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Resource Category: Jewish Connection to Mental Health

Shavuot: The Holiday of Ultimate Awareness

By Rabbi Steven Gotlib | Beginning on the second night of Passover and extending until Shavuot, many Jews count the Omer. For 49 days, Judaism maintains a special awareness of time — even for a religion that, as Abraham Joshua Heschel described, constructs a sanctuary of time each week in marking the Sabbath. But what exactly makes these 49 days between Passover and Shavuot so special?
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Jewish Mantras: How to Change Your Brain

How can we change our mood when we’re in a funk? This resource will describe brief exercises to improve your mood now as well as retrain your brain to help you be more positive overall. It is important to verbalize and analyze our emotions. Feelings help us gather information about ourselves— how we are experiencing the world and what we need in order to feel better. But if unwanted thoughts and unsettling feelings start to consume us, how do we focus on joyful concepts instead of those that circulate anxiety and depression? We must retrain our brain to cultivate our own happiness and strength, recognizing we are not defined by our emotions; in fact, we are the boss of them.
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Ladder of Emotional Regulation

We have a variety of strategies and skills available to manage and/or “regulate” ourselves when we feel overwhelmed. Their effectiveness depends on the person as well as the type and intensity of the distress they are experiencing in that particular moment. Several types of tools address the different aspects of the emotional experience, and we can address our needs from all sides. We can manage unhelpful thinking, employ sensory strategies to calm our bodies, use social support to validate our feelings and get help when we need it.
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Brachot (Blessings) and Intuitive Eating

Jewish rituals surrounding food can be a fantastic tool for developing mindful eating practices and strengthening our ability to eat intuitively. According to Jewish tradition, before and after eating any food, a blessing should be said. However, the blessing recited before eating is not a generalized prayer of gratitude. Rather, each blessing is specific to the kind of food you are eating.
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Immersive Experience Staff Journal

We know staff mental health needs are important, and we hope this resource offers an opportunity to better support the staff’s mental health over the summer. The Blue Dove Foundation is proud to partner with BeWell, an initiative of Jewish Federations of North America, and Foundation for Jewish Camp in the creation of this meaningful resource.
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Summer Camp Staff Journal

We know staff mental health needs are important, and we hope this resource offers an opportunity to better support the staff’s mental health over the summer. The Blue Dove Foundation is proud to partner with BeWell, an initiative of Jewish Federations of North America, and Foundation for Jewish Camp in the creation meaningful resource.
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Passover: Four Cups Toward Freedom – Exploration of Liberation and How to Reclaim the Passover Seder for Ourselves with the T’Shuvah Center

Leaving Egypt is not just about our story and journey on the road to freedom. It is a foundational roadmap to liberation, both for a community and individuals and offers us a story of recovery. Each year, we retell it as a reminder to leave behind constrictions and slavery, and instead choose freedom and sovereignty. Jewish tradition commands us, as we are telling the story, to see ourselves as if we have left Egypt. Egypt is not just a country, an ancient place, or a space. It is not just the setting of the enslavement that we’ve endured. It is also an edict about how we leave Egypt internally.
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Looking for Chametz – Inside and Out

Chametz is also symbolic of other things like the yetzer harah (the ego, the self, mental clutter, negativity) that live within us and distract us from our true goals. We are tasked with cleansing ourselves of that kind of "chametz" as well, which allows us to focus on what matters in our lives. In a way, this is a mental cleanse as much as it is a physical cleanse. Try this fun mental cleanse resource to make space in your mind for freedom.
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