Dec 21

Dec 21 Pathways of Teshuvah (Dr. Pesach Chananiah)

Pathways of Teshuvah:

Repentance, Return, and Reconciliation
Across Time and Place

Abstract

In the millennia since exile and the destruction of their holy temples, those tracing their heritage from the ancient Israelites have had a contentious relationship to land and location. All too often, our cosmopolitan landlessness and our adherence to scripture and law have left us alienated from the natural world. Yet, recent movements within the Jewish world have prioritized an ancestrally-rooted relatedness to the Earth and a recommitment to theologies of stewardship. The horizon to which they point invites our attention toward new possibilities for embodied ritual. This liberatory and ecopsychological Jewish autoethnography traces the impacts of exile on the (Jewish) psyche and explores modes of healing through connection to land. The Jewish Earth-based organization Wilderness Torah and the Palestinian farm Tent of Nations serve as fieldwork sites through which to approximate a practice of teshuvah, a Hebrew word most accurately translated as “repentance,” “return,” or “reconciliation”.

Keywords: reconciliation, ecopsychology, liberation, trauma, Israel-Palestine

Spiral Beginnings

It is still light out. And yet the moon is already bright. A half-moon, as there is at this time every year. It is Shabbat Shuvah, the sabbath that falls between the Jewish High Holy Days of Rosh haShanah and Yom Kippur. It is, in part, because of the gravity of these ten “Days of Awe” that every year this season approaches, I think of my experience from other years: the times my vast family spent the holidays together, particularly the few early years that my paternal grandmother, my Bubbie, often references nostalgically; the year that my maternal grandmother died, just one week before Rosh haShanah – which colored the whole season for me; or last year, when my family yearned to be together but chose to maintain our respective quarantines amidst a global pandemic.

The annual recurrence of religious observances, and the way that they intersect with the ebb and flow of our lives, is illuminated nicely by the Jewish view of time “as a spiral,” wrote Rabbi Waskow, “not as a circle[,] returning always to the same sacred place in the past, as some traditional societies see time [nor] as a straight line, marching always forward to triumph or oblivion . . . as modernity sees time” (2000a: 70). While we observe the same holidays every year, each time we return, we are different; the world is different. We have spiraled.

Waskow’s image of the spiral encapsulates not only the Jewish view of time but also the iterative essence of teshuvah, a concept central to the transformative potential of these High Holy Days. Teshuvah (the root word being Shuvah) is translated most literally as “to turn” or “return,” as in returning once again to that day of the year – or, even better, a psychospiritual return to the Holy Source of All That Is. Traditionally, and particularly at this time of year, teshuvah tends to be understood as “repentance,” as in repenting for one’s sins. And, yet, for many, to return is simply to go through the same obligatory motions as the year before. Save for the traditional liturgy and annual asking of forgiveness from one’s contemporaries, modern Jewish life does not offer much of a roadmap for what it looks and feels like to do teshuvah.

One of my ambitions in writing this essay is to offer some potential pathways for doing teshuvah, informed by a liberatory and ecopsychological Judaism. This work is autoethnographic in that it “engages ethnographical analysis of personally lived experience,” in the words of Alexander, “designed to engage a locus of embodied reflexivity using lived experience as a specific cultural site that offers social commentary and cultural critique” (2008: 91). I offer my own experience as an object of research and site of Jewish subjectivity, a starting point from which to consider both the impact of historic collective dynamics on today’s Jewish psyche and potential methods of healing and reconciliation rooted in that same collective.

Using the methodology of autoethnography in this instance is meant to evoke an engagement with the researcher’s own people. Applying “personal experience (auto)” to “cultural experience (ethno),” I investigate my own ethnic inheritance, through the reflexive lens of the anthropologist. For me, this method entails a decisively Jewish perspective, as that is the lens (among others) through which I view the world. This narrative, however, is not exhaustive of “the Jewish experience”; it is particular to my own lineage and location. My experience as an Ashkenazi male, whose most recent ancestors hale from Eastern Europe and whose grandparents struggled to assimilate in the United States, is not the same as those Sephardi Jews whose ancestors came from the Mediterranean, perhaps settling in South America; or the Mizrahi Jews whose ancestors have lived throughout the Middle East for generations; or even the small minority who have remained in the Land of Israel since our exile over two-thousand years ago.

In addition to not being exhaustive of “the Jewish experience,” this work is also certainly not exclusive of a non-Jewish experience. While partially an autoethnography of this author’s relationship to Jewish cultural dynamics, this research is also about my relationship to the natural world. Following the call of Brisini and Simmons toward a posthumanist autoethnography, I seek to “bring autoethnography into the broader, more inclusive, more other-oriented fold of natureculture by deeply considering relationships that include human and nonhuman animals, plants, microbes, objects, matter, technologies, places, and the other copresences that make manifest our shared world” (2022: 356). By using the phrase natureculture (Latour 1993; Brisini and Simmons 2022), and thereby situating culture within nature, this work moves beyond the particular cultural experience of diasporic Ashkenazi Jews, like myself, and verges into the (perhaps universal) human condition of relationship to land and psyche.

