H eadlines
Retreat Continued from Page 1
life — on street signs.

That was how my retreat
began, but arriving at the center
surrounded by trees and moun-
tains just before Shabbat, it was
nice not have my phone func-
tioning. It helped me be present.

I spent that weekend, from
March 1 to 3, with a group of
about 30 young adults who had
come to this Jewish getaway from
cities across the country to attend
the Passover-themed retreat.

Passover is, of course, not
here for another month-and-
a-half, but this retreat was not
intended to be a celebration of
the holiday. The experience was
intended to empower and pro-
vide resources to the attend-
ees in advance of the holiday
so they could host their own
seders when they got home.

This retreat was just one of
more than a dozen that Moishe
House puts on throughout the
year in different parts of the
country — and even sometimes
the world. Examples of other
retreats include The Shavuot
Study, The Havdallah Hike
and The Sukkah Build. Like
the Passover retreat, the hol-
iday-themed ones are held in
advance of the actual holiday.

The Passover Seder retreat
was my first Moishe House
retreat, so I can’t say how it com-
pares, but other attendees told
me they are all different, even
when they are on the same topic.

When I arrived at the cen-
ter, retreat activities were
already underway, so I imme-
diately jumped into icebreaker
activities. Then we did a text
study of “In History,” written
by Antiguan-American writer
Jamaica Kincaid. Afterward,
we went off to our cabins to get
ready for Shabbat.

In early March, the Isabella
Freedman Jewish Retreat
Center was a winter wonder-
land. The center looked over a
frozen lake and trees covered
in snow.

We ate our Shabbat din-
ner, like every meal during the
JEWISHEXPONENT.COM One of the cabins at the retreat center
retreat, in a dining room that
we shared with the center’s
other guests: a Jewish family
staying there to celebrate their
daughter’s Bat Mitzvah.

The center felt both like a
camp and a farm. We slept in
cabins and spent the majority
of our days in a room with big
windows and bookshelves on
topics that included Chassidus,
women and LGBTQ issues and
Zionism. While walking one of
the center’s trails, we even saw
the center’s goats.

The vast majority of the
attendees on the retreat were
women, and most worked in
the Jewish community at day
schools, Hillels, synagogues
and other organizations.

Attendees ranged in religious
observance, and while some
had a concrete task of planning
a seder ahead of them — one
woman was there gathering
resources for a 300-person
seder — many others didn’t.

Over the next day, we
engaged with Passover. We
studied different types of met-
anarratives, read through the
Maxwell Coffee Haggadah,
learned Yiddish Passover songs
and storytelling techniques
and brainstormed ways to
enhance the holiday.

Finally, in the late after-
noon on the second day of the
retreat, we began preparing for
our mock seder.

The entire weekend felt like it
had been gearing up to this event.

We were divided into ran-
dom groups of three or four
and assigned pages from our
Maxwell Coffee Haggadahs.

As fate would have it, I was in
The frozen lake at the retreat center
the first group, and so ended
up with pages that included
the first cup of wine, the first
hand-washing, dipping of the
karpas and the Four Questions.

We had about a half an hour
to figure out how we would
present these parts of the seder.

Then, we gathered for
Havdalah and we were on —
seated around conference-style
tables arranged in a rectangle.

I was the first to speak, and
I opened our mock seder by
weaving together the Kadesh
with a guided meditation. I
had everyone close their eyes,
and in between each line of the
blessing over the wine, I added
instructions to breathe in and
out, or be aware of their toes or
other parts of the body.

Some memorable ways
attendees presented their parts
of the Haggadah included a
game in which each person
said only one word at a time
as the group tried to tell the
Passover story and 10 Plagues
charades. When we got to the
“Ki l’olam chasdo” — “whose
mercy endures forever” — part
of the Haggadah, the group
leading this activity started a
beat, then each person shared
what they were thankful for
to the rhythm of the beat,
followed by everyone join-
ing together to say, “Ki l’olam
chasdo.” This got everyone at
the table to join in.

From this exercise, I learned
how central the idea of thanks-
giving is to Passover. Many
of us know “Dayenu” and are
familiar with the idea that
“It would have been enough.”
But the concept of grateful-
ness was intertwined through-
out much of the seder, which
became apparent when multi-
ple groups’ activities related to
that idea.

We had one morning left
together after the mock seder,
and then I was back on the
road, winding through moun-
tains and over creeks, trying
to beat the snow scheduled
for that evening and follow-
ing the one other Philadelphia-
area resident who attended
the retreat.

When we reached the bor-
der with New York, he stuck
his hand out the window and
gave me a thumbs-up, asking,
I assumed, if I had connection
again and felt comfortable con-
tinuing on my own.

I rolled down my window
and gave him a thumbs-up. l
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