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I spent the past week invoking these bad ass ances

I spent the past week invoking these bad ass ancestors for sukkot, working with these incredible ushpizin cards from @zacharyisafox & rosza daniel lang/levitsky. These cards are based on their research on Jewish women partisan fighters and other women/femme liberation fighters.

I’ve also been thinking of all of these legacies of resistance so much as I’ve been witnessing, thinking about and working to find ways to support the powerful protests in Iran.

Deeply grateful for these stories & this beautiful project from Zachary & rosza. && really feeling the ways we can breathe in these tales as inspiration, let these lineages sing in our own bodies & work, & draw on the courage, vision, & fierceness of these ancestors.

#ushpizin #femmerage

For my 🧿writing project🧿 which I’m not nam

For my 🧿writing project🧿 which I’m not naming as book here bc I am my mothers daughter & we spit on everything three times, I’ve been writing about Jewish ancestral traditions & rituals for healing & protection with liberatory potential. I’ve been thinking a lot about how we craft this sense of belonging, safety, groundedness, & healing with each other. How we make felt, make seen our interdependence through ritual & amulets.

I’ve been diving into a lot of dense liberation & process theology & have been so inspired by the writing of Ivonne Gebara, a Brazilian eco feminist liberation theologian & catholic nun who speaks of god as relatedness. This is the closest thing I’ve found to how I understand the Jewish traditions of mitzvot/chesed/mutual aid. I wanted to share some of her words which have been total sparks of magic for me. I feel like she’s talking about the sacredness of mycelial interdependence, infused with radical & revolutionary politics. Heading into the shabbes sukkah with these words.

Text in comments

🌾✨🕸

#diydivinityschool #ivonegebara #jewishprotectionmagic

Very honored to have a song in this beautiful coll

Very honored to have a song in this beautiful collection of Jewish ancestor songs and prayers woven by @jewishancestralhealing.

Ancestralization is an album of songs honoring the dead, by emergent Jewish artists, songwriters & liturgists, with new songs released each day of sukkot. So many truly gorgeous songs!

This song, The Angels Revealed To Us Healing Plants, is inspired by a line from the Apocrypha, Book of Enoch (9:7): “The angels taught the daughters of men incantations, exorcisms, the cutting of roots, and revealed to them healing plants.” This verse speaks to knowledge acquired through direct transmission, through relationship, specifically between angels & “the daughters of men," which we know means anyone without access to institutional power/gender non-conforming/trans/femmes-- people who are identified by who they belong to and who are clearly transgressing by hanging out with and learning from angels. It also suggests that this knowledge is always available to us; that even though it can feel like the healing wisdom and practices of our ancestors have been lost or purposely hidden from us, we can access this knowledge by connecting with “angels.”
Who are these angels?
Perhaps they are the trees and flowers themselves, our plant ancestors, who channel wisdom through embodied, non-textual intimacy. (*in the Apocrypha, this was not actually a celebration of learning about healing from angels, as you can imagine.)

This song came to me on a long car trip with my friend Jo as I was telling her about this esoteric text that I was obsessed with.

Thank you to @jewishancestralhealing for the invitation to record it & to @mollybajgot @helenmiriambennett @margseagull for singing around a bunch of garlic with me & @mongomatt for recording it. ♥️🧄🧿🌱

Lyrics:
The angels revealed to us healing plants, The angels taught the daughters* the cutting of roots.

Erez v'ezov, levanah v'rimon, shaked v'tamar, peygam v'shoom

Cedar & hyssop, frankincense & pomegranate, almond & date palm, rue & garlic

To receive the link to listen, follow the link in @jewishancestralhealing b1o. Full album will be released on band camp soon!

#jewishplantmagic #gay4garlic

I have loved @raffosusan & her writing for a long

I have loved @raffosusan & her writing for a long time. Every time I read her words it’s like: coming home, having my skull cradled, a nourishing feast at a beloveds kitchen table, jumping into a cold river to remember I’m alive, a jar of medicinal tea warming my hands, listening to a sermon song & my insides shouting amen.
This book is care.
I am so grateful @adriennemareebrown & @akpressdistro invited this gathering of her wisdom & made this book happen.
I stayed up way too late reading this in the bath, doing that draining a little & refilling with fresh hot water thing just so I could keep reading. Beginning this year immersing myself in Raffo’s stories & wisdom about bodies & land & healing & generational trauma & organizing & parenting & liberation was perfect.
I fell asleep holding this book to my heart & woke up grateful to be in this world, this work, this web with Raffo.

