Ways of Awe: Bonus Episode

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Hi dear listeners.

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We’re back. We propped the gates open for a little longer for an unexpected bonus episode.

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If Ways of Awe was a meaningful companion for your days of awe, will you help us make season two possible? Find the fundraiser link in the show notes. Thank you so much for listening close to these prayers with us. It’s good to be here together.

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And now on to the bonus episode.

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

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So we’re taking part in creation by speaking these words. And a slowness. Heartbroken. Full blessing, full connection. So whatever that’s possibly worth in this moment.

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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.

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I’m Maya. I’m Shelby. Welcome to Waves of Awe, an audio companion to the prayers and rituals of the Jewish High Holidays.

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Um we wanna 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.

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We’ve been studying together for years, and ways of awe share some of our translation experiments.

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Woven together with research and soundscapes from where we live and pray. All with the help of mentors, friends, and ancestors. Known and unknown.

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Sound as touch, sound as touch. Sound as touch. And our ancestors knew it. All these things are trying to access you in every possible way to break you open.

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It’s crowded inside these prayers. But there’s room. Come on in. Days of awe. Last night the book of life opened wide as a gash that won’t clot for ten days. Another impossible year gestates in front of us like a threat. Elsewhere, names of the future dead are being written. The wind blows. We hear the pages rustle, but where? What else can we do to stop the hand, to bleed the pen, to shred the ledger? My comrade says the world is underwater and we’re tired of losing. He’ll drive to Asheville after synagogue, car loaded with Gatorade and batteries and bandages. FEMA announces a nine billion dollar shortfall. On the same day, Israel receives 8.7 billion from the US and bombs Gaza, Lebanon, Syria, Yemen. We debate, is despair a feeling or a luxury? A political project manufactured by our opposition, by those who coerce us to forget we have power and can win? Who will perish by fire and who by water? Who by bomb and who by plague? Who will be named and who will be numbered? Who will be at rest and who will wander about? Does the world of our ancestors careen towards us or us towards it? How much of awe is fear, and how much is wonder? Before you answer, know that the first draft of this poem was all about love. Here are the lines that I started with. There is the tenderness of my dog falling asleep, standing with her head on my knee. There is the tenderness of strangers wearing kaffias on the train, making eye contact, nodding toward the world we need. There is the tenderness of beloved singing in the police van after the protests, wrists zip tied behind their backs, heads leaning on each other’s shoulders. I couldn’t say all that and mean it without saying everything else first.

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And to do that together on unseated Koselish Duwamish land at this very cuspy time of the last Shabbos, the Shabbat, before Kol Nidre.

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And it’s so cool to have you all here because we’re at Jack Straw Cultural Center. Give it up for Jack Straw. This is where we recorded this project, and this project wouldn’t have been possible without it. So it’s very sweet to bring you all into this space. Right after we released this project, Lainey Solomon, who’s one of our mentors and one of the brilliant people we interviewed on the podcast, they reminded us that a Talmud volume, a meseket, literally means a woven thing. And they were like, What you made is a tapestry. And studying Talmud is what brought Maya and I together as collaborators, which basically means that our collaboration began with us like hunched over Hebrew and Aramaic dictionaries. And I went digging around this word meseka, and I found, as usual, a few very weird and very beautiful meanings and examples, including a web of unfinished stuff on a loom, woven stuff, examples being a morning veil or a bed covering. And so once again, the strange poetry of the dictionary delivered. We should be so lucky if what we made is a woven thing. That really was our goal for this project. And maybe the warp of it, the threads that are tug tight when you start on a loom, maybe that is the prayers and their histories, and maybe the weft under and over the warp. Maybe that’s all the sounds that are included, the retranslations, all of our friends saying really smart stuff to us. And um all of that weaving becoming something that could be a veil for grief or a soft sheet to pull over us. We really hope that’s what we made. We hope we made a woven thing. And also, unfinished stuff on a loom definitely hits.

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Um, and thank you, of course, to all of the storytellers that you’ll hear tonight. And to all of you who are listening and have been listening. This was an experiment, arguably many little experiments over years. And when we started, we were making a little sonic space for ourselves to grapple with this season, these rituals, these texts. And it’s beyond our wildest imaginings how many of you have joined us here. It’s a very good surprise.

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And we will keep weaving with all of you tonight. More threads, more sounds, more poems, more teachings. Welcome to Ways of Awe Live.

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Sali Lauren and Stephanie Fox, who will be responding to Al Khait, Jenny Asarno, who will be featuring field recordings that they generously lent to Ways of Awe. And finally, Rachel Edelman and Devin Nahr, who will be responding to Kaddish. Weaving all of these offerings together, we have our amazing house band who you heard as you came in.

