i. landcestors & plantcestors
ii. divine mystery
iii. ancestors & frameworks
iv. braiding lineages
v. naming teachers
on lineage & background
there are lands that grow you and lands that you are grown from. lënapehòkink is the land that has grown me & held my life. in longer lineage time, i am grown from the bison, sweetgrass, black sea coasts, and ever-witnessing birch forests of borderless yiddishland & the balkans where my jewish lineages, through my dad, lived. through him, i am a 3rd generation settler in the cities now known as philly & camden. im a longer time 6 gen. settler on tulpehakink // turtle island through my mom’s lineages—who in longer-time were grown from the wild atlantic cliffs and willowy salmon waters of éire, alba, & cymru, the mountains and forests of alsaice & bavaria, and the shimmering iberian peninsula of the mediterranean, birthplace of the jewish mystic tradition of kabbalah.
on landcestors
coming from healers, medicine makers, & a lunisolar ethnoreligion with deeply connective land-based rituals and practices, i similarly want to name and honor the plants, trees, and flowers that grow me and that these lineages have grown from. this is an ever growing// changing // incomplete list.
i honor the towering maple, walnut, sycamore, pine, cedar, & locust trees that grew me since childhood in philly; the willow, birch, oaks, linden & pines of yiddishland; the ancient yew, holly, hawthorn, hazel, rowan, & ash trees of éire & alba; and the olive, lemon, fig, date, mastika, & pomegranate trees of the mediterranean, especially those whose lives have been uprooted and destroyed by zionist violence.
i also honor the plantcestors [word teaching: layla feghali via myrto daskaloudi] that have been used by my lineages as medicine: solstice (st. johns wort), calendula, violet, chamomile, horsetail, rosemary, calendula, plantain, rue, yarrow, myrrh, nettle, aloe, nutmeg, clove, water lily, comfrey, fennel, saffron, rose, za’atar, thyme, sage, myrtle, lavender, motherwort, and countless others (working on cataloguing these, too, in my lineages’ names for them.)
on plantcestors
there’s much to say about divine mystery: the ways we deepen, across the arcs of lifetimes, how to trust, divine, venerate, and learn from // alongside honorable ancestors. there’s also much to say about lineages of exile, displacement, and genocide, when there is so much you “can’t know” —at least in a meter or measurement controlled & validated only by empire. there are so many ways we must go beyond blood and bone and writing when the tracings and stories are incomplete to honor ancestral relationships by being in a place of constant openness, as well as reverent, active listening, & observation [teaching from ari felix].
in keeping with these mysteries, i have slowly come to trust that i come from sefardi lineages alongside the ashkenazi ones i grew up with, through years now of carefully and intentionally incorporating sefardi rituals, practices, amulet making, plant medicine, music, & language into my life; including through ritual bulsika making over years of caregiving for my dads health, & eventually through the ritual portal of his death. im only ready to name this because of the support from my rabbi, sefardi community members im deeply grateful for, as well as years now of interpreting emotion, dreams, visions, feeling, listening, and memory recognition. im also curious about the hope i feel when imagining some sort of repair, reclamation, stitching, & ancestral healing when it comes to my non-jewish iberian peninsula lineages, as i envision the ways they could have harmed or been in deep community with their sefardi neighbors in the golden age of al andalus.
many port cities of the black sea were not only centers of sefardi-ashkenazi connection, intermarriage, and braidings of customs, but also sites of ancient greek port cities and settlements that grew alongside and were inextricably intertwined with their neighbors. the influence of these ecosystems of trade & cultural exchange create deep connectivity. after a lifetime of reverence, fascination, & study of the mythologies, deities, language & landscapes of Ελλάδα — i have also realized how much of this is ancestral memory as i’ve come to venerate, pray to, divine, & work with the greek deity pantheon; asteria Ἀστερία, athena Ἀθηνᾶ, aphrodite Ἀφροδίτη, amphitrite Ἀμφιτρίτη; as well as the gorgon medusa Γοργόνα Μέδουσα & sorceress circe μάγισσα Κίρκη.
all of this followed my obtaining a degree in “classical & near eastern” archaeology (2019) where i wrote about landscape divinity and gendered rites of passage; as well as experienced my profound & transformative first time touching the earth and waters of Ελλάδα (2018) when i lived and worked for several months in athens at the museum of cycladic art. it was this journey, and my first time traveling solo, when i realized everything i had always been interested in was for deeper reason. it was touching that earth & looking out on those waters that i started to write my first poetry, move towards the paths of divination, ancestor veneration, and ritual learning of all of my lineages—and commit more intentionally to the forms of astrology, divination, and mythological meaning-making that my lineages have practiced for hundreds, or thousands, of years. in this way, ellada//greece has been a compass central to all of this.
