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From the Archives: “Home: A New Pesach Reflection” by Ivy Helman

Author’s note: This post originally published on this website on March 11, 2018. How prescient it is. I live in Prague, about an 8 hour car-ride to the Ukrainian border. Over 300,000 Ukrainian refugees have arrived here, with more arriving daily. They need homes, and this need is overwhelming our small country. Yet, we are doing all we can each and everyday to help those fleeing the war. Yet, this housing is not home, not when war still rages and when families are still separated. We need peace. Everyone deserves a home.

In ancient times, Pesach was one of three pilgrimage holidays, the others being Sukkot and Shavuot. According to the the Torah, Israelite men were required to travel to Jerusalem to bring offerings to the temple. Supposedly, this reconnected these Israelites to their religion, to each other and to the deity. Participating in these pilgrimages brought about a deeper sense of community. In short, three times a year, Jerusalem became a home away from home.

Homebound by Joyce Zonana

When my parents left Egypt, they left behind everything they’d grown up with, all the objects that carried their deepest associations and memories. They taught me to scorn such “things”—what others value as mementos or souvenirs—rightly reasoning they can be lost in a moment. But while we have them, it is lovely, I’m learning, to let the spirits embedded within them, the memories and feelings they evoke, surround and comfort us. As I move through this house, I feel bound to my own and others’ histories, embedded in a rich and complex life that nurtures and sustains me. And as I sit still and knit, I sense that I am knitting (knotting) up the by now long, loose threads of my own life, shaping them into a coherent and satisfying whole.

Joyce Zonana When I was growing up, home was the last place I wanted to be. It’s not that ours was an abusive or angry household: both parents loved me and my mother labored to create a calm, clean space to contain us all. It’s just that I felt suffocated.

Part of the problem was that we were immigrants. My parents were struggling to find their way in an alien culture, and, with little else to hold onto, they clung to their customs and traditions. I wanted to be “American,” to mingle with classmates, to venture into the vastness (New York City!) just beyond our door. The Middle Eastern culture from which we hailed had strict rules for women and girls, and my mother expected me to follow them. She herself was an excellent cook, a creative seamstress and scrupulous housekeeper, a devoted and dutiful wife. I rejected all of it, refusing to cook, ripping out seams, balking at my weekly chores of dusting and vacuuming and ironing. Instead I dreamt of life as a writer, a renegade, an outlaw. My role models were hobos and witches and gypsies; more than anything, I yearned to be free, longing to “walk at all risks,” like Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh.

Continue reading “Homebound by Joyce Zonana”

Coming Home to the Sacred by Carolyn Lee Boyd

My grandparents and mother at their home in 1929. In 1929, my grandmother wrote the word “HOME” in resounding letters across the bottom of a photo of a herself and my grandfather, smiling lovingly and confidently, with my infant mother propped in between them on a rattan chair. Within a few years the Great Depression stole that house, rendering them desolate and homeless, cutting a psychic wound so deep that it never healed.

I recently found the photo and thought of our family’s ancestors who, millennia ago in Old Europe, worshipped the Goddess in peaceful, egalitarian societies. Then and there, as in so many cultures outside modern western societies, “home” was a sacred place. As discovered by Marija Gimbutas and others, small statues of the Goddess were frequently found by the ovens inside family dwellings, and temples included rooms for both sanctuaries and workshops for making bread and weaving cloth. Houses and temples were extensions of one another.

Continue reading “Coming Home to the Sacred by Carolyn Lee Boyd”

A Nurturing Environment is Not a Luxury by Elisabeth Schilling

There are two tarot card decks that have accompanied me on my trip overseas this summer: Alana Fairchild’s Rumi Oracle and Lee Bursten’s Tarot of Dreams. In recent readings, I have been presented with messages of place, thus the topic of my post.

But first, Seneca, Stoic philosopher born around the time of Jesus, cautions that people traveling to escape their difficulties are sometimes no better when they have arrived to a distant land because they have not become rid of themselves. Likewise, zen philosophy suggests that it is not our circumstances that matter so much as the peace and calm we create in our inner landscape. Nhat Thich Hanh or Ram Dass or Pema Chödrön (maybe all 3) have a metaphor for the tumultuous ocean – that the sea is often rocky, but it is always calm in the deep beneath. Yet, I see all this as a reminder to be mindful about the added layers of suffering we can create and advice for difficult times when we can’t leave yet. Regardless, I think any wisdom cannot discount the need for a nurturing, healing space when at all possible.

