As featured in The Forward: By: Jory Hanselman On Friday night, October 27th, 2017,  BaMidbar’s Director Jory Hanselman spoke at Mishkan Chicago’s services. The Forward featured a portion of Jory’s drash on Scribe, the Forward’s curated contributor network. “Why are…

By Miriam Green The festival of Sukkot is the season of the Jewish people’s greatest rejoicing.  From the beginning of Elul through Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, we reflect and strive for personal improvement. Then, following the…

As we prepare for the Days of Awe, the task before us is not insignificant. Nor is it easy. Yet, we are capable. And, as this week’s Torah portion tells us, we have the tools to…

This summer, I spent a week at Beit T’Shuvah, learning best practices in the Jewish world of recovery and getting a chance to see their spiritual counseling program firsthand.  In Beit T’Shuvah’s integrative treatment model, each student…

By Miriam Green When I arrived at the Wilderness Therapy Symposium on Thursday, I found myself in a new community, very different from the Jewish bubble in Los Angeles that I call home. I traveled there…

By Rabbi Mark Goodman Depending on your perspective, Moses was either a flawless paragon of moral virtue, or an ill-tempered foster child with a tendency toward angry reactions. Abraham was either a true servant of the…

As many of you may know, at 2:00 am MDT Monday morning, a fire broke out in the lodge at Ramah in the Rockies, the parent program of BaMidbar Wilderness Therapy. The building, which included administrative…

I just returned from a month at Ramah in the Rockies, overlapping with tzevet (staff) training, and the first few weeks of chalutzim (campers) on the property.  After a month at camp, it’s hard to not…

At the recent Independent Educational Consultant Association conference, I attended a session discussing Joseph Campbell’s “Hero’s Journey.”  In The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Campbell asserts that many important stories and myths from around the world…