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Jimmy Austin, Peter Lippman, and Lori Andrus. And as Maya already said, we’re gathering at the end of Shabbat Shuva. And so the veil is thin, the portal is open, the gates are open. So it’s a really ripe time for reflection, your own accounting, Chuva. So we will have some prompts in the middle, just some brief time. If you want to like journal, you can also sit and we’ll let y’all know when it’s time for that. And with that, we’re gonna get started.

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To me, Kol Nidre is uh the crack if we think about the hinge of the year. Kol Nidre is that first incantation prayer that calls us into place for this day. And um the day itself of Yom Kippur to me is sort of like its own year cycle. You know, you go through so much and you start with this somber dirge and you end breaking bread with your friends and the family and hanging out and singing. And like, how can one day incorporate so much? Um but uh this is a poem I wrote a long time ago um when I realized that I actually didn’t have to sit in Jul all day for young people, which I’m hopefully is an experience that we’ve all had too. Um and you know, these words um that I grew up saying every year, um the call and response, um, the listening. The translations were meaningful to me about all vows. Um but they also sometimes become sort of a summons, right? Where you stop listening to the words and you just say them uh and you are thinking something totally different. And so um, this is a poem about sort of the things I’m daydreaming about in school and when I’m not paying attention to whatever’s happening. So maybe I’ll have uh our literal readings and um our personal readings this year. I watch the year float by in a small room with no doors and no windows. Today is about focus. I touch the sharpness of hunger for a few hours and consider my needs, every promise and failing. I measure all my most accessible pleasures, the soft hands, the hard-earned money, the roast bird, and consider their worth. I think I am happy. I am good. I think I am still hungry and afraid of the darkness that pours into this room and lingers. Yesterday I was heavy with commitments. Today I call them regrets and watch them dissolve like crumbs in holy water. Today is our tiny catastrophe from which we will all recover. I squint up at the year and know that I own nothing, just awe. My debts are all owed to a single disruption, a small opening in September, a lake that swallows when I spit from a dry mouth, a moon that bends and bends and bends and bends like the year toward a new start before breaking.

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And for the sin we have sinned before you of hardening the heart. And the last line of Psalm 27, the psalm that permeates the liturgy of Elul in the high holidays, reads, Kaveh el Hashem, Khazak the Yametzlibecha, the Kaveh El Hashem. Wait for Hashem, be strong and courageous, wait for Hashem. And that phrase, be courageous in Psalm 27, Ya Metzlibecha, comes from the same root and root combination as Imutzhaleev, hardening of the heart. Yametzlibecha literally means something like your heart will be hardened. So that whole phrase, right, says, wait for Hashem, be strong and your heart will be hardened. So this triumphant final line of this hopeful psalm tells us that one of the very first sins that we ask for forgiveness for is also something that we must do, we will do, while we wait for Hashem. And what are we waiting for? For me, I’m not waiting on some personal mashiach, a personal redeemer to show up and redeem us. Um, but I am an anarchist. And I um I uh I hold out hope and I wait for for a revolution and or revolutionary change in the way that I think Chabad holds out hope that the Rebbe’s somewhere in the tunnels waiting to redeem us. Um if if we’ve learned anything as as people fighting for liberation, people who believe in a liberatory future, as freedom fighters from the last year, the last three years, the last five years, the last ten years, the last hundred years, we’ve learned that we cannot trust everyone and everything. Because when we are truly a threat to the established order, they will come for us. Like they did to the Black Panthers, like they did to Solidarity Encampments from UW to Colombia, like the IDF does every day to Palestinians, they will infiltrate our ranks, they will snatch us from our homes, and they will kill us. So we harden our hearts to the cops, to the ICE agents, to the fascists. As we wait for that beautiful future that we know one day must come, because it’s always coming, and it must one day come. As we build these resilient networks of resistance, as we fight in the streets, as we wait for this messianic revolution, we must be strong and we must harden our hearts. But on Yom Kippur in our Al-Hate, we remind ourselves and we ask for forgiveness, because we remember that this is fundamentally against the natural order of things, that this is against God. We ask for forgiveness, not just for all those things, those horrible things that God forbid we did or someone we know did, but for those things that we must do, but that have no place in our beautiful utopia. And Yom Kippur is said to be one of the happiest days of the Jewish calendar. There’s many reasons why this could be true, but maybe one is because tomorrow night, when we beat our chests, we can break down the barricades that we’ve built around our hearts, and maybe glimpse a world beyond the barricades. We can see our own Olam Haba, that world that is always coming. And we can get a glimpse of what Psalm 27 is telling us to wait for. If we wait, if we fight, if we remain strong, and harden our hearts when we must. So this Yom Kippur, in not that long at all, I hope for just a second to meet you when the barricades come down in that beautiful world, in that place where the wild birds call. If just for a moment, I’ll see you there.

