This Guided Tour is intended to serve as a companion through the High Holy Days of 5781. Though we cannot be together in person, curated rituals and activities will connect us in spirit. This resource can also be used as a supplement to traditional forms of worship.
Follow this Google Map with pinpointed locations throughout Baltimore for ritualized prompts of reflection, intentional eating, studying, mourning, and much more. Take the locations as suggestions! You are encouraged to apply the activities to spaces that speak to you, including inside the home and outside of Baltimore -- alone or with your pod.
Share your outings with photos and videos on the Hinenu Members Facebook group with #HinenuElul #HinenuGuidedTour and #HinenuHHD5781! Our hope is to weave a tapestry of personal and shared experiences by posting online. Some of your pictures may show up during our services together!
1. Symbolic Foods Picnic - Wyman Park Dell
Symbolic foods are one mechanism of awareness towards the turning of the year. Pack a flight of honeys, pomegranate & date salad, a hunk of round bread with fish, or any other foods that carry symbolic, traditional and/or spiritual significance to you. Set up a New Year’s picnic under your favorite tree. Savor the respite, sensations and memories that these distinctive tastes provoke. Share your favorite recipe!
2. A Jonah Moment - Druid Park
On Yom Kippur we read the Book of Jonah. It reminds us of our responsibility-- to ourselves and each other-- and of G-d’s to respond to teshuva (repentance/return) with forgiveness. Bring yourself to a body of water and do a little studying! Use Hinenu member Jonah ben Avraham’s source sheet to connect this text with the self and community.
3. Yizkor Wall - Homewood Friends Meeting House
This year, we seek to offer our community a space to grieve with a sense of connectedness to others’ grief, even as we are maintaining physical distance from one another. To supplement the online Yizkor (memorial) service Hinenu will be holding on Yom Kippur, Hinenu members have built an interactive Yizkor installation, which will will be available on the grounds of Homewood Friends Meeting House from Rosh Hashanah through the end of SukkotSh’mini Atzeret. Add your entry to this beautiful monument! More details can be found on the high holy days schedule.
4. Community Voices - Graffiti Alley
Baltimore is lush with street art. This conversational imagery marks both permanence and evolution as it exalts the vibrant neshama (soul) of the city’s residents. Which mural speaks your mind during these Days of Awe? Take in the site and listen to Song Circle’s, “All the Leaves,” a joyful collaboration of voices that echo the spirit of this moment.
5. Prayer for Nature - Lake Roland
Visit your dearest park or quiet stoop. Dwell, be present. Reflect on, “Prayer for Nature,” by Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav.
6. Sacred Mundane - Your home!
Our relationship with Home and Safety is unique this year. Surviving this time might provoke a complex interplay of gratitude, longing and untold emotions. Take this opportunity to identify an object of significance within your dwelling or everyday environment: a houseplant, stone, token. Offer an intention or prayer that reflects your relationship with this source of grounding and with the divine. Find inspiration for the sacred mundane from Mary Oliver’s Praying.
7. Labyrinth Walk - the Weinberg Y in Waverly
“Walking the labyrinth is a meditative practice used by many traditions and cultures to rediscover our renewal and rebirth.” These winding mazes come manicured in a garden and scribbled with sidewalk chalk; travel the one that’s pinned or create your own! Then use this guide from ritualwell, focus on teshuvah, or simply let your mind (and feet) wander.
8. Letter to Yourself - the BMA Sculpture Garden
R. Alan Lew explains that, “the passage of time, another year -- like our life, like our death -- heals us, carries us toward home, makes us whole, gives us a sense of what is important in life.” Reflect on your journey through this year, these past months, this very moment. Settle into a space that calls to your heart over and over again. Write a letter to yourself, to be opened during the High Holy Days of 5782. Where is there space for hope, forgiveness, healing and return? Mindful sketchers and kinder (children) can make use of these coloring pages!