Jewish Ancestral Healing Podcast Season 1
hosted by Taya Mâ Shere
Jewish Ancestral Healing teacher and practitioner Taya Mâ Shere engages spiritual leaders, artists, activists and visionaries on their journeys of ancestral healing, embracing resilience, and ancestor reverence practices rooted in Jewish traditions and counter-oppressive devotion. May this offering be a portal of connection, that we may root in positive resource, remember ancient ways, reclaim and innovate new possibilities, and be deeply nourished by the well of our loving and wise ancestors.
Download from your favorite podcast platform, or listen directly below. Season 2 is available here.
Ep 1: Amidst the Blessing of the Ancestors w/ Taya Mâ Shere
Taya Mâ sets the context for our Sukkot Summit journey, and shares a bit of her story, how she came to the path of Jewish Ancestral Healing and how she orients in these realms. Taya Mâ invites us into the possibility of rooting in positive resource in the realms of ancestral connection and offers blessing and inspiration for our journey to come.
Taya Mâ Shere, summit host, plays passionately in realms of transformative ritual, embodied vocalization and ancestral reverence. She is co-founder of Kohenet Hebrew Priestess Institute, co-author of The Hebrew Priestess: Ancient and New Visions of Jewish Women’s Spiritual Leadership, and is on Assistant Professor of Organic Multireligious Ritual at Starr King School for the Ministry, training emergent clergy across faith traditions. Taya Mâ teaches Ancestral Lineage Healing, offering sessions virtually and workshops world-wide. She is a Somatic Experiencing practitioner and offers online courses including Embodied Presence, Jewish Ancestral Healing and Pleasure as Prayer. Taya Mâ’s Hebrew Goddess chant albums — This Bliss, Wild Earth Shebrew, Halluyah All Night and Torah Tantrika — have been heralded as “cutting-edge mystic medicine music.” www.taya.ma
Ep 2: Jewish Ancestral Plant Magic w/ Dori Midnight
Dori Midnight shares the honey-dripping alchemy of working with Jewish ancestral plants including garlic, cedar and pomegranate, as well as ways the wisdom of her grandmothers guide her to work and play for collective liberation.
Dori Midnight practices community rooted intuitive healing, helping people connect to and collaborate with everything- plants, stones, rituals and practices from their own ancestral traditions- for personal healing and collective liberation. Drawing on ancestral healing wisdom from her Ashkenazi/Sephardic Jewish lineage, Dori’s work is grounded in and enlivened by Disability and Healing Justice work and queer liberation. Dori was raised in the scrubby hills and neon malls of occupied Tongva/Chumash land (Los Angeles) and currently makes home on occupied Pocumtuc/Nipmuc land (Western Mass). https://dorimidnight.com
Ep 3: Reclaiming the Practice of Tkhines: Spontaneous Yiddish Prayer w/ Noam Lerman
Noam Lerman reclaims the power and practice of tkhines ~ spontaneous Yiddish prayers ~ sharing ways tkhines have been kept alive in their family and have been a home for women and gender-marginalized Ashkenazi Jews, as well as ways we can engage this practice of prayer from the heart today.
Rabbi Noam Vered Raye Berl Lerman [they/m] was raised in occupied Milwaukee, WI (Potawatomi, Ho-Chunk and Menominee homeland) with a strong connection to their Ashkenazi heritage, and carries Ashkenazi and Sephardi ancestors with them. Noam was ordained as a rabbi at Hebrew College and continues their studies in trauma response and crisis care through the Movement Trauma Healer Training Program. They teach teens, practice intuitive energy/ bodywork, lead prayer and song, and are on the core organizing team of Let My People Sing! They scribe personalized Hebrew amulets and mezuzos. Noam has served as a chaplain for elders, incarcerated, and previously incarcerated individuals from an abolitionist perspective, and is a Restorative Justice circle keeper. They are the founder of the online spiritual community Sha’arey Ometz Gates of Resilience, and Der Tkhines Proyekt, which supports the pairing of new melodies with tkhines liturgy. Noam believes that when we engage with tkhines as a sacred prayer practice, we can imagine and discover hidden stories and folk customs embedded in the words and in our own families. For new tkhines songs, follow the SoundCloud, and check out www.spontaneousprayer.com
Ep 4: Mizrahi Activism, Jerusalem in Exile, and the Sacred Practice of Falling on Ones Face w/ Hadar Cohen
Hadar Cohen weaves Mizrahi magic and activism through the lens of sacred arts, Jewish mysticism, and her ever-evolving relationship with longing and belonging, in relationship with exile and her ancestral homeland of Jerusalem.
