7 Chapter Seven – Waking Up with My Ancestors: Returning to Earth-based Jewish Practice & Trusting in Divine Mystery

My sensitivity to the living world has been awake for as long as I can remember.¹ When I was young, I knew everything to be alive. The world was thrumming with Life and I sought this out wherever I could find it. I sought out the trees and the stones, the soil and sky, the small creatures. I lived in imaginal spaces, in magical realms where a spark of possibility beyond the ordinary resided. An eagerness to connect moved through me, and in the animate, more-than-human world that connection was most vividly available.

I was raised in a middle-class Ashkenazi Jewish home in the suburbs of New Jersey in the United States. My earliest memory of Jewish ritual is my mother lighting Shabbat candles. Every Friday night, we witnessed her place two tapers in a candleholder, light the flames and cover her eyes to recite the blessing:

.בָּרוּך אַתָּה ה׳ אֱלֹהֵינוּ מֶלֶך הָעוֹלָם אַשֶׁר קִדְשָׁנוּ בְּמִצְוֹתָיו וְצִוָנוּ לְהַדְלִיק נֵר שֶל שַבָּת

Baruch ata Adonai, Eloheinu Melech ha-olam, asher kidshanu b’mitzvotav vitzivanu l’hadlik ner shel Shabbat. Blessed are You, Adonai our G*d, Sovereign of the universe, who sanctified us with the commandment of lighting Shabbat candles.

It was a rare moment of sanctified quiet and intentional space. I remember days overcome by the ache of loneliness in isolated school chairs under bright fluorescents, the stress of pressure to achieve perfectly and attempt to fit-in, in a predominantly white, gentile world. I remember striving to become something alien to my own nature to meet the standards set by my teachers and peers. And I remember, on Friday evenings, a brief portal into another reality. Taking in the spirit of the fire, we allow the flame to transform the mundane, stress-filled week into the sacred space of Shabbat. This time of kavanah, of intention, carved out in my mind another possibility. Here, I could feel a different world and something in me hungered for it.

As we grew older, this visible tether to my mother’s more observant Jewish upbringing slipped away into the overwhelming pressures of contemporary U.S. life and capitalism. She stopped lighting candles – and this rare space was swallowed.

As for so many European-heritage Jews, it seemed “safer” to my family to blend in, to “become white,” and in this way hope to escape the risk of violence, rather than allying ourselves with other oppressed peoples, as many Jews also do and have done. In Jewish communities throughout the U.S. and elsewhere, people chose, or were forced, to change their names, speak English rather than Yiddish or other Jewish cultural languages², strive for academic and professional “success,” blend in — in other words, to become “American.”

My family continued to maintain some Jewish practice. We went to my grandparents’ house for Passover seder and Yom Kippur break fast, to synagogue for the High Holy Days. I had a bar mitzvah. My mother’s father maintained a gentle effort to help us feel the meaning of our tradition. As a mostly agnostic man raised in Brooklyn, my maternal grandfather didn’t try to force us to observe the mitzvot or believe in G*d. He didn’t make us study or pray. He simply wanted us to know that being Jewish mattered, to remember the songs and stories, the horrors and glories of our people.

Through him, I could sense a glimmer of meaning, but with so much lost, this did not feel to me like the vital presence of a living tradition, passed down to bring spirit, depth and purpose into our lives. Yes, there was tradition here, and celebration. Yes, there was food and love and laughter, amidst the challenges that all families bring. But what did being Jewish matter in any of this? All people could have family meals and joyful celebrations. Why bother maintaining the Jewish elements? Why recite prayers in a language none of us, save my grandfather, understood a word of, to a G*d almost none of us believed in? Where did my life fit into this ancient body of teachings and practices? Was there some deeper dimension hidden in Judaism to ease the ache of my heart, provide a path of sacred practice and remind me of our vibrant connection with all of life?

These were the burning questions of my adolescent heart that I began to ask at home and in Hebrew School. For all their desire to help, no one knew how to respond. I did not need answers so much as someone to sit in the questions with me, someone who had asked the same questions before. I needed someone whose very life could respond, saying “Here is one way these questions can be answered.”

In Zen Buddhism, as I would later learn, there is a teaching that some questions cannot be answered conceptually. They can only be answered by living, in the whole presence of a life. Similarly, in Talmudic Judaism there is a rich tradition of answering questions with more questions, upending the frame of the initial question and inviting us into a deeper reckoning with paradox and mystery. Without consciously knowing it, this is what I sought.

