INTRODUCTION:

On chilly nights, a bonfire is a great way to come together and enjoy the outdoors. This program guide offers suggestions on Jewish elements to add to a bonfire program. 

COMPONENT SUGGESTIONS (choose 1-2 for your bonfire program):  

• 🧿 Fire Tashlich (20 minutes) 
• 🧿 Rosh Chodesh Bonfire Reflection (10+ minutes) 
• 🧿 Jewish Singalong (20+ minutes) 
• 📖 Black Fire on White Fire: Multiple Meanings (15+ minutes) 
• 📖 Fire, Anger, and Forests (30 minutes) 
• 🧿 Marshmallow Mouth (5+ minutes) 
• 📖 What Fire Can Teach Us About Community (15+ minutes) 
• 📖 Preventing Burnout (10+ minutes)   

Jewish Culture and Holidays – Fire Tashlich 

• Materials: sticks, twigs, acorns, or whatever else is around 
• Sing a brief, repetitive, quiet song or nigun while participants collect small twigs, acorns, or other materials to throw into the fire  
• Explain the traditional tashlich ritual briefly for participants: Between Rosh HaShanah and Yom Kippur, people gather at a flowing body of water and toss in stones or breadcrumbs, representing sins or things they want to let go of 
• Guide participants through reflection on their past year, using a month-by-month meditation such as this one. Make sure to adapt it so that it starts and ends with the current month. Encourage participants to gently toss their twigs into the fire as they answer internally 
• Close with the same song from the beginning, followed by a full minute of silence 

Jewish Culture and Holidays – Rosh Chodesh Bonfire

• For bonfires occurring around the time of a new month 
• In ancient times, two witnesses had to confirm the appearance of the new moon. In order to quickly transmit this knowledge to the far-flung Jewish community, bonfires were lit on hilltops around Jerusalem. Each community that saw the fires burning would light its own bonfire. Thus the news would pass from mountain to mountain and town to town, until all the Jews knew it was Rosh Chodesh, the new moon. (Source by Jill Hammer) 
• Open your Rosh Chodesh circle with the following ritual, in commemoration of the ancient one: Give each participant a candle. Have the first person light their candle from the bonfire, and answer a reflection question based on the month.
• Then pass the flame to the next person in the group, who answers in turn, until all the candles are lit. 
  • Tishrei: What’s something you worked on that eventually paid off? (Sukkot) 
  • Cheshvan: What is a journey you’re on right now? (Sigd) 
  • Kislev: What’s something that brought you light recently? (Hanukkah) 
  • Tevet: What’s something you feel drawn to protect? (Asara b’Tevet) 
  • Sh’vat: What’s a seed you’re planting now for the future? (Tu Bishvat) 
  • Adar: When have you chosen to hide or display your Jewishness? (Purim)  
  • Nisan: What is something you’ve overcome in your life? (Passover) 
  • Iyyar: When do you wish you’d had a second chance? (Pesach Sheni) 
  • Sivan: What gift did you get that you still think about? (Shavuot) 
  • Tammuz: What is something you’ve given up, or given up on? (Three Weeks) 
  • Av: What is something you lost this past year? (Tisha B’Av) 
  • Elul: What is something you’re working on right now? 

Jewish Culture and Holidays – Jewish Singalong

• Use this playlist or create your own, then print out lyrics for everyone to share 

Jewish Learning – Black Fire on White Fire 

• Read this blog post by Yoni Mozeson 
• Ask participants to share stories from the Torah, Jewish traditions, or memories of Jewish moments that contain more than one meaning for them 

Jewish Learning – Fire, Anger, and Forests 

• Use this source sheet by Gila Caine to reflect on fire, anger, and what we can learn from forests. 

Jewish Culture and Holidays – Marshmallow Mouth

• Write some Jewish jokes or tongue twisters on a slip of paper. Have participants choose one, then in turn stuff a bunch of marshmallows in their mouth, say the phrase, and have others try to guess it. (You can also have participants come up with their own.) 
• For example: 
  • Lilah Tov, I love you a latke. 
  • I’ve got chutzpah and I’m not afraid to use it. 
  • Schmoozing in the shtetl with a schmutzy sheitel is a shande. 
  • How does Moses prepare coffee? Hebrews it! 
  • I don’t do cardio, I hora. 
  • My bubbe’s brisket is basted with butter. 
  • The joke about kippahs went over my head. 

Jewish Learning – What Fire Can Teach Us About Community 

• Then, revisit the questions within it (bolded for easy access) and discuss the community you are bulding together. 
• Read this reflection, adapted from “The Torah of Fire” by Rabbi Malka Drucker 