Hadar is a feminist multi-media artist, healer and educator originally from Jerusalem. Her Mizrahi Jewish roots influence her approach to justice, healing, and spirituality. Hadar is the founder of Feminism All Night, a project that designs communal immersive learning experiences about feminism, and is the creator of Jerusalem In Exile, a psychosomatic film on the political and spiritual reality of Jerusalem. Hadar writes a new moon newsletter on the wisdom of Jewish time called "in loving faith". She teaches Jewish scripture and embodied practices through various platforms, including At The Well. Her artistic mediums include performance, movement, writing, weaving, sound and ritual. Hadar is currently a fellow at Abrahamic House, a multi-faith incubator for social change based in Los Angeles. You can check out more of her work at hadarcohen.me.
Ep 5: Spiritual Multiplicity: Weaving Mixed Ancestral Spirituality w/ Shoshana Akua Brown
Shoshana Akua Brown shares the blessings of weaving mixed ancestral spirituality, the practice of altars as a portal for connection, and ways that justice and ancestral tending go hand in hand, and ways that her existence is an expression of her ancestors deepest dreaming.
Shoshana is a healer, educator, and organizer working to transform the prison system as well as organizing with Jews of Color. Shoshana works as a Dean/Social Worker in New York City public schools, and is an adjunct professor at Silberman School of Social Work. She has facilitated and planned conferences and convenings of more than 200 prison activists, workshops and retreats on the Paulo Freire methodology, social work engagement, trauma, and group work. Shoshana is an Infinite Possibilities trainer and supports individuals working on taking action in their life and creating their dreams. She is a trained african dancer, practitioner of Reiki I, and a Yoga Teacher. She weaves earth based spiritual practice into Judaism through her training from the Urban Atabex and Kohenet Hebrew Priestess Institute. Shoshana is fierce, loving, and energetic. She is a Black- mixed race Jewish womxn who generates liberation and full self-hood in the essence of love. http://shoshanaakua.com/
Ep 6: Ancestors, Activism & the Poetics of Liberation w/ Rae Abileah
Rae Abileah shares stories of how activism became her portal for ancestral connection, invites us into ways ritual can be woven for justice, and dreams a poetics of liberation.
Rae Abileah is a social change strategist, author, editor, ritual facilitator, an advocate for collective liberation and economic justice, and an ordained Kohenet. Rae is a trainer and contributing editor at Beautiful Trouble and she is the co-creator of the global Climate Ribbon storytelling art ritual project. Rae was the co-director of CODEPINK Women for Peace for nearly a decade and was the recipient of the Rising Peacemakers Award from the Agape Foundation. Rae founded CreateWell consultancy to support people to create impactful events, publish books, coordinate strategic campaigns, mark life transitions with moving rituals, and achieve their wildest dreams. She is a contributing author to numerous books including Beautiful Trouble: A Toolbox for Revolution; Beyond Tribal Loyalties: Personal Stories of Jewish Peace Activists; Sisters Singing: Blessings, Prayers, Art, Songs, Poetry and Sacred Stories By Women; and Siddur HaKohanot: A Hebrew Priestess Prayerbook. Rae's matrilineage is Dutch and Belgian; her patrilineage is Israeli and Eastern European / Ashkenazi Jewish. She is a first-generation American on her father's side. Her ancestry informs her relationship to war and oppression, and her actions toward dismantling white supremacy. Her queer nature sparks her work toward shaking up entrenched patriarchal power dynamics and cultivating embodied, multi-gender, counter-oppressive communities. raeabileah.com
Ep 7: Ancestral Memory & the Queering the Creative Process w/ Riv Ranney Shapiro
Riv Ranney Shapiro sings their way into ancestral memory, queering the creative process and brings us along on their journey of ancestrally-inspired creations.