As I sit under the Shabbat Shuvah moon, I feel the tension in my bones between an acceptance of Jewish cultural, ethical, and religious encumbrance – and the encumbrance of the universal. I remember the few years after my Bar Mitzvah, at age thirteen, when I first began to wrestle with the institutional religion I inherited. It was at the same time that I became enthralled and enamored with the stars in the night sky – taking out the trash or perched on my parents’ balcony throughout my adolescence, I was increasingly struck with awe, humility, and a visceral sense of interconnectedness under that vast canopy.

Immersed not only in this year’s holiday, but in millennia of sacred observance, I tread the pathway between my own personal obligations of repentance and the communal responsibility of teshuvah. In this essay, I explore landlessness in relation to Jewish exile and exiling, and then turn to modes of connection with the Earth as an access to individual and collective healing. Through a Jewish, Earth-based and embodied praxis, I seek to flesh out novel practices of teshuvah – as repentance, return, and reconciliation.

Exiled (from Place)

My own personal narrative begins with the story of my people, a people who, though certainly not seamless in objective historicity, have come to be known interchangeably as Ivri (Hebrews), Israelites, and – at present – Jews. I was raised with the (internalized) stereotype of the “Unnatural Jew” (Schwarzschild 1984), like many Ashkenazi-Americans whose ancestors migrated away from our agrarian roots, settled and assimilated in metropolitan regions, and were left alienated from the natural world. Although I can trace this migratory pattern in the last few generations of my lineage, exile and landlessness are both central and timeless elements of the Jewish experience, tracing back almost to the beginning of our civilization.

As Comins wrote in A Wild Faith, the “Israelite religion was indigenous – a direct response by the original settlers to the demands of their particular, local environment” (2007: 13). Many of the holidays that we have inherited today began as agricultural festivals commemorating the seasons of the ancient Israelites. Korngold wrote similarly, in God in the Wilderness (2007), of our peoples’ spiritual bonds being forged in the desert: Moses’s encounter with the divine in a burning bush while tending his flock; Jacob’s nighttime rumble with a mysterious figure in the wilderness that completely altered his life.

Yet, the revelations of prophets that occurred in the desert often challenged the hegemonic classes. Although Judaism likely grew out of pagan roots and a connection to the land, according to Korngold, the orthodox bureaucracy of the ancient Israelite empire eventually denounced the possibility of an Ivri animism: “the priests ordered the destruction of the altars on the high places and herded us all indoors” (2007: 10). Rather than experience spiritual connection to one’s own particular tree or stone or mountain, we began to correlate all religious ritual – not to mention individual identity – to one geographic location, the Temple Mount in ancient Jerusalem.

The Temple at Jerusalem became for the Israelites what Eliade called a representation of “axis mundi,” or Center of the World (1959: 35). For “indigenous” people across the world, the home, the community, and especially the religious site were mythopoetic manifestations of this imaginal locus. Eliade wrote that, for my ancestors, “the Temple was an imago mundi; being at the Center of the World, at Jerusalem, it sanctified not only the entire cosmos but also cosmic life” (1959: 75). The constriction of religious practice to this temple therefore not only impacted those of its day, but has forever characterized the way that the descendents of Israel have related to their Holy Land. This land was, in essence, our sole collective taproot to the natural world.

In the year 586 BCE, the ancient temple in Jerusalem was sacked by the Babylonians, sending the vast majority of Israelites into exile. The temple was rebuilt 70 years later, with some fraction of the population returning, only to be destroyed again by the Romans in 70 CE. After the fall of the Second Temple, our religion went from one of priestly rites and animal sacrifice to one of textual study and debate. This adaptation was both necessary and ingenious, for without the centrality of law and story – and perhaps the longing for return to a homeland – our peoplehood would have been no more. As Benstein wrote, the “spiritual sophistication of the Jewish people was seen to be embodied precisely in our ability to dispense with a homeland of soil and borders, and to live in the world at large, or in the text” (2006: 206). As we became dispersed across the globe, the Rabbinic focus on adherence to rules and scripture allowed Judaism to be practiced in any location.

For the past two millennia, Jews have migrated across the globe, often forced to leave one place and find solace in another – and forever longing for a return to Eretz Zion. Bernstein argued that privileging Israel as the sole holy land has reinforced indifference to our local environment: “Ignoring nature in their own communities and with no day-to-day relationship with the soil of Israel, these Jews achieve no genuine connection to nature” (1998: 41). While those with enough privilege to make regular pilgrimages to Israel may benefit from their connection with that land, those who are unable to make the journey are often left feeling alienated from the natural world as a whole. Exile from the particular soil of Jerusalem has often meant for Diasporic Jews a disconnection from the land anywhere.

Despite the fundamental importance of scriptural study in sustaining Judaism’s evolution and survival over the past two-thousand years, some have questioned this emphasis for its consequential de-emphasis of nature. Korngold, for example, argued that “despite the palpable role of nature in the revelation [,] for thousands of years we have been taught to focus on the words that were given, rather than the place in which they were given” (2007: 51). It is possible that our evolution towards being the “people of the book” has left us lacking a connection with the potential raw awesomeness of spiritual experience often occurring in the wilderness.

