Practice - Hitlamdut

This year our congregational value is practice.  We will be exploring as a community what it means to take on various ritual, spiritual and intellectual practice. To do this each month we will be exploring a different middah – ethical or spiritual trait. We will use simple mindfulness exercises and study to deepen our understanding of concepts like savlanut ­– patience, hesed ­– kindness and anava – humility.  Some of you may know this as mussar –Jewish ethical. We will be calling this  Tikkun Middot ­which means to strengthen or repair our ethical traits.

This Shabbat we start our Tikkun Middot journey with the foundation of hitlamdut – engaged inquiry. Hitlamdut is the quality that makes our learning transformative. A mitlamed (one who practices hitlamdut) is someone who can see how any particular situation applies to her or his life.

Join Rabbi Elliott for a morning of study and discussion about this practice and about how to bring a quality of curious engaged inquiry to our ethical development.