Midwifing the Future: A Conversation on Joy and Prophecy

Rav Jericho Vincent interviewed by Lila Rimalovski

Lila Rimalovski: Tell me your origin story with Asherah — how your relationship has evolved and where you are now.

Rav Jericho Vincent: I grew up in an ultra-orthodox environment with a very punishing God that I felt very close to, and I had a very difficult childhood. When I became overwhelmed, I would leave my home — which was not a safe place for me — and run up to a big park up the block from our house. There was a tree in a small band of woods that I had formed a connection with. I would go by myself and sit at the base of that tree, and I felt something there that I just didn’t feel anywhere else. The forces in my home that felt so enormous and made me feel so small — the tree dwarfed all of that. I felt like I belonged to her. I called her my mama tree. She was, I think, the loving maternal energy I didn’t have and really longed for — safety and belonging.

In my ultra-orthodox education, we learned about Asherah as idol worship. It was this bizarre puzzle that our ancestors, who were so much greater than we were, had this yetzer hara — this evil inclination — to worship sticks and stones. We were told we couldn’t understand it because the desire had been taken from us. But there was something puzzling about why anyone would mistake a tree for God, particularly people who talked to God directly, who had prophets and miracles. In my early thirties, about ten years ago, I had an epiphany from what I was learning — I was returning to Judaism after having been away for a long time. I realized: Asherah was our people’s portal to the feminine Divine. What the ancestors worshiped, what they were drawn to, what they loved, was the feminine face of the Divine and full female inclusion in divine worship. Of course they kept returning again and again to so-called idol worship — they relapsed into it like a choking person relapses into breathing. They were just trying to stay with the truth. The more I learned, the more I saw how violently our native faith had been stolen from us by King Josiah, the 7th century BCE ruler who went on a brutal rampage to try and erase Asherah from our people’s traditions, and by the forces that stepped into the king’s place once the king was gone.

I realized that this current had been in my life all along, from back when I connected to that mama tree. Thinking about trees as a home base, and Asherah — that tree form of the divine feminine in our faith — as a place to root, has been really grounding and central for me. I’ve had a strange life that’s taken me to sometimes disjointed places, and that current is a constant that feels like home.

LR: I’ve heard this story before — starting with that historical moment when Asherah left, and the desire for so-called idol worship came alive. When I see other people hear this for the first time, I see something in their eyes: “Oh. This is why I have this relationship with trees.” And in your story, I also hear a deep homecoming to the ecological world.

JV: Children in particular — sensitive children, but maybe all children — get something about trees. My little one, she’s a teenager now, but when she was young she would sing to the trees, talk to the trees. I think it’s a very human impulse. The trees are nursing us with their oxygen — in some ways they are an actual physical mother figure for us, and I think kids get that on some deep level.

LR: I’m curious how Asherah relates to, is connected to, or diverges from the Goddess that you center in the Ivri Way.¹

JV: The Ivri Way — my faith, that I practice and teach — is non-dual and deeply, truly monotheistic, in that it worships the One within all beings, between all beings, beyond all beings. That One has many faces, many ways we can connect to a piece of it. The word “God” is one way to hold on, “Goddess” another, “Goddexx” another. Each of these windows is very partial, humanly formed, with human fingerprints and schmutz on them. We have to look out through the veils of our eyes — that’s mostly how we connect. So Asherah is one form of the Goddess, and the Goddess is that larger window referring to the feminine energies of the Divine. But for me, it’s all different pieces of the One. Asherah is a very important piece because she has been neglected for so long — there’s a buildup of blessing waiting for us, just waiting and waiting. When I connect to Goddess, when I connect to Asherah, and especially when I bring other people into what was theirs all along, I feel not only the people’s eyes light up, but I also feel the ancestors. I’m sitting in ceremony and I just see their ancestors extending back for generations who had been waiting for someone to come along and reclaim the faith that had been beaten out of them. And now — oh my Goddess — there’s going to be an Asherah journal at Harvard Divinity School! Our ancient mothers and fathers, ancestors two and a half thousand years ago, they’ve been waiting so long. How much nachas they must have that we’re coming home.

