In nefesh, I corporealize nigunim and nusach into tangible offerings, no less physical than ancient sacrifices in the Jerusalem Temple. Just as my ancestors chanted to reenact sacrifice, I dance to reclaim their sound. This project was propelled by curiosity about the heritage my Eastern European family rejected upon emigrating to Palestine at various points between the 1880s-1930. Learning these unmetered melodies is an insufficient protest against the predominance of  Jewish ethnonationalism, but it is one way I attempt repatern, to reconnect, to return Zionist Hebrew Labor, avoDAH, back and forwards, into diasporic sacred service, aVOYde. While yearning is a posture underlying both of these kinds of labor, I orient my yearning not toward an ancient Israelite polity, but towards the Divine. This Divine is both The Place (haMakom) and of no place— or as the ancient rabbis articulated it, “The Holy Blessed One “is the place of the world, and yet Their world is not Their place.” [1] A divine that is of my body, and yet beyond my body.  

I’ve been guided in this study by ethnomusicologist Hankus Netsky, who I met at a workshop on Hasidic Nigunim. I’ve learned from him to listen and hear what makes this music particularly Jewish. I listen on loop to little gestures with names like krechtz (which imitates the break in your voice when you cry), dreidel (a slow vibrato that spins out of control and falls), and knetch (a guttural pinch). I study them the way I would study a movement, listening to the form, weight shape, direction, and timing. These sounds are a kind of text, a kind of knowing. I learn them by gesturing them with my hands and pelvis. I guide myself with my hand until I can imitate the shape of the vowel and the timing with my mouth.  

“Do I sound like them yet?” I ask Hankus. He says, “your ancestors would have more gesture going into the downbeat: dini YOy!” As we sing he shows me how the older women stepped in the volach dance, how their touch struck the floor on the downbeat with a lift. It’s a gesture that scoops into emphasis but pulls back just as it touches its destination. My body helps me understand the effect of this gesture in space. There’s a power and humility about it: reaching for an other — or the One that has no other — with a great yearning that acknowledges the unbridgeable distance between us. How we can never fully know an Other, or the cosmic force that contains us all and brought us here.

In my process of learning this music, and then in the performance of nefesh itself, I map the pitch of each nigun along the ladder of my spine. Using a  practice I learned from contemporary Indian vocalist Simita Sinha, I draw nigunim on paper or in space like  diagrams by contemporary content creators of Indian classical music. While the singing of nigunim is already a corporeal method by which to reenact the sacred service (it is not for nothing that Chabad hasidim called their records “Nichoach,” for the smell that rises up from a sacrifice to please the divine), by explicitly embodying the nigun through dance, I recall the ways the altar itself, and the sacrifice itself, correspond to parts of the body. [2] My pelvis becomes the altar and the corporealized nigun rises like fire and smoke around my spine and beyond it.  

I learned from Victoria Hanna, whose work is inspired by the earliest book of Jewish mysticism Sefer Yetzirah, and my choreographic chevrusah (study partner) Tatyana Tenenbaum, how the sound of speech — of letters and vowels — carves and shapes matter inside and beyond my body. The text and its sound are material. Vowels are called tnu’ot, movements in Hebrew. In Bereshis the world is created by an act of utterance and Rabbi Schneur Zalman of Liadi (1747-1812) builds on this by teaching that the world is still held up by the ongoing vibration of those original utterances, continuously creating the scaffolding that holds up the firmament and creation. [3] Reality would collapse were the vibrations to discontinue. Our utterances participate in creation, shaping the inside and outside of our bodies.

At the end of nefesh, I map the shape of an Antwerp hasid’s Musaf Kedusha that I learned with Hankus. The vowels and letter shapes contain and move me. The meaning and utterance of text become my movement score. My body enacts the various symmetries suggested by the text, by mystical interpretation, and by my own feminist reframing of the liturgy. The angels above sing with the people below, the upper mouth sings with the mouth below. The side of gevurah and restraint balances the side of chesed and flow. Davenen gives body and shape to yearning. May the prayers of my lips and hips rise like an incense offering. May they be received like the sweet scent of sacrifice.