What fears are dancing in the underworld of the Jewish psyche? What fears were born through generations of oppression? What fears go unspoken in family systems, forcing their way to the surface in anxiety, food culture, distrust, self-ghettoization, racism? How are our perceptions, visions, souls disfigured by fear? How do we create places and communities where it feels safe to speak our fears? How does cultivating true awe/fear of spirit affect all our other fears?

What is the present and future of Judaism in a time of Jewish genocide? Can we pray in Hebrew, while Hebrew is the spoken language of a terrorizing army? We have reached the moment of Post-Monotheism – a singular male deity became the template for kings, patriarchy, egos chasing capital, xenophobia (you don’t speak the language of my god), and ecocide (god and I are above the earth). But we are many as much as we are one, inextricably bound up with air and soil, water and other creatures, our souls more like a chaotic system of roots, than the trunk of a great tree. As we bury certain modes of boundedness to our heritage, we open new doors.

What little havens are we building? Little worlds of goodness and generosity and the values to which we aspire, pockets of culture that nourish the feeling of safety, truth, and the drive to trust, to be faithful that our small works exist upon a long arc of justice and collective liberation? How do we create spaces of care, for the sake of the sustenance of our activism? What binds a garden in the Hudson Valley to the gardens of Gaza? What makes a garden an escape, a facade, a screen to horror, like gardens just beyond the walls of a camp?

What is the relationship between spirituality and the pursuit of justice? What are the ways in which they are necessarily bound up with one another and positions that separate them create hollow spiritualities and abscesses of justice? 

We have to be explicit in our language, even when it evokes guilt and shame and fear and the desire to flee, because the work of excavating and deepening our histories and souls is painful, but essential. Our souls crave it, and we are carving the pathways forward. 

We will make ferocious prayers, for systems of apartheid to come crumbling down, for children to be freed and fed and loved, for the angels of compassion to rise within all beings. We will be attended by psychopomp oud players, harpists and dulcimers bangers, who will hold our sorrows with tenderness, masters from Mali and Palestine, teachers of unexpected poetics. We will descend below our depths and raise our skies, not alone for we are not one, together, particles, storms of dust and magic.