There is a joke shared in some Jewish circles, “All Jewish holidays are essentially the same: they tried to kill us, we survived, let’s eat!” Though there is a humorous lightness here and several Jewish holidays do indeed mark times of persecution, it is also true that many Jewish holy days are centered on divine connection, the earth and seasonal cycles, and celebrating human community. That this joke exists in many ways speaks to our collective cultural memory. Especially in Ashkenazi Jewish culture, many of us have over-identified with the violence and persecution in our history and forgotten the alive, transformative elements of Judaism, the living revelation.³ Though understandable, given the violence our people have been targeted with, especially in response to being visibly Jewish, this focus has kept us in an unnecessarily narrow frame. One of my beloved Religious Studies professors, an Israeli-American Jewish woman, once said to me, “If you are going to be Jewish, be Jewish because of Moses, not because of Hitler.” That is, we must embrace Judaism for its revelatory, world-changing potency, not only because of the harms we have endured. Who are we beyond our history of suffering and persecution? How can Judaism remain a living practice to actually meet the needs of our souls and help transform our world? What is at the heart of this tradition, so complex, vibrant and layered?

With these questions sitting in the deep recesses of my mind, I continued searching. I connected with the trees and the rocks, smoked marijuana, listened to music, found friends who could relate – anything to sate this gnawing sense of lack. I began engaging in other spiritual traditions, especially Buddhism. I sensed that among all the world’s spiritual traditions, I might be able to find practices and teachings to awaken and live a wholehearted life. Yet there was always this doubt in the backdrop – is there a way to find this in my own tradition, in the Jewish traditions of my own people?⁴

My Buddhist practice led me to live in a Zen Buddhist monastery in the Pacific Northwest of the U.S. Hungry for an opening into a deeper dimension of consciousness, I continued my intensive practice, with hours of daily sitting, silent work-practice, group sesshin (intensive retreats) and community engagement. In the rhythms of dedicated communal practice, in the temperate rainforest and the abundant garden, here I could be held. One tree on the trail on the back of the land stands out. Grandmother Maple we called her, an elder Maple spirit, who seemed to preside over the forest and human community, holding a profoundly different view of time. I came into relationship with her, and began receiving the support of her vast and ancient presence. I trusted her, I trusted her forest, and I became increasingly open.

One misty October day, during a retreat for “Silver Dragons” (practitioners over 65 years old), some monastery residents and guests were led in a qi gong session. Circled on the grassy field, we flowed through the poses, moving qi and listening to the cool wind whistling. As if a storm struck, I was transported – something shattered in the veil ordinarily separating us from the world of Spirit, this raw presence that permeates our world, yet is often invisible to the senses.

I was suddenly in the presence of a disturbed spirit who I knew to be my biological paternal grandfather, Ed Alter. Caught having an affair and promptly kicked out by my grandmother when my father was eight years old, Ed had always been a shadowy figure in my mind, a shrouded, painful mystery of my father’s early childhood that most of us avoided mentioning. Yet, here was Ed, a man I had never met and a palpably tortured soul. I could feel the disturbance he carried. The boundaries blurred between ordinary reality and the visionary, as well as past and present and all sense of fixed identity. I was visited by Ed and simultaneously I was having a vision, a somatic “memory” of my father as a young child being harmed by his father. Meanwhile, we continued moving qi in the stormy field. When the teacher completed our session, I woke as if from a trance, and stumbled-ran into the woods.

In the presence of Grandmother Maple, I was held, a reprieve from the intensity of this vision. Though I felt shattered, I was also alive in a way I rarely had been. Something had broken loose and it wasn’t going to come back together in the same old familiar shape. Beyond the terror, a deeper knowing in me rested in this trust. I went back to the Zendo for evening service, washed clean in the misty autumn air. Entering this potent ritual space, the rawness of the vision returned. So overcome by the presence I now brought with me, I could barely stand or think, let alone bow or chant. A few teachers and fellow students noticed me and helped me find a teacher and friend, Kisei. In the calm and clear grace of her presence, a spaciousness entered that could hold me and Ed both. Over the next four months of my residency, I gradually regained stability in my life and practice and found some respite from Ed’s haunting presence – but this hungry ghost remained entangled with me, following me as I left.

After the monastery, I moved to Brooklyn to start building the next stage of my life. I adjusted to the rhythms of life in New York City, came out as queer, joined a progressive Reconstructionist synagogue and other Jewish communities, and continued finding steady ground.

Soon after, I encountered the practice of ancestral lineage healing. The concept of ancestral healing was not unfamiliar to me, but it was new to have an intentional ritual practice to connect with my own wise ancestors and to support the wounded ones to heal. I learned to access the ancient presence of my beloved ancestors and to feel them with me here and now – not as a memory, image or story but as a real living presence, felt in the body, known as intimately as you know the person standing before you. A lifetime of relating with the living world around me, as well as years of Buddhist training, had primed me for these intuitive connections.

