Led by Rabbi Michael Lezak of GLIDE & Kitchen-ite Lissa Soep

Rabbi Michael Lezak of GLIDE Memorial and Kitchen-ite Lissa Soep have both, in their own ways, spent their lives exploring how language can bring us close to the people we love, and to God. Sometimes that language is the voice of prayer. Other times, it’s an ordinary expression, a lyric, a text. Our everyday language is brimming with voices, remembered and imagined, drawn from our personal and ancestral histories, and from deep within ourselves. Especially in times of loss, these layers within language can give us life. Within our own voices, we catch a hint of someone we’re missing – a phrase, an intonation, maybe just a single word or sound – and we can feel less alone.

As we move through Elul – a month of spiritual preparation and return –we’re invited to listen more closely: to memory, to our own hearts, and to the voices that still speak through us. This 90-minute session, building on Michael’s rabbinic and justice-driven practice and Lissa’s recent book, Other People’s Words (which features The Kitchen!), is part writing workshop, part Torah study, part source for community in the face of grief and aloneness. Whether you write for a living or hardly at all: everyone is welcome. Together, we’ll draw on the language left behind by those we’ve lost — and begin to shape the new stories we want to carry into the new year.

Location to be announced.