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Permanent link for Kicking Off the Cohorts: Diving Deep and Coming Up For Air | By the Kaufman Program Staff on September 23, 2025
What is the earliest story you can remember? What stories do we retell within our families, with our friends, in our professional circles, even to ourselves, that shape our being and becoming? Would one of your early stories be rooted in your religious or spiritual tradition? Maybe it had a moral lesson that has stuck with you as a core value you hold to this day. Maybe past or current traumas interrupt those memories or even prevent you from knowing certain parts of yourself. As we seek to advance interfaith understanding we must begin with the self - knowing, understanding, and loving ourselves before we can hope to know, understand, and love another.
Our Interfaith Leadership Cohorts scratched the surface of this heart work at our Kick Off Retreat on the lakeshore two weeks ago. The Kaufman staff facilitated foundational conversations to create brave spaces of growth for the year ahead, all held together with the glue of camaraderie and a bit of good ol’ goofiness. Between meaningful explorations of our spiritual and religious heritage, an initial foray into “the story of me,” we broke bread together, we felt the sand between our toes, we played games and held on to the joy that keeps us going. Because tackling big questions requires equal time devoted to big belly laughs.
“The earliest story” prompt is where we started. That grew into conversations about each other’s histories, backgrounds, worldviews, identities, values, beliefs, challenges, and more. We paused to assess which of our predecessors had made an impact on our lives today, inspired by an exercise of Valarie Kaur’s which situates us firmly as the link between the wisdom and courage of our ancestors and the future we envision. We practiced honoring the difficulty this exercise can unearth. Why was storytelling difficult for some? Do I feel safe enough to share? Who holds the power to tell our story? What story am I choosing to tell at this moment?
With the tough work of sharing our stories behind us and vulnerability settling in, the strangers or acquaintances we sat with now knew us more deeply than we might have expected at the start of the day. We fell back on one of the first ways to form bonds with others, through play, to soothe that vulnerability. So we made kabobs and played badminton. We played together, engaging in the most innate form of community building, present in all of us from our childhood days. Because only with a lungful of air can we hope to dive deeper.
As we look to the coming year, as we tell our stories together and build a narrative of community within our community of narrative, we hope to continue the cycle of vulnerability, learning, and coming up for air whenever necessary.