Although our relation to nature was largely lost along with our ancestral homelands, a closer look at Jewish tradition reveals the possibility of a somewhat more pluralistic practice than scripture would have us believe. Rabbi Artson argued that while the rabbis “did not deny the particular holiness of Eretz Yisrael,” they actually expanded the notion of “holy land,” making “the sanctification of all earth central to Jewish practice” (1998: 42). For some leading Hasidic mystics and their disciples, time out in nature was an essential technique for “cleaving” (dveykut) to the Divine. But while the vast majority of the world’s Jews read the stories of our ancestral figures - nomads who had numinous experiences in the wilderness - we have by and large lost the sense that we, too, might experience dveykut under the night sky.

Returning to Ancestral Teacher Trees

Today, the vast majority of us – Jews and non-Jews alike – live, as journalist Richard Louv wrote, in a “society that has disengaged the child from nature” (2009: 208). Louv argued that, lacking an upbringing that includes developmentally appropriate opportunities in nature, today’s children are subject to depression, attention-deficit/ hyperactivity disorder, obesity, and other symptoms of what Louv called “nature-deficit disorder” (2009). Depth psychologist and wilderness guide Bill Plotkin wrote similarly that “the nature-oriented task of middle childhood (approximately age four until puberty) is to learn the enchantment of nature through intimate contact with the wild, other-than-human world” (2021: 38). In order to mature into full Adulthood, Plotkin argued, we must fill in any gaps that were left unfulfilled in earlier stages; in the case of middle childhood tasks, Plotkin recommended finding an ecotherapist or enrolling in a nature-connection program.

A number of years ago, while in my late 20’s, I found myself uprooted from my hometown and trying to survive in the San Francisco Bay Area. In the middle of an intense, sometimes excruciating, period of transformation, I decided to address my as-yet-unfulfilled nature-oriented tasks from middle childhood. Heeding Plotkin’s advice, and seeking to do so through a Jewish lens, I chose to volunteer for Wilderness Torah’s B’naiture program. I spent nearly a year mentoring Jewish 11- and 12-year-olds in wilderness activities and rites of passage, simultaneously confronting my own growing pains while I sought to inspire the next generation to gain a vibrant connection with our Jewish heritage and the natural world.

For 14 years, Wilderness Torah has offered annual festivals to celebrate the Jewish holidays Tu b’Shvat, Sukkot, Shavuot, and a week in the desert for Passover – as well as programs for children, families, and teens. Wilderness Torah is part of a growing ecosystem including other organizations such as Hazon, Camp Eden Village, and Urban Adamah, collectively referred to as Jewish Outdoor, Food, Farming & Environmental Education (JOFFEE). This new generation of Earth-based Jews seeks to awaken the Jewish connection to land and to reinvigorate in our tradition a foundation on which to live more amicably with the Earth.

During the year that I volunteered for the B’naiture program, I found myself immersed in community with others, asking together: If all humans need connection to the wilderness, and if sanctifying the Earth is part of Jewish practice, how does one who has inherited the Jewish tradition use that tradition to create a sacred connection with the particular area of land that they are most in contact with? The San Francisco Bay Area environment where Wilderness Torah participants gather is not so different from that of our Mediterranean lineage. So, in some ways, maybe breathing in its smell of oak trees and fallen figs brings forth something indigenous from those of us descending from Semitic lands. But, in another way, perhaps we must explore the local environment for the nuances with which it affects the psyche and the modes of practice that it awakens from generations of slumber deep inside our souls.

Tacey wrote in Edge of the Sacred of depth psychologist Carl Jung’s belief, influenced by anthropologist Franz Boas, that anatomical and psychical changes were caused by land. Jung was, according to Tacey, “enchanted by the indigenous view that spirits of the land can reincarnate themselves,” influencing foreigners; yet he imagined the phenomenon not so much as metaphysical or supernatural, speaking instead about “archetypal forces in land and place” (2009: 46). Building on the theories of Jung, Boas, and Tacey, ecopsychologist Craig Chalquist wrote: “when people inhabit a particular place, its features inhabit their psychological field, in effect becoming extended facets of their selfhood” (2007: 7). Chalquist’s concept of terrapsychology invites us to be aware of having been altered by the local environment, offering profound implications for a people who have settled and been expelled across the globe: what does it mean for people that trace our roots to the land of Canaan to then be transformed by Babylon, the Iberian Peninsula, Eastern Europe, and now Brooklyn or Berkeley – and alienated from them all? This inquiry into place and selfhood presents a profound possibility, inviting us to become conscious of our specific location – and how we might interact with the soul it inhabits.

A particularly valuable way to be in touch with the soul of a place is to engage in a form of sitting meditation which the wilderness survival world refers to as a “sit spot” or “solo site.” Rabbi Comins, who prefers the phrase “soul-o site,” emphasizing a religious connotation to the practice, traces the “sit spot” to leaders of Outward Bound sending participants of their innovative trips on solo excursions (2007: 66). This practice is, according to Comins, an access to the “awesome mystery of the things that we are usually moving too fast to see,” an opportunity to “acquire a profound respect for the plants and animals we come to know intimately” (ibid). Although sometimes habituated to use the phrase “sit spot,” the leadership at Wilderness Torah gives credit to our own Jewish tradition in their choice to call this practice “hitbodedut,” Hebrew for “alone time for spiritual purpose” (Comins 2007: 157). Rabbi Nachman of Breslov, who is often cited in correlation with hitbodedut, is famous for his practice of talking to God alone in the forest (ibid). While the vast majority of Jews today are likely to dismiss meditation as a relic of a different religious tradition or to scoff at the (threateningly pagan) idea of speaking to the natural world, a growing community of Jews is reclaiming hitbodedut as a way to find powerful spiritual connection out in the wild as did our forebears.

