Ways of Awe: Introduction

[Reflective opening string music with slowly-building energy]

Xava: I like to think of it as one of the hinges of the Jewish year, right, where things sort of turn into a new direction.

Binya: Like actually our goal is something much bigger and more beautiful.

Noam: So we’re taking part in creation by speaking these words.

Laynie: In the body.

Jessica: And a slowness.

Noa: And…heartbroken rage-full blessing-full connection, for whatever that’s possibly worth in this moment.

[String music gets stronger and faster]

Xava: By reinterpreting a text, we have the power to heal a wound that’s actually in the past, and our ancestors are already in the future, healing the wounds of the foolishness that we’re saying now.

[Horns enter the music with a feeling of both grief and hopefulness]

Maia: I’m Maia.

Shelby: I’m Shelby. Welcome to Ways of Awe.

Maia: An audio companion to the prayers and rituals of the Jewish High Holidays.

Mónica: Um, we want to honor and remember and face death, loss, destruction. And also we want to agitate the living, give the living practices that will allow us to embody grief and move towards courage.

Shelby: We’ve been studying together for years and Ways of Awe shares some of our translation experiments.

Maia: Woven together with research and soundscapes from where we live and pray, all with the help of mentors, friends and ancestors, known and unknown.

Shelby: Sound is touch, sound is touch!

Xava: Sound is touch, yeah.

Shelby: And our ancestors knew it!

Binya: All these things are trying to access you in every possible way to break you open.

Shelby: It’s crowded inside these prayers. But there’s room. Come on in.

[Reflective music slows, resolves and stops]

[Sound of someone walking with their footsteps crunching on the ground and body moving through what sounds like a door, blending into rustling prayerbook pages and a group singing the Ashkenazi tune for Une Tane Tokef]

Group of singers: Be’Rosh Hashana yikateivun, uv’Yom Tzom Kippur yechateimun…Be’Rosh Hashana yikateivun, uv’Yom Tzom Kippur yechateimun…

[Sound of someone walking returns]

Shelby: Hi Maia.

Maia: Hi Shelby.

Shelby: Um. What are you doing here?

Maia: We’re taking a minute in the studio to reflect on this thing that we’re actually still making, but we’re imagining it out into a world where it is someday finished.

Shelby: So time travel.

Maia: Yeah. Um, our favorite thing, and it feels like it could be useful to introduce our collaboration a bit and maybe tell some origin stories for the sounds that we’re trying to knit together and what we think we’re making and our hopes for it. I think it’s good to tell people what we think we’re making, but I also think it’s good to tell people that what we think we’re making might be irrelevant.

Shelby: Yeah, we’d really love you all to tell us what you think we made. If you choose to go on and listen to this thing we’re making, which has a name, what’s the name?

Maia: Ways of Awe.

[Sound of waves lapping on a shore]

Shelby: Ways of Awe. So Maia and I have known each other for a long time, and we met in Palestine, solidarity organizing. And then we’ve connected through ritual. And then we got more connected through queer Talmud study. And then we started translating stuff every Elul in the lead up to High Holidays.

Maia: We had been for a while, and we knew that we liked to work together. And I also think our friendship is kind of project-based. So what’s sweet for me is that it’s like, okay, if we have a project that I know that I’ll see Shelby. So there’s also other motivations behind coming up with a project. Um, and we, I think initially just wanted to know more about the texts that we come back to every year, um, that were familiar and unfamiliar to us, each in different ways. And we knew we could take our Svara tools and just go word by word with each other and see what happened. And for me, what’s always been really exciting about doing that with you, as a poet, is that we realize that the act of translating is also an act of writing, and it’s always lovely to know that it’s always a poem.

Shelby: Mhm. So you’ll notice when we share some of our translations, we’re like leaning into everything we found along the way. And things get weird in the Hebrew-Aramaic dictionary.

Maia: Well, I’m curious to hear you describe how we got to an audio studio with this collaboration.

Shelby: Well, we are united by a fascination with sound. Um, Maia was raised by a linguist and it shows and has a fascination with transliteration. How we represent the sounds of different languages. And I’ve learned a lot from you, Maia, because you’ve studied not just Hebrew and Aramaic, but Yiddish. You’ve brushed up against a lot of languages and are really interested in sound. And Maia is always the person that’s like, literally it’s just happened in the studio. You could say this word this way because of this. You could say this word this way. So anyway, we were both obsessed with sound. I’m obsessed with sound, thinking about poetry and, um, like rhythm and meter. Sound is physical. Sound touches us. You can’t express or experience sound…and there’s many ways people experience sound through many different bodies because at its core, it’s vibration. So in whatever way that hits the body. These texts, if we think about the importance of sound in them, it’s like a map that our ancestors have left us, our textual ancestors. And it’s like their bodies reaching out to our bodies.

[Waves lapping on a shore before Une Tane Tokef is sung again]

Group of singers: Be’Rosh Hashana yikateivun, uv’Yom Tzom Kippur yechateimun…

Maia: I sort of have been thinking of this as a record of being in conversation with each other over time, like our collaboration. Um, but also this is an excuse to bring in more explicitly all of our mentors and all of the people that we’ve learned from over the years. And I think that the act of bringing in so many different voices, literally, and stitching them together, and more often than not sending them back and seeing what people think of the new thing that is made feels very much like the practice of commentary that we are, in fact, studying.