I connected with an elder ancestor, or ancestral guide, on my mother’s mother’s lineage. Known to me as Beloved One, I felt her as a bright presence, an angelic being imbued with a vibrant, clear light and a deep well of compassion. Awash with her loving presence, I could let go. In her arms, my heart could rest open, my body could trust in safety, my spirit could stay awake. Beloved One directed me to deepen my connection with her through deepening my connection with Jewish practice. I was already practicing Shabbat each week, entering into the ancient rhythms of communal prayer, renewal and celebration. It was not until this time, though, that the tradition truly came alive for me, as I learned to feel the immediate presence of my Jewish ancestors in these rituals. I began wearing a sterling silver necklace from my Bubbe, my great-grandmother on this lineage, as a physical portal to direct ancestral connection with the vibrancy of this lineage of female ancestors before her and beyond, into the wellspring of all life.

In my Shabbat practice, I was guided to not simply chant and pray, sing and celebrate, but to feel the prayers and practices as a living tradition, calling in divine presence and ancestral and angelic protection. I feel Beloved One’s presence and through her, the vibrant well of Jewish ancestors and contemporaries throughout the world in relationship with the same Hebrew prayers. As I make kiddush, the blessing over the wine, I receive the wine not only with the knowledge of centuries past participating in this ritual, but as a direct communion with the still-living reality of the ancient ones.

My life began to change in ways I never could have imagined. Jewish practices I had loved and yearned after for years were infused with a new vitality. Memories and phrases from my grandparents came alive as Yiddish and “Yinglish” rooted in an ancient tradition. The pathway for communion with the deeply rooted elder beings all around us – known in English as trees – opened up even wider, as my contact with my own ancestors further opened contact with all the world of spirit. White Oak and Red Maple, Pine and Weeping Willow, these were not only dear friends and trusted elders, but also a living reminder of our people’s ancient connection with these rooted beings and their medicines. I finally felt held again, held and not alone.

While I had forged a deep bond with this elder ancestral guide, and I had accessed a new depth of Jewish connection, I had not directly addressed what had emerged in that qi gong session two years past. As Autumn turned to Winter, I grew increasingly pulled toward the shadows – not pain only, but also the darkness that begets transformation. The bright, outward energy of Summer fading, I had nowhere to turn but the depths of my own being and to the spirits. In many cultures, this is a traditional season for connecting with the ancestors – Samhain in Celtic tradition, Día de los Muertos in Mexican tradition, and Sukkot in Judaism. I had just returned from an immersive Sukkot retreat in a queer land-based Jewish community in upstate New York and I was primed for something to change.

In the inwardness of Winter, I began to feel again the wound that had been exposed, the hole in my psyche wrought in this vision. Behind the veils of daily life, Ed continued to lurk. There was not malevolence in his presence; he was more like a lost soul, a wandering ghost, hungry, distraught, disoriented. He did not intend to disrupt or disturb. He desperately wanted help and attention and didn’t know where to turn, much like an upset and abandoned child. Yet his very presence, in this state, drained the life force from my spirit. Perhaps this is not so different from what plagued him in life. He did not intend to harm my grandmother or my father and his sisters. He was desperately seeking something to ease his distress and lost his integrity in the process.

Three times of contact stand out, vivid against the backdrop of this dark time, two winters past his initial contact. Ed’s presence first returned in a dream. I remember waking with a start, hours before dawn, a heaviness settled over me. I knew Ed had been here. My body remembers the sense of him as a specter, hovering around my space in the fugue between waking and sleep, desperately seeking something. There was a sinking dread, a mute terror. This was not a dream about Ed. I encountered Ed in the dream as a living presence, a distinct being. This was not happening “in my mind” so much as the dreaming consciousness opened a portal into a different aspect of reality, where spirits and the living have contact. That night, I did nothing but make note and continue deepening my connection with Beloved One, my practice of prayer and Shabbat, surrendering to a greater will that, somehow, all would be well.

Some nights later, I woke again with a start, hours before dawn, a heaviness settled over me. Here was Ed again, or perhaps still, this time not in a dream, but in clearer waking consciousness, looking for something to sate his aching soul. I was that something. I sat upright, dazed, stood at the foot of the bed, and prayed. I prayed to all the powers I knew and to ones I didn’t. I prayed to Beloved One, to Yah, to the ancient tree spirits, to the Earth, to the Nameless Powers, anyone who could help. I prayed in Hebrew and in English, aloud and in the wordless language of the heart. I prayed with reverence and with utter despair, I prayed. I prayed for protection, called for healing and grace, surrendered my heart and cried out for help. Ana El na r’fa na lah. I prayed. Eventually, some time before dawn, ease came and sleep returned.

Some days later, I encountered Ed again. This day, deep in Winter, I moved as if through a dense fog. I met with a beloved teacher and friend and left drained of energy. I tried to pass the time, to find my footing. Early that evening, I came onto the subway from Manhattan. Returning from a therapy session, I was a touch more grounded, but also more open, sensitized.

Riding on a New York City subway in rush hour is a jarring experience for the nervous system – train cars packed overfull with people squeezed shoulder to shoulder, grocery bags, strollers, the loud screeching of train wheels, harsh bright lights blaring, not nearly enough seats or handrails, electricity pulsing through the air, nearly everyone too exhausted for human contact.

