Written by White Noise Collective core member Jay Tzvia Helfand, for the recently published anthology There is Nothing So Whole As A Broken Heart: Mending the World As Jewish Anarchists, edited by Cindy Milstein.
Through stories at once poetic and poignant, There Is Nothing So Whole as a Broken Heart offers a powerful elixir for all who rebel against systemic violence and injustice. The contemporary renewal of Jewish anarchism draws on a history of suffering, ranging from enslavement and displacement to white nationalism and genocide. Yet it also pulls from ancestral resistance, strength, imagination, and humor—all qualities, and wisdom, sorely needed today. These essays, many written from feminist and queer perspectives, journey into past and contemporary trauma in ways that are humanizing and healing. They build bridges from bittersweet grief to rebellion and joy. And via concrete illustrations of how Jewish anarchists lovingly transform their own ritual, cultural, and political practices, they clearly illuminate the path toward mending ourselves and the world.
Ritual technology for a liberated future
12 Elul 5779
This is for us –
Who are timtum,[1] faygele, freaks, queer AF, trans and gender nonconforming, and many more words we claim, past and future.
Words still held in the jaw, words in the space between night and day,
words saturating the soil mineral-thick with promise, words ushered as a sigh by the waving grasses, in the gush and tumble of rushing water. Our bodies are bodies on the body of the earth.[2] Our bodies are woven into the web of life, and into the webs of our tradition, etz chaim. Just as resistance and longings for freedom have always existed, so have we.
This is for us –
Who feel in our marrow, in our deepest gut, how our fights are connected. Jew, queer, anarchist, revolutionary, held alongside many varied, even contradictory identities, with a clarity that never again means never again for anyone. Never again for anyone.[3]
For us –
For whom hope is a narrow bridge, and a practice.
Who experience spiraling diasporas within diasporas, as we are exiled for our anti-Zionism, for our queerness, for the ways we threaten white supremacy as it moves through hegemonic Jewish religious and cultural institutions. For how we move and don’t move, how we fuck and don’t fuck. For how we contend with and resist what Hannah Arendt called the banality of evil.
We cultivate homefulness, doykeit,[4] where we are. We breathe into our hearts and our bellies. We cultivate our depth of feeling, we stretch out towards our longing.
We lay claim to a lineage beyond singular identity around suffering, beyond exceptionalism. In our clarity, our tradition and our liberation there is joy. There is radical amazement.[5] There is a wild love for the world.[6]
These words are for us, all of those at our backs, and those future ancestors, those to come.
Zikrona Livracha- May your memory be a blessing. You are not forgotten. We remember and we honor you, you who make us possible, who we make possible as we live inside of practices to honor your memory.
Here is a ritual technology I offer to you, and especially for those taking Estrogen (E) or Testosterone (T). I do this as part of taking my T shot every week. I invite you here with me and honor specific lineages of these words and practices along the way. Thank you for your accompaniment, and also the ways you adapt this, or do not engage in the service of your needs.
1. Set your space with stones and cedar
Our tradition has many technologies to honor those who come before. In Ashkenazi practice, stones are portals between worlds. We often place stones on the spaces our dead are buried. Cedar has been used to invoke boundaries and protection since ancient times.[7]
If you don’t already know the names of the original peoples of the land you inhabit as you contemplate gathering stones and cedar, go find out. If you are not indigenous, consider how you are participating in transforming the ongoing impacts of colonial genocide in which you are complicit.[8]
If you choose to gather stones and cedar, invoke a kavanah or intention.
Consider: For the sake of what do you invoke this kavanah? How can your invocation of portals and boundaries support your kavanah?
2. Gather ritual objects with your T or E
Arrange stones, cedar, and your hormones alongside other ritual objects that hold meaning. I set mine alongside a havdallah candle made by Jonah at Narrow Bridge Candles.[9] I leave the candle unlit, rather than lighting it at the end of Shabbat, as is customary for many people. I do this as a reminder that my rest is holy as a chronically ill person.
Bring your hormones and needles to that space with other medicines too, including tinctures and herbs.
3. Light a candle
Lighting candles serves as another tool used since ancient times. After destruction of the second temple, marking one beginning of diasporic Judaism, lighting candles offers a way to hold the sacred fire wherever we are.
Consider: What does homefulness look and feel like in your body, in relationships, with the land? Feel into lived experiences or practice imagining them.
4. Grounding practice
As is supportive for your body, sit or lay down in front of your ritual objects. For those who are able, sit with back body in contact with a chair or against the wall, soles of feet on the ground. No matter what physical shape, find a posture that invites more of a sense of ease and gentleness in your body. For a lot of us, this is by no means easy or simple. Explore posture as feels supportive to your kavanah.