it is with deep reverence, curiosity, trust, and lots of ??? that i feel grounded in my divine-mystery-suspicions that my balkan & black sea jewish ancestors made it to those lands by way of living, learning, trading, & loving in Ελλάδα. greece is a connector and conduit; it draws and pulls so many in exactly because it has always been a crossroads [teaching: myrto daskaloudi]. honoring the living & breathing land, culture, people, & its magic is intertwined with honoring the emotions, dreamscapes, and visions that have been lovingly offered & extended to me since my childhood.
on divine mystery
the ancestor framework i follow is polytheist, animist, & focused on land-based rituals of the ecosystems my lineages come from.
the jewish practices and ancestors i venerate are of the Land & trees; the waters of prophecy; the moon as our guide. because judaism is an ancient ethnoreligion, it has existed for millennia before there were any conceptions of institutionalized “religion.” our holidays and months follow the cycles of the moon & seasonal// agricultural changes in the land. jewish ethos demands arguments, questions, and opinions. it values imperfection, rest, teshuvah (repair, accountability, and transformation), the deeply mystical traditions of kabbalah and hasidism, & the vastness of all we will never know.
jewishness also holds core beliefs of ein sof— our infinite neverendingness— and the shema — that god represents our interconnected oneness. sometimes ill describe this in shorthand as everything is everything [teaching: lauryn hill, later noname].
im inspired by and often describe my jewishness in a way many have described islām: like a crystal clear river always taking on the colors of the bedrocks it flows through [dr. umar faruq abdullah]. in this way, my jewishness acts as the framework through which the traditions, deities, rituals, and lands of my other lineages flow.
in other words, the water ((my jewishness)) flows with rich motion, circulation, and connectivity over the river rocks and roots of my other lineage traditions; in turn taking on the colors of my animism, poly//pantheism, and reverent engagement with the land, deities & spirits of Ελλάδα // the greek pantheon, as well as the land, deities, & divination practices of éire & alba ((like the ogham)).
the jewish tree of life, sense of divine mystery, & our perceptions // experiences of time as a spiral, rather than linear, allows us to permeate and time travel our healing and traditions across lands and eras. these spiritual and cultural frameworks have also survived for thousands of years exactly because they have been rooted outside of institutionalized spaces, and woven deeply into mundane rituals, divinatory, astrological, herbal wisdoms, prayers, and cultural ways of life kept alive largely by women & gender expansive community in priestess roles, homes, music & storytelling spaces, and birth//death//grief portals and rites.
indigenous spiritualities, land-based ethnoreligions like judaism, and global folk traditions all together represent only 7% of the worlds traditions. they are ancient and will never be defined by modern understandings, or projections, of religion, practice, “orthodoxy,” or language [teaching: zohare jacobi]. (judaism also insists that i argue with god, & im an aquarius sun stellium, so you can’t tell me shit about jewish “monotheism”.)
and very importantly: judaism is thousands of years of history: not the fascist, genocidal regime of zionism. my spiritual framework seeks to honor every lineage murdered by fascism & genocidal regimes, & the exiles from the many Lands, trees, and plantcestors we've lived symbiotically with. it's also a practice of honoring our beginnings through which we can be more reverent of the world's constant becomings. this includes my being a years-long devotee of asherah—the sacred tree mother goddess of cana’an from which the first jewish traditions were birthed— as well as anat and astarte, cana’anite goddesses of power, war, sexuality, fertility. patriarchal—and largely christofascist— ideas and understandings of judaism, and projections of “religions” as a whole, conveniently reject any and all conceptions and earliest gestations that grew & shaped our vast traditions. this does no justice to radical traditions of jewish feminist liberation theologies, militant antifascist resistance, histories of developing and teaching labor movement & union organization tactics like striking, nor the forest, & land rights that jews have held close and often fought for until death— in solidarity with their marginalized, indigenous, and antifascist neighbors. it is through weaving our beginnings and constant becomings that we assert our roots: roots that anchor us like asherah, mother of all trees, in the movement for a free palestine; in creating a world without empire, genocide, borders, imperialism, prisons, abuse.
on ancestors, pantheons, & frameworks
i believe in the divine timing of deep diving into ancestors and lineages when they make themselves known to us // in trusting they will reach us in our moment of readiness // that the ancestors of different lineages will reach to us at different times // that it’s important to braid the lineages together as they open to us. this kind of intuition and trust has been my guide since i began moving towards this lifelong work, and has been especially shaped by textures of grief and loss ((broken//openness.))
