The name “Selah”, which means “rock” in Hebrew, was inspired in part by our collaboration with the Rockwood Leadership Institute. In Hebrew prayer and song, including the Psalms, the term Selah is often used at the break of a passage as a call to the reader to “stop and listen” before moving to the next passage. Selah believes that leadership requires the ability to “stop and listen” to cultivate the ability to reflect on our work, our skills, and our mission, vision, and values. Being an effective leader requires inner awareness and self-management as well as skillful engagement with the outside world. Selah teaches Jewish social justice leaders how to cultivate the internal power and presence necessary to change external systems. We believe both are necessary for social transformation.
Upon completion of any Selah program, Selah participants become members of the Selah Network, which is a multiracial Jewish community. The Selah Network consists of over 400 members and is a place to foster relationships, strategize, learn from one another, and find the support leaders need for their work over the course of their careers. There is an intention to create opportunities for regional gatherings and trainings for the network. Our team would love thought partnership from the alumni community in building out programming and support systems for the alumni network. Please fill out this form to join the alumni engagement committee.
Simply put, praxis is practice. It's how we make theory come to life through putting ideas into action. A community of praxis is a group of active practitioners who connect around shared work or interest to network, learn together, and share knowledge. Communities of praxis can be a place where iron sharpens iron, creating new knowledge and supporting the development of practitioners within the community. Communities of praxis allow practitioners to have trusted, transparent space to identify and wrestle with the edges of their leadership.
Selah alumni already have a shared baseline for resilient and effective leadership practices and are leading in many capacities across Jewish and non-Jewish social justice spaces. However, the ask of Jewish leaders is constantly evolving and leaders are tasked with navigating a multitude of new tensions through the last decade. While there is a growing consciousness and recognition of white supremacy in the United States as both persistent and systemic, there is also a growing backlash in our government and resistance in our communities towards building pro-Black spaces and praxes. There are tensions or outright disagreements about how to understand and respond to antisemitism, questions of Jewish safety and relationship to Israel and Palestine, new access needs in changing pandemic times, inflation, rising fascist policies, and other constant new challenges.
Furthermore, we perceive a significant gap in the field around multi-racial leadership development. While there are excellent curriculums and learning spaces for both white Jews and Jews of Color around racial equity praxis, there hasn’t been a space where these learnings are coming together for us to ask: what do we actually need from each other to meet the demands of leadership in this time? The need for this toolkit is apparent across the field as we encounter challenges in sustaining our communities and our work. We will build upon Selah’s core shared foundation of leadership praxis to build a transformative cohort that can sharpen and practice the tools to sustain multiracial leadership across the ecosystem and broader field.
This cohort will focus on building the leadership capacity of an intentional multi-racial group through relationship building and the weaving of twenty years of Selah leadership theory into practice. Using case studies, skill sharing, and Selah leadership content, the learning will be leaderful and co-created. There will be space for community practice and for the group to sharpen each other’s analysis and skills, as well as sessions with external trainers to focus on particular skill and capacity building. Participants will sharpen their analysis, deepen their relational resilience, and further align their leadership with Jewish wisdom and justice-rooted values.
If you are an alum and would like to get involved in broader programming for the Selah alumni network, please fill out this form. The pilot cohort will be a curated group of alumni stakeholders who are joining together to shape the curriculum in this first year. The cohort is already in process, so look out for updates for future years.
Yes! We will be sharing learnings from this pilot with the network in hopes of offering more tools to our field. These learnings may take the form of webinar report backs, written pieces, or trainings.
Selah has always been a program designed to ask what the Jewish social justice movement needs and how to respond to that need. This pilot is very key as we assess what the current needs of our field are and is an offering of a response to meet those. Our goal is to evaluate the program upon its completion, assess resources and communal needs, and make a decision about the next steps with Selah moving forward. We hope to be able to open back up to the broader Jewish social justice community pending resources, and possibly even run multiple cohorts of new Selahniks and alumni.