Rather, I learned it by talking to my dad in preparation for the seance, and by studying a family tree he had made. For one, I learned more about her: that she grew up in a village called Dvinsk (home of Jewish icon Mark Rothko), that she was married to a rabbi, and that after he died, she and her children moved to America. (If I’m being totally honest, that’s probably the clear-cut ancestral guidance I’d been seeking perhaps, in that way, I’m not so different from Saul.)īut yes, I do feel more connected to her than I did before.
WORDS FROM SEANCE HOW TO
Spoiler: no, Sara River did not appear as a specter emerging from her challah bowl and tell me how to live my life. I called out her name, inviting her to come from the spirit realm into the room with us, and to give us a sign that she was there. And I attempted to make contact with Sara River. Then, I taught a little song with Yiddish words that were used in the Ashkenazi seances in Cairo in the 1800s: “Habe sich, tishelah,” which means something like “Raise yourself, little table.”Īs the group sang, I put my hands on a challah bowl that my great-great-grandmother Sara River brought over from Latvia in the 1800s, which now sits in my apartment. These form a bridge between finite, definable reality and the unknown. The sefirot are the 10 knowable attributes of the divine.
So first, I got a bunch of friends together, took over my apartment (thank you to my partner!!) and got everyone to stand in the shape of the sefirot, a powerful shape in Kabbalah. Photo by Jose Talmud teaches that you need a minyan of 10 for many sacred rituals. I created a seance by pulling pieces together from bits of existing traditions. I wanted to know if I could I wanted to hear from my ancestors. So, I decided to create a Jewish seance ritual. If something is prohibited, then it’s gotta be possible. It makes me think: If something is banned, then it’s gotta be happening. And yet… there are LOTS of stories of Jews reaching out to the dearly departed. There are lots of teachings - in the Torah, Talmud, and from great rabbis - about how contacting the dead is banned in Jewish tradition. Allegedly, a hand from the grave will come out and give you a slice of honey cake to wish you a sweet new year! Going back further, I learned that in some Hasidic traditions, it is customary on Erev Rosh Hashanah to go to a cemetery and visit the grave of a rabbi. They passed along messages from these spirits through a planchette, a little wooden tablet with a pencil attached. They would sit at a small table for half an hour, silent and focused, until their hands started to move across the table, signaling that they had made contact with a spirit. In the 1800s, two Ashkenazi sisters in Cairo got very into the spiritualist movement, hosting seances in their apartment to communicate with the recently deceased. I learned that there’s a rich, transgressive history of Jews contacting spirits from The Beyond™ - and being forbidden to do so.
And I was like, why has no one TOLD me this before?! From there, I went to the Brooklyn Public Library. However, Saul had forbidden people from contacting ghosts, so he was asking this woman to break a law he himself had created! There’s some back-and-forth, but he promises her she won’t get in trouble, and she does it: She raises Samuel from the dead. In case you aren’t up on the Book of Samuel, the Witch of Endor is a medium who’s asked by King Saul to raise the prophet Samuel from the dead so Saul can get his advice about a war with the Philistines. I was going to Shabbat on Zoom every week, making challah and feeling more Jewish by the day I was also pretty sure that the stories in the Tanakh contained lots of plagues, and that seemed topical! So I read the Tanakh as my pandemic hobby.Įventually, I made it to the Book of Samuel and read about the Witch of Endor.
It started around April 2020 when I decided to read the Tanakh, the Hebrew bible, early in quarantine.
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