Riv Ranney Shapiro (they/them/theirs) is a queer Ashkenazi multi-modal artist, educator and ordained Kohenet living on Chochenyo Ohlone land. Their creative work is process-oriented and often participatory, reveling in the intersections of ancestors, interspecies relationship, justice, queerness and spirituality. Blending the roles of Educator, Priestess and Artist, Riv is dedicated to sharing the wisdom and the medicine of their Jewish ancestors through adaptive, accessible, and liberatory means. Riv’s multimedia project “fragments” explores how we remember what’s been forgotten, following their journey of recovering the stories and strengths of their Romanian Jewish ancestors who migrated to Minneapolis at the turn of the 20th century. In 2020 Riv was selected as a Rising Song Fellow with the Hadar Institute and Joey Weisenberg, and they look forward to deepening their songwriting and leadership in that container. For music, film and Kohenet services, visit rivshapiro.com.
Ep 8: Liberation, Decolonization & the Ancestors w/ YA (Yocheved Angelique) Rivera
YA (Yocheved Angelique) Rivera drops ancestral wisdom on collective liberation, decolonization and the power of claiming Jewish identity and remembering hidden Jewish ancestral roots.
(Ya/Yaya) Angelique, transparently and irreverently is a Liberation Coach + Priestess/Kohenet + Consultant. Passionate about justice, equity, and healing, she brings a unique framework to support the collective. Revealing the path to healing and a shift in consciousness, recognizing that we all have spheres of influence that impact each other. Her passion is teaching practices that help us heal from trauma, decolonize and embody liberation.
http://www.AngeliqueGuides.net
Ep 9: The Eastern European Jewish Women's Tradition of Cemetery Measuring w/ Annie Kohen
Annie Kohen invites us into feldmestn, the Eastern European Jewish women's tradition of cemetery-measuring, as an embodied practice of honoring our beloved dead.
Annie is a Kohenet in training and a PhD student in Modern Jewish Studies at the Jewish Theological Seminary, New York. She is a Yiddish translator and teacher, and has created a website www.pullingatthreads.com to share her translations of Yiddish texts relating to women's rituals and magics. https://www.pullingatthreads.com
Ep 10: Remembering the Ancient Ones & Dreaming into Restorative Justice w/ Lynn Gottlieb
Lynn Gottlieb speaks to her journey as one of the first women rabbis, tells stories of the ancient ones and the power of naming, and asks us to dream into restorative justice.
Rabbi Lynn Gottlieb, one of the first women to become a rabbi in Jewish history, is a pioneer Jewish feminist, human rights activist, writer, visual artist, ceremonialist, community educator and master storyteller. Lynn has been a congregational rabbi since the fall of 1973, and founded the Congregation Nahalat Shalom in Albuquerque, NM, in 1980. Lynn engages in multifaith, intergenerational and multicultural organizing in solidarity with racial, indigenous, gender justice and Palestinian liberation struggles. Currently, Lynn serves as Director of Youth and Family Programming at Chochmat Halev and sits on the Rabbinic Council of Jewish Voice for Peace. She is board chair of Interfaith Movement for Human Integrity and a member of the organizing team of The Grassroots Reparations Campaign, a black led organization dedicated to reparations as a healing pathway. Rabbi Lynn is the author of several books, including Peace Primer II, She Who Dwells Within: A Feminist Vision of Renewed Judaism, World Beyond Borders Passover Haggadah and Trail Guide to the Torah of Nonviolence.
Ep 11: Ancestors, Resilience & Priestessing in Times of Crisis w/ Keshira haLev Fife
Keshira haLev Fife invites us to embody resilience, shares her experience priestessing in the wake of the Tree of Life Synagogue shooting, and speaks to intersections of her Ashkenazi and Filipinx ancestral identities and legacies.
