Last year, in an event co-organised by Shamir Collective, Shomer Collective and the Workers' Circle, Sarah Chandler (Aka Kohenet Shamira), Eleonore Weill and I returned to Mount Carmel Cemetery to lead a group of people in the Elul ritual of feldmestn. You can now watch a video of that event, produced by Sarah Chandler and filmed and edited by Toney Brown. In the video, I explain the history and significance of the ritual. I also recite two tkhines - one improvised, one sung to a melody by Rabbi Noam Lerman.
If you are interested in learning more and/or practicing these rituals yourself, Sarah, Eleonore and I will be co-leading an online course on the same topic with Ritual Well https://ritualwell.org/event/threading-stones-an-elul-tradition/2024-07-02
Unlike some of other courses I've taught, this will be part history and part ritual - you won't just learn about the practices, you'll also learn to do them, as well as ways to adapt them at home or in nature if you don't have access to ancestral graves.
Also: If you are less of a Kohenet and more of a Yiddish language geek (or, like me, both), then stay tuned for another course coming up which will be taught entirely in Yiddish.
Yom Kippur feels far away, but it also kind of feels like Yom Kippur every day at the moment. While I've been a little quiet on here, distracted with other work and horrors in the world, I've also been drawing on these rituals more than ever in the past seven months.
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