Continue reading “A Nurturing Environment is Not a Luxury by Elisabeth Schilling”

Bless This House: Creating Sacred Space Where You Live, Work & Travel by Mama Donna Henes – A Book Review by Joyce Zonana

“There is no such thing as a bad blessing,” Mama Donna tell us, “no rules . . . no recipes, no prescriptions, no instruction manuals,” no “one-size-fits-all” House Blessing. Yet it’s not so much “anything goes” as “everything matters”: “The only thing you can do wrong in a ritual is to not pay attention to your true intentions.”

jz-headshot Donna Henes, familiarly known as “Mama Donna,” is a national treasure. From her “House of Many Altars” in what she mischievously calls “Exotic Brooklyn,” she serves as an exuberant, irrepressible urban shaman: holding outdoor public rituals at each solstice and equinox for over forty years; blessing and leading New York City’s annual Halloween Parade; creating meaningful, personalized ceremonies for funerals, weddings, new babies, new homes, and new businesses. In 2009, the governor of New York State called on her to bless the fleet during the quadricentennial celebration of Henry Hudson’s voyage to the New World. She is the author of five books, including The Queen of Myself and Celestially Auspicious Occasions, and publishes a monthly e-newsletter, The Queen’s Chronicles, that offers “meaning, moxie, and magic for midlife women.”

In her most recent book, Bless This House: Creating Sacred Space Where You Live, Work & Travel (Ixia Press, 2018), Mama Donna generously shares her house-blessing “secrets”—revealing that they are not secrets after all. Demystifying the blessing process, the book details everything you need to know to “claim and consecrate” your own house with “authority and aplomb.” Continue reading “Bless This House: Creating Sacred Space Where You Live, Work & Travel by Mama Donna Henes – A Book Review by Joyce Zonana”

Home: A New Pesach Reflection by Ivy Helman

What an interesting and quite awful definition of home: a male-only community focused on slaughtering animals to atone for sins. Did ancient Israelites think that this religious obligation actually created a better home than where they lived most of the year? Or, was it just a religious obligation? Did anyone bemoan the massacre of the animals? In a related fashion, was Pesach alienating for women and children? Did the ancient Israelite home become less important during these festivals? Did women and children feel left out of their own religious traditions if they didn’t live in Jerusalem? What did they do for Pesach? Continue reading “Home: A New Pesach Reflection by Ivy Helman”

Belonging to the Land by Carol P. Christ

I believe that we can restore our hope in a world that transcends race by building communities where self-esteem comes from not feeling superior to any group, but from one’s relationship to the land, to the people, to the place, wherever that may be.—bell hooks

In these words from her poignant memoir-reflection-analysis Belonging, bell hooks suggests that rather than creating identity by comparing ourselves to others, whether in the academy, in communities, or in the larger society, we would do better to root our identity in the land.

Hooks “left home” in rural Appalachia in order to pursue “higher” (why do we call it that?) education including a Ph.D. which enabled her to teach at prestigious universities in the urban north. Despite her considerable success as an academic and a black feminist, hooks suffered persistent depression in the cities where she taught. Eventually she diagnosed her dis-ease as a longing for the home she had left behind, specifically as a need to connect with the traditions of her ancestors, the mountains, and the land that had sustained them since the end of slavery. Continue reading “Belonging to the Land by Carol P. Christ”

Touching Roots: An Incredible Lightness Of Being by Carol P. Christ

A few days ago, a German-speaking friend spoke with an Eiloff relative of mine who lives in St. Nikolaus, Saarland. My relative remembered hearing the story that Heinrich Eiloff, my 2x great-grandfather, emigrated to the United States in the mid-1800s. Since we connected, I am experiencing an incredible lightness of being.

This is the first time my two years of genealogical research have led to a “Kunta Kinte” moment, a connection with a relative in “the old country.” I have been unable to trace most of my ancestors back to the places of their birth.

My relative in St. Nikolaus was perplexed by a call from Greece from a woman claiming to represent his American relative. But when she explained that I only want to find my roots and perhaps visit relatives in St. Nikolaus, he said, “that would be very nice.” He promised to speak with other living relatives and said we should call in a month or two and he would tell us what he found.

According to my research, my 2x great-grandfather Heinrich Eiloff was born in 1820 in St. Nikolas, Saarland, in Prussia (now in Germany).