Having learned to meditate in college, although typically indoors, I was pleasantly surprised to see our B’naiture youth instructed to find a place in nature to simply be with their surroundings. I adopted the practice as well, often sitting under the sole tree in the middle of a nearby park. Wilderness Torah mentors often reference the passage from our people’s myths when our forefather Abraham is called to an elon moreh (Genesis 12:6). Although Biblical translations and commentaries typically mistranslate this text as the “terebinth of Moreh,” the most basic translation leaves us with: “teacher (oak) tree.” When the participants of B’naiture are encouraged to find a spot alone in the wilderness, they are invited to sit at the feet of our world’s greatest teachers, just like our ancestors did. According to Moore, “trees are the teachers, revealers, containers, companions, and protectors of the sacred, and our relationship to them. . . touches on our deepest values, emotions, and sense of meaning” (1996: 28). In order to glean wisdom from our ancestor teacher trees, Tacey advised, “it is not that we must listen to the orange tree, but like the orange tree,” for only when the “human barriers that separate us from nature are overcome” can we achieve “imaginal vision” (2009: 159). The journey into imaginal vision requires seeing through a different lens than our normal egoic selves, practicing a mode of being which is in touch with the web of life that surrounds us.

What Tacey called “imaginal vision” might be understood as the receptive mode that the Hasidic rabbis refer to as mochin d'gadlut. According to Comins, mochin d'gadlut is a “state of expanded consciousness [,] of seeing the sacred in every person, thing, and action” (2007: 41). One of the benefits of hitbodedut for pre-teens (and everyone else) is that it trains the practitioner to be present to their surroundings – in ecological interconnection with the more-than-human world. Whereas our urban eyes are trained to hone in on objects, being hyper-focused during such activities as driving a car or surfing the internet, the appropriate manner of gaze in the wilderness is to be as expansively aware as possible. In the words of archetypal psychologist James Hillman, we are teaching these young people to move with their “hearts toward the world,” adopting an “animal sense of the world – a nose for the displayed intelligibility of things, their sound, smell, shape, speaking to and through our heart’s reactions” (1992: 114). To behave in this way, according to Hillman, is a prescription for psychological wellbeing, a mode of meaning-making through engagement with the soul of the world.

Practicing hitbodedut might also be a way to become indigenous to a particular land, tending to the phenomenological manifestations of the soul of a place. The Hebrew word for “place” – makom – also happens to be one of the names for the Nameless. An engagement with place is, therefore, also an attempt to connect with what Jung called the archetype of the Self. Rabbi Gershon Winkler, whose career has been dedicated to awakening and restoring an indigenous shamanic Judaism, wrote in The Place Where You Are Standing is Holy that “covenanting with Self then means that there is an honoring of your separateness from everyone else, your individual distinction from all Others, and at the same time a recognition of your connectedness to and commonality with everyone else” (1994: 72). To approach a covenant with Self in the wilderness, as Winkler invites us to do, we must become connected to place. In this post-exilic world, we have the opportunity to make any locale our axis mundi; to become indigenous anywhere. The imaginal experience of axis mundi, whether a sit spot under a tree or the temple of an entire civilization, points to something greater. To find godliness at a tree or a rock as our ancestors might have done places us into dialogue with a consciousness of where we are at present – the exact place to which we have (re)turned.

Exiling (the Other)

While some Jews are learning to become indigenous to whatever land they reside on, others have literalized the instinctive impulse to be connected to land as a return to the land with which they associate their ancestors. For this group, it is in Israel that (otherwise “unnatural”) Jews can wear Teva sandals and go on hikes. “Zionism and the return to the Land of Israel,” wrote Benstein, “suggest a profound redefinition of the relationship between Judaism and the natural world, and of our responsibilities toward our environment” (2006: 29). As Benstein attested, oftentimes “making aliyah” (immigrating to Israel) is a “personal attempt at ‘reindigenization’” (2006: 208). I, too, had the intention of radical “reindigenization” when I visited my ancestral homeland a few years ago, hoping to glean from its local wisdom a deeper sense of identity. For me, however, there is a tragic ambivalence in the Jewish reclamation of our ancient homeland.

In 1948, Jewish paramilitary forces called the Irgun declared independence from the British-occupied territory called Palestine and established their own sovereignty. The Zionist narrative – “people without a land” settling in a “land without a people” – echoed that of the British colonists who declared “land as terra nullius, the ‘empty land,’ possessed by no-one and available for appropriation” (Tacey 2009: 33). This is, of course, the hegemonic narrative of the victors. Jewish critical theorist Jonathan Boyarin wrote about his consciousness being raised above this “standard Israeli historiography,” documenting the reality of:

well over 300 Palestinian villages whose residents were exiled as a result of the 1947-49 war; of the efforts to disrupt traditional patterns of Palestinian land tenure, deny Palestinian agricultural loans, and so on, and thereby accomplish their aims of acquiring control of strategic geographical regions, with the intention of setting up a Zionist state. (1992: 122)

Unfortunately, most Jews turn a blind eye to this reality, justifying the occupation through a variety of cognitive sleights of hand, biblical mandates, and preemptive defensive postures.