Suddenly, in the midst of this scene, a heaviness settled over me. Here again was Ed. My mind succumbed to his weight. I can remember nearly falling, physically dizzy with the burden of his wounded spirit, silently panicking. And here, I had nowhere to go, no elder Maple trees to ease my spirit or wind and rain to wash me clean. Here there was no respite, no balance or ballast. Hurtling under the streets of New York City at 20 miles per hour, surrounded by people and utterly alone, was only the dark. Me and Ed, and the world spinning by.

Finally I made it to my stop, five minutes later or two hours. I canceled my plans that evening, hurried home and collapsed. Some nourishment, rest and quiet returned me to myself, a new recognition dawning that something needed to change.

Why was Ed’s spirit in such pain, causing such harm? The Jews have been targeted with violence and oppression for over two thousand years.⁵ We have been exiled from our homelands, forced to live in segregated areas, barred from full participation in society, and survived with the constant threat of harm. We have been targeted for annihilation, blamed for all the ills of society, hated, betrayed and misrepresented. The Holocaust, known as the Shoah, or utter destruction in Hebrew – in which one-third of the global Jewish population was systematically exterminated – was not an isolated event. It was the logical progression of a worldview of dehumanization originating many centuries earlier.

At the core of this oppression is the message that there is something so irredeemable about the Jews that the world would be better off if they did not exist. The false, prejudicial stories told about us are used to reinforce this perception. Jews are said to kill Christian babies and use their blood to make matzoh (ritual unleavened bread for Passover, the Spring festival of liberation) and are wrongly blamed for killing Jesus, erasing that he was himself a Jewish revolutionary and prophet. As a result, violence against Jews is heightened during Easter and Passover. Jews are misrepresented as greedy, ugly, selfish, obnoxious, controlling and manipulative. All the while, we are strategically set up to be misperceived this way – in being banned from other roles in medieval Europe besides moneylending, in ugly caricatures of “Jewish” faces and in extreme, negative portrayals of Jews in Hollywood and other media. The Protocols of the Elders of Zion is one historic example of an intentionally fabricated and widely circulated document falsely portraying Jews as seeking world domination.⁶

Anti-Jewish oppression historically moved in cycles, from periods of covert or less visible antisemitism to times when the violence was more visible. In times when the oppression was less visible, in Europe, Jews would gradually become integrated, or at least tolerated, by the surrounding peoples. Some Jews were allowed to have positions of relative power, known as the middle-agent role, while most Jews remained poor and disenfranchised. As the discontent at their own oppression increased by non-Jewish poor and working-class people, ruling classes would misdirect the blame at the Jews, claiming the Jews were the cause of all their problems, and using the select Jews in the middle-agent role as “evidence.” With anti-Jewish messages latent in these societies, blaming Jews led to pogroms, displacement, and other violence, as well as diverting the possibility of a broader liberation movement against class oppression.

Jews and Jewish communities have been and are targeted specifically for being Jewish and often more so for being visibly Jewish. This oppression has created a tremendous pressure to become invisible, assimilate – to stop being Jewish. To seem like the people around us, even as we were barred from full participation in many of those societies, often seemed and can still seem like the best route to security. Many of our ancestors had to choose between physical safety and cultural-spiritual belonging. When it was too dangerous to claim being Jewish, we made it invisible.⁷

During the Spanish Inquisition, for example, Jews and Muslims were targeted and forced to convert to Catholicism or face torture, death or exile. Not wanting to leave their homes or risk violence, many Jews converted, or pretended to do so, while maintaining some rituals, such as lighting Shabbat candles. Known as conversos, centuries later, families with Sephardic Jewish ancestry learn this history, suddenly understanding, “ah, that is why my Catholic grandmother always lit two candles on Friday night at sundown!”

In suppressing our Jewishness, we also had to suppress much of our vitality, our spirit, our prophetic vision. We were targeted not only as the Jewish “other,” but also for what being Jewish has often meant: boldly alive, outspoken, resisting empire, visionary. These are qualities that can feel threatening to the ruling classes and to people who have lost touch with these innate elements in their own cultural traditions, including to other Jews who have not reclaimed these qualities. Some years after these experiences, when I connected in with the elder spirits on Ed’s lineage, I learned that our lineage comes from priestly people, people of deep vision and prophecy. Over generations of facing the oppression, as with so many Jews, they were forced to suppress these gifts, this creative, prophetic fire.

Suppressed, it did not disappear – it went underground, turned inward, against ourselves and each other. When it cannot be expressed outwardly, where else could it go?⁸ Life gets turned against itself. All gifts, when denied, become distorted, twisted into a violent shape, and my lineage was no exception. Fire, not contained or channeled clearly, can become particularly destructive.

Here I was in the darkness of Winter, reckoning with the burden of Ed’s past, the generations of wounding in our lineage, and the weight of violence targeted at the Jewish people. Would I find my way through?

