All of a sudden, so much about my life made sense. I did not know how Sephardic I really am until I reconnected with the land of Andalusia. They became my mentors: the ones I do not have names for but whose love and care I can feel in my body. By connecting my body with the land and practicing deep listening, I felt an abundance of support from the ancestral realm guiding me to this knowledge. This is the secret of Kabbalah: the sacred teachings that shine a light unto the realization of God through embodied experience.
#Summer memories expansion full#
Yet here in the mountains of Girona, I remembered that my lineage is full of God lovers - those who have dedicated their lives to creating frameworks of knowledge to understand God. In many Jewish communities, learning is prioritized over devotional practices and sometimes even the word God can be controversial. My Judaism has always centered around God, though I often feel isolated with this perspective in the Jewish world. I started contemplating the presence of all the Jewish mystics that came before me on this very land, expounding words of Torah to reveal the light of God. I did not have words for what I was hearing, but somatically I felt a certain transmission of knowledge. It was there that I began to feel this deep ancestral call. This to me is not simply the light of the Sun, but the light of God too. The sun rises in all cities, yet there are some lands where she shines extra brightly. I spent Shabbat there, on my own, and as I viewed the magnificent sunset from an overlook, I felt how the rays of light shone with a particular expression that felt familiar. I all of a sudden felt that there was something alive in the city that was paying attention to me and my visit. I was intrigued by the Jewish history there so I traveled to visit Girona, where there was a Jewish museum filled with teachings of Kabbalah, stories of Sephardic sages and artifacts of the culture and history of my tradition. I felt the land calling me back a few times and one year I acquiesced and visited Barcelona.
There is something here for me, I knew.Īfter that summer, it took me some time to return to Spain. But of course, as I spent the summer there learning about the history and visiting cities like Toledo, the unknown memories of my bones awakened. I did not connect the two at first, the land of Andalusia and my lineage. Yet here I was, excited to embark on a journey to Spain.
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