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I’ll hate until not sins. I chant a litany of atrocities, but what is happening to you overflows every word made for it. Alone at this autumn shore, the water is dark and unreflecting, finding only the shame of my own damp shoes in the darkness, sky a veil slung too low, and yours lit with death at every hour. Not prayer book, I study the shrouds, your child’s impossible smallness, infant held fast in your arms without sound. Not fist, I am curved around the toil. If I could build a bridge of effort from which you could cross out of that fire, I would, I will, I would, but when, but when. Not chest, I am beating the soil, forest floor, knees abraded, ankles braided with root, pounding and clawing, despair, another word for wildness when I let it break me. The world is not made for this. The dirt agrees. Turning, I see us. Not prayers, we are the trembling of water, not words, not cries, not trying. We have failed all year. Forgive us. This liturgy, our swell, a tidal pull against the cruelty, desperate to unbury the night sky. We are not wrong, just longing to restore the world to itself, knowing we cannot make it there alone, knowing it is the will to join that returns land to sky, star to water, wave to earth. When at last weather parts to reveal the moon on the slick of the black creek, the mirror will score, restoring the surface into a shimmering bridge of sound and light and wave, and there we will be carrying, carrying the city.

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But we’re about halfway through, and we just wanted to take a moment because the portal’s open. What I’m gonna invite you all to do is actually something we had all of our guests do at the end of all the interviews that we did. We asked two questions of our guests. What does emptiness make possible? And we also asked, what are the risks of emptiness? And so once people are set up, what I’m gonna do is I’m gonna ask you these two questions over and over. And so I’m gonna keep asking it, and when we did it with our guests, they were responding verbally, right? So I would say, what does emptiness make possible? They’d say everything. Then I’d say, what does emptiness make possible? So every time I ask it, try to answer it in a new way or repeat the same thing. And we’ll just keep going and then I’ll switch to the second question. Okay. What does emptiness make possible? What does emptiness make possible? What does emptiness make possible? What does emptiness make possible? What are the risks of emptiness?

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The sounds you just heard are sounds from the Salish Sea. They’re sounds from both above the water and within it, including sounds recorded by scientists who record orca whales, as well as a fish called the Plainfin Midshipman that makes those humming sounds and growls. So I wanted to start with that bit of wonder. When Maya and Shelby told me they were creating this project, I was very excited because it brings together two parts of my reality that I hold very dear. One being this Jewish community that we share, and the other the practice of creating narrative audio. And both of those I find to be sacred practices that are very connective. So a few years back I created a project with another artist named Rachel Lahm about our relationships and responsibilities towards the Salish Sea and connecting waters. It’s called Saltwater Soundwalk. And similarly to Ways of Awe, it’s also probably best described as an audio collage, or I like the tapestry term now as well. So Rachel, my collaborator, she’s an enrolled member of the Cherokee Nation, and their work is focused on indigenous language. And Rachel also grew up right near the Ship Canal, which is where this project was located. It’s also like an audio walk. Rachel invited representatives of a lot of the local tribes to contribute recordings about their favorite water places and include language that they wanted to share. So we wanted to connect our collective experience in a specific place and time near the ship canal and connecting waters to places and times near and far to that, um, distant, past, speculative and approximate. So the sounds you hear in ways of R are audio recordings that we created for that project.