Take three deep breaths, elongating the exhale. Let your jaw soften, belly get more full. Lean back if you are seated or against the wall.
With your inhales and exhales, imagine widening out to your edges, filling out from top of spine through base of feet, feeling back body, side to side of ribs.
If it is hard to notice what is happening in your body, that’s OK too.
Consider: What helps you to know that you are here right now? Sensations of warmth or coolness, movement of the breath, sounds, contact of body against the ground, feeling of textures, clothes on skin?[10] If pain is there and it feels supportive, acknowledge that pain and the edges of it, along with places where there is less pain.
7. Say the Shechechianu, or blessing for the first time, aloud
Recall an ancestor, blood or chosen, or someone from your own life that helped you to feel possible, maybe from when you were a kid, a person whose gender presentation or affect invited some seedling of hope, or some question mark of what might be available to you . Feel them at your back, imagine those who invited that sense of possibility for them.
Consider: What helps you to feel your dignity, your interdependence, your aliveness? What kind of elder do you want to be? What kind of ancestor? What do the shadows of your dance with life and death teach you about arriving here in this moment?
8. Draw out your shot
Feel your feet on the floor, notice the objects in front of you, invite the jaw soften, notice your mood.
Consider: The material and ongoing struggle for us now and those before to make our access to gender-affirming medical care possible. The conditions of our lives are transformed through our fight, and we fight to win. We fight for all of us.
9. Sing Elohai neshama before, during or after your shot
אֱלֹהַי נְשָׁמָה שֶׁנָּתַתָּ בִּי טְהוֹרָה הִיא
Elohay neshama shenatata bi tehora hi.
The breathful soul that You, living source of life, has given me is pure. As you sing, bring the voice deep into the low belly.[12] Sing for yourself. This current, present you, and for past and future you. Sing for the sake of your life, your body, your innate and unshakable dignity and belonging.[13] Your here-ness and any amount of away-ness that moves in you. Try to take it in, even a little. You are building a practice. What you pay attention to grows.[14]
10. Grounding Practice
Sit with the silence after your song after your shot. Take three long breaths, elongating the exhale.
11. Blow out your candle
Recall your kavanah, your intention.
Consider: What do you feel in your body? What, if anything, has shifted? As you breathe into the space of your back body, offer yourself appreciation for your effort.
[1] Timtum is a Yiddish word for genderqueer, reclaimed in trans and queer Jewish community. For more information, check out Micah Bazant’s zine on Timtum, http://archive.qzap.org/index.php/Detail/Object/Show/object_id/408
[2] Language and framework is informed by Movement Generation Justice and Ecology Project. For more information, check out https://movementgeneration.org/.
[3] “Never Again for Anyone” has been a campaign of the grassroots movement organization the International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network (IJAN). For more information, check out http://www.ijan.org/projects-campaigns/nafa/.
[4] Check out JB Brager’s zines on doykeit, a concept of radical hereness, in contrast to home through Zionist colonization, emerging from the Yiddish Labor Bund. For more information, check out https://jbrager.bigcartel.com/product/doykeit-zine-all-three
[5] Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel is famous for coining this phrase: “Our goal should be to live life in radical amazement”.
[6] A reference to a line from the late poet and dreamer, Mary Oliver.
[7] I learned about stones and cedar as Jewish ritual tools to access ancestors from Taya Mâ Shere, of Kohenet, a Hebrew Priestess Institute. For more information, check out http://www.kohenet.com/.
[8] One example from my Bay Area context is the Shuumi Land Tax. For more information, check out https://sogoreate-landtrust.com/shuumi-land-tax/.
[9] Narrow Bridge Candles is a Jewish ritual candlemaking project in support of the full Palestinian call for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions of Israel (BDS). For more information, check out https://www.narrowbridgecandles.org/
[10] These prompts were influenced by my work with generative somatics, a politicized healing organization rooted in growing movements for justice and transformation. For more information, check out http://www.generativesomatics.org/.
[11] Wording crafted by members of the International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network from IJAN’s Liberation Haggadah. For more information, check out http://www.ijan.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/haggadah2014pages-1.pdf.
[12] For the melody of Elohai Neshama, check out Sol Weiss’s composition from Let My People Sing: https://soundcloud.com/user-478813445/elohai-neshama-by-sol-weiss-1
[13] This language comes from generative somatics, a politicized healing organization rooted in growing movements for justice and transformation. For more information, check out http://www.generativesomatics.org/.
[14] Concept from adrienne maree brown’s book, Emergent Strategy.