Weaving together interpretative translations, research, interviews, and sounds, Ways of Awe is a queer anti-Zionist audio companion for the Jewish High Holidays. Join talmud scholars, rabbis, and artists as they unearth the meanings, grammar, and ancient gossip inside the holiest prayers of the Jewish year. Created by Maia Brown and Shelby Handler, these audio collages range from meditative to liberatory, grief-stricken to playful, irreverent to awestruck, and from the ancestral to the immediate.
From Rosh Hashanah to Yom Kippur, the Days of Awe, or the Yamim Noraim, are a portal for collective reckoning and return. Each episode of Ways of Awe features a different prayer and could be listened to during the ten days, or in the month of Elul leading up. Whenever and wherever these sounds find you, we hope they deepen your relationship to and reinvention of our annual traditions—in service of diasporic flourishing and decolonial imagining.
Listen
Stream the episodes wherever you listen to podcasts or at the Signal Fire links below, along with show notes and transcripts. You can also download Ways of Awe to support the project and have these episodes at your fingertips, or you can donate any amount to support the co-op hosting us.
Episode 1: Introduction
This episode of Ways of Awe introduces the project through an informal conversation with its creators, Maia Brown and Shelby Handler.
Episode 2: Kol Nidre
This episode of Ways of Awe features the Kol Nidre (“All Vows”), the prayer that opens Yom Kippur as the sun sets.
Episode 3: Al-Cheyt
This episode of Ways of Awe features the Al Cheyt prayer, one of the central atonement prayers of Yom Kippur–a primary part of the Vidui, or Confession.
Episode 4: Kaddish
This episode of Ways of Awe features the Mourner’s Kaddish, a prayer that’s recited year-round, but has a particular charge during the Days of Awe.
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