For the Palestinian people, Israel’s War of Independence was the Nakba – Arabic for “catastrophe.” Masalha wrote of the continued effects of this occupation: the “forced displacement of Palestinians caused by Israeli colonisation of the West Bank, land confiscation, continued closures and invasions, de facto annexation facilitated by Israel’s 730-kilometre ‘apartheid wall’ in the occupied West Bank, and the ongoing horrific siege of Gaza” (2012: 254). The concept of colonization, however, becomes complicated in the case of Israel-Palestine, considering the ancestral identification of the “colonizers” with this territory – perhaps more of a return than a conquest. Yet, “from a Palestinian viewpoint, [Zionists] are considered twentieth-century colonizers,” wrote Palestinian liberation theologian Naim Ateek, who was eleven-years-old when the Zionists occupied his hometown of Beisan (2002: 105).

I would be naïve if not callous to elide the historical circumstances of pogroms and the Holocaust that made the takeover of Palestine seem like the only possibility of survival for the Jewish people. We must be sensitive to what Scheper-Hughes and Bourgois called “a kind of collective post-traumatic stress disorder [which] may predispose certain ‘wronged’ populations to a hypersensitivity and hypervigilance that can lead to another cycle of slaughtering in ‘self defense’” (2003: 14). Ultimately, however, it is ethically insufficient to exploit the Holocaust as a rationale for Israel’s treatment of the Palestinian people. It is similarly unacceptable to pretend that the Palestinians are present-day Canaanites, using biblical scripture which justifies slaughter to build a homeland in some ancient place and time to once again rationalize this behavior.

Moreover, the argument that our progenitors were there hundreds if not thousands of years ago is all but irrelevant in considering the immediacy of our own epoch’s conflicts.

My own consciousness of the Nakba was awakened my senior year of college. I was conducting participatory research on the Los Angeles Community Action Network, a group fighting the displacement of Skid Row residents. As I explored the theoretical links between gentrification and colonization, I couldn’t escape the similarities between what I saw occurring in that community and what I had read about in Israel-Palestine. Amidst the final weeks of fieldwork in Skid Row, I caught a cold so bad that I slept nearly 24 hours straight, only waking again at 3am – miraculously cured, but with the newfound realization that I couldn’t, in good conscience, document injustice in Los Angeles and not call to account my Jewish brethren for the injustices they had been levying against the Palestinian people. At that moment, in the middle of the night, I had an experience like the Islamic prophet Muhammad when he was embraced by the angel Gabriel and commanded: “Recite!” Although the words I would type were nowhere near as prophetic or poetic as the Holy Quran, they became the preface to my manuscript and, more importantly, a declaration of the cross that I bear – as a Jew – for the tragedy of the Nakba.

Mastering Return, Laboring Toward Restoration

As I awakened to this epiphany, its attendant ethical commitment became clear: I must offer sweat equity to the Palestinian cause. The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines sweat equity as “labor toward upkeep or restoration.” Ironically, an investment of “sweat equity” is what those who colonized Skid Row claimed about their loft conversions in order to cut costs. For me, it meant breaking a sweat (literally and metaphorically) in an attempt to approximate equity. I considered it my obligation, as a Jew, to atone for the damage caused by those with whom I share an identity. The Nakba has resulted in a deleterious impact on the social fabric of the Middle East and, I believe, on the collective psyche of both Palestinians and Jews. Yes, we are tortured, in part, because of the traumas we have faced; but also because of the way that we have dispossessed the Other and then dissociated from the pain we share. Our bondage – and our liberation – is bound up with theirs.

It wasn’t until a number of years later that I finally honored my commitment. I was approaching my last opportunity to take advantage of the Birthright Israel trip, an all-expenses-paid “10-day Miracle” in Israel that every diasporic Jew is entitled to. The program is called “Birthright” because, as my cohort and I had been raised to believe, we have a birthright to that land. The archetypal roots of this birthright can be found in the biblical story of Jacob and Esau: “Jacob demanded that Esau first sell him his birthright, and Esau did so with an oath, spurning his birthright” (Genesis 25:29-34). Later in the story, Isaac gives Esau’s blessing to Jacob – who is eventually renamed “Israel” – “that he might possess the land that God had assigned to Abraham” (Genesis 28:3-4). Jacob therefore lays claim to his brother’s birthright and blessing – and his descendants, the children of Israel, are its heirs. This story has been used by rabbis over the centuries to spurn the supposed descendents of Esau and to justify their exclusive right to a particular geographic territory. Although I was certainly skeptical about the Zionist nature of the Birthright trip, I made a plan to ethically balance my participation by extending my trip another ten days to volunteer with Palestinians.

