How some ‘Jewitches’ are embracing both Judaism and witchcraft

[yankeedoodle]

A scene from "A Kaddish for Bernie Madoff."

How some 'Jewitches' are embracing both Judaism and witchcraft
Rabbis and witches alike are bringing together magic — often called witchcraft — and Jewish ritual.
https://religionnews.com/2021/10/25/how-some-jewitches-are-embracing-both-judaism-and-witchcraft/

(RNS) — In a scene from a recently released movie, three older women in a small room slowly walk clockwise around a table covered in candles, chanting curses softly.

A scene from the latest "Macbeth" remake? Not exactly: It's a moment from indie film "A Kaddish for Bernie Madoff," a musical exploration of spirituality, Jewish identity and the Bernie Madoff case.

Its creator, Alicia Jo Rabins, identifies as a Jewish artist and educator who incorporates elements of witchcraft into her practice of Judaism, an increasingly common, if still controversial, combination.

In both the modern witchcraft and Jewish communities, people are bringing together magic — often called witchcraft — and religious ritual. The ways in which these two seemingly distinct practices merge is often highly personal, depending on heritage, education and spiritual calling.

"The kinds of witchcraft that I practice draw on my training in Jewish ritual," said Rabins, who holds the Torah in the above scene in the Madoff film. "I don't see it as opposed to it, but as building on it."

Rabins, whose upbringing was not very religious, discovered "texts and traditions and the religious rules and laws and ways of living" as an adult and immersed herself in yeshiva.

The more she studies and practices Judaism, she said, the more she also feels the pull of witchcraft or Jewish folk magic — practices she's caught glimpses of in the edges of Scripture, as well as from Jewish cultures.

"My relationship to Judaism is kind of like classically trained, and then with witchcraft, it feels more like I'm just kind of intuiting," she said.

Rabins admits the two practices seem contradictory, considering that at several points the Torah specifically forbids witchcraft. She interprets these passages as prohibitions against negative practices. The two also overlap in their observance of the natural world: Rabin is a member of a women's group that gathers for "Rosh Hodesh," or each new moon, a longstanding tradition in Judaism as well as in witchcraft.

But in an ancient patriarchal society, she said, Jewish leaders likely wanted to set themselves apart from the surrounding culture.

Rabbi Jill Hammer highlighted this point in an interview with Religion News Service, explaining that the difference between Jewish ritual and witchcraft is mostly political.

"Often the way that it's structured is, if you're part of the hierarchy ... it's called ritual, it's called prayer, it's called ceremony. And if you are doing something outside of the hierarchy, that's often called magic or sorcery or witchcraft," Hammer explained.

This distinction was made to shut out particular types of spiritual practitioners and ideas, the rabbi explained.

"Witchcraft is often associated with marginalized people, particularly women," she said. "There's a whole body of women's ritual that tends to be called witchcraft simply because it is women's ritual."

   Yael Schonzeit, top right, chants from the Torah during a Kohenet Hebrew Priestess Institute training week in July 2016 in Northern California, while Kohenet co-founder Rabbi Jill Hammer, bottom right, and student Sarah Moser look on. Photo courtesy of Kohenet Hebrew Priestess Institute 

Hammer is co-founder of the Kohenet Hebrew Priestess Institute, which seeks to "reclaim and innovate embodied, earth-based feminist Judaism," according to its website. While Kohenet is not a school of witchcraft, its teachings can include magic as ritual and ceremony within a Jewish context free of political stigma.

"We are not interested in that distinction," she said.

Once you remove the boundaries between ritual and magic, she added, you realize "it's not very different from what Jews have been doing for thousands of years."

The Torah and the Talmud contain many stories of magical ritual traditions, even if such practices were not always sanctioned. Hammer pointed to the Book of Samuel's positive portrayal of the witch of Endor as an example of how the rules forbidding magical practice were not upheld consistently.

Apart from sanctioned rituals, Jewish folk practices often included healing and protection magic, as well as ancestor veneration, especially during the high holidays. Archaeologists have also found ancient incantation bowls once used to capture demons and expel illness.

Rarely were any of these ceremonies called witchcraft.

Kohenet is working to "reclaim much of these traditions" along with others, according to Hammer, and the institute has attracted people with many different spiritual backgrounds, from rabbinical scholars to Wiccans with Jewish heritage. The ways these clients engage with these ritual practices varies greatly, depending on their background and comfort levels.

This variety is evident anywhere you find people who practice Jewish witchcraft. Professional astrologer Aliza Einhorn doesn't merge Judaism and magic at all. Einhorn grew up in a traditional Jewish household and continues an Orthodox practice. However, along the way, she studied astrology and other forms of esoterica.

  A depiction of Jewish gathering for Rosh Hodesh in a German book published in 1724.   

"I was hungry for spiritual knowledge. I wanted to learn," she said.

While Einhorn does call herself a Jewish witch, she does not seek to define what that means. "Words like witch are fluid and mean different things to different people," she said. "I do what I do."

