Adamah

Adamah is a Jewish environmental organization formed from the merger of Hazon and the Pearlstone Retreat Center. Its flagship programs include the Adamah Farm Fellowship at Isabella Freedman, a live-in Jewish farming fellowship, and the Pearlstone Retreat Center in Baltimore, a living lab of Jewish sustainability. It also brings Jewish earth-based programming to camps, college campuses, and a growing network of city Hubs.

Small Group Vision: Garden Circles

Garden Circles began in Israel, where its founder has run the program for six years and more than a dozen cohorts. This year it comes to the US for the first time as a formal Adamah program. Ten circles of about eight participants each will meet weekly for 11 weeks, from mid-March to mid-June.

Groups meet in participants’ own gardens, rotating hosts each week. The facilitator’s garden anchors the first and last sessions, and the 10th session is a group volunteer project out in the wider community. Participants pay a modest sliding-scale fee, which funds facilitator compensation and builds commitment.

Adamah sees Jewish wisdom as an inheritance every person and community receives, and one they can use to build a more sustainable world

Accessible Jewish Wisdom

Adamah sees Jewish wisdom as an inheritance every person and community receives, and one they can use to build a more sustainable world. Each week pairs a Jewish agricultural concept with a modern gardening one. For example, the halachic prohibition of kilayim, which bars planting certain species together, is set beside companion planting, in which compatible plants support each other. Participants explore where the two frameworks meet and how to apply both in their own gardens.

Sessions open with a ritual, a grounding reading, and a bonding question. They then move through text study, personal journaling, and garden planning before the group gets its hands in the soil together. Each session closes with a spoken or silent blessing for the garden. The program welcomes Jewish gardeners of every experience level. Its aim is to help participants experience their Jewish and ecological identities as one, and to bring together Jews from across the spectrum of belief.

Peer Leadership Model

Facilitators are recruited largely from Adamah Farm Fellowship alumni. Some are paired with a locally rooted “chair” who supports recruitment and community connection. Facilitators begin with a three-day in-person training retreat that walks through the full program. After that, they join weekly Zoom mentorship calls focused on facilitation and group dynamics, along with a peer WhatsApp cohort.

Facilitators are encouraged to develop their own opening and closing rituals and to adapt the curriculum to their community’s relationship with Jewish text and practice. Adamah hopes that regionally adapted curricula will emerge from this first year and shape the program’s second.

h