Kohenet Keshira haLev Fife sprinkles sparkles, disrupts expectations, and offers blessings wherever she goes. As Executive Director of the Kohenet Hebrew Priestess Institute, she delights in supporting organizational growth and serving as part of the faculty. She also pours love and intention into her work as founder and leader of Kesher Pittsburgh, Program Director of the ALEPH Kesher Fellowship, and more broadly as a shlichat tzibbur, life spiral ceremony/ritual creatrix, liturgist, songstress, teacher and public speaker. Her work in these realms is informed by her lived experience as a queer Jewish Woman of Colour and the quandries she encounters as a scholar of the Orphan Wisdom School. Keshira received Kohenet smicha in 2017 and earned her BS 2000 and MS 2001 at Carnegie Mellon University. Dual-citizens of the USA and Australia and avid travelers, these days, she and her beloved are leaning into stillness and sheltering-in-peace at home in Pittsburgh, PA. http://www.keshirahalev.com
Ep 12: Bearing Witness in Auschwitz-Birkenau w/ Rami Avraham Efal
Rami Avraham Efal brings us to bear witness in Auschwitz-Birkenau, unpacking the radical act of showing up to honor the unthinkable, and inviting us to find healing and transformation in ceremonial silence.
Rami Avraham is a dharma holder in the Zen Peacemakers Lineage, the former executive director of Zen Peacemakers International, and a student of Zen teacher Bernie Glassman. Avraham is a facilitator of prayer, meditation, dialogue and nonviolent communication; a visual artist, an activist and a rabbi-& cantor-in training. For five years he has co-directed the multi-faith Zen Peacemakers bearing witness retreats in Auschwitz-Birkenau and the Native American Bearing Witness programs in the Black Hills South Dakota, Rami Avraham is an Israeli-American based in Brooklyn, New York USA, and a descendant of Hungarian and Polish Holocaust survivors.
Ep 13: Transcending Ashkenazi Trauma w/ Jo Kent Katz
Jo Kent Katz shares her map for transcending Ashkenazi trauma, speaks to how legacies of intergenerational trauma impact the body, and to the possibility of unwinding these impacts toward healing.
Joanna Kent Katz is an intuitive healer, drama therapist, social justice educator, youth worker, Theater of the Oppressed practitioner, and rite of passage ritualist. She is a political educator who centers healing and a healing practitioner who believes in collective liberation. Jo supports the building of individual and collective capacity to notice, name, and interrupt patterns of oppression, most recently through her map for transcending Jewish trauma. She finds alignment in attending to the healing required to release ourselves, and one another, from our unconscious allegiance to the systems that hold us captive, availing us to imagine and embody the world we long for. Joanna is an ordained Kohenet. She holds a Masters degree in Social Justice Education and is a Licensed Mental Health Counselor with a degree in Counseling Psychology/Drama Therapy from California Institute of Integral Studies. Her garlic is currently planted on occupied land originally stewarded by the Nipmuc, Nonotuc and Pocomtuc Peoples, known by settlers as Northampton, Massachusetts. Jo offers Intuitive Healing sessions through her website at jokentkatz.com. Learn more about Jo’s work at transcendingjewishtrauma.com.
Ep 14: Yemenite Jewish Ancestral Traditions w Rachel Leah (Reya) Bello
Rachel Leah (Reya) Bello shares with us Yemenite Jewish traditions, stories of her midwife great-grandmother and how the support of her ancestors guides her in her personal journey as a healer.
Kohenet Rachel Leya Bello aka Reya brings the heritage of the Mizrach through her yeminite and Turkish Jewish ancestors. She carries the lineage of her great grandmother who was a yeminite Jewish medicine woman and midwife. She is an ordained Kohenet Hebrew Priestess and a board certified holistic registered nurse. Rachel Leah is a graduate candidate in a nurse practitioner program studying psychiatry and mental health and has extensive education in Torah, nutrition and indigenous healing. She is an intuitive healer and songstress weaving the science of western medicine with Jewish ancestral wisdom into her practice of holistic nursing and ritual artistry.