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Yes, there was a chief rabbi of Gaza in the 16th century, Israel Najara, when all of Palestine was part of the Ottoman Empire. And Israel Najara is a very fascinating figure because he created the liturgical melodies that would be adopted by Sephardic communities all across the Muslim world. He created his own Hebrew poems, and he melded together Spanish styles of music with Arabic styles of music, with Turkish and Greek styles of music, and he became very, very popular. And so what did his opponents accuse him of having sex with men and with married women. Now, it is possible that he did have sex with other men and married women, because we know that in the Ottoman Empire and in the Muslim world more generally, having same-sex sex was pretty standard at the time. And in fact, in another part of the Ottoman Empire, in Saranika, the city my own family comes from, where they lived within one square kilometer for 450 years, my own ancestors. The rabbis there issued a decree in the 18th century that said that young men who are unmarried are not allowed to study alone at the yeshiva. Why? Because they will definitely have sex with each other if they are left alone. In the 19th century in the Ottoman Empire, a case comes before a rabbi in the city of Izmir on the Aegean Sea just across from Salonika. A person who was born a woman now lives his life as a man. What do we do with this person? And this rabbi, who is in the Ottoman Empire in the Muslim world, says, treat this person like a man. It’s very fascinating, 1896. And when the trans-affirming community in the 1970s, the Jewish community here in the United States were looking for precedents for how to validate trans-identity, they found one. One modern precedent, which was this ruling from the Ottoman Empire. Now, thinking about anti-Zionism in this context also raises some interesting possibilities. Because for Jews in the Ottoman Empire, Palestine was already part of their country. From what is today Greece and Turkey to Egypt to Israel-Palestine to Lebanon to Syria to Iraq, one country. So when the Zionist movement emerges, many of the leaders of the Jewish communities of the Ottoman Empire are like, what are you doing exactly here? You are going to try to separate our Palestinian, Muslim, and Christian neighbors from us. You are going to divide the space. You are going to imagine that this is a place that has no people, a land without a people for people without a land? And they say, no, that’s not the case. Not only are there Palestinians who live here, we live here too. This leads me to thinking about the Kadisha tom, the Mourner’s Kaddish. Because I think about it maybe on the grand scale. About a whole world of possibilities that have been lost to us. Difficult even to fathom that they once could have existed. And I mourn those losses. And I mourn the ruptures between those worlds and our world today. And for me personally, I think about my Minhag coming from Solonika, a community decimated by the Holocaust. And I think about my own politics and my own ideology, and I feel a sense of orphanhood. Orphaned in an Ashkenazi-dominant leftist space, often, and orphaned in an often right-wing Zionist Sephardic space. But I still feel that I have the power of inspiration that comes from my lineage. Here I have the bilingual Hebrew Ladino Mahsor that my great uncle, Rafael, who became Roberto and then Robert, or when I knew him in the 80s, as he called himself Bob, because he couldn’t say Bob. He was born in the Ottoman Empire in 1899. And he came to the United States unauthorized, pretending to be a Mexican, during an era in which, if you can believe it, it was easier to enter this country as a Mexican than it was as a Jew from Greece or Turkey. He served as a Hazan of our Sephardic congregation in New Jersey for 40 years, and it’s from him that I learned some of the Sephardic liturgy. Interestingly, in this Maxur, which is also from 1899, the year that he was born, the era of Sultan Abdul Hamid II, which it says on the front cover, and to make sure that we don’t make too rosy of a picture of this past, he was the one who initiated the massacres of Armenians that would culminate in the Armenian genocide. Khadish Yatom Monar’s Kadesh appears here how many times? No times. And I wonder if it’s related to something that Sali said earlier about the happiness that we may associate with Yamin Noahim and especially with Yom Kippur. And the introduction to this Maqsur, I will read it to you in Ladino here, and I’ll tell you what it says. Maybe you’ll understand. Which means this holy day, the day before Yom Kippur begins, in the lead up to Yom Kippur, is considered like a feast day, Moed. And one should be happy on this day, and it should be filled with the mitzvah of enjoyment and happiness. And one should eat and drink and prepare the home as if it were a feast day. And the person who is happy on this day is counted as if they fasted. And then it refers to a biblical passage in Leviticus that specifically points out eating well in the lead-up to the sundown of Yom Kippur is in fact a commandment. But it also relates more broadly to Tammuric concepts around Yom Kippur. In Bhava Batra, it says, Yom Kippur is the ultimate day of joy because it is a day when we obtain forgiveness and pardon. Rambam Maimonides said that Yom Kippur is the climax of forgiveness. Different cultural contexts, different attitudes, different approaches. But the Mur’s Kaddish would be said in a Sephardic congregation on Yom Kippur. Everybody knew what the Mur’s Qadish was, and the Kadish is repeated many times in the service. It is used for many different things. I was looking in the Ladino newspapers. Some people really did not like the Qadish for this reason. Said, you put a Kadish here, you put a Kadish here. Kadish, every you do, it’s all purpose thing, it loses its specificity. But here we have the full kadish, and I will chant it for you in the style of my great uncle and the Jews of Salamika.

