From Google-ing to Gardening

Adamah Fellowship Program at Isabella Freedman Jewish Retreat Center, Falls Village, CT

In 2005, Adina Allen was an undergraduate environmental studies student at a university in Boston, MA taking an intensive course on the geopolitical issues connected with oil and water.  She was looking for information and tools to engage with the paradigm shift of humans and their relationship to the world.  She wasn’t satisfied that her academic learning was translating into practical experience.  Adina considered that maybe Judaism could provide that paradigm, and she wanted something hands on to do after all of the book learning in school.  She found her way into the Adamah Fellowship program at Isabella Freedman Jewish Retreat Center (IFJRC) in the fall of 2005 by Google-ing “Jewish, organic gardening, northeast”.

Beyond the expectation of working on the farm, Adina experienced what it means to live in true community with Jews from many backrgrounds, and making that work.  Everyone in the fellowship program and at the retreat center had to share in the workload no matter the task, including cleaning bathrooms.  The fellowship provided a holistic experience, which involved prayer, leadership development and text study integrated into farm work. 

Adina describes a typical day during the Adamah Fellowship:

• 5AM – meditation/prayer for 1hr (yoga, thai chi, hike).
• Breakfast
• Chores – house, goats, compost
• Farm – 4-5 hours
• Lunch – 1hr
  
• Farm – 1hr
  
• Late afternoon – Practical workshops (canning, preserving), text study, speaker on how text related to environment.
  
• One night a week the fellows had a group meeting to processes their thoughts and emotions.

Adina came to realize that her Adamah experience modeled the kind of spiritually vibrant, intellectually engaged, and land-based communities that she was seeking to help create out in the rest of the world. Although she enjoyed the animal husbandry and pickling, she focused her energies on building and keeping the community together through interpersonal skills, and learning to lead and teach within the context of Jewish prayer.

The Adamah Fellowship’s leadership development program provides participants with a sense of gratitude and the empowerment to do anything so that they can take the bold, necessary steps to clarify and actualize their highest visions for themselves and for the world.  Practically and on a small scale since the fellowship, Adina has already begun to create opportunities for Jews in an urban setting to have a taste of the Adamah experience.  On a larger scale, Adamah prepared her to first move to San Francisco and work as the Assistant Editor of Tikkun magazine (a progressive Jewish-based, interfaith publication), and then to move back to the East coast to begin rabbinical school.  As a student at Hebrew College’s transdenominational seminary, she is working with other students and faculty to help green the institution.

While in rabbinical school, Adina hopes to create more urban Adamah experiences by building local communities around text study and farming (community gardens) that are pluralistic, interfaith, and intergenerational.  She also wants to see the small grant-making foundation her family founded, grow into an institution to help support progressive young people and their work and ideas.  Adina serves on the Advisory Board of Adamah and on the Board of the Isabella Freedman Jewish Retreat Center and continues to be involved with and help support the Center and its vital programs for Jews of all backgrounds.

Contact: Adina Allen
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For further information about the Adamah Fellowship please visit the Isabella Freedman Jewish Retreat Center.