I have heard it said that we are not presented with circumstances we are not ready to face. Even in unwavering faith in this perspective, it can be no more convincing in times of despair. All seems lost, as if the gates of the underworld have opened wide, pulling you in, and the most you can do is attempt to claw your way out and not get swallowed by the invading darkness.

This is how it was in me and even with the increased protection of my guides and my growing connection with the holy, I did not know – could I pass through this darkness? As with my Israeli-American professor, many Jewish leaders have observed our people’s collective tendency to become stuck in the heaviness, the abyss. Our people have been plunged there again and again and have, at times, forgotten how to get out. This was a response to the violence we faced, as well as a gift of our people to know how to enter that darkness – but it is only a gift if we remember how to leave.

Would I remember?

.גַּ֚ם כִּֽי־אֵלֵ֨ךְ בְּגֵ֪יא צַלְמָ֡וֶת לֹא־אִ֘ירָ֚א רָ֗ע כִּי־אַתָּ֥ה עִמָּדִ֑י “Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for You are with me.”⁹ Widely known as a Christian prayer, this line from Psalm 23 originates from Jewish tradition, in the Tanakh or Hebrew Bible. This prayer is the medicine, as well as the imperative. In the shadows of despair, in the deepest recesses of our psyches, know G*d, know the presence of the divine, and you will be protected. This is not a force of will, which would not work, nor even an act of faith, but a kind of soul reckoning, and the outcome is not always clear. This is an encounter between the soul and its own depths, and the source of consciousness that gives birth to all light and shadow.

“The 19th-century Hasidic master Rabbi Mordecai Yosef Leiner, also known as the Ishbitzer, expresses this plainly:

“Yea though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for You are with me” means that one who falls truly falls into their portion of the Holy One.” (Pri Tzedek, Naso 15)

What the Ishbitzer is saying is… know that when you fall you’re falling into God. And maybe God falls into you too. Maybe when we fall into each other, we won’t fall apart. We’ll fall together.”¹⁰

How do we stay connected enough, awake enough, maintain enough inner light, that even in the depths of shadow, we are illumined from within? Some soul’s journeys, perhaps, are not meant to return from that darkness, as much as the grieving, enraged, justice-seeking, life-seeking parts of us want to rebel against this apparent truth. How, then, did I return?

Truthfully, I don’t know. There was a deep fire of commitment to Life, a knowledge that my soul had not completed its time in this form. There was steady prayer, trust in the divine, and an abundance of support from skilled and compassionate friends and teachers. Beneath all of that, though, lay a kind of divine luck, a mystery the mind cannot comprehend. For there are those who have all the elements I had – fierce commitment, prayer, a will to live, compassionate support – and yet still they do not return. I don’t presume to know the answer to this mystery and my heart aches that it is so.

There is a saying in the Zen tradition, “Enlightenment is an accident, but we can make ourselves more accident-prone.” Perhaps that is true here, as well. Healing, continuity of the soul, is an accident, a mystery, but we can support the conditions that make it more likely to unfold.

In ritual, I had already forged a deep and protective bond with Beloved One, this wise and loving elder spirit on my mother’s mother’s lineage. With the support of a trusted practitioner, I was guided to ask my wise ancestor to create a protective, compassionate boundary between me and this haunting spirit. Helped by another protective guide, Beloved One contained Ed, enwrapping his spirit in a sacred cloth, and carried him firmly outside my space to an imaginal meadow under a tree. There was a marked and immediate change. The disturbance ceased. My space was clear. My mind could breathe. My body relaxed and my heart softened again into trust.

People sometimes wonder, “how do I know this is all ‘real?’” and not just a psychological projection, a useful fiction created by my mind to work through family trauma? In one sense, I don’t know. There is nothing I can say to definitively “prove” the “objective” truth of these experiences, and the doubting, skeptical parts of us who feel the need for this proof are not so easily persuaded.

What is clear, though, is that this process was transformative. Something disruptive happened in my psyche, and the disruption is now gone. Was all of my family and ancestral trauma resolved in that one moment? Of course not. It has been a multi-year process of emotional integration and lineage healing that still continues to this day. Are there ongoing struggles in my life? Certainly, and I’m not expecting that to change. Residual doubts do still persist in me. My mind is a product of scientific, post-Christian, secular U.S. culture and our over-reliance on a narrow frame of empiricism and knowledge. I am still human, with our inevitable spiraling in and out of trust as the tides of life turn. But this underlying sense of disharmony, the sense that “others” were in “my” space – that is gone. Over five years later, it is still gone. My space remains clear and protected.

As I have deepened into ritual practice, the ache of this question of “truth” or “falsehood” has eased. True or false, real or imagined, this is itself a question of the limited paradigm from which many of our problems have themselves arisen. What has blossomed in its place is trust in the divine unfolding, a newfound sense that the world is so much vaster and more mysterious than I ever imagined it could be. As I let go, as I learn to trust in imagination and dream, mystery and magic, the world has changed, and things that might never have been, now become possible.