LR: What is required of us to make space for all of those blessings, all of that wisdom that is now flowing through, that had been cut off? What does it look like in Jewish ritual practice to make space for the wisdom of Asherah and for all of the female and queer ancestors? What needs to be made possible for that wisdom to come and live and breathe?

JV: Some of it is on the surface. In a lot of progressive synagogues, the English will be very gender-neutral — maybe “spirit” — but the Hebrew is all masculine. Why are we putting those words in our mouths? Why are we reifying this cycloptic vision of who the One really is? So certainly there’s work around how we speak about the One. Can we reclaim the One using all pronouns, all genders? The Toratah project of translating — or channeling — the Hebrew Bible with all the genders reversed feels like a really important piece. For Jews, we understand that words make worlds, and so the words really matter.

And there’s also something more structural. We lost so much, but we know that the connection to Asherah and Goddess was through trees, hilltops, the moon, pouring libations, and moon cookies. To me, those all point to earth-based, body-based, democratized, domestic worship. How can we come home to the body? How can we open space for Goddess with the tree in our backyard, with our families and friends? There’s such a profound inferiority complex that most Jews seem to have — feeling not Jewish enough — and with it comes an unconscious relinquishing of their own power to what I call “the king” — forces of authority that promise security in exchange for obedience. The king defines what is Jewish enough, mediated through the priest, through the rabbi. We should sometimes respect people who have authority — I’m a rabbi, I’ve invested in our traditional authority systems. But also, the Divine should be accessible to all of us. We should feel enough in our faith, in our lineage, in our relationship to the One. Goddess invites us to that kind of stance.

LR: I’m curious how this relates to the idea of democratizing prophecy.

JV: Our people had a prophetic tradition for a long time that was shut down — really in a period when patriarchy was consolidating its grip. A big dimension of patriarchy has been the consolidation of power to some central force, and it makes sense they wouldn’t want prophets who speak truth to power. So they continually said: There’s no such thing as prophecy anymore. I believe we need to revive our prophetic practice. It’s a dangerous practice and not something to take lightly, but prophetic capacity is available to any of us. It is part of our lineage. It’s a democratic way of not only connecting to the One, but sharing our transmission from the One to our communities. That’s a really important thing to be making space for.

LR: I often think about ritual as a space for democratized prophecy to occur. Large-scale Jewish ritual in community helps do the work to take off our layers, to open up our hearts and souls, to let messages come through all of us, and then to tell a story we can only tell when we’re together.

JV: Yes, that’s beautiful. I teach a lot about the individual body versus the communal body — we belong to communal bodies, but as Americans we’re never really told that. So when the communal body is manipulated or unwell, we sense something is profoundly off, but we don’t know how to see it, name it, or intervene. What I hear you talking about is tending to the communal body — a birthing of the communal body’s prophetic voice — creating the environment and container so people can become aware of themselves as sacred within the communal body and become a channel. That’s really powerful, really beautiful work.

LR: This connects to the seventh principle of the Ivri Way, where you reframe messianism as a process of individual, communal, and ecological liberation. I’m curious about that word “process” in particular — it’s not a destination, it’s a continual unfolding. I’d love to hear how you landed on that.

JV: I think Messiah is the secret to Jewish longevity that people have speculated about for so long. We survive because we have this incredibly powerful myth about future liberation. That myth has been articulated, certainly in mainstream Judaism, as a new king — the king was abolished, so a new king is going to rise, some dude on his calico donkey who will save us all. It’s very beguiling, and, of course, he’s never going to come. But what the mystics understood — what my teacher Reb Zalman Schachter-Shalomi understood — is that Moshiach is a liberatory consciousness. We’re not trying to flip from exile into a static Moshiach state where everything is perfect forever. Who wants to live in a world that’s frozen, paralyzed, with no free will and no dynamism? The real question is, how can we give birth to more liberation and freedom for ourselves, our families, our communities, and the world? That’s what we see happening over the course of history — two steps forward, one step back. There are milestones: where we are with queer rights versus where queer rights were a hundred years ago. We’ve crossed over a really important threshold, even as we