Crossing the Threshold Together
Introducing The Threshold: Monthly Gatherings in Deep Ecumenism
We’re nearly at the end of the Omer period and our spring fundraiser. Thank you so much to all who’ve made it such a rousing success! If you haven’t yet given, it’s not too late to add your voice to the chorus of support for Yerusha’s work. And check out additional programs at the end of this post. -Reb David
There is a moment that anyone who has stood at the doorway of an unfamiliar tradition knows well — the slight hesitation before entering, wondering whether you belong. And then, when welcomed in, the astonishing recognition: this longing, I know this longing.
That moment of recognition is what we at the Institute for Deep Ecumenism (IDE), a program of Yerusha, call a threshold moment. We are committed to cultivating, deepening, and making threshold moments available to more people.
That’s why we are so excited to announce something new: The Threshold — a monthly community of inquiry, wonder, and conversation, open to everyone.
Tell me more!
The Threshold is like a book club where the “book” will be a featured text selected by the IDE planning group (our team of academics, clergy, and practitioners from across the spectrum of faith traditions). That may be an article, a video, an actual book, or occasionally a conversation with a practitioner that opens a window into a particular tradition, a pressing question, or a moment of genuine interspiritual encounter.
Every month, we’ll share that resource here on Substack, free and available to all.
Three or four weeks later, we’ll gather for a virtual community discussion. These conversations will be enriched by voices from our planning group — and sometimes by guest speakers or video presentations that bring the material to life in unexpected ways. Think less seminar and more gathering: warm, curious, substantive, and genuinely fun.
You don’t need to be a scholar. You don’t need to come with answers. You need only bring your questions and your willingness to sit with others at the threshold.
Watch for the first of these to drop next week, with the inaugural gathering following on Thursday, June 25th at 12:00 pm, MT/ 2:00 pm, ET.
Why Now?
We believe the world is asking something of its spiritual communities right now. The divisions between us — across faith, culture, and political life — are real and consequential. But so is the longing beneath them. When we open the doors of our sacred traditions and invite others across the threshold, we discover that beneath our different prayers and ceremonies lives the same longing — and it is in that shared longing that healing begins.
The Threshold is our offering into that possibility.
What is Deep Ecumenism, anyway?
The term Deep Ecumenism was coined by the theologian and activist Rev. Matthew Fox, whose work has long pushed the boundaries of spiritual inquiry toward something more radical than institutional dialogue. Where traditional ecumenism sought unity among Christian denominations, Fox’s vision reached further — toward the living encounter between the world’s great wisdom traditions, grounded in what he called Creation Spirituality: the conviction that the sacred is not the property of any single faith, but the river that sources all of them.
That vision found a profound resonance in the work of Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi — Reb Zalman — the visionary who inspired Jewish renewal and one of the great spiritual bridge-builders of the twentieth century. Reb Zalman took Fox’s deep ecumenical impulse and carried it further, weaving it into his understanding of what he called paradigm shift. For Reb Zalman, authentic encounter with other traditions was not a compromise of Jewish identity but a deepening of it — a way of discovering, through the mirror of difference, what is most essentially and universally alive in one’s own path.
Yerusha’s commitment to Deep Ecumenism grows directly from this lineage. We understand interspiritual practice not as the erasure of particularity, but as its flowering — the moment when rootedness in one’s own tradition becomes the very ground from which genuine meeting with another becomes possible.
In our increasingly interconnected yet divided world, Deep Ecumenism offers a pathway beyond superficial tolerance toward authentic relationships and collective action. It asks not merely that we coexist, but that we actually know one another — and that together we become more capable of addressing the urgent needs of our shared world.
Join Us
Watch this space. As noted above, our first featured text will be presented next week, and our inaugural gathering will follow on Thursday, June 25th at 12:00 pm, MT/ 2:00 pm, ET.
Subscribe to this Substack to receive each month’s selection directly in your inbox. Share this post with anyone you know who carries that same hunger for depth, connection, and genuine encounter across difference.
The door is open. We’d love for you to walk through it with us.
Join us tomorrow for Shavuot and Pentecost: Chazzan Steve Klaper and Brother Al Mascia open the evening, followed by a Tikkun Leyl Shavuot with Rebs Victor and Nadya and other beloved Yerusha teachers.
Register for Steve & Brother Al’s session (includes the tikkun leyl)