Beloved Land: Israel and Palestine through the Kaleidoscope
Multi-tiered intellectual inquiry • Heart-centered learning • Embodied on-the-ground exploration of the Land and its teeming life
Beloved Land is a unique, 4-part, year-long course of study through the ALEPH Ordination Program (AOP) engaging with the incredible opportunities and challenges that come from a contemporary Jewish State.
Beloved Land explores the challenges of Jewish self-governance on the national scale that have sharpened the existential, ethical and spiritual dilemmas that occupy us all as budding klei kodesh, as Jewish spiritual leaders in a new paradigm.
- What forms of Judaism and Hebrew culture are being born, revived, or snuffed out?
- How do we live with/share space with the Other, both Jews from around the globe and Palestinians who are also indigenous to the region and also love the Land.
Our study is informed by a multi-tiered (4-Worlds) methodology that integrates intellectual, historical, existential-affective, spiritual-meditative, and embodied forms of engagement.
Join the next cohort!
3 Weeks in
May-June 2027
“This is the kind of Israel Program I wish had existed when I was a rabbinical student. Deep and soul-searching, integrating heart, body, and mind.”
— Rabbi Marcia Prager, Dean Emerita of the AOP
Program Overview
Two sequential semester-length courses of historical, literary, artistic and spiritual inquiry, required as prerequisites for the Israel and Palestine experience.
Three-week ALEPH Ba-Aretz, Israel and Palestine residential program based in Jerusalem. We will explore the Land and its people. We will dive into immersive Torah learning in our Beit Midrash u-Ma’aseh.
Through our travels and meetings, we will encounter a wide array of Jews and Palestinians, artists, settlers, peace makers, just-folks, gender-pioneers, Torah-scholars and seekers.
Follow-up session for processing and integration that will enable students to reflect on their experience and develop facilitation and leadership skills to bring back to their communities.
Program Costs
Each semester-long course carries the regular AOP 1-credit course tuition and fees.
ALEPH Ba-Aretz program fees will be determined closer to registration. For reference, the 2017 program fee was $6,800 which included standard double occupancy housing for the program. Need based subsidies/scholarships may be available.
Costs for the follow-up integration session are covered in the ALEPH Ba-Aretz fees. If the session is held in person, for example at or ajacent to the OHALAH conference, participants would be responsible for their own travel and lodging costs.
The Semester-length Courses
Journey Through the Histories of Israel and Palestine
Explores the complex history, sociology and anthropology of pre-state Ottoman Palestine, including traditional understandings of home and sacred place, the emergence of Israel as a modern nation-state, Palestinian nationalism, and their relationship to the wider, shifting geopolitics of the Middle East.
The Dream of Place: Contemporary Culture in Israel and Palestine
Explores the rich cultural and religious diversity of human expression in Israel and Palestine through literature, poetry, film, music, art, foodways, liturgy, theology and prayer communities. The focus will be on contemporary ferment and will treat such themes as Land and Desire, Rituals of Memory and Home, Trauma and Healing, the interplay of languages and voices, as well as spiritual renewal and the rhythms of daily life.
Participants in the summer residential program are expected to have taken at least “Journey Through the Histories of Israel and Palestine,” and preferably “The Dream of Place”, or the equivalent. Semester courses are offered as part of the regularly scheduled offerings of AOP courses. AOP students, students at other recognized seminaries, and ordained clergy are eligible to apply.