A Creative Torah Academy of the Arts - Open Temple
Our program has been adapted in accordance with health guidelines to promote safety, meaning, and our natural need for personal connection. We will continue to adapt as guidelines shift.
What if the creative spiritual practice was a part of Jewish education? If the paintbrush, dance shoe, sense of humor, yoga mat, and drum kit were as integral a part of Jewish education as a tallit, siddur, and Hebrew letters? Open Temple's Creative Torah Academy is a unique Jewish Journey for students to engage in Torah, Jewish Civilization, Thought, and Traditions through art, music, movement, theater, nature, and spirituality. Our studio sessions, creative activities, discussion forums, guest artists, and visits to locations around Venice and Los Angeles nurture the Jewish imagination and critical thinking.
We believe in setting families up for success. We depart from the traditional weekly Hebrew School obligation and offer a program that blends these experiences:
Monthly Home Chevruta small group experiences in private backyards
Monthly Zoom Rooms
Once every other month community family experiences outdoors and around town
Shabbat and holiday engagement opportunities
At-home, DIY, Jewish living kits. Judaism is the evolving religious civilization of the Jewish people.
-Mordecai Kaplan, Founder, Reconstructionist Judaism
The most enduring element of the Jewish people is adaptability. At CTA, we not only teach the next generation of Jews about the content of Jewish history, thought, and peoplehood, but methods that drive Jewish adaptation. The disciplines of art and spirituality are the lenses through which we refract the hidden Jewish light that the Torah teaches us was created on the first day of creation, and collectively explore what is revealed through this "bending" of tradition.
CTA brings the Open Temple methodology of performance art ritual engaging prompts, contemporary conflicts, and creative departures from text and tradition into the Hebrew School classroom, where the classroom is transformed into an atelier, dance, and yoga studio, and black box theatre. Our students are young people who thrive in the creative and individualistic curriculum, who think for themselves, and who enjoy sharing their individuality with others to create something larger together. Our students are the children of intermarried couples, assimilated Jews, Jews without Jewish education, Jews with too much Jewish education, Jews who feel disenfranchised or alienated from Jewish life, or Jews on the periphery and their children. Open Temple provides a place for all of the Jew-ly curious to reclaim our spiritual center right where we are and apply the knowledge we possess to the knowledge we inherit. Together.
