Our Values

All are welcome.

We don’t care who your parents were. We don’t care what gender you identify with, or your sexual orientation. All are welcome, and all are called to Torah. We are radically egalitarian.

Torah is at the heart of what we do.

We all love the cultural rituals of dancing a hora, eating latkes, having seder. But ritual is empty if Torah isn’t at the center. Our davening (prayer) will be in Hebrew. We will use a siddur (prayerbook). We’ll study and learn. But don’t worry if you don’t know how: there will be transliteration, commentary, singing. And we’ll teach you why we pray, and how to pray.

Judaism can be exquisite.

We don’t want to leave our aesthetic values at the door of our Jewish experience. Whether it’s our website, the locations where we have services, the siddur, the food, the music...our goal is to elevate Jewish experience to the highest level.

 

No one is an island.

Our goal is to create experiences that emerge organically from unmet needs and input and that create community in one beautiful virtuous circle. We want to be here for each other in joy and in sorrow. We want to lead each other on the road to spiritual fulfillment, but also to empower each other to lead. We want you to help design, participate, innovate. Want to host a Shabbaton? Learn how to blow a shofar? Create a gorgeous Ketubah? We’ll help you get started with some seed funding and know-how.

Nature is calling.

We all live in the Roaring Fork Valley because it is gorgeous. We can access the mountains and lakes and streams to hike, bike, climb, ski, skin, paddleboard...and we want Mountain Minyan to connect to that impulse and that beauty in the service of our spiritual and ethical best selves.

Social impact.

At the core of Jewish belief is the necessity of action. How can we, as individual Jews and collectively, make the world a better place? We want to help each other find our passion to help locally and globally.

The first year of Mountain Minyan our spiritual leader will be Rabbi Shira Stutman, founding rabbi of Sixth & I in Washington, DC. She’ll lead monthly Kabbalat Shabbats. Our services will be in different locations, but they’ll all include music and a delicious non-meat meal. We’ll have baby sitting, and we’ll have some interesting books at the back of the room if you aren’t ready to daven. 

Who we are

  • Jennifer Moses

    Jennifer Moses

    Founder

    Jennifer Moses had the good fortune to move to Aspen in June 2020. She and her husband Ron Beller were enthusiastic Board members at The KitchenSF, and hope to bring that spirit to enhance Jewish life here. Jen and Ron have three children (Sarah, Jesse and Leah) and two dogs (Jackson and Luna). Jen loves “doing Jewish”, skiing, hiking, yoga, eating and drinking. You can find more about her professional life at: www.linkedin.com/in/jennifermoses.

  • Rabbi Shira Stutman

    Rabbi

    Rabbi Shira Stutman is a nationally known faith-based leader and change-maker with more than twenty years of experience motivating and inspiring groups large and small, most recently as the founding rabbi of Sixth & I in Washington DC. She teaches Torah and speaks nationally on topics including growing welcoming Jewish spiritual communities; building the connective tissues between different types of people; and the current American Jewish community zeitgeist. She currently is working on a variety of projects including writing a book on the blessing of interfaith couples and helping synagogue communities have less reactive and more heart-centered conversations about Israel. In January, she and the actor Joshua Malina launched the PRX podcast “Chutzpod!,” which aims to provide Jewish answers to life’s contemporary questions and help listeners build lives of meaning. She was named one of “America’s Most Inspiring Rabbis” by The Jewish Forward, among other awards. Rabbi Shira graduated from Columbia University and the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College, where she was a Wexner Graduate Fellow.