Ep 15: Ancestors, Animals & the Mystery of Creation w/ Shoshana Jedwab
Shoshana Jedwab speaks to the power of remembering, as the child of a Holocaust survivor, sings us into the mystery of creation and ways that animals can be a bridge for ancestral connection.
As a child, Shoshana Jedwab would drum on parked cars, plates, tables, books and other people's bodies. Hailing from a family of rabbis and community leaders decimated by the Holocaust, Shoshana became a prize winning sacred text teacher, the Jewish Life Coordinator at the A.J. Heschel Middle School as well as a founding faculty member at the Kohenet Hebrew Priestess Institute where she goes by the name Batshemesh. As one of congregation Romemu’s regular hand drummers, and as worship leader, singer-songwriter, and teacher, Shoshana brings depth, humor, voice, feminism and sizzling rhythm to her grateful audiences. Shoshana Jedwab’s original sacred music grounds body and spirit, and brings the ancestral past into joyous contemporary practice. The seven songs of Shoshana’s 2016 debut album, “I Remember”, and her 2018 viral single, “Where You Go,” emerged from ceremonies Shoshana was leading, and are now being sung, and danced to, in churches, synagogues, weddings and protest marches around the world. In 2017 Shoshana Jedwab was included in Jewish Rock Radio’s Jewish Women Who Rock the Worship World. Shoshana released her new single, “Openings,” on Sukkot 2020. www.shoshanajedwab.com and https://shoshanajedwab.bandcamp.com/track/openings
Ep 16: Jewish Views of the Afterlife w/ Simcha Raphael
Simcha Raphael shares how he first came to understand the existence of life beyond death, and takes us on a dynamic journey through Jewish views of the afterlife, and offers wisdom on how to show up well for those who are dying.
Reb Simcha Raphael, Ph.D. is Founding Director of the DA’AT Institute for Death Awareness, Advocacy and Training. He has served as Adjunct Professor in Religion at LaSalle University, and Temple University, is on Faculty on the Art of Dying Institute: Integrative Thanatology Certificate Program of the New York Open Center and e works as a psychotherapist and spiritual director in Philadelphia. Ordained as a Rabbinic Pastor by Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi, he is a Fellow of the Rabbis Without Borders Network, and author of numerous publications on death and Judaism including the groundbreaking Jewish Views of the Afterlife.
www.daatinstitute.net
Ep 17: Multireligiosity, The Path of the Heart & Karaite Jewish Traditions w/ Matta Ghaly
Matta Ghaly shares their journey of multireligious identity, speaks to Karaite Jewish traditions, sings Jewish prayer in the maqam of the heart and brings blessings of connection with queer ancestors.
Matta (they/them) is a queer spiritual devotee of Egyptian descent, residing on Stl’pulmsh lands, near Chinook territory in Portland, Oregon. After studying process-oriented psychology, Matta completed a Master of Divinity at Luther Seminary and a Master of Arts in Liberation Theology at the Graduate Theological Union. In their practice, teaching and accompaniment, Matta aspires to be intimate with the heart, attuned to the body’s wisdom, and grounded in cultural humility. Matta enjoys being out in nature, pilgriming to sacred places and deepening connections in loving community.
Ep 18: Ancestral Wisdom in Jewish Mysticism w/ Jill Hammer
Jill Hammer shares the brilliance of ancestral wisdom in the earliest Jewish mystical text, the Sefer Yetzirah, speaks to the magic of midrash, creatively telling the stories of ancient ancestors, and invites us into the power of ancestral dreaming.
Rabbi Jill Hammer, PhD is a ritualist, author, educator, dreamworker, midrashist, and poet. She is the co-founder of Kohenet: The Hebrew Priestess Institute. She is also the Director of Spiritual Education at the Academy for Jewish Religion, a pluralistic Jewish seminary. Rabbi Hammer is the author of Sisters at Sinai: New Tales of Biblical Women, The Jewish Book of Days: A Companion for All Seasons, and The Book of Earth and Other Mysteries, and the co-author of The Hebrew Priestess: Ancient and New Visions of Jewish Women’s Spiritual Leadership and Siddur HaKohanot: A Hebrew Priestess Prayerbook, as well as other books. She was ordained at the Jewish Theological Seminary and holds a doctorate in social psychology from the University of Connecticut. Her forthcoming book is called Return to the Place: The Magic, Meditation, and Mystery of Sefer Yetzirah. She is also known as Rav Kohenet Ye’ilah.