there are a million ways to respond and track the past years of ancestral learnings// shapings// cordings //changes, but it was the grief of the world changing in 2020 that led me to walk away from academia to more reverently and pandemic-safely show up for ancestral work and archiving// caregiving with my high risk dad; deeply trusting the call to learn more about our jewishness in all of its awe, beauty, and devastation. this is also the first time i was taught that antifascist work and my lifelong learning of political education—and unlearning the fascist miseducations of whiteness—would require anti-assimilationist recognition of the cultures and lands i come from [teachings: pita, dray, destiné]. this is also the first time i even began using the word “ancestor.”
and i don't think any story of braiding lineages would or could be anchored without disclosing the loss of my gentle, loving antizionist 89-year old dad (2024); the grief//joy//love i feel for him through this most devastating loss of my life is the center around which this journey and everything in my life// heart// mind is orbiting. he was a jazz musician for 82 years and a healer physician for over 60 years who spent his life listening to hearts; not just listening but really witnessing and responding. he carried this moral and political clarity and consistency through his life that informed his rejection of violent zionism, war, and constantly shaped // shapes me. dad also always listened and kvelled every time i learned something new about our lineages or our jewishness or rituals and history, and i could feel him smiling on me as i read through the collection of hopes and plans to make a pilgrimage to our ancestral yiddishlands for the first time (july 2025).
ive been steadily catapulted through loss and grief into more discovery with the portal of my moms moms death in the past year, right as that lineage started reaching out to me loudly. at the end of 2024 i hiked a snowy mountain and being with the birch trees brought me to a place of profound re//membrance with my pale of settlement ancestors but also began opening portals to these other éire // alba lineages making themselves known ((timing over time)) through shared symbolisms, animals, plants, trees, and even weather patterns. acknowledging these ancestral lands and climates has also made me think more deeply of disabled and chronically ill ancestors as i find occasional relief from my extremely painful new life of chronic pain & fatigue when in colder temperatures more akin to my ancestors homes.
now, i feel anchored and more whole as i begin braiding my lineages together; like they intuitively combine inside me and each lineage teachings make the other(s) make more sense. (my friend pita said, of course you feel more whole braiding them together— you are literally the embodiment of each of your lineages merging together to create you!”)
the ancestral portals of my matrilineal lineages have been opening up to me sometimes overwhelming quickly and abruptly, like the feeling of water that keeps spilling over but can't be stopped or slowed, just waded into & through.
i feel complexly about the ease with which some of this wisdom or information has made itself known to me:: maybe because of so many years working with my jewish ancestors who survived genocide im used to waiting or researching for eternities just to uncover a single name or place or idea; used to the grief and anger in all that i'll never know even if i spend my life searching. im trying to hold this heaviness and ease together in my hands.
i was told the story of fionn mac cumhaill agus an bradán feasa (& the salmon of wisdom) for the first time in early 2025 [storytold by dougie mackay, who shares one of my lineages names] within class series for ancestral remembrance of éire & alba [facilitated by aoife ní lodainn]. it was in this months-long series i learned that my lineage names are a mix of native gaelic, highland gaelic tribes, & the northern sea tribes of éire & alba— whose cultural exchange was immense because of the constant traveling between the two lands [teaching: àdhamh ó broin].
i haven't been able to stop thinking about the themes of accidental discovery and divinity // salmon as ancestral memory // water as change // revolutionaries as poets. ((at first i thought how "warrior poet" felt like an oxymoron, but then i remembered words of jewish partisans or interviews with hamas where every sentence felt like the most divine poetry on earth.))
salmon somehow find their way back to the rivers of their spawning thousands of miles away. this is how these portals feel:: an anchor that somehow we are meant to find our way back; that despite time & separation, it is our intuitive nature to remember.
𓆝 𓆟 𓆞
on braiding
on naming teachers
in jewish tradition, the great chain of wisdom is its own spiritual lineage that can be honored by naming teachers & attributing knowledge to sources. the sages of the talmud taught: “whoever repeats a statement in the name of the one who said it brings redemption into the world.” in the hopes of continuing this lineage of reverence & lifelong learning, i will be naming some of my many teachers below, and you will also find many places in my writings where a concept is [bracketed] with the name of the person who shared or led me to the teaching. this practice is less about naming the original source of the teaching, although those types of citation are also important, but more so is about transparently showing the chain of teaching in community.
