Storytelling Workshop with Cassandra Sagan: Immigration–How My Family Got Here

This is the second in a three-part series that focuses on the art and craft of storytelling. The workshops can be taken independantly and in this workshop the focus is on Immigration–How My Family Got Here. Cassandra Sagan is an ordained Maggid, a Jewish teacher/preacher/storyteller through the lineage of Reb Zalman Schacter-Shalomi z”l all the way back to the Baal Shem Tov. She has devoted her life to helping others access and express creative brilliance through story, poetry, song, and InterPlay, which she calls “play as a spiritual practice.”

Cassandra is a designated Leitzah Kedushah, Holy Clown, on the faculty of JSE, the Jewish Spiritual Education Maggid-Educator Training Program where she teaches Personal Narrative and InterPlay Torah study. She has hosted, taught, and told stories at local schools, libraries, synagogues, churches, and travels around the country to teach and tell. Cassandra shares, “I’m a student of Kabbalah and a mosaic artist and I love to make beauty out of brokenness. Through Story we enter the timeless realm, we can lift up/redeem joy from the past and transform the present and the future. Breishit b’ra Elohim: in a beginning, God starts creating. When we engage our creativity, we begin to know God, which is the goal of Judaism. When we tell our story, through words or silence or song or art, we make a tikkun, we help to repair this world. What’s not to love?”