Daroma 5784 Spring Practice Season — Stillness, Ancestry, Brutality, and the First Crossing

Daroma began in Spring 5784, in the weeks between Pesach and Shavuot. It was an opening - a response to the disorientation, grief, and rupture following October 7. About twenty people stepped into a container that was being built as it unfolded. The structure was light, the tone was serious, and the commitment was to practice rather than clarity.

We began on the second night of Pesach with a Stillness Seder: four long blocks of silent meditation, lightly held by fragments of the Haggadah and niggun. No food, no performance, no discussion - just sitting together inside the paradox of liberation and constriction, silence and history.

Practice First

From there, the season followed the arc of the Omer. From the outset, Daroma privileged practice over discussion. Gatherings opened in silence, teachings were brief and often fragmentary, and niggun functioned not as expression but as a vessel to shift states. The instruction was not to understand, but to turn the light inward - to turn Daroma, south, where the menorah stood in the Temple.

Ancestry and the Old Continent

As the weeks unfolded, a second axis emerged: ancestry.

Yom HaShoah became a central container. Rather than a historical or educational framing, the gathering moved through silence, names, maps, and memory. Participants explored lineage - namesakes, places, and the persistence of trauma across generations. The working assumption was not that the past is “over,” but that it lives as a current in the body. The Shoah was approached both as a specifically Jewish rupture and as part of a wider human field of violence and dislocation.

There was also tension here: between particular and universal, between affinity and openness. These tensions were not resolved; they were practiced with. A phrase that returned more than once: “Return to the land of your hatred” - not as ideology, but as a contemplative koan: participants inquired into their own family geneology, created maps to track their movements across eras, and artwork to integrate.

Israel, War, and the Koan of the Present

Yom HaZikaron and the ongoing war brought the work into the present. The gatherings did not attempt to adjudicate politics or produce agreement. Instead, they named the experience directly: fragmentation, fear, and dissonance.

In the wake of 10/7 and the war that followed, in the face of unimaginable violence, the group oriented toward the existential edge of violence through the koan of “brutality.” How does the body, mind, and spirit respond to it?

Participants were invited to notice impulses - to explain, to justify, to take sides, to collapse complexity. The practice was to pause before those impulses, to widen awareness, and to see the grief beneath expression. The “koan of Israel” was not solved. It was held.

Creativity, Flow, and Torah as Emergence

Alongside grief and ancestry, another current opened: creativity. Lag BaOmer marked a pivot from mourning to ignition. The figure of Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai and the Zohar introduced the language of hidden light - and the possibility of beginning again after collapse. Chanting, art practice, and musical sessions were not add-ons but integral - participants engaged in artmaking together during sessions, in poetry, journaling, writing and drawing.

Covenant as Practice

In the final weeks, the season gathered into the language of ברית - covenant. Not covenant as belief, but as orientation. Drawing from sources and contemporary reflection, covenant was reframed as a partnership between awareness and experience - a commitment to return, again and again, to presence.

Even in rupture, even in betrayal, even in the sense that “the covenant was broken,” the practice continues.

Shavuot — Integration

The season closed on Shavuot.

Torah was approached not as content received once, but as ongoing revelation: a dynamic between infinity, nothingness and form, between awareness and perception, between ancestry and emergence.

Participants brought forward art, questions, and their own unfolding relationship to practice. The arc - stillness, ancestry, brutality, creativity, covenant - was not resolved, but integrated.

Sources spanned books such as the Zohar, Sefer Yetzirah, Psalms, the Passover Haggadah and the liturgy of Sefirat HaOmer, biblical texts including Song of Songs, Lamentations, and Ecclesiastes, Judges, and the Book of Ruth; alongside teachings from figures such as Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai (רשב״י), the Baal Shem Tov, Rebbe Nachman of Breslov, and other Hasidic masters, as well as Isaac the Blind. Contemporary voices included Rabbi Art Green, Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi, and Rabbi Tirzah Firestone, alongside Holocaust testimony and reflection (e.g., Viktor Frankl, Primo Levi), and contemplative influences such as Dogen’s Fukanzazengi.