I planned to be in the West Bank as the Muslim holy month of Ramadan ended and the Jewish holy month of Elul began. Through working on a farm in the West Bank, I hoped to contribute sweat equity to the Palestinian fight for freedom, and also to glean something from that land which my ancestors had forgotten through their exile. I figured that the Palestinians might have a more visceral experience of tilling the soil in this region, compared to the Jewish newcomers who have mostly lived far away for millennia. While the reality is that the Palestinian people have largely been robbed of their ability to work the land (and modern Israelis have become quite adept), my vision was that Jew and Arab could unite through a shared understanding of the seasons and what the land asks of them. As Lederach and Lederach wrote, “nurturing of a land, digging deep into a sense of something that holds purpose and provides sustenance”, offers a metaphor of healing through images of “cyclical, season-like processes tied to location and land” (2010: 62). Collaborating around shared needs for both purpose and sustenance, I imagined, holds the possibility of an enlarged identity which can encompass the suffering of many peoples.

After ten days of exploring Israel’s sites, I parted ways with my cohort, to cross the border into the West Bank, “lands captured by Israel during the Six-Day War in 1967 and currently under the joint control of Israel and the Palestinian Authority,” I learned in preparation for my journey from writer and activist Starhawk (2005: 13). Starhawk explained that the region is “inhabited primarily by Arabic-speaking Palestinians, but some Israelis have established settlements within its borders in an attempt to claim the land as a part of Israel” (ibid). I first had to go to East Jerusalem on a bus called a nesher and, from there, to Bethlehem. My neighbors on the nesher were mostly baalei teshuvah, the phrase used to describe secular Jews who have become more religious. The singular, baal teshuvah, means “Master of Return,” signifying the return to an ancient people. Sometimes, baalei teshuvah remain in their country of origin, but many settle in Israel. Aliyah, translated as “ascent,” refers to the immigration of Jews to the Land of Israel and is one of the most basic tenets of Zionist ideology. Many of the settlers occupying Palestinian land had made aliyah as baalei teshuvah.

In 1950, Israel passed the “Law of Return,” under which “every Jew had an automatic right to settle in Israel,” while the Palestinians whose home had been this land for generations faced great difficulty in gaining citizenship (Ateek 2002: 36). The Palestinian community has also demanded a “Right to Return”; a government sign in Bethlehem reads: “Return is our Right and our Destiny”. United Nations General Assembly Resolution 194, passed on 11 December 1948, technically affords this right to Palestinians, resolving that “the refugees wishing to return to their homes and live at peace with their neighbors should be permitted to do so at the earliest practicable date” – yet this certainly has not happened (UN General Assembly 194). I have the privilege of returning to Israel-Palestine any time I want, a luxury not afforded my Palestinian kin. By volunteering in the West Bank, I planned to use my privilege to complicate baal teshuvah: not returning to a heritage, per se – although I sought that, as well – but by becoming a Master of Teshuvah, seeking forgiveness for the actions of my people. Perhaps, in finding the best definition for the word teshuvah, reconciliation is nestled right in between the traditional translations of repentance and return.

After spending a night in Bethlehem, I awoke early the next morning to meet a man named Daher Nassar at the Babzqaq bus stop. Together, we took a taxi to Tent of Nations, the farm Daher runs with his brother Daoud. The Nassars’ grandfather purchased this land in 1916 under the Ottoman Empire (Fadil 2013). In1991, the Israeli government declared the land their farm was on to be Israeli “state land.” The Nassars appealed in court, brandishing the deed that had remained in their family for nearly a century. In 2001 and 2002, though the land case was still unresolved, the local council of Israeli settlements made multiple attempts to build a road through the Nassars’ land (ibid). The brothers kept challenging in court and finally, in 2005, the Nassar family was told that they could begin the process of registering their land with the Israeli authorities – something no Palestinian had been able to do since 1967. Although the Supreme Court gave the Nassars the green light to “re-register” the land, according to the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, the authorities have continued to postpone this process and to thereby claim that the Nassars’ farm is “illegal” (Prusher 2014).

The taxi dropped me and Daher off a sizeable distance from the farm; as I dragged my tourist luggage over rocks, navigating the barriers of boulders set up by the Israeli army thirteen years prior, Daher explained that these obstacles have prevented him from transporting produce from his farm to the market. Since 1991, the Nassars have regularly had Israeli military and settlers trespass on their land – an occurrence which I witnessed during the first hour of my visit. When people walked onto the land from the rear, claiming in Hebrew to be “tourists,” Daher approached them, politely requesting that they leave through the front entrance and come back with some notice so that he could prepare a pot of tea. They insisted on leaving the way they came, their response tainted with the air of arrogance possessed by a colonizer.

Another tactic commonly used by both settlers and the Israeli army is to cut down trees on Palestinian land. Cutting down trees in this manner happens to go against both official Israeli policy and the Jewish law of bal tashchit, “Do not destroy its trees” (Deuteronomy 20:19). Although this verse in Deuteronomy initially referred only to wartime prohibitions, it has been expanded over the centuries by the rabbis. Perhaps the most famous of them, Maimonides, wrote circa 1178 CE that bal tashchit does not apply only during a siege, but that “the Torah’s rule is broken whenever a food tree is cut down just to be destructive” (Sulomm Stein 2000: 101).

