NIGHT/LIGHT: A Tikkun Leil Shavout!
Come celebrate Shavuot, the Jewish holiday of revelation, with the mystical tradition of Tikun Leil Shavuot, an ancient ritual in which we stay up late into the night to seek out the Divine voice.
Our evening starts with a provocative immersive experience of ritual theater designed and led by Rabbi Jericho Vincent, spiritual leader of Temple of the Stranger in New York. You can then choose your own adventure — mystical study sessions led by Rabbi Vincent, Chochmat HaLev’s Spiritual Leader Zvika Krieger, Jewish mysticism scholars Professor Sam Shonkoff and Deena Aranoff well as music, dance, art, and embodiment experiences led by artists from LABA: A Laboratory for Jewish Culture.
Sam Shonkoff is the Taube Family Assistant Professor of Jewish Studies at the Graduate Theological Union. His scholarship focuses on themes of embodiment, revelation, and interpretation in modern Jewish spirituality.
He is the author of a bunch of journal articles and book chapters, as well as co-editor (with Ariel Mayse) of Hasidism: Writings on Devotion, Community, and Life in the Modern World and editor of Martin Buber: His Intellectual and Scholarly Legacy. He is currently completing a book on Buber’s interpretations of Hasidic sources. Sam taught formerly at Oberlin College and holds a PhD from the University of Chicago Divinity School.
Rav Jericho Vincent was raised in an ultra-Orthodox rabbinic family with a lineage studded with a chasidic master and many rabbinic luminaries. They learned from Buddhist, Sufi, and atheist communities before returning to Judaism to excavate wisdom from their family’s ancient traditions. Rav Jericho is the founder and spiritual leader of Temple of the Stranger, the Executive Director of Shuva, and teacher of Torah to tens of thousands on Instagram.
Deena Aranoff is the Faculty Director of the Richard S. Dinner Center for Jewish studies at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley. She teaches rabbinic literature, medieval patterns of Jewish thought, and the broader question of continuity and change in Jewish history. Her recent publications engage with the subject of childcare, maternity, and the making of Jewish culture.https://www.lababay.org/team-2
Olallie Lackler is a queer, non-binary experimental dancer, creator, and educator based in the San Francisco Bay Area. Their work explores the universes between contact improvisation and contemporary/experimental dance. Frequent themes of exploration include relationships, queerness, the realms of the inner cosmos, and power.
Bonny Nahmias is an interdisciplinary artist, who comes from a matrilineality of Sephardic Jewish Brushas (“witches” in Ladino). Her work is an expression of the spell they casted on her. She was born and raised in Israel and moved to the United States in 2006. Nahmias first lived in Brooklyn, NY, where she explored performance art, and later moved to San Francisco, where she received a BFA from California College of the Arts. She now lives among the owls in the woods with her husband and daughter.
Naomie Kremer is a painter, video artist, and stage designer. She has exhibited widely in the US and abroad. Her work is in many private and public collections, including the Whitney Museum of American Art, The Berkeley Art Museum, The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, and the US Embassy, Beijing, China.
Kremer’s imagery, though largely abstract, is based in the real world–incorporating nature, architecture, language, letterforms, and the human figure. Her work draws from a wide range of sources and inspirations, including art history, music, poetry and literature. Her video based set design led her to begin combining painting and video.
Forest Reid is a Bay Area based sound designer, composer, and installation artist. His audio-visual work engages with Jewish mysticism, Yiddish culture, and repurposed archives. He has diverse experience with sound, including archival preservation, data sonification, and studio engineering. He has created installation work for the La Jolla Playhouse and the Scripps Institution of Oceanography and has had his work featured in the Without Walls (WOW) festival in San Diego and Sukkahwood in New York.
Israeli-born artist Hagit Cohen works primarily with digital images, constructing visual scenes with photographic images and objects of ritual.
Hagit holds a BFA in Photography and Art History from Israel, and an MFA in Imaging Arts from the Rochester Institute of Technology, where she also taught fine art photography for several years. Upon completion of studies at Rochester, she developed her career in interactive multimedia as an illustrator, art director and producer.
Jeff Raz has performed in circuses, such as Cirque du Soleil and the Pickle Family Circus, and in theaters from Berkeley Rep to Broadway. He has directed dozens of circus, dance, puppet and theater productions and written 18 plays and three books.
Free for members
Suggested donation $18-$54 for non-members; no one turned away for lack of funds.