The deepest wounds of my lineage were a result of violence my people had experienced and were actually a mirror, a doorway, to their deepest blessings. As I sit with this history, I more and more feel it as not a personal fault of Ed Alter, nor merely “family trauma” in the conventional sense, but rather the consequence of many generations of oppression and wounding. Ed was down lineage from a millennia of suppressed prophetic fire with nowhere to go but inward, against himself and against his own people. Never given an outlet, likely never even knowing such creative life force was within him, he misdirected it against his loved ones. It was the perfect storm of generations of internalized antisemitism and the conditioning of patriarchy and sexism to act that pain out against the women and children in his life.

I used to imagine that, somewhere inside him, his heart ached and raged for the harms he caused. I now know this to be true. This Jewish man, Ed Alter, my beloved grandfather – I claim you. I embrace you fully, as mine and as ours. I know your wounds are not yours, your wrongdoings are not yours and this weight is not ours to carry alone. I open my heart again to you, dear grandfather, as I know you have to us.

As I continued the healing on my grandfather’s lineage, I experienced a deep reckoning in spirit with and from him. I witnessed the sorrow and despair he carried, and I feel now the deep heart call toward repair. Held by his elder ancestors in the bright light of their presence, he humbled himself, kneeling with forehead to the ground, asking forgiveness, asking what is needed to make repair, and was taken into their ancient light. At the same moment, these elder guides asked me to follow my grandfather, to put my forehead on the Earth, to humble my spirit as he humbled his, surrendering to what is beyond me, and remembering that to love well is the highest imperative.

This is the specific story of my lineage, but it seems to me that most Jewish lineages carry a similar story. Such cultural loss and distortion is often, if not always, a result of harm, not only for the Jews, but for all peoples. Those who targeted the Jews in Europe and elsewhere, for example, were themselves targeted by a parallel attempt at erasure, forced to renounce their indigenous practices of magic, “witchcraft,” and connection with the land, to fit into a rigid concept of “Christian,” “moral” and “rational.” The antidote to this deep ancestral wounding is not to uproot our “evil” tendencies, or to exile certain parts of us or certain groups of people, but to help restore us back into our original state, finding the blessing as a seed of life within the arid desert.

I do not think there is one way forward, but I do know this: to claim brightly, boldly, proudly being Jewish, even in the face of the oppression, is a radical act of healing. There may still be times where prudence would dictate a quieter reclamation of Jewish identity to avoid violence, but in our spirits, we can always know the blessing of being Jewish and never lose contact with this reality. We can practice the traditions in a living, vibrant way, and remember – know in the body – the potency of our practices.¹¹ Channeling this fire would allow a healing and creative force to move through and would transmute the pull toward reenacting harm or misdirecting the impulses for fiery expression. We can reclaim our roots: fully Jewish, full of life, against all oppression, alive with the fire of love.

For those of us with such cultural loss, this is the transformative potential of reclaiming our ancestral traditions. Cultural reclamation does not need to be complex or flashy. In the wake of significant cultural loss, learning and speaking aloud a few words from an ancestral language or doing a simple ancestral ritual can be a profound act of cultural repair and revitalizing. For groups targeted with annihilation, such as the Jews or native and indigenous peoples around the world, this is even more so, as we actively heal the cultural harms caused to our people. When I learn a new word in Hebrew, light Shabbat candles, or recite the Shema, especially as I am held by my elder ancestors, my spirit wakes up in a way that far surpasses the ritual’s immediate significance. For in that act, the deep bond with my ancestors has been rekindled anew.

For many people raised Jewish, especially in assimilated families, it can feel undesirable, and utterly terrifying, to be or be perceived as Jewish. In response to the oppression of Jews, many of us want to hide and distance ourselves to avoid being targeted. Anti-Jewish oppression can make Judaism appear ugly, backwards, oppressive and unappealing, rather than a vibrant well of wisdom and depth. It is true that racism, sexism, queer oppression and other harms exist in Jewish tradition – as they do in every tradition – and these life-denying forces do affect the vitality of Judaism. Some strands of Jewish tradition have also become stagnant in response to navigating the oppression, such as an increased focus on maintaining Jewish continuity, rather than on our flourishing or our interconnection with all peoples. Even with the urge to turn away from our tradition, as I myself felt, there is a deep pull in our hearts toward it, an ache to be re-rooted. There is such depth and beauty here, and many of us can feel it.

In the Jewish ancestral healing circle I now lead, people access a newfound connection with this tradition they never imagined possible. Feeling the heartache of what has been lost, a profound relief comes from engaging in their own tradition, as together we renew the deep, soulful, world-changing elements of Judaism. Connecting with other Jews, sharing stories, wrestling with complex realities, grieving what we have lost and gently easing into old and new ways – a spark enters our eyes and new possibilities are born.

One person raised Jewish has shared openly about how, for the first time, she could sense the depth and joyfulness in our tradition. One client sings Hebrew prayers as she connects with her ancestral guides and is held in the embrace of her own people. Many other people come to these circles with only a single thread of connection to Jewish heritage – perhaps one great-grandparent or an even more distant ancestor. For these folks, it is a profound shift to be welcomed into the tradition, to embrace it, learn from it and be part of reimagining it.

One participant from a Dominican home with Catholic and indigenous roots always felt a deep bond to Jews and Judaism, finding herself close to many Jews and working in Jewish institutions. Many years later, she learned she has some Ashkenazi Jewish ancestry and is eagerly seeking a doorway to reconnect with this part of her heritage. When another client and colleague recently uncovered her Jewish ancestry, she too felt a deep heart call to tap into her Jewish roots as well as to more fully embrace her indigenous Colombian heritage. As she listened to Sephardic Jewish music, learned prayers and Hebrew words, she could access both a deep well of grief for what was lost, as well as a profound renewal of connection to herself and to her people.

Our ancestral traditions live inside us already. I feel this in my bones, perhaps literally. It is palpably different from living inside of another tradition, as deep as that can also be. My years of immersion in Zen Buddhist practice were transformative. Life at the monastery taught me to have clear, embodied presence and a spacious and focused mind, as well as the joys of silent work-practice and the potency of group ritual. Rooted primarily in the traditions of Japanese Zen Buddhism, here I remembered the power and significance of honoring ancestors – in this case, ancestors of spiritual lineage rather than cultural heritage. Yet, when we tap into our own ancestral ways, they awaken a knowledge more ancient, more primal, more intimate than our ordinary conscious minds can comprehend.

As I turn toward my own ancestral tradition, I access the deep wisdom it contains, and through it, find a renewed appreciation for the depths of Zen, much like my time practicing Zen opened a doorway to reconnect with Judaism. As I embrace my own ancestors and their vitality, I can engage in traditions that are not my own, such as Zen Buddhism, from a place of rootedness and respect, knowing the age old wisdom woven through these practices and knowing also that my own people have their expression of these fundamental truths. I can, in a way, become the descendant of another spiritual lineage, not from a place of cultural lack, but rather from the wholeness within which I am already held.

Each day, I wake up, step out into the cool morning air and greet the birds, the soil and the sky. I allow my mind to rest in spacious presence, as I learned to do in the halls of the Zendo. I recite a short Hebrew prayer, Modeh Ani, praising creation and embracing divine compassion. My spirit wakes up and I return to a deep sense of trust, one that I know my ancestors have also felt. I never imagined such a simple and traditional practice could carry such depth, but so it does. May we all have this medicine. Whoever you are, whoever your people are, may you have it. Rooted in our people, rooted in our ourselves and our place in the living Earth, imagine the world we could create.
.כֵּן יְהִי רָצוֹן Ken yahi ratzon. May it be so.

Guided Practice: Noticing the Gifts & Wounds of Our Ancestral Heritages

For those of you who have a relationship with the elder guides from a specific ancestral lineage, you can engage in this practice with those guides, asking about one lineage blessing and burden. For those who do not, you can call in support from any protective guides and wise elder ancestors and direct the questions toward one ancestral lineage or cultural heritage of your choosing (remaining open if the guides direct your energy elsewhere).

Before starting the practice, find a space that supports ritual, gather any sacred or meaningful items, and set your intent to enter the practice. Read the practice once or twice ahead of time to familiarize yourself. You may wish to record yourself reading it and play back the recording for guidance. You may keep your eyes open or closed. With each step of the practice, allow it to unfold as long as it needs, until there is a natural pause or shift in energy. If your guides direct the practice elsewhere, follow their lead, rather than your own intent or the written steps of the practice. You may ask for more clarity or specifics if their guidance is ever unclear. If anything becomes too intense, you can ask the guides to lower the intensity or open your eyes and shift your awareness to something grounding. Keep a journal nearby to make any notes after you finish the practice.

~ Land in your body, noticing the natural flow of breath in and out and the contact of the ground beneath you.

~ Call in one trusted, protective guide or ally: a plant or animal spirit, a wise and loving elder ancestor, angels, the spirit of the Earth or divine presence – asking them to be present with you.

~ Notice the felt sense of their presence, listening for any guidance or requests. Rest in this connection until there is a natural pause or shift in energy.

~ Ask for your space and your own energy to be gently cleared and for you to be held in a circle of protection.

~ (If you have not already) Call in your own wise and loving ancestral guides to also be present here.

~ Notice the felt sense of their presence, listening for any guidance or requests. Rest in this connection until there is a natural pause or shift in energy.

~ Ask the ancestral or protective guides to show you one blessing connected to the ancestral lineage you have chosen. Allow this to unfold as long as it needs, until there is a natural pause or shift in energy.

~ Ask to be shown one way you already embody this ancestral blessing and/or one way you can further embrace this quality in your life.

~ Invite the guides to extend the energy of this blessing to you in this moment. See if you can soften enough to allow this blessing to enter, even if only a little. Allow this to unfold as long as it needs, until there is a natural pause or shift in energy.

~ Without needing to feel the full weight or know the entire story behind it, ask your ancestral guides to show you one burden or wound connected to this lineage.

~ Ask for the energetic impact of this burden to be lessened or, if possible, removed entirely from you and your family. Allow this to unfold as long as it needs, until there is a natural pause or shift in energy.

~ Ask for what tangible steps you can take in your life to further release the impact from this burden and integrate the healing. Set the intention to follow this guidance, to the extent possible.

~ Check with the ancestral and protective guides if there is anything else they want you to know or do in this time. Follow both their guidance and your own intuitive knowing.

~ Invite the guides to gently clear your space and your own energy of any stuck or heavy energy remaining from this practice. Ask for all pathways that were open to be closed and sealed. Check somatically and intuitively to confirm the felt sense of being in a clear, protected space.

~ Acknowledge and thank the guides for their love, resting in the felt sense of connection until there is a natural shift of energy toward completion.

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Endnotes

1 In the spirit of honoring lineage, I am deeply grateful to Ursula K. Le Guin and her prophetic vision as a writer. As I wrote this essay, I reread her beloved Earthsea cycle. Her deep explorations of the ordinary reality of magic, the power of trusting the beyond and the encounter between a soul and its own darkness greatly influenced my writing. Zichrona livracha— May her memory be a blessing.

2 As a result of racism and Euro-centrism, people typically think of Jews as white and European-heritage, and as speaking Yiddish or Hebrew, but there are Jews from many cultural groups, and we have many other languages, such as Ladino (Judeo-Spanish) and Judeo-Arabic.

3 In the present period, for many Jews, this has also reversed — from an over-identification as the victims of oppression to an over-identification as the perpetrators of oppression. While Jews, as with all people, learn to act out oppression, and while there is great violence happening to the Palestinian people, some of it in the name of a narrow conception of Jewish safety and security (not to mention the central role of more dominant colonial powers such as the U.S. and U.K.), this too is not all of who we are, nor are Jews “worse” or “more oppressive” than other peoples.

4 Some people might insist that, ultimately, all humankind goes back to the same ancient ancestors, and my ancestors five or ten thousand years ago were not “Jewish,” not to mention that Judaism itself, as with all traditions, is by its nature syncretic – composed, at least in part, of disparate “non-Jewish” elements. I understand the impulse to universalize, and yet, relatively more recent history and culture still matter, and though it may be porous and evolving, there is something distinctively “Jewish,” something that tugs at the heart strings of my spiritual core and that of so many other Jews.

5 I acknowledge Cherie Brown and others for their groundbreaking work on understanding and describing antisemitism, or more accurately, anti-Jewish oppression. Much of this description of the oppression comes directly from or is inspired by my learning with them. To learn more of Cherie Brown’s work, here is one excellent recent talk on antisemitism as well as a link to a pamphlet she co-wrote describing the oppression in greater detail: https://www.dcbcenter.org/post/webinar-recording-antisemitism-is-everyone-s-concern

6 This harm is not a relic of the past, as it is sometimes seen. It continues to this day, moving between periods of hidden and visible antisemitism. From synagogue shootings to blaming Jews for orchestrating the “end of the white race” to daily “hints” at our controlling and greedy natures and being singled out for blame, it continues. See, for example, this article on the role of antisemitism in the White Nationalist movement in the United States: https://politicalresearch.org/2017/06/29/skin-in-the-game-how-antisemitism-animates-white-nationalism

7 Assimilation has never truly provided the safety and security so many Jews desperately hoped and still hope it would. The most striking example is of the German Jews in the Nazi era, who were at that time the most integrated, assimilated Jews of anywhere in Europe, and yet were still targeted by the Nazis, including many betrayals by colleagues, neighbors and friends.

8 Some Jews, as with all oppressed peoples, did and continue to resist their own oppression as well as the oppression of others. The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising is one of many examples, as well as the long history of Jewish participation and leadership in collective liberation movements all over the world.

9 The Hebrew transliteration for this line is: Gam ki-elech be-gei tzal-ma-vet lo-i’ra ra ki-at’tah im-ma-di

10 https://www.myjewishlearning.com/article/psalm-23-who-walks-in-the-valley-of-the-shadow-of-death/

11 As they say in the Reconstructionist Movement, one lineage of Jewish practice, “tradition gets a vote but not a veto,” i.e. we draw from and are always in relationship with our ancestral traditions, yet are not wholly dictated by them, so many of which are rooted in oppressive paradigms or no longer relevant in their earlier forms.