Shortly after registering as a volunteer and setting down my bags in the tent I would be staying in, I received an opportunity for instant karma – the moment I had been waiting for: Daher instructed me on how to water a grove of olive trees. Olive trees are special in this region, a traditional sign of peace. Starhawk reflected that “olive trees can live for two thousand years”; they “have seen empires come and go, have seen betrayal and brutality and assassination, but still they endure” (2005: 13). The trees in Palestine are still reeling from the Turks, who turned them into fuel during the First World War. This lack of greenery, combined with a shortness of memory, allowed the British and the Zionists to propagate the myth that the Palestinians were in need of more civilized outsiders to teach them efficient farming methods. Oh, how we treat our ancestors and teachers!

As I began my practice of sweat equity in the afternoon sun, a sort of mantra occurred to me that I had read a few years earlier in the book Zero Limits (2007) by Ihaleakala Hew Len and Joe Vitale. Hew Len had learned the ancient Hawaiian practice of ho’oponopono from traditional healer, or kahuna lapaʻau, Morrnah Simeona. Simeona is known to have modified the traditional Hawaiian practice of forgiveness and reconciliation for more contemporary applications. In Zero Limits, Hew Len recounted the story of transforming an entire psychiatric hospital of patients and staff through ho’oponopono, using the simple mantra: “I love you. I’m sorry. Please forgive me. Thank you.” Remembering the power of this practice from the book, I repeated these words over and over, sharing love and nourishment with my little green charges.

Here, in supposed “enemy territory,” I started the process of teshuvah, forgiving myself for the tremendous burden I carry for my peoples’ hostile takeover of this land. For hours, I proceeded to water and say my mantra. Doing so, I was reminded of the upcoming Jewish ceremony of tashlich, which Chamberlain wrote, “hinges on water as a dissolver and container of sins”: “water’s irrigation of the Earth symbolizes the quenching of spiritual as well as physical thirst and the cleansing and purification of the soul, as well as the soil” (2007: 42-3). As the sun set over the West Bank wadi, the month of Elul began, along with the elongated process of teshuvah leading up to Rosh haShanah.

Across the wadi, or valley, Muslim calls to prayer rang in my ears from a nearby minaret. Glaring in the opposite direction, I saw what looked like a lookout tower with the Israeli flag on it. Surrounding the Nassars’ family farm were two dozen Jewish “settlements” on the hilltops that make up Gush Etzion – sprawling suburban outposts declared illegal under international law.

The settlers of this land tend to envision themselves as the archetypal equivalent of American manifest destiny. Starhawk, however, critiqued the implication of “settlement” as a “lonely outpost in some hostile wilderness,” since most of these neighborhoods are “actually gated suburban communities” with “guard towards, razor wire, and an armed security force backed by the Israeli military” (2005: 14). At that moment, I glimpsed the experience of a colonized person, with the attendant psychological resonance of the colonizer nonchalantly planting their flag on what was your soil.

That night over dinner, Daoud Nassar explained that the farm is his way of channeling frustration about the occupation toward a constructive effort: he has the opportunity to engage the international community in this conflict, to give Westerners some farming experience, and to effectively resist the occupation in his own personal way. When I asked him about the suggestion that Israelis and Palestinians might begin by becoming friends, he appeared hesitant and a bit agitated. He responded that he has trouble with that possibility under occupation because only two humans can meet equally for a cup of tea. First, he insisted, he must be treated like a human.

Over the next few days on the farm, I watered more trees, placed figs and grapes on a roof to dry, and even tended to goats and chickens. I also worked with the other male volunteers to dig a cistern so that the farm could obtain sustainable water resources and forego dependence on an expensive Israeli water supply. At various points in that process, as I struggled to effectively use the jackhammer and shovel, I could experience a lack of masculine corporeal competence. Over the next few years, I’ve realized in hindsight, engaging my body in connection to the Earth would surprisingly expand my relationship to masculinity. At that moment, however, I was just barely learning to slam a shovel into rock.

Shortly after returning home, the sweat equity I invested in digging that cistern returned the favor tenfold. My grandmother passed away just days before Rosh haShanah; as I shoveled dirt on the casket at her funeral, I experienced a striking bodily competence. People typically do a symbolic flinging of a few pebbles, but I felt brawny enough to give my Baba a powerful send-off – lovingly shoveling piles of earth onto the plain pine box. As I look back, I’m reminded, quite viscerally, of the reconciliation that happened between the estranged Biblical characters Isaac and Ishmael (supposedly archetypal progenitors of the Israelites and Arabs, respectively) when they joined together to bury their father Abraham at Machpelah (Genesis 25:9). Irene Diamond expressed a similarly embodied shift in burying her mother, when she discovered an “understanding of bodies that was far more corporeal and involved with a sensuous living earth than is commonly understood through the lens of most Hellenistic and Western Christian thought” (2000: 247). It was the experience of “bringing the dead body in direct contact with the earth”, Diamond wrote, that allowed her to see Judaism’s “important ecological traces” (ibid).

Spiraling Back to the Present

While Diamond brought to life the bodily experience of Jewish burial, Seidenberg wrote in the same article about the embodied Jewish practice of “living in a booth [sukkah] during the fall harvest festival called Sukkot,” which traditional Jews do for as many as six or seven days a year (2000: 251). He explained the power of the sukkah in that “it manifests this moment of ingathering of sense and meaning and smell and sight, earth and wind and starlight[,] the interfacing of body and earth, divinity and history, creation and redemption” (252). Although I have been unable to build a proper sukkah at my Los Angeles apartment, my chosen sit spot on my balcony is a year-round luxury in which I get to experience, through communion with nearby trees, the simultaneously transcendent and immanent that Seidenberg described.