You can preorder Liberated to the Bone through @akpressdistro 🖤

Please join me in supporting the @tzitzitproject -

Please join me in supporting the @tzitzitproject - Jewish ritual garments for all bodies & genders

Donate now & receive this beautiful ritual guide written by @femmef8al & @nomyteaches , illustrated by @sol_weiss_

I had never worn tzitzit before because I thought it was just for old men/not for me, but was so honored when I was sent this silky diaphanous coral piece with lavender fringe to try out. Fringe, perhaps, is inherently gay. These knotted fringed garments can remind us of the invisible web of life we’re bound up in & what we want to tie ourselves to. These fringes also remind us of where the holiness dwells : in our bodies, on the fringes, on the edges, in the wilds. We can be the altar, we can be the temple, we can adorn ourselves as ritual.

I giggle when I think about what my great uncle Leo, a chassidic rabbi in Brooklyn, would have said if he saw his descendant modeling tzitzit in velvet hot pants in the woods - we truly are our ancestors wildest dreams/biggest nightmares.

Photos by @alchemillajewelry

Shana tova u’metukah! Anyada buena i dulce! A

Shana tova u’metukah! Anyada buena i dulce!
A zis nay yor! A good and sweet year!

It is a beautiful practice to wish someone not only goodness, but metukah, or sweetness, for the year to come. The blessings of sweetness flow through our tradition, our history, and specifically the high holy days. We place honey on the table for the whole ten days of awe & in some places, there is a tradition of placing honey in the corners of our house. We dip apples in honey & make and consume a lot of honey drenched desserts.

the root for metukah/sweet is מתק / M T K, meaning:

1. to be sweet

2. to partake with delight, smack, suck, gnaw

3. to indulge

So when we offer this greeting to one another, we are not simply wishing each other a pretty okay year, we are invoking a year so delicious we want to suck it down with relish, gnawing on a year so ripe, the juices run down our fingers and faces.

Sugar and honey are potent remedies in Sephardic healing -- sweets are offered when one first enters a home, sugar is sprinkled at the site of an accident, and honey water that has been placed in a windowsill overnight is sipped for fright. One of my favorite traditions is blessing a handful of sugar at the mezuzah or placing a small packet of sugar in a prayer book to use for a healing ritual. Honey can be infused with herbs or with words. Sweet substances soak up the magic of the night air and the power of ritual objects and become more potent as healing remedies.

This is a season in which we spend time reflecting on where we’ve missed the mark, both personally and collectively, and we are compelled to do work of accountability and re-alignment. And so we can pour a little honey over everything we do, offer honey to the hurt places, and bring a little more sweetness to our process of Teshuvah/return. Honey is a wound healer, it is both antimicrobial and repairs tissues, so it makes for a perfect ally for this time where we bring our loving attention to what hurts, what has been torn, and what might turn bitter or infected if not tended to.

Blessings for a year sweet with justice & liberation !!

L1nk you know where to sign up for my newsletter

A clip from my recent class on apples & honey/ or

A clip from my recent class on apples & honey/ or is this my new tv show called queer witch for the straight b*tch which is kind of a cooking show but like you just whisper spells into holes of fruit & I will blow the shofar over you after a break up, dose you with flower essences & then make you get in the bath & recite psalms by @adriennemareebrown? Coming soon on @netflix ?

(Ps see my previous post for directions for this ritual!)

The tradition of eating apples dipped in honey for

The tradition of eating apples dipped in honey for the jewish new year is found in texts from the 13th century in Spain, & later in eastern Europe. Both apples and honey are potent substances in Jewish imagination, ancient text, folklore, magic, & healing practices.
Apple as container for blessing, awakener, medicine, love spell. Apple as wisdom & temptation. Apple orchard as sacred site for sex, birth, and divine encounters. Apple orchard as one of the names for the divine in the Zohar.

Honey as divine nourishment. Honey as what home tastes like/land of milk & honey. Honey to sweeten the spirit. Honey to soothe heal & connect.
(more on this in my apple & honey magic class!)

Here is an apple & honey ritual for equinox & new year, inspired both by the Ashkenazi tradition of “silent water” (whispering prayers into water) & Sephardic sweetening rituals, for banishing demons/illness. To me, offering sweetness to entities or energies that aren’t serving us is like transformative justice for demons – acknowledging they have needs & hunger, that everyone and everything needs healing & we can offer the sweetness of honey instead of our own spirit. But I also think the honey is also a delicious sticky lure for the parts of ourselves that we banish, that we exorcise, that we abandon. So this ritual is both a release & a calling back to precious parts of ourselves.

Take a whole apple, carve a hole in the center. Whisper into the hole all your wishes, intentions, blessings for yourself for this new year. Tongue the apple, breathe & sing into the apple
Then pick up a small jar of honey. Whisper, breathe, sing incantations to the parts of yourselves that need extra sweetness to come home, as well as blessings and prayers for the collective - loved ones, all beings, the earth.
Now pour the honey into the hole, watching this gleaming gold made from the love affair between bees and flowers, sunlight and water, fill up the hole. Fill that hole honeys! When your apple is full of honey, it is time to say a blessing and bite, suck, lick - let the honey & juices drip all over your hands and face, savoring the blessings as you yourself become the spell.

#equinox #roshhashana

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