Learning Project
arye...@gmail.com
Unfortunately, as many of you know, my family suffered a terrible tragedy recently and we lost our beautiful three year old daughter Ruti. My wife and I have been trying to think of a learning project to start in her memory and we thought of trying to develop a program to help busy adults find ways to continue to focus on personal growth and self improvement while also creating a forum to develop tight knit groups of friends providing emotional support and connection.
About seven years ago, together with a group of my friends, we started a weekly mussar vaad together over video (we were way ahead of the world on that one). BH, it is still going strong and the vaad has been an important source of growth, support, and inspiration in our lives. We live in different cities and have flown in for each other’s smachos and tragedies, we have found ways to try and support each other when one of us was in need, and we have developed a friendship built on the goal of growing together.
The idea is to start a nationwide/worldwide weekly mussar vaad program made up of many individual small groups. Vaadim can be self led by the members of the group or they can be “moderated” by a more knowledgeable person/rav. The thought would be that the vaadin are not supposed to be a top down shiur, but an interactive discussion based group supported by a prepared curriculum. Groups would be kept smaller to enhance the ability to converse, to provide a forum to develop a cohesive unit, and to allow people to more openly discuss how the discussed ideas could be implemented in their lives.
People can sign up to form on their own with their friends, neighbors, shul members etc.
People can be matched up with people of similar age/background/life stage from around the country to form groups for those who cannot form their own. This can be advantageous from people from smaller communities especially.
Rabbonim from across different communities can start their own small groups.
A curriculum of mussar topics with sources would need to be developed, covering the scope of classic and modern sifrei mussar, not to provide an encyclopedic knowledge of all the different shittos, but rather to comprehensively delve deeply into personality development and refinement. One of the keys to the successful development of the program would be that the individuals in the vaad would hopefully become a sense of support and encouragement to inspire growth for each other. As such, suggested homework can be provided along with the curriculum with vaad members holding each other accountable. A curriculum could be developed for men’s groups (Mussar Avicha?), designed for weekly 30-45 minute vaadim, and one for women’s groups (Toras Imecha?), designed for weekly or maybe monthly groups(held on Rosh Chodesh?).
Future ideas that can develop from this vaad is the creation of a sefer based on the curriculum, something of an Otzar HaMussar, and annual conventions with speakers discussing the themes presented the previous year.
If anyone has any ideas, advice, suggestions, feedback, or ways they can assist in the development of the project, please feel free to email me directly.
arye...@gmail.com
arye...@gmail.com
arye...@gmail.com
- joining a vaad
- creating a vaad of 4-9 people
- contacting shuls that may be interested in starting with this soft launch
- helping to coordinate the project