Community Covenant

Rooted in respect, care, and sacred accountability, this covenant helps us create a nourishing space for prayer, ceremony, and radical kinship during Passover/ Pesach. 

Guiding Principles to Ground Your Experience

Intention / Prayer 

Clarify your prayer, return to it regularly and use it as your anchor of why you are here.


Emergence

Gather with a spirit of emergence: activities and rituals start when they start, end when they end, trust that everyone who is supposed to be there will be there. 

Socio-political Location & Context

Attune to your context. Check in with your assumptions and biases and bring awareness to how power and privilege can be informing your interactions with others.

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Community Agreements

At the gathering, we agree to uphold the following pillars to guide the way we interact and build our emergent community:

  1. Respect & Kindness
    Treat all beings—human, land, and spirit—with reverence. We move and speak mindfully, refraining from personal attacks, harmful language, or disrespect. If we experience or witness harm, we bravely move towards safety and repair when possible, reaching out to the Collaborative Leadership Circle for support if needed.

  2. Consent
    "No" is complete. We honor the bodily, emotional, and spiritual boundaries of the other and take responsibility for our own yeses and nos.

  3. Radical Inclusion: 

    We value inclusion and diversity within the community. When engaging in the village with others, we choose to share and connect in a way that attempts to invite in others to feel welcome and valued, regardless of their background, identity, or beliefs. 

  4. Lineage Tending
    We honor the many lands, traditions, and beliefs that inform the myriad of humans coming together for this gathering. In the ethos and inspiration to gather around Jewish time and technologies, we lift up in compassion the complexity of the diasporic and mixed-lineage experiences for many of the Jews living on Turtle island attending this gathering. With open hearts, we navigate differences with curiosity, and we celebrate shared commitments to justice and healing for all oppressed peoples.

  5. Collective Liberation
    This is a space free from racism, antisemitism, colonialism, and all forms of bigotry. We move with care, knowing our histories and present struggles are intertwined.

  6. Accessibility

    Recognizing that gathering in the wild can cause access barriers, we orient to our own personal needs and our abilities to support others. We especially center littles, caregivers, elders and people with disabilities, by offering to help and creating pathways to access when possible.

  7. Brave Space

    We strive to create together a “brave” space (which is not necessarily a “safe” space). One in which we can bravely risk mistakes, call each other to more truth and love and one where we each have room to grow while still being accountable to one another.

  8. Accountability with Love
    Mistakes happen and we can unintentionally cause others harm. Engaging in repair processes with curiosity, humility and self-reflection allow growth and deeper connections / community building to be possible. We commit to move with compassion, speak honestly, listen deeply, and assume good intent when we interact, especially when addressing impact.  


This space thrives when we tend it together.
Thank you for honoring these agreements 

M A N N A

Prayer and Statement (2024)

As Jewish organizers creating a Jewish holiday event on Turtle Island (North America) at this moment in history, we feel compelled to include the following statement and prayer:     

  • We will do our best to create a thoughtful, inclusive, pluralistic, justice-oriented, emergent, joyful, collective convergence. We recognize that in our efforts we will miss the mark, disappoint people and be incoherent as organizers and as a community. Thanks in advance for your patience, input and vital contributions towards wholeness.

  • We are invested in decolonial culture that respects Indigenous land relationships, we commit ourselves to education and repair with the land we hold this event on and to offer reparations wherever possible. We acknowledge that our safety on Turtle Island is a product of the genocide and ongoing displacement of Indigenous people.

  • We see the current and historical violence being perpetuated against Palestinians and Israelis as abhorrent. We align with calls for an immediate and permanent ceasefire, releasing all hostages and bringing much needed life-saving food and aid into Gaza.

  • We value Jewish safety and flourishing in the world and denounce all forms of anti-Jewishness and uses of Jewish heritage to justify bigotry. 

  • We actively invite and welcome our non-Jewish friends, family members, and allies who want to co-create this gathering. We believe diversity is a crucial component to our collective thriving. 

  • We unambiguously denounce and oppose all forms of prejudice and discrimination based on race, faith, ethnicity, culture, gender, ability and sexuality. We ask all in attendance at Manna to share responsibility for our collective welfare in this respect.

  • We pray that our coming together in ancestral pilgrimage and temporary village brings beauty and healing to our lives and to the land, that we might learn what it means to be a “light unto the nations” (Isaiah 42). We pray that the culture we create together leads us on a path of peace, as individuals and as part of collectives. We hold in our hearts the complex and profound suffering of these times, as well as the opportunities available to us to repair, speak out against injustice and celebrate regenerative ways of being human. 


This prayer statement is adapted from statements by nordic.animism, Wildchoir, JOOL, and our own process of trying to cope in these changing times.