Mitzvah Garden Teen Internship
The Sinai Mitzvah Garden Teen Internship aims to embody Jewish values of stewardship, community education, and Tikkun Olam (repairing the world). The summer internship runs for six weeks each summer. Interns will learn land stewardship principles and engage in hands-on gardening and sacred space tending, while engaging with the broader Jewish and Springfield community.
Your thoughts and ideas about how we can use the Mitzvah Garden are important to us. Please share your thoughts with us.
About the Garden
Begun in 2022, the Sinai Mitzvah Garden is an educational garden for young people and adults. This garden is a Sinai Temple project and available for use by the larger community, including the religious school, B'Yachad.
The garden engages students and adults in our synagogue land in a new way - breaking ground to grow edible crops; cultivating seeds and watching them grow; learning about life cycles and seasons; and harvesting culturally relevant crops that correlate to our Jewish calendar and holidays. In this way, the garden aims to connect our community to our biblical agricultural past and present day cultural traditions.
Additionally, we seek to make the garden a place where people can find belonging and renewal. Whether it is a quiet place for retreat and meditation, a place of joyous singing and dancing, for prayer, or for family-centered activities, we want to make the Mitzvah Garden to be a place where all feel a sense of welcome and belonging.
Here, Hassan Abduli, a member of the Somali family which Sinai members helped to resettle in Springfield, was helping Bonnie Thomas get the garden beds ready for planting.
