Pesach 2026

Before my initiation, I was pretty candid that I preferred a skepticism-forward approach to my practices. I’d be the first in line to tell you, “Yeah, this is probably purely psychological, and yet that doesn’t make any difference against its utility and efficacy for me or other people.”

And to a certain extent, I still hold that to be true. But also.

There’s a community of Indigenous people in the Amazon called the Pirahã. They’re most well-known for helping to stir fistfights amongst linguists over the universality of recursion, and for being a token amongst politically ardent (mostly white) atheists to showcase why any novel belief in the unseen is dumb, because the Pirahã have no concept of deity, specifically because they are primarily focused on what is tangible and empirically demonstrable. Mind you, the Pirahã don’t have a lot of linguistic categories and concepts that are endemic to the languages most of us speak, it just so happens that the main Western scholar who is best known for discussing them, who lived with them consistently for almost 20 years, was an ardent Christian when he went to go missionize to them and failed miserably, like most missionaries who hit remote jungles, assuming they don’t die shortly thereafter.

What those atheists leave out, however, is that the Pirahã do - as in, all of them - see and communicate with spirits. They have a very robust spiritworking and spirit-warding practice. They are able to physically see and hear spirits and interact with them, to such an extent that aforementioned researcher said that on multiple occasions he was told the spirits were threatening to harm the community. Isn’t it interesting how *that* gets dismissed and glossed over?

So, you can imagine what it’s felt like to have to return from my own Uranian wandering in the jungles of Finda Asiliya, so sure I was a nutcase, armed with the realization that I was probably lying to myself and a *lot* of others, human and non-human, thus making me feel *even more* like a nutcase. That even as I happily trotted after ritual and meaning, trying to be transparent and earnest, what I’ve mostly been doing was trying to appease the gaze of people who are very limited by a need for control and fear.

It’s Pesach and shabbos. I’m out of lamb’s blood because Pharaoh’s reincarnation has also kept inflation high while indiscriminately murdering children, the enslaved, innocents, and the planet- the former my ancestor, Moshe, also engaged in. I’m thinking of Miriam, who held our shit together on the shores of the Red Sea as the rest of my ancestors allegorically scurried the hell up out of that mess with rapidity. I am reflecting on the first experience of Divine Inhabitation I had many recent moons ago: I passed out singing and playing tambourine using Elana Arian’s arrangement of Mi Chamocha. I am reticent to talk about what that experience was like, other than to say that that’s really when I knew something had changed in my life in a way I severely underestimated.

I’m in this really liminal space of my Jewishness being incomplete and insufficient (my Hebrew is, genuinely, disgusting, to start), but leaving where the Shekhinah led and took me, and from where the Shekhinah was said to have departed long ago. I have come back to lands and people I recognize but I feel foreign to, I am here, gathered with loved ones, but also very alone. How do I talk about experiences that were genuinely so existentially confronting that it spun me into a deep grief for several years, where all I wanted to do was go back to regular life, and avoid them, because I do not know how to think about the experiences I’ve had? How do you return from the mountain? The abyssal sea? Do you ever, really?

Behold Your Name, my affliction, champion of my cause. Redeem me for the sake of Thy Presence. Blessed are You, Transcendence, who hides Their face in the wilderness, and brings redemption to the wrestler.