Dancing with the Divine by Rabbi Nadya Gross

Moderator’s Note: The first part of this blog first appeared on the Yerusha website on Sept. 29, 2025. You can see it here.

From my earliest memories, I saw things others didn’t see and knew things I had no business knowing. I thought everyone noticed the dance of light around bodies, or the tiny life forms at the base of trees. I assumed everyone could feel another’s emotions as vividly as their own.

That illusion ended when my grandmother—my Savta—took me into the kitchen (where everything important happened), closed the door, and said: “Never speak of these things to anyone but me.” And so, my training began.

Savta’s gifts were different from mine. She had grown up in a circle of women and their daughters—a circle where wisdom was passed from generation to generation. In that circle, women taught each other, shared their insights, cultivated their gifts and skills, and preserved a legacy of sacred knowing.

The wisdom she shared with me was as ancient as the land itself. We began with reverence for the Earth and her elements—echoes of pre-patriarchal Goddess traditions. She taught me that everything is interconnected: harm to a tree, insect, or stream is harm to us. Respect is not something to demand, but to embody. I learned to ask permission before lifting a stone from its resting place, to give thanks to the fruit-bearing trees in my grandparents’ yard when I plucked the ripened fruit, and to recognize Creation as a web of relationship.

She taught me that the world itself was born from longing—the Creator’s yearning for relationship—and that our task is to learn how to live in right relationship: with ourselves, with each other, with the more-than-human world, and with all existence.

Our relationship with the Divine was cultivated in the kitchen. Mornings began with “dancing with God/dess,” bringing divine energy through our bodies. I learned alchemy as Savta combined simple ingredients with prayer and praise, transforming meals into sacred offerings.

Later, when I studied Kabbalah, I recognized the resonance. So much of what Savta had taught me echoed Jewish mystical wisdom. And yet, her teachings also bore the imprint of other women’s circles, echoing across cultures and generations.

Most importantly, Savta taught me to listen with my whole being—to open heart, body, and mind to the messages waiting to be expressed through me. This is the essence of kabbalah—“receiving.” The wisdom is alive, evolving, flowing through each of us in unique ways. Our task is to embody it with humility, compassion, and presence.

Savta often reminded me of the ancient Jewish story of the Sun and Moon. Originally created equal, the Moon complained, and God instructed her to diminish herself. But Savta said we are living in the time of their restoration—when Sun and Moon, masculine and feminine, would shine again in full balance, each radiant in their own light.

By the time I came along, her circle of women had dissolved. (That’s a story for another time.) So our work was hidden, carried out in secret. For years, I kept it concealed—only carefully revealing small pieces to my beloved husband ten years into our marriage. Later, I shared it with my teacher, Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi, a great modern mystic. He urged me to pass it on, to write a book. I refused to trap it on paper where it would become static, so he suggested training others as I had been trained. At his insistence, I founded the Wisdom School nearly two decades ago.

What began as “Secrets My Grandmother Told Me” has become a living lineage. Today, the Wisdom School is in its ninth cycle: a two-year journey of deep initiation, where Savta’s wisdom continues to unfold and renew itself. And, keeping Savta’s vision of the evolution of the sun and moon story at the heart of my work, this journey has been open to all who feel called—honoring the full spectrum of human expression and experience. Along the way, I’ve gathered my own circle of legacy holders—and called them Yoreshet—graduates who embody this evolving tradition in their own voices.

Update: Savta’s circle of women dissolved before I could fully inherit it. What she passed to me, she passed in secret, behind a closed kitchen door. And I know I am not alone in this. So many of us carry fragments—a grandmother’s gesture, a half-remembered prayer, a recipe that was also a spell—with no circle to place them in, no lineage to return them to.

This is exactly why I am so moved to invite you into something I believe Savta herself would have recognized and celebrated.

This April 22–23, 2026, My organization, Yerusha, in partnership with The Lilith Institute, is hosting Wisdom of the Mothers: Honoring Our Ancestral Roots—a virtual symposium dedicated to reclaiming the wisdom, resilience, and creativity of our foremothers.

Together, we will ask the questions that haunt so many of us: How do we honor the ancestors whose names we barely know? How do we grieve what has been silenced or lost—while celebrating what has somehow, miraculously, survived? How do we tend the broken places in our lineages, and weave memory back into the fabric of our living?

Through learning, ceremony, and dialogue, we will explore ancient practices and birth new ones—rituals and acts of remembrance that speak to the lives we actually live today.

Savta taught me that the wisdom is alive, evolving, and waiting to be received. This symposium is an invitation to receive it—together.

For more information and to register for the symposium, click here.

BIO: Rabbi Nadya Gross, is a Founder and Chief Programming Officer of Yerusha, a progressive, multi-faith educational organization committed to interfaith diversity and paradigm shift. Trained in a Jewish indigenous mystical tradition by her grandmother, she transmits the teachings in a two-year wisdom school: Secrets My Grandmother Told Me. Nadya is also a congregational rabbi, spiritual director and teacher. She and her husband, Rabbi Victor Gross, serve Congregation Pardes Levavot, in Boulder, CO which shares space, study, occasional worship and good works in the community with Shepherd of the Hills Lutheran Church. This has been a living laboratory for the practice of Deep Ecumenism – a concept first articulated by Rev. Matthew Fox and developed by her teacher, and founder of the Jewish Renewal movement, Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi.