Earth-based Magickal Judaism, often known as Jewitchery - writings, rituals, midrash, magick, prayers, and more…
Becoming Blessing/Prayer Flags Painted at the Annual Membership Retreat
Becoming Blessing/Prayer Flags Painted at the Annual Membership Retreat. Can you Guess Which is Mine?
Incredible Salad Bar Created by the Members of Becoming for Lunch
Me with my ever-present cup of tea, getting ready for a retreat group session.
Thanks to Patti for taking such great pictures!
Technorati Tags: becoming, spiritual group, retreat, prayer flags
With the Kohenet session starting, I knew that I’d be asked about what I’ll be working on over the next year. In general I want to dive into symbolic foods in Judaism and how they’ve been used over the centuries. I’m not sure how I’m going to tie this into the Life Spiral work that is the focus of the second level of Kohenet training, but I have a few ideas.
Along with whatever assignments come my way this year, I had one huge goal for myself already. This year I’ll be producing the 5th anniversary edition of the Peeling a Pomegranate Passover Haggadah! I’m planning and working on a radical overhaul. I’m taking all the wonderful comments that people have given me over the years and doing the most comprehensive new version I’ve done, since I started publishing it. The work started just after Pesach this year, when I sat down and removed a section that I was clinging to, but frankly never worked all that well. I’m hoping that my new learning and insights into food practice will really enhance this new revised edition.
Along with my general research on Jewish food practices and food symbolism, I’ve also fallen in love with the little practiced Rosh Hashanah tradition of “Yehi Ratzon.” The practice is a great example of Jewish food magick or if you are not comfortable with that word, food offering practice where you ingest the offering.
The custom is based on a phrase from the Talmud:
“Abaye said ‘Now that you have said that an omen is significant, at the beginning of each year, each person should accustom himself to eat gourds, fenugreek, leeks, beets and dates…’.” (Kerisus 6a)
I’m not going to go into the specifics of the practice right now, because I’ll do that when it gets closer to Rosh Hashanah. What I’m doing now around this practice is researching each of these foods to learn what their symbolic, historical, social, and metaphysical properties are - both historically and now. I’m doing this for a bunch of foods, but as part of my High Holiday preparations, I’m focusing on these foods to for now.
I just ordered Food At The Time Of The Bible: From Adam’s Apple To The Last Supper
Technorati Tags: food, sacred eating, yehi ratzon, food practices, bible foods, symbolic foods, food offerings, food magick
My sister Kohenet, Annie Gilbert, is an astonishingly talented singer songwriter. Take a listen to her work with her band The Red Line and if you are up Boston way, keep an eye out for her performing live. I’m not sure where you can pick up her album, but at least you can hear her on ReverbNation. She also goes by Floxy Blu.
Be sure to check out Track #2 - Holiness. It’s one of my favorites and just goes like an arrow to my heart every time I hear it.
Technorati Tags: kohenet, music, floxy blu, annie gilbert
service space bridge connection storytelling myth-making truth-finding dream-embracing tradition creation expansion life-affirming death-acknowledging paradox
There’s a new website called Wordle that creates these “word clouds” for you from text you give it or directly from a blog. People are doing all kinds of nifty things with it. One of the “wordles” that I created was using my answer to “What is a Priestess,” which I wrote during my first Kohenet training two and half years ago.
Check out the rest of these visualizations I’ve created at Wordle. The one titled “Offerings” is another favorite. It’s from something I wrote for Hanukkah a couple — specifically the last paragraph. I also really like the visualization called Kaddish, which is from the Kaddish I wrote in 2006.
Technorati Tags: priestess, wordle, word cloud
The first training week for Kohenet Bet began with far less drama for me than the first round of training. I was a complete mess of nerves and stress my first week, and even broke into tears when my husband dropped me at Elat Chayyim that time. Now it was more like returning to school for your senior year. You know that there is still a lot of work to do, but you’ve got some history and experience under your belt and it’s all much more comfortable.
I really was looking forward to the second half of the training program and its focus on Life Spiral events. Actually, just working with the idea of the Life Spiral instead of Life Cycle was very exciting. I loved looking at the concept that not only do our own lives build on our experiences, but also that we build on all the experiences of all our ancestors. A circle seems so limited with a finite beginning and end, but the spiral keeps growing and building all that comes before it and puts more focus on the journey than the destination.
We focused this week on rituals concerning fertility, pregnancy, and birth. The assigned reading before the session covered a lot of the depth of ritual specifics and history, and I definitely found a few favorites that I’ll start with if people ask me for good earth-based baby namings and such. Our session on the mikvah, ritual bath, was one of my favorites. Mikvah has yet to become a part of my practice, although conceptually I really like it. I was shocked to learn how negative an experience it has become for many woman. My only true Mikvah experiences have been with Kohenet and those have been very satisfying experiences. I have had experience with ritual bathing elsewhere, and those too have been very good experiences for me. R’Jill mentioned the The Mikvah Project
Our guest teachers this week were Rabbis Raquel S. Kosovske and David Seidenberg. Rabbi Raquel lead a session on the Placental Tree of Life, which was fascinating and bizarre. Frankly it was bizarre to me to spend that much time talking about placentas, but at the same time why not? It’s something every single person deals with in their life and yet it’s one of those birth mysteries we just don’t discuss. I’d never actually seen a picture of one before. Thankfully, it was in black and white, which reduced the general ickiness factor for me, but what was amazing is that one side seriously looks like a tree. Placentas do seem to truly be a tree of life. One of the books R’Raquel passed around was Spiritual Midwifery
Rabbi David lead a session on Jewish Ecology that completed changed my poorly formed opinions of Rambam - Moses Maimonides. Turns out that good ole Rambam was more progressive than I ever gave him credit for, finding his 13 Principles to be very limited and annoying. In his writings he seems to a proponent of the Gaia Theory and very ecologically focused in the Guide fof the Perplexed. Truthfully, I’d never realy explored his teachings before and R’David’s discussion prompted me to pick up a copy of The Guide of the Perplexed
I got the chance to lead morning Davvening, prayers, on Wednesday morning. I really enjoy the chance to lead a semi-traditional Jewish service because it’s such a rarity for me. The Kohenet siddur is just amazing and I love Holly, Jill and BBat Shemesh’s songs, poetry, and translations. Last time I lead morning Davvening I went over by about 15-20 minutes, which I felt really bad about. This time I think I was a little too obsessed with the timing, but overall I was really happy with how it went. My ritual intent for the service was to ground everyone in the reality of Kohenet, especially the new Kohenet Aleph class. For them it was only their second day, and I wanted to give them a nice anchor for the morning. Very exciting for me was also the chance to honor my sister, with what I now call “Amy’s moment” — the traditional Oseh Shalom after a silent meditation. It’s something waits for in every service and I knew it was a nice traditional thing that would help ground people after singing new versions of everything and different versions of all the traditional prayers. A Rabbi from the Oraita program that was also at Elat Chayyim with us came and shared her own Mah To Vu chant. It was lovely and I loved that she came to join us!
As usual, Bat Shemesh’s talmud class was one of my favorites. I was so inspired this time that I specifically requested Advance Priestess Training weeks that are entirely talmud focused! There’s never enough time to dig into anything, and I could spend a week (or a lifetime) just exploring and reconstructing the talmud from a Kohenet perspective.
I guess the last thing to share is about the new Kohenet class. They are really wonderful. It was such a crazy experience with two classes there and plenty of growing pains organizationally, but nothing that can’t be cured with time and patience all around! I didn’t have a chance to get to know all of the new women well, but I didn’t get to know all of my own cohort well the first week either. There were a few in particular that I really got to know (*Waves, Hello!*) and just really enjoyed being around and learning from during our combined classes.
That’s honestly just a taste of the week. The days are so full and fulfilling that it’s just incredible.
Oh!! And I got an updated certificate with Ketzirah on it! I need to get it framed now!
Technorati Tags: kohenet, hebrew priestess training, judaism, earth based judaism, study
