EMUNAH
eh-moo-nah
EMUNAH is a growing cultural and educational ecosystem dedicated to cultivating the conditions for multidimensional and mutual flourishing of all life.
Human lives take shape across many dimensions at once, and within relationships and systems larger than ourselves. EMUNAH brings education, embodied practice, ecosystem attunement, community, and culture together in active experiments for wiser living.
At our center is Emunah Academy, the educational hearth of the ecosystem. Surrounding the Academy, EMUNAH is ever evolving through community, media and artifact creation, live experiences, professional development, collaboration, and research.
EMUNAH was founded by Ganga Devi Braun and Seth Kaufmann, partners in life and work who bring complementary bodies of knowledge, experience, and ways of perceiving human life and the living world.
WHY EMUNAH EXISTS
As we were expecting our first child, we felt deep concern for the world our children, grandchildren, and future generations will inherit.
We felt both the responsibility and the opportunity to contribute what we could toward a more humane, compassionate, and beautiful world, and toward a livable Earth for generations to come.
And as we considered what that might mean, our attention turned toward the people our children would share their lives with.
What capacities would we hope were present in the friends, teachers, neighbors, communities, and leaders our children will encounter throughout their lives?
Our attention widened toward the relationships and environments that shape people, and began connecting with and imagining the cultures and institutions that could support us all becoming more mature human beings.
EMUNAH grew from that widening sense of responsibility and a question we continue to live with:
How can we make our lives the most effective contribution possible to all life flourishing for generations to come?
WHAT EMUNAH MEANS
The Hebrew word emunah (אֱמוּנָה) is often translated as faith or belief. But the word carries a wider field of meaning: trust, steadfastness, firmness, reliability, stability, and trustworthiness. For us, emunah points toward something more lived than belief alone.
A lived relationship of belonging and participation with that which is greater than ourselves.
Our lives unfold within realities much larger and longer than any one life: generations, histories, places, ecosystems, and a living Earth that existed before us and will continue beyond us.
Belonging within these larger realities calls for reason, knowledge, and discernment: paying attention to what is here, understanding more clearly what we are part of, and participating intentionally in what happens next.
That relationship between belonging and participation is part of what the name EMUNAH holds for us.
PERSONAL DEVELOPMENT FOR COLLECTIVE EVOLUTION
The families, communities, organizations, institutions, and cultures we create are shaped by the people who participate in them.
As we develop greater awareness, integrity, resilience, and wisdom, we become more capable of contributing those qualities to the relationships and systems we are part of. Personal development, in this sense, extends beyond the individual.
The way we live become part of the conditions other people live within. As enough of us learn to relate, discern, create, and participate differently, families can change, communities can change, institutions can change, and cultures can change.
But development is only part of a flourishing life.
We also need pleasure and rest, beauty and play, love and relationship, meaning and wonder. A life well lived includes our capacity to grow and contribute, as well as our capacity to enjoy being alive.
EMUNAH is our contribution to a world in which more people have the conditions and capacities to continue evolving and maturing, to contribute to the lives and systems they are part of, and to experience more of what makes life worth living.
HOW WE ARE BUILDING EMUNAH
As EMUNAH grows, we will face choices about what to create, what to decline, how quickly to grow, how authority is shared, how knowledge develops, and what responsibilities come with carrying something forward.
We are exploring principles of dynamic governance alongside a set of organizational principles that help us make those choices.
Mission Before Method
Our methods, programs, platforms, and structures can evolve. The mission provides a deeper orientation, allowing the forms EMUNAH takes to respond to what we learn and to changing circumstances while remaining connected to why we began.
Participation, Feedback & Distributed Intelligence
Knowledge develops through relationship. The people who learn, practice, question, teach, and contribute within EMUNAH bring perspectives and forms of knowledge that can help the institution learn and evolve.
Coherence Over Accumulation
As EMUNAH grows across different forms and areas of activity, new expressions should deepen, connect with, or meaningfully extend what is already here. Growth should create greater coherence rather than simply more things.
Regenerative Growth
We want growth to increase EMUNAH's capacity to serve its mission while strengthening the people, relationships, resources, communities, and living systems that make its continued development possible.
Accessibility With Rigor
Depth and accessibility can belong together. We want ideas and practices to be understandable and usable while preserving the complexity, care, and discernment their subjects deserve.
Long-Term Stewardship
The consequences of what we do now will shape the lives of people we will never meet. We want today's decisions to create a rich field of potential for future participants, collaborators, educators, and stewards to carry EMUNAH forward in ways we cannot yet anticipate.
WHO IS STEWARDING EMUNAH
Ganga’s work is deeply rooted in relationship with the living world.
Her background brings together ecology, spirituality, creativity, community, and ways of understanding human life’s nestedness within the larger systems of the Earth. She brings particular attention to place, interdependence, culture, beauty, and the conditions that allow life to regenerate and flourish.
Seth’s work began with the human body and has continued to widen from there.
His background spans exercise physiology, strength and conditioning, yoga and meditation, somatics, sexuality, relationships, trauma, and spiritual life. Across these fields, his attention has increasingly turned toward the relationships between the different dimensions of a human life and the systems in which that life develops.
Their perspectives meet in a shared interest in relationship: between body and mind, self and other, people and place, individual development and collective life.
Ganga and Seth currently carry primary responsibility for EMUNAH’s mission, curriculum, culture, and development. As EMUNAH grows, stewardship will become increasingly shared.
Educators, facilitators, researchers, artists, practitioners, community members, collaborators, and others can bring their own knowledge and experience into what EMUNAH becomes, widening the field of teaching, creating, decision-making, and caring for our shared future.
WHAT EMUNAH IS BECOMING
EMUNAH is still near the beginning of what we imagine it can become.
Today, its clearest expressions are the Academy, community, publications and media, live experiences, and direct engagement with people and organizations. Over time, we imagine an ecosystem that can take shape through locally rooted communities and physical places, networks of educators and practitioners, publishing and cultural production, research and university collaboration, technology, experiments with new economic models, large-scale gatherings, and partnerships across disciplines and institutions.
Some of these forms are already beginning. Others may take years or generations to develop. And some of what EMUNAH eventually becomes will emerge from people, possibilities, and circumstances we cannot yet anticipate.
Through the inevitable waves of EMUNAH’s evolution, the consistent thread will always be our commitment to the human scale of growth and development toward the flourishing of all life.
Programs can change. Technologies can change. Organizational structures, economic models, partnerships, and cultural forms can change with them. An enduring institution needs enough continuity to remain coherent and enough adaptability to keep learning.
The horizon we care about extends beyond what we will personally be able to build.
EMUNAH is being built for people we will never meet and a world we will never see.