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Uphide the Hol Beth Israel Bagalau Vismankariven. Yesmerabame vorach Lealamul mealmaya, It Barah Vishtabach, Vit Pavitraman, in a Sevitar Vita Levitalal, Shemedekudeshaberehu, Le Alaming Holbirhata, Shirata Tushbehata, Venehemata Damiram, Vru Amen Ali Sra Valbanan, Valtamidhon, Velkol Tamidatamidhon, the skin barata, Kadishta, Vetra, Hadin Vede Bekolatar Vatar, Yehe Lanu, La Hon Hinavik is Dabrahameh, Min Kadam Mireshama, the Rab The Imru Amen, Yehe Shlam Rabba Min Shamaya Hhaim, the Savaveshua Nechamavesh, the vowel for the glaves, the Kaparaba Rebak la Hasalbanu mechal, a moy sorael the imru amen, or se shalom, but a mabi ashalamaleno the alcohol, a moy sorael the imru amen.

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It asks us to visit the world to come. Two months ago, I visited the Jewish cemetery in Seruk, Poland, and I walked along a path lined with fractured headstones. They were propped up at an angle, kind of like an exhibit, and they were stripped from their bodies. Bodies that, according to the placards, were no longer there. My feet sank in the Polish mud, and I remembered the old section of my Memphis Temple Cemetery, where stones crowded close, stones whose bodies had also been stripped of their names. I wrote this poem I’m about to read in English in 2021, and my Yiddish translation of it began that day in Zerok. The eyes get vocal, the self was my side had former up to stellen all in Zimmer. Up melh cadence, geduld they solen sich to her. By welchem him to begrizen, the trap von my readden had geknacked with the halberd. A manch can sign circle can sein shreckle ruik. When the temple hot verkoift the karke in the center shot man ebergellost the mason ungeru spirgal hot mech gelern as a metaboline those was a schrift lane machtsechor the mineral grand von a pain the molt in the tongue enough English Enough with the past let me deal with the dead Past the microphone past the glass I clocked the resistant squint cornering the old man’s eyes the drawn-out vowels the same as my grandfather formed to call the room to a halt slow cadence patience to make them hear you He bought the table where I ate my fill where to greet him my syllables clicked to half speed Yes Men can be gentle Men can be terrifying calm When the temple sold the plot downtown they left the bodies and moved the stones The hill taught me how a rubbing holds what a reading hand the jaw wrecks itself taste the mineral edge of a bone ground down in the clinch them so I’m in mia in a mia in a mia in a mia in a mia This is my setting of a Trina published in the eighteen thirties.

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Quoting Maika from Nevaim, it says, And you will cast all your guilt into the deep of the sea, so you can be like the one who does not hold their anger forever because they delight in pardoning. Trinas are an Ashkenazi women’s and genderqueer prayer practice, mostly in Yiddish, mostly outside of or parallel to Davanin and Shul, prayer and synagogue, not dissimilar from Prikantes in Ladino. This text is used for when we go to living waters before Yom Kippur and we empty our pockets of breadcrumbs or a handful of pebbles and cast them into the water so we can watch all that we want to let go of from the year that’s passing sink or drift or rush away from us. Maybe we can hear its weight break the surface and then recede. Maybe we can feel the air change around us as it arcs out of our hands. Some of us used this Trina earlier today in the Ravenna Ravine. What was once a Duamish canoe route before colonization destroyed 14 longhouses and fragmented our watershed. The sun is setting. Let’s try on some of these niggins, these nigunim wordless melodies. Some of the Yiddish or the Loishan Koidish, the Ashkenazi Hebrew. There’s a call and response. There are other places that you can lend your voice. Welha net after in zorg. Waarom gaf het, geset hoor, er god liefgen. Er god lief genoeg. Waarom gaf het gez het hoor? Er god lief genoeg. Er gaat lief genoeg. Waarom gaf het ges het hoor? Er god lief genoeg. Er tot lief genoeg The Trina ends by citing to Hillim psalms associated with Tashlich that remind us that we can never take refuge in authoritarians. We can never trust princes. No kings, Nidkane Mylet, are sacrificing our children to kings. Nitkin Sadek, no justice, Nitkane’s Jolim, no peace. Nitkin’s card deck, Nitkin Jolim, Nitkin in Medalet, Nitkin in my let.

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All episodes edited by Maya Brown, Audio Engineering by Daniel Gunther.

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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.

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Thank you to our friends Ross Kirshenbaum or Lavona, Jimmy Austin, and Peter Lippmann for our show music, and to Jenny Asarno for their field recordings.

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Thank you to the Jackstraw Cultural Center Artist Support Program, the King County Office of Arts and Culture Smart Ventures Program, and the Signifier Co-op, without which this project would never have made it into your ears, dear listener.

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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.