Ep 19: Justice, God Everywhere & the Coming Transformation of Religion w/ Arthur Waskow
Arthur Waskow tells intimate stories of his ancestors as the inspiration for his lifelong justice work, shares powerful racial, social and environmental justice movement history as it intersects with his own deepening on a Jewish spiritual path, and invites us to find God everywhere and in everything.
Rabbi Arthur Waskow, Ph.D., founded and directs The Shalom Center. He received the Lifetime Achievement Award as Human Rights Hero from T’ruah: The Rabbinic Call for Human Rights, and has been named the Forward as one of the “most inspiring” Rabbis. He pioneered in urging (1969) a two-state peace settlement between Israel and Palestine; beginning (1989) to shape the theory and practice of Eco-Judaism; initiating (2002) Abrahamic multireligious action in the US; and urging a Transformative Judaism (2010) that would be committed not only to renew Judaism internally but shaping a Judaism that could help transform the world. He continues to engage nonviolent protest and has been arrested about 27 times. Rabbi Waskow’s newest book, of his more than twenty on Jewish thought and practice, is a harvest of his past work, intended to feed the future, is Dancing in God's Earthquake : The Coming Transformation of Religion.
https://theshalomcenter.org
Ep 20: Ancestral Pilgrimage & Genealogy w/ Daniyel Berchenko
Daniyel Berchenko shares of his pilgrimages to ancestral homelands in Eastern Europe, invites us into the portal that can open when visiting the place of one’s people, and speaks to gathering genealogical research as a pathway for revealing connection.
Daniyel is a detective of his ancestral story and supports others in uncovering and connecting with their own ancestral tales. Daniyel grew up in a family of Soviet Jewish refugees who had been cut off from Jewish tradition for generations. In 2013, at a Jewish community farm in Berkeley to learn farming and permaculture skills, he experienced a profound awakening of ancestral memory in his bones that shook him to his core, and found the doorway back into his Jewish heritage. He embarked on a pilgrimage through his ancestral homelands that lasted two years. Out of his own pilgrimage came the next call, to offer guidance to others seeking to connect with their own ancestral stories. He has guided pilgrims through their ancestral shtetls in Lithuania and Ukraine, offers Jewish genealogy research support and will be offering Jewish ancestral pilgrimage guidance to Eastern European lands when safe travel is possible again. Learn more at www.daniyelberchenko.com.
Ep 21: Ancestors & the Power of Story w/ Rachel Rose Reid
Rachel Rose Reid speaks to story-telling as a portal for ancestral memory, shares ways of tending grief-rituals across distance, and invites us to listen for the deep wells of wisdom beneath the surface of things.
Kohenet Rachel Rose Reid's work encompasses story, song, community activism, and ritual. She was a founding resident of Moishe House London. Whether holding space at Sukkat Shalom, Limmud South Africa, Wilderness Torah, or the Sadeh, her priority is the renewal of meaningful, living connection with Jewish-rooted spiritual practice and ancestors, in particular for those who struggle to find themselves reflected in institutional spaces. She is an award-winning writer and storyteller who has worked with Billy Bragg, BBC Radio and the London Symphony Orchestra. Together with Kohenet Yael Tischler she is co-founder of Yelala, a constellation of work that celebrates Earth-centred, feminist Jewish spirituality and reclaims the practices of our women/femme and folk ancestors.
www.rachelrosereid.com // www.yelala.co.uk
With so much gratitude to Kohenet Sarah Salem for Lean Back, the song which opens and closes each session, and to Kohenet Laura Ahava for the opening call. We thank our generous listeners like you.