon seven core values, shared by Or HaLev. These include:
Diversity and Integrity (Shivim Panim): We recognize that all Jews, within their particular identities, inherit and contribute to a shared, living Torah. We respect the integrity of diverse spiritual traditions and seek to deepen our Jewish practice by learning from their wisdom.
Inclusion and Equity (Tzedek u’Mishpat): Our practice helps us grow in awareness of our biases, limitations, and intersecting identities and privileges. We aspire to support every person in nurturing their expression of spiritual life.
As we work to become a more diverse, equitable, and inclusive community, we invite feedback/suggestions you may have regarding ways that we can make participation in the program more accessible, welcoming, and affirming of your humanity. Please email us at yesod@orhalev.org.
We Are Here
Any questions? Please email the Yesod Manager, Carrie Watkins, at yesod@orhalev.org.
Our Partner
Since 1999, IJS has been a leader in teaching traditional and contemporary Jewish spiritual practices that cultivate mindfulness so that each of us might act with enriched wisdom, clarity, and compassion. These practices, grounded in Jewish values and thought, enable participants to develop important skills while strengthening leadership capacities, deepening their inner lives, and connecting more meaningfully with others, Judaism, and the sacred. To subscribe to the IJS newsletter, click here.