Torah is sometimes likened to fire. It is the Aish HaTorah, the fire of Torah that warms–and burns–as we draw near to God’s message for us. If we attempt to know more than is possible, its fierce radiance forces us to withdraw. As Rabbi Nahum Ward-Lev says, “Torah is not all milk and cookies.”     Since we believe that God is revealed in everything, fire itself is a great teacher. The hearth is associated with home and community. Building a fire teaches us about building a relationship, a home, and a community. Here’s what I’ve learned about community from fire.     First, what will contain the fire? A cozy wood stove, an ornamental fireplace, a simple pit? What boundary contains our community, defines it, and keeps it safe? Next, a fire needs fuel, oxygen, and heat. What is the fuel that sustains our community? What is the oxygen, the breath of ideas, visions, and dreams? And what is the heat, the passion? And who or what is the spark, the catalyst to get things going? The fire not only needs these things, it needs them in a right order.     We start with a small pile of something quick to burn. What catches fire most easily with our community? Old newspapers is always good way to start a fire, so we can spark it with light conversation, news, gossip, or small talk. A fire doesn’t need too much of this to get it going, but to be sustained we need to add kindling, thin at first and then thicker. The big, thick pieces, the grand visions, can’t be added until the fire is going hot and strong. When we put them on too soon, and we smother the fire. (I have smothered more fires because of this character defect than I care to remember).     What size log is right for the fire at this moment? Who among us likes to bring lots of kindling, the type that creates a brilliant flame for a brief time, and then dies down? The little twigs, the everyday details, often lay groundwork for the big-limbed oak logs. Too many twigs smother a fire, too. There are times when I’m impatient and drop a handful of kindling only to create a smoking mess.     A fire needs tending. How do we feed our fire? How do we tend our community? Every text, every greeting at the happy hour, is part of our way of feeding the fire. Timing is everything in fires and community! The same log that may keep the fire burning when the flames are hot may kill it if we wait too long to put it on. Showing up for an event, helping set up or take down, apologizing, answering an text–all these small acts of service–are best done at the right time.     Sometimes we need a high, hot blaze for a bonfire or quick heat, but if we want to cook, we have to use the embers. How do we find courage and creativity in the ember moments, when energy seems low and the issue is sustaining and not blazing?     Working together is always fragile and delicate, and we need to look at how we douse the fire. Careless communication is the best way to put out the fire. Maybe we have a program that warms all of us and then on the way home we complain loudly about the leader mispronouncing someone’s name, a dessert we didn’t like, or a communiy member who didn’t talk much. We often talk only with those who agree with us and don’t challenge ourselves to talk with those who don’t see things the same way as we do. We don’t give loving feedback, we don’t accept feedback, and we neglect to say a word of affection, praise, or support that might carry someone through a difficult time.     As we sit around this fire, we can meditate on how we communicate as a community and honor our expressions with each other as profound spiritual practice. May we blow on the embers of trust and hope between us to build a community of light, heat, and illumination.

Jewish Learning – Preventing Burnout

• Read the following excerpts from this Yom Kippur sermon by Rabbi Toba Spitzer 
• Then discuss: How do we keep our inner fires tended when the world around is a mess? 

Several times in the Torah, God is depicted as a “consuming fire.”  What is this divine anger about?  To put it most simply, I think the Bible is trying to say that God has plans for humanity, and gets really pissed off when we refuse to play our part. Defiance of God means defiance of instructions to be in right-relation with the divine and with one another.  The very first time that God gets angry in the Torah is when Moses is hesitant to take on the job of liberating the Israelites.  When the Israelites are finally freed, they are warned that they too will suffer God’s anger if they fail to care for the most vulnerable in their midst.  YHVH tells the people: “You shall not oppress any widow or orphan.  If you oppress them, when they cry out to me, I will surely hear their cry, and my anger shall burn hot.”  When the covenant is denied, when God’ plans are thwarted, when the people try to turn back to Egypt—at those moments, the flames of divine anger blaze.  The Biblical texts about God as a “consuming fire” also teach us that there are times when a “holy fire” of anger is an appropriate, even sacred response to events in our lives or in the world around us.  Anger is a completely normal—and healthy—reaction to situations of abuse or oppression. Yet anger, like fire, can also be a profoundly destructive.  It can overwhelm us, causing damage to ourselves or to others.  It can consume our spirits and destroy our relationships.   When Moses first encounters God, he sees the divine in a bush that is burning yet is not consumed.  I once studied this text with a group of Jewish social justice activists, and one participant noted that to do the work that Moses was called to do—the work of fighting injustice, of bringing about liberation—you have to have burning within you a passion, an anger at the way things are—and it can consume you.  This is why so many activists suffer from burn-out.  The challenge is to keep the fire burning without having it consume us.  Each of us needs to pay attention to what feeds the sacred fire in our hearts.  This is not selfish; it is essential. We need to make time and space for those things that nourish our spirits—whether it’s being in nature or connecting with good friends, coming to services or practicing yoga or tai chi or meditation, making music or art or cooking for ourselves and others.  Sometimes we let care for our spirits drop to the very bottom of our “to do” list.  But even with all the obstacles I know so many of us are facing, I hope we can all do whatever we can to tend to our inner fire, even if it’s just for 10 minutes a day.   And just as we need to provide fuel for our inner fire, we also need to be wary that we don’t let it get dampened by cynicism or escapism or despair.  To keep the fire burning on the altar, the priests had to shlep wood every single day.  We are in a for a long shlep.  Panic won’t help, regret won’t help, blaming others won’t help.  Pretending that others will fix it won’t help.  What will help is staying clear on those underlying problems that are the targets of our holy anger, and doing all that we can to bring the evil forces under the sway of holiness.  May we do all of this in a spirit of love, with compassion for ourselves and others.  May each of our avodat halev, our service of the heart, be for the sake of healing, for the sake of justice, for the sake of transformation.