Songs to Re-Root and Remember

This artwork is a cycle of harmony songs about healing a Jewish connection with land. As I witness the harm and destruction of what capitalism, zionism, and extraction-culture are doing in the world, I am thinking about lineage-connection to land — or lack of it, damage to it, unhealed land-trauma. I want to sing my way back towards healthier Jewish connection with land, and I think that this healing is part of breaking the harmful cycles of colonialism and extraction globally and locally. These songs are simple enough that people can listen to them, learn them, and really sink into them – using them as invitations to move towards wholeness, embodied action, connection with land and with each other. Shmita, for me, feels centered around rebuilding health in our communities: health for people and water and land, healing and wholeness for the body of the earth and for each individual body. The opposite of destruction is connection – these are songs to heal our connection with the natural world. I come from a lineage of transient people. Diaspora scattered my people like seeds. How can I grow towards living rightly on stolen, unceded land? How does unhealed trauma around lost connection with land, home, and deep community continue to play out in my body and mind, in collective memory, in continuing cycles of harm? Can I sing myself home towards wholeness, rooted in my Jewish identity? When endless facts detailing the crises of our era leave us overwhelmed and unmoved, perhaps it is through the ancient art of harmony singing, a language of cellular resonance, that we will find ourselves beautifully beholden to the whole — and motivated by our undeniable connection to work to heal what is broken, in ourselves and in the world.