THE 2025 THEME FOR LABA IS CHANGE.

Our relationship with change reaches in two, oppositional directions. We fear change, loathe change, long to keep things as they are or reverse things to how they used to be. We desire to return to mythical homelands, to gardens, our childhoods, to the people and communities and places we knew before change happened. And yet, what is our lives if not constant change, or the pursuit of constant change? The, to borrow from our Buddhist friends, permanence of impermanence? Changes in our moods, changes in our bodies, changes in our levels of enlightenment, sometimes premeditated, sometimes sought out through the embrace of new experiences. We subject ourselves to unpredictability with the hope that we will be changed, if only for this moment, if only forever. 

As culture-makers, we simultaneously pursue change of words, materials, musical notes, ideas, sensibilities, and warn others of easy, shallow change. Change, real change, is never so simple. In Jewish culture, we also toggle between a resistance to change and embrace of constant flux – laws, ideas, customs, feelings are simultaneously fixed and malleable, altered through careful deliberations as well as dreams and intuitions. Medieval scholar Maimonides believed the Torah was immutable. Meanwhile, Spanish Jewish mystics believed that truth was mutable, and every era demands a new approach to the Torah.

This year at LABA we will dive into the paradoxes of change in our collective souls and individual creative practices. Most importantly, we’ll have a great time talking, eating, drinking, learning, and laughing in the lush, fertile, free-flowing, romantic, super-serious, and endlessly playful environment of LABA: A Laboratory for Jewish Culture.

We invite you to look within, or without, be still, or be active, and interrogate change in your minds and your work.