Tag: witch

Where there’s fear, there’s power.

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When I was little, I was scared of the moon.

My bedroom window had venetian blinds, and every night the moon was out I’d position myself in whatever corner of the bed that I had to to make sure the moon didn’t shine through the slits in the blinds. If I caught a glimpse of it, I’d jump with fear and throw the covers over my head. I was terrified of that moon.

Really, though, I was scared of everything as a kid. Obviously I was scared of the dark. But more than that, I was scared of being alone. If I had to get something from my room in the middle of the day, I’d ask my mom or my babysitter to come with me for fear that something would pop in at me from my window. Once I asked my mom to come stand in the doorway of the bathroom during the 90 seconds it took me to pee and wash my hands.

To this day I’m scared of looking through telescopes. I love stargazing and take my telescope out to the patio several nights a month, but in the moment when I lean down to put my eye to the eyepiece, I still feel that gut-wrenching dread. I think of the third corner of the Witch’s Pyramid—audare, to dare–and breathe in strength as I bend to look at Venus or Jupiter. But the terror is still there. I googled it and found out that I’m not the only person afraid of telescopes.

When I was little I saw a ghost in my room: a human-shaped shadow that squeezed my shoulder and faded as I turned to look. Was that the origin of my fear of being alone? It was shortly before I began sleeping in my mom’s bed every night.

In many ways, fear defined my childhood. In many ways, fear has defined my life.

*  *  *

According to Starhawk, we witches have a saying: where there’s fear, there’s power. (Starhawk is thus far the only witch I’ve actually heard say this, but I’m a solitary, and I don’t get out much.)

A few months ago, I worked with Isis for the first time. I’d begun having dreams about Isis, so I knew going into this spell that she was waiting to work with me. I knew shit was going to get real.

In the spell, I had a glass of wine to use as a libation. I didn’t realize, though, that the light from the candles was refracting through the glass and creating circles on the ceiling. I only looked up after I’d cast the circle and invoked Isis, when I had worked into a pretty good trance, and when I saw those circles on the ceiling, I jumped out of my skin.

Where there’s fear, there’s power. That irrational fear was my signal that Isis was there. Yes, Isis is lovely and motherly and nice. But she’s also a big power.

I’ve wondered where my fear of the uncanny stems from. A simple explanation is patriarchy–my moonly womanish sense of Goddess love was perverted by et cetera et cetera. But that explanation feels like an ill-fitting sweater. It does the job, but…it just doesn’t sit right.

This fear came from somewhere, but I doubt I’ll ever know where. Because where do you pick up a fear of telescopes? How exactly does that happen?

Where there’s fear, there’s power. To be honest, I think that’s the best explanation I’m ever going to get.

When I was giving birth and my daughter was crowning, I could feel myself on the verge of tearing and I kept holding back. “It hurts,” I finally cried. “Push through that,” the midwife said. I knew she was going to say that because that’s what they said in my childbirth class. I’d learned ahead of time that the only way to end the pain of labor was to push through it. (It’s the type of wisdom that seems really obvious until you have to use it.) So I pushed. And I tore. Tearing is no fun at all, but my daughter was born and labor was over. I would much rather have a daughter than be in labor forever.

So that’s what I tell myself when I feel that fear, when I know I have to Dare. Push through it. Push through it. Push through that fear and touch some of that power.

Thoughts on the Kohenet Siddur

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When I realized that I need to try to blend my Judaism with my Witchcraft–that is, when I realized that the practice of enacting Jewish folk rituals alongside Witchcraft was becoming more confusing than fulfilling–I started doing random Google searches for other Jewish witches. That’s how I came across the Kohenet (Hebrew Priestess) Institute. From their About page:

This movement includes shamans, kabbalists, wilderness Jews, environmentalist Jews, priestesses of Shekhinah, Jewitches, practitioners of Israeli nature spirituality, and many others. This earth-honoring Jewish movement is one element of a larger circle of earth-based practitioners in many lands and cultures.

…

Some of us practice or have practiced shamanic, magical, or pagan spirituality, and are now exploring spiritual life in a Jewish context.

Ding ding ding! I have an uncanny talent for developing an interest in things right as they’re rising to prominence. Back in high school I was wearing headscarves and messenger bags  just before they were cool.

Anyway, I bought a copy of their prayerbook. As an effort to blend Goddess/earth spirituality with Judaism, the siddur is a breathtaking success. The authors have mixed Kabbalistic explorations of the elements with modern poetry and quotes (including Starhawk!). They’ve included all the female-pronoun-based Shabbat prayers I’ve been searching for for years. The illustrations are maybe a little more rough than I’m used to in a $25 book, but they still speak to me as a Witch–for instance, the cover features a woman surrounded by stars and snakes, growing into a tree, with a spiral over her womb.

Perhaps the poem that made the deepest impression on me is “What is in the Goddess’s Tefillin?” According to the authors, Kabbalah holds that the tefillin represent an umbilical cord between a davener and God. Rabbi Jill Hammer explores the perspective from the other side of that cord:

who is like you
o my people
who bind your stories to your arms

I too
tie my story to the parabolic curves of my body
my physics like an alphabet

you must recover me
from the tar pits of the years

It gives me shivers.

I really liked the siddur’s interpretation of the morning and evening prayers (although, lacking a formal Jewish education, I still have a hard time sorting them all out). And something interesting happened after I read them–I felt inspired to begin reciting the Sh’ma in the morning and evening, along with my devotionals to the other deities with whom I have relationships. I had to cobble together my own Goddess-centered, female-pronouned Sh’ma, though, because for some reason, that was the only prayer in the book that was only presented as masculine. I guessed at the grammar from other prayers and chants.

I was initially worried that the siddur would be an attempt to reach out to Jewish Witches and Pagans and draw them back into “proper” Judaism. You see these kinds of attempts all the time–I’m thinking, here, of the supremely misguided Punk Torah, which was just a mainstream siddur with the word “punk” on the front. (Note: there’s currently a punktorah.org, but I can’t tell if it’s the same organization or not. Doesn’t look much different, in any case.) But the Kohenet Institute means what they say: they are unabashedly Pagan, offering prayers to Anat, Asherah, Lilith, and other deities. What drives me up the wall about Judaism is its uncritical acceptance of the rightness of monotheism. Well, of course the prophets and priests had to smash all the idols on the hillsides, we think. Our God was jealous of those other gods! And also those gods didn’t exist! And also it’s a metaphor! We set up logical paradoxes in which polytheism is simultaneously treason and wasted energy, but no one can explain why it’s so bad. I am Jewish in that my ancestors are Jewish and I embody their traditions, observing Shabbat and other rituals because they are worth observing. I am Pagan in that I pray to multiple gods. I’m simply not going to stop being those things, no matter how angry it makes mainstream Jews.

The one aspect of the siddur that I didn’t connect with was all of the praise heaped upon Shekhinah. Particularly in the Amidah, the prayers are filled with lavish thanks for Shekhinah’s kindness, tenderness, love, and blessings, and that was the point at which my eyes glazed over. I need a Goddess that is both Ouranian and Chthonic–pretty and kind and clean but also ugly and fierce and mucky. That’s the only way I can make sense of the world. How am I supposed to watch half my garden die in yet another SoCal drought, and then thank Shekhinah for her perfectness? At best, it sets up cognitive dissonance and a denial of anger and pain. At worst, it feels passive-aggressive: You’re so kind, Shekhinah! You’re so loving! (Did you, ahem, notice that you killed half my garden?) It cultivates that classic feeling of guilt and estrangement: if you’re so wonderful, and bad things are happening to me, then this must be punishment for something I did wrong.

But this is my own personal reaction. I’m not well-versed in Jewish theology and I don’t claim to be. If these prayers work for other Jewitches and Judeo-Pagans, they should embrace them with no apologies.

I’m really looking forward to the day when Kohenet is more than a tiny fringe movement–when I can come out of the broom closet to other Jews, when I can stroll into a shul and be reasonably sure there will be a place for someone like me, when drums and timbrels and dancing and chants are a normal, if not integral, part of Jewish worship. I don’t think that day is coming soon. But I have to believe that it’s coming.