In addition to dwelling – or at least eating – in the sukkah during this holiday, there is a customary ritual requiring what is called a lulav and etrog. The lulav, a date palm frond, which is flanked by two willow branches on the left and three myrtle branches on the right, is held in the right hand; while the etrog, a citron fruit, is held in the left hand. Together, these objects are blessed and waved on each of the seven days of the holiday (although typically not during Shabbat). When conducting this ritual, the lulav and etrog are shaken three times in each of six directions: east, south, west, north, above, and below.

At the very end of Sukkot, on the seventh day of the holiday, is Hoshanah Rabbah. The Hoshanah Rabbah ritual is a procession of supplications, with individuals fervently beating their branches on the ground in one last plea of redemption that reached its height ten days prior on Yom Kippur but was actually being prepared for throughout the previous six weeks. Rabbi Waskow admitted in his article “And the Earth Is Filled with the Breath of Life” that this ritual which is located at “the end of most traditional Jewish prayer books” is rarely practiced: “a few people in some traditional synagogues will gather in a small chapel and beat willow branches on the rug. . . but they don’t connect the words with any act that might be done” (2000b: 271).

The phrase “Hosha na,” Waskow continued, has been “transliterated into the rather meaningless English word ‘hosanna’ [but] actually means ‘Please save us’ . . . ‘Save the earth, save us!’” – a thread that becomes clear when we read the prayers of that liturgy, many of which “name the dangers that face the earth and plead with the Breath of all Life to save the earth from plague and drought” (ibid). In discussing how Hoshanah Rabbah might be enlivened, Waskow fantasized that tens of thousands of American Jews might show up at the edges of rivers throughout North America on that day, dancing around the Torah, beating their willow branches on the earth, and demanding that corporations and Congress take action to heal the earth.

The first time I learned about Hoshanah Rabbah was a few years ago when I was teaching a bimonthly class for 8th and 9th grade students at a local synagogue. As an educator of Jewish youth beginning their journey into adulthood, my underlying intention was to (re-)vitalize the power and potential of our ancient inheritance: to enmesh an analytic study of myths and practices with a connection to body, breath, earth, and prayer – to wake my students up as I believe the prophets would have wanted. My students were incredibly generous and gracious in their embrace of my pedagogical experimentation, which often included elements of Jungian depth psychology and ecopsychology.

My students’ willingness to participate in my class was demonstrated perhaps more than any other time in my lesson on Hoshanah Rabbah. I offered my students the traditional prayers as well as more contemporary versions, and then invited them to come up with their own: “As part of the greater biotic community,” their writing prompt went, “we are called to say ‘Hoshanah!’ for all of creation. After reading the above examples, write down at least seven (7) things that you would beg to be saved.” One after the other, each student got a chance to lead the procession while chanting “Hosha’na for the sake of __________, please save us!,” whipping their branches against the ground and declaring the salvation of whatever they had written on their papers: children, trees, refugees, friends and neighbors who had recently been victim to California wildfires.

With their prayers, the students were concrete, relevant, and purposeful. It was almost as if they thought their pleas could possibly be answered. “For us to celebrate our ancient festivals in such ways,” Rabbi Waskow wrote – and as I attempted to demonstrate with my students, “we would have to believe that our prayerful pleas do not fall into emptiness but into a Place that hears and can respond” (2000b: 273). As we relate to that Place, through prayer and ritual and embodied connection to Earth, we simultaneously imagine the tremendous possibilities that arise from that relating. What I believe was evident at this particular Sunday school class, and as I have been continuing to explore through a Jewish approach to liberatory ecopsychology, is an opening up to the existential horizon posed by Waskow: “What would it mean for us to pray not only with our mouths but also with our arms and legs?” (ibid). Perhaps a prayer of the mind, soul, or heart only becomes real when it’s embodied.

Like the V’ahavta prayer central to Jewish liturgy, the work of teshuvah requires the totality of our hearts, souls, and might. As we journey once again to the close of the Jewish High Holy Days, this new horizon of Yom Kippur and the year that follows beckon me to reap my harvest from the paths of teshuvah thus trodden. After practicing hitbodedut under the sole tree standing in my local Berkeley park for the year that I lived there, I have continued to develop my sit spot practice of returning to that Place in my heart. Watering those plants on the Nassar family’s hills outside of Hebron may not have changed the dynamics of the conflict in Israel-Palestine, but it certainly altered something deep inside my own soul, the ripple effects of which have been tremendous. And the might that my students drew into their prayers that morning as they pleaded with branches in hand solidified the distinction between reciting a rote note and infusing our prayers with a conscious intention. Spiraling anew, as we hear the sound of the ritual ram’s horn called a shofar, I marshal all of my powers toward the teshuvah ahead.

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Dr. Pesach Chananiah is a Jewish ecopsychologist, educator, and community organizer working in interfaith and environmental spaces. He writes about the psychological impact of disconnection from land, through a Jewish lens, and explores modes of healing through embodied spiritual practice in the natural world.