Shelby: Mhm. Yeah. And just to shout out all the brilliant people that you’re going to hear in these episodes, who we’ve learned Talmud from Binya, Jessica, Laynie, Mónica, Noa, Noam, Xava. We recorded interviews with all these badass people, and then we took fragments and put them alongside a person. They didn’t talk to live, but now they’re talking to live.

[Sound of a crowd of people chattering to each other with a warm and interested energy, mixed together with the ongoing waves lapping on the shore]

Maia: I also think it’s been fun to put our current selves in conversation with our past selves. I think in a way we’re doing something actually quite vulnerable, which is to share essentially unchanged translation work that we did as much younger people and also much younger translators. And we made the decision pretty early on that we actually weren’t going to fundamentally change the work that we had done, even though if we did it again now, we would probably do it very differently. And so I actually, I like how sort of lovingly we have brought work to this collaboration that we didn’t expect to share more broadly at the time and might have done differently now.

Shelby: Yeah. It’s located in the time and place that it was translated in with the level of like skill and time that we had at that time. And it’s also the times we’re trying to do this project in are times of seemingly endless genocide in Gaza, ever-expanding war in Iran and Lebanon…and fascism in the US. And with all of that in the room, this moment that we’re in and the impossibility of addressing this moment. But why this project now? Why take time now to sit in a studio and reach back towards these texts, towards these ancestors?

Maia: In a way, what I’m feeling, at least this morning, is that the most intuitive, honest answer is it doesn’t actually make sense for us to be making this right now, which is, I think was the indicator to me that we should probably make it.

[Sound of walking quickly, blended with atmospheric ocean sounds]

Shelby: Right. There’s a deeply uncomfortable and also urgent necessity to the trying to the fighting and contesting for lineage at a time where it’s being used as cover for the genocide in Gaza. We’re reaching backwards and forwards to a Jewishness and a Judaism that we can’t yet imagine. It’s something absolutely new and absolutely ancient and in the immediate, in the now, we hope we made something that we, all of us fighting for another world can use as we organize against the unfathomable depravity of Zionism and white supremacy. We wanted to make something for you and for your comrades to carry with you as you keep going until Palestine and all of us are free. And in this time where the fascists literally want us spun around, distracted and fractured, we think that working with sound and ancient text demands our close attention. So it’s simultaneously kind of pragmatic and sacred. Practicing focus fuels our resistance, our capacity to strategize and imagine possibilities, our ability to build relationships that might be strong enough to weather what’s ahead.

[Ocean sounds continue with walking sounds returning, with waves on the shore that continue underneath the speech]

Maia: Part of what has felt important for these episodes to be maybe playfully non-linear in structure, is to make it clear that we’re sharing a process, rather than something that can be or should be a finished thing.

Shelby: Mhm.

Maia: And I guess I’m hoping in particular, that that kind of sonic aesthetic is more of a compelling invitation for others to sort of weigh in and wade in to these texts and traditions with us, and to feel like, as you actually say in our intro, that there’s space for people in these texts to do that, and that there’s no such thing as sort of a finished meaning in any text, arguably, but certainly not in the way that I’m interested in thinking about our tradition. So, you know, when I’m asking what I think we’re making, I think we’re making some sort of imperfect guide for getting deeper or messier in our relationship with our words, and especially words that we either grew up saying. and need a different relationship to or didn’t grow up saying and want a relationship to.

Shelby: Because so much of the High Holidays liturgy and when we say the High Holidays, we mean the ten-day span between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, also known as the Days of Awe. Those days are filled with repetitions of sound, you know? And yeah, whether you have it in your body or you want to move your body towards it, we hope that these episodes are companions to put in your pocket as you prepare to engage with those prayers, to find something new in them. You know, and we haven’t captured everything, which is daunting and beautiful, that there’s a million ways these prayers are said, histories, lineages, complexities, contradictions. And we’ve tried to hint at some of them as responsibly and reverently as we could, and we missed a thousand things. So please tell us what we missed.

Maia: Mhm.

[Une Tane Tokef singing returns]

Group of singers: Be’Rosh Hashana yikateivun, uv’Yom Tzom Kippur yechateimun…

[Reflective show music returns]

Maia: Ways of Awe was written by Maya Brown and Shelby Handler, based on translations originally shared with the Kadima Reconstructionist Community in Seattle, Washington, on unceded Coast Salish, Duwamish land.

Shelby: All episodes edited by Maia Brown. Audio engineering by Daniel Guenther.

Maia: We’re indebted to each of our interviewees for their brilliance and generosity, and we’re grateful to the community who lent their prayer voices to these episodes.

Shelby: Thank you to our friends Ross Kirshenbaum, or Levoneh, Jimmy Austin and Peter Lippman for our show music, and to Jenny Asarnow for their field recordings.

Maia: Thank you to the Jack Straw Cultural Center Artist Support Program and the King County Office of Arts & Culture, Smart Ventures Program, and Signal Fire Coop—without which this project would never have made it into your ears, dear listener.

Shelby: Thank you to all of our mentors and teachers. Thank you to our ancestors. We feel you with us. We’re hoping the feeling is mutual.

[Show music continues and fades out slowly]