Shuv HaMakom: On Returning to Place/Space for the High Holidays
The Judeofuturism Project is putting on a two-week exhibition and community laboratory bringing artists together from around the country to imagine futures of American Jewish life. Join us for our opening reception in Boston on 10/27, two weeks of in-person programming that follows, or for our digital exhibition tour on 11/19!
I just got back from two weeks traveling around Spain––first, to celebrate a dear friend’s wedding and then, to explore and visit places that are special to me. I’ll try not to be dramatic or cringey, but to put it mildly: Spain is my favorite place in the whole entire world. When I first went to Granada in 2018 for my study abroad program, I had the bizarre sensation of feeling like I was coming home to a place I’d never been. Every time I go back, it feels like its own sort of miraculous return. And it always seems to coincide with a period of immense transformation in my own life.
The last time I was in Spain, it was fall 2022. I spent three months wandering the beaches of A Coruña, walking the Camino, eating my way through Pais Vasco, exploring Fuerteventura and Toledo, reuniting with loved ones in Madrid and Granada. And attempting to resolve the very small, very simple matter of what I wanted to do with my brief, wonderful time on this earth. My time in Spain in 2022, especially the several weeks I spent back in Granada, inspired my application to Harvard Divinity School. It was also the events of that trip that made me realize I was hopelessly in love with my best friend (now fiancé). Call it coincidence. Call it divine revelation.
The same fountain from different angles in Carmen de los Mártires, Granada in Oct 2022 (left) and Sept 2026 (right).
Four years later, I was back in my favorite place. I was taking the same photos with the same gorgeous views. My hair is longer; I’m sure I have a few more smile lines. And of course, that ring on my finger is a new life update that my friends in Spain are THRILLED to ask me about. But I’m still lugging around the massive crossbody leather bag with the zipper and latch close that I grabbed at Unique in Fairfax, VA, in summer 2022. I’m still interrupting random strangers at cafes to make friends. The best heladería in the city is still the small shop at the entrance to Plaza Nueva, and eating magdalenas made by the cloistered nuns in the Albaicín at the Mirador de San Nicholas with a cafe con leche in hand is still the best way to start my morning.
But some things have changed. I went to the Alhambra at night––the first time I’d ever done the night tour––and saw how the shadows brought new aspects of the breathtaking architecture into sharp relief (see below). And the fountain that I stumbled upon newly repaired and bare four years ago is now bursting with lush, green life (see above).
La Sala de los Abencerrajes (Hall of Abencerrajes) in the Nasrid Palaces at the Alhambra in daytime Oct 2022 (left) and nighttime Sept 2026 (right). The right photo is slightly more zoomed in.
Just like in 2022, I spent (at least part) of the High Holidays abroad. In 2022, Tashlich was fulfilled with bread tossed into the rushing waves in Valencia, accompanied by full-body sobs of homesickness and confusion. In 2026, we tossed fallen flower petals into moving water and reflected on where we’d fallen short in the past year and how we could make amends. I wept from exhaustion, from despair, from inspiration, from a sense of hope so sharp and profound it brought me to my knees. Clearly, my dramatics have not changed in four years.
This past January, I went to Big Jewish Gathering, a two-day spiritual convening in Brooklyn that wove together immersive ritual, embodied learning, and creative renewal. There, some of the ritual leaders introduced a song titled “Shuv Ha Makom,” meaning, “return to the place.” I’ve had the song stuck in my head these past two weeks, murmuring it under my breath, humming the tune unprompted as I’ve wandered the streets I’ve meandered so many times before. Feeling utterly the same and utterly changed.
Shuv means return, but it does not mean repeat. Jewish time, famously, operates not as a linear plane, or a perfect circle, but as a multi-dimensional spiral. Even the word referring to the past in biblical Hebrew, kedem, also means what lies before us. Jewish time allows past, present, and future to exist in spatial proximity to each other. Rabbi Yosef Goldman writes in a forthcoming piece, Jewish time “draws the past near and lets the future shimmer through the edges of the present.” As someone who spends her days thinking about futures––Jewish and otherwise––I find this weirdly comforting. Returning is not necessarily an identical repetition or a retreat. It can (the operative word, here) be a way in which we meet and relate to different worlds across time.
We are taught that the High Holidays are a time of shuv: of turning, returning, and transforming. It is a moment of reflection––how have I erred and harmed, who has erred and harmed me?––and of inflection––how can we transform and how do we have the agency and imagination to do differently moving forward? [Conversations about imagination and agency are, of course, also about power. That's another blog post for another day.]
In this way, the High Holidays bring us to the precipice of both our own beginnings and our own ends. While we spend time attempting to untangle and rewrite our own mistakes and misdeeds, we also physically embody a kind of rehearsal of our own deaths––by fasting, dressing in white, abstaining from sex, etc. Standing at the edge of our own endings, we see our lives the way I saw the Alhambra at night: the same structure we've walked through a hundred times, with the shadows bringing new aspects into sharp relief. Mortality, in this way, is a phenomenal editor. And then, in a turn (ha!) that I find absolutely brilliant and wonderful, many Jewish communities have the custom of starting to build the sukkah right after Yom Kippur. We rehearse the end, and then we go pick up a hammer.
In futures work, we are encouraged to make a possible future tangible enough that we can create and dream inside of it and return to the present changed. Our traditions on Yom Kippur highlight that Jewish communities have been doing this for a very long time: step into the ending, then turn and live differently.
That's the spirit behind 70 Seeds, the exhibition and community laboratory that the Judeofuturism Project opens in Boston this October. Eleven artists step inside Jewish life in 2070 and bring something back for us to hold, question, and (we hope) argue with. In the gorgeous words of R'Yosef Goldman: "The mystics described the rhythm of spiritual life as ratzo v'shov––running forth and returning. The soul expands toward what exceeds it, then carries what it glimpsed back into the vessels of ordinary life. Every peak has its valley, every opening its closing. The question is not how to remain at the summit but how to let the summit reshape the ground" [italics and bold my own].
In this moment of turning and churning, may the endings we rehearse usher in new beginnings for a sweet, transformational year.
G'mar chatimah tovah,
Becca
Comments