In fact, Einhorn never even used the title Jewish witch until recently, when she stumbled across the term. "It encompassed so much of what I was already doing," she said, so she adopted it.

However, she still maintains a clear separation between Jewish ritual and magic. "I don't try to reconcile the two at all."

But Laura Tempest Zakroff, an artist and author of "Anatomy of a Witch: A Map to the Magical Body," who lives in New England, sees her witchcraft and Jewish heritage as inseparable. Zakroff calls herself a Jewitch, demonstrating this syncretic relationship through word play.

"It describes someone who acknowledges their Jewish cultural heritage and where that intersects or informs their witchcraft," she said.

Zakroff was raised mostly in her Catholic mother's faith, but she became strongly connected to her father's Jewish heritage through history, reading, music and dance.

That heritage comes through in the way she performs her magic, she said. "I know a lot of folks probably (think) the Kabbalah or Qabalah, but to me, (Jewish witchcraft) is the everyday mysteries found within daily ritual — the blessing of a beverage, the honoring of food through preparation. It's the attention to detail that acknowledges we aren't alone in this world," she said. 

For Rabins, Jewish tradition gives her spiritual life structure, she said, while other rituals meet her needs in the moment. The connection, however, is seamless in practice: It might mean untying all the knots in the house before a birth, in keeping with Eastern European Jewish rituals, or incorporating plants mentioned in the Talmud into her practices.

"I think that's part of why it's easy for me to kind of dismiss the traditional Jewish rules against witchcraft — because I grew up in a place that basically de facto had rules against traditional Judaism," she said.

"I already kind of broke all the rules I grew up with, and from here on it's all just kind of searching."

[abduLMaria]

Jews try to dominate the "Progressive community" in Sonoma County, where a lot of the Guru's spout their Guru BS.

Criticize Israel in a web forum separate from a community garden run by Jews ?

You will get kicked out of the community garden.

Jews must be afraid of something - they're so sensitive to criticism of IsraHell.

[yankeedoodle]

The season of the Jewitch: Meet the occultists who blend witchcraft and Jewish folklore
https://www.jta.org/2021/10/27/culture/the-season-of-the-jewitch-meet-the-occultists-who-blend-witchcraft-and-jewish-folklore

(JTA) — Occult practices and totems are a mainstay of Halloween season, and sage bundles, altars and crystals are an increasingly trendy way to dabble in divination and witchcraft. But the spooky supernatural world also has a long history in Judaism, and modern "Jewitches" are encouraging the connection — though their practices often slightly differ from their non-Jewish contemporaries.

"I do not burn sage," said Zo Jacobi, who runs Jewitches, a popular blog and podcast that deep dives into ancient Jewish myths and folkloric practices. The sage-related ritual of "smudging," an Indigenous ceremony popular among modern witches for cleansing a person or place of negative energy, "is not a Jewish practice," she said. "But Jews had crystals. Actually, they were called 'gems.'"

Jacobi and her peers are revitalizing ancient Jewish practices of witchcraft, which have been seeing something of a revival as of late. Far from having an uneasy relationship with magic practitioners, Judaism — or at least Kabbalistic strands of it — has long embraced them.

Jacobi, based in Los Angeles, studies those gems' role in Jewish ritual, along with the connections between assorted other magical artifacts and Judaica. Eight shelves in her home are filled with books on Judaism as well as Jewish magic, witchcraft and folklore.

Her studies have revealed the historical ways that items like gems have been used in Jewish magical correspondences. Like healing crystals, gems are meant to protect and heal based on their properties, according to Midrash (Numbers Rabbah 2:7).  For example, sapphire was thought to strengthen eyesight.

"It's in a medieval text called the 'Sefer Ha-Gematriaot,'" Jacobi said. "But even if we go to the Torah, we see crystals on the breastplates of the kohanim (high priests of Israel)."

Many Jewish rituals today have their roots in warding off demons, ghosts and other mythological creatures. When we break glass at a wedding, scholars say, we're not just remembering the destruction of the Temple; we're also scaring off evil spirits that may want to hurt the bride and groom. Likewise, ancient Jews believed that the mezuzah protected them from messengers of evil — a function parallel to that of an amulet, or good-luck charm.

"The mezuzah is absolutely an amulet," said Rebekah Erev, a Jewish feminist artist, activist and kohenet (Hebrew priestexx, a gender-neutral term for "priest" or "priestess") who uses the pronouns they/them and teaches online courses on Jewish magic. "I consider it to be a reminder of the presence of spirit, of goddess, of shechinah [the dwelling or settling of the divine presence of God]. Much of magic is about reminding ourselves that we're all connected and that everything is alive and animate."

The moniker "Jewitch" itself can be seen as controversial within the group. Erev first heard the term while attending a 2014 "Jewitch Collective" retreat in the Bay Area.

"I feel that any word that identifies someone as a witch is controversial in nature because of how society, including Jewish society, has demonized witches leading to violence and ostracizing," Erev said. "To be a Jew and to be a witch has had serious repercussions throughout time. I hope the recent popularity of the term 'Jewitch' will bring more acceptance and understanding of both identities and help to make our practices more widely accessible."

"I feel that any word that identifies someone as a witch is controversial in nature because of how society, including Jewish society, has demonized witches leading to violence and ostracizing," they said, even though they do consider both witchcraft and Judaism to be major tenets of their life.

Cooper Kaminsky, a Denver-based intuitive artist and healer, concurred that the portmanteau was "revisionist" to some, but added, "Many, including myself, are empowered by identifying as a Jewitch."

Historically, as Judaic practices grew more patriarchal, women were exempt from studying the Talmud and Torah. They knew little Hebrew, so they created their own prayers in Yiddish, used herbal remedies and centered their religious practices around the earth.

Erev mirrors these customs by creating magical rituals, like meditating on cinnamon sticks during the month of Shvat, hearkening back to how cinnamon trees in Jerusalem scented the land during the harvest.

"There's a Kabbalistic idea of making oneself smaller for creation to emerge. Connecting with a cinnamon stick is a simple ritual. The cinnamon folds in, and the bark contracts in on itself," Erev said. "Sometimes contracting inward can give us space to emerge and create."

They also do spellwork, creating spells for new love, pregnancy protection and social justice; on their blog, they shared an incantation designed to bring more awareness to Indigenous Land Back movements.

The goal of many "Jewitch" educators and practitioners, they say, is to shine a light on rituals that have been forgotten or buried for self-preservation. Jacobi believes that many folkloric practices died out following the 13th-18th centuries because, at the time, Jews were viewed as demonic witches.

"Jewish communities did what they thought would protect them from literal certain death. Some of that came at the expense of some of these practices," Jacobi said. "Instead of the supernatural reasons, they tried to give rational reasons for what they were doing. Ashkenazi Jews routinely tried to debate with their oppressors in the hopes that they could out-logic antisemitism."

This traumatic history, the Jewitches say, is often papered over or dismissed as "myths" and "superstitions." "Saying 'superstition' is a way that we downplay our magic," Kaminsky said. "We protect ourselves because, historically, a huge part of our oppression has been because we're magical."

Kaminsky, who uses the pronouns they/them, does spiritual readings for clients that draw upon Kabbalah, Tarot and the Akashic records — a reference library of everything that has ever happened, which spiritual mediums believe resides in another dimension. Kaminsky incorporates Jewish prayers into their spellwork, like reciting the Psalms of David when doing candle spells and the B'sheim Hashem as a magical invocation.

Kaminsky, who uses the pronouns they/them, grew up in a Conservative Jewish household and learned the basic concepts of Kabbalah in Jewish day school.

"Kabbalah looks at Judaism through a cosmic, mystical lens that clicked for me a lot more than looking at a story from the Torah," Kaminsky said. "As I read more Kabbalah, I started feeling more connected to my Judaism."

Various scholars and rabbis have linked Kabbalah to Tarot, a deck of cards originally used in the mid-15th century to play games that evolved to divinatory practices in the 18th century (though Jacobi, for one, refutes this idea, claiming the connection has never been proven). The Tarot's Major Arcana — the trump cards of the deck, which detail the evolution of one's soul — usually make up 22 cards in any given pack, a meaningful Jewish number: the same as the number of letters in the aleph-bet, and the number of pathways on the Kabbalistic Tree of Life.

For their energy work, Kaminsky draws parallels between the chakras, energy points in the body discussed in Hinduism, and the Kabbalistic Tree of Life.

"The Tree of Life is an energy network," they said. "There's the meridians of energy, and the chakras are like the middle pillar."

Mystical practices were a part of Jacobi's upbringing. Her parents practiced Kabbalah, metaphysics, folklore and folk mythology. They have attended the same local Chabad since Jacobi was three years old.

Thanks to these experiences, Jacobi is comfortable living out of the (broom) closet — a tongue-in-cheek term that some modern witches use to refer to openly practicing witchcraft. She grew up with astrology, used tarot cards on Shabbat and played with her mother's rose quartz crystal ball while her father led Havdalah prayers. The Jewitches blog and podcast are filled with mythological creatures with origins in Jewish beliefs, like dybbuks, werewolves, dragons and vampires.

Some creatures are unique to Jewish lore: the vampiric Alukah, a blood-sucking witch referred to in Proverbs 30, turned out to be Lilith's daughter, while a Broxa originated as a bird from medieval Portugal that drank goat's milk and sometimes human blood during the night.

"Whenever there have been dire times throughout history, people have turned to mysticism; that's how Kabbalah emerged," Erev said. "We need to look to our ancestors for guidance. There are a lot of tools in our human community for healing and re-dreaming and creating a world that is safe and generative for all beings."

Kaminsky thinks magic has the power to repair the world: "Almost all of our Jewish spells are for the sake of healing. Tikkun olam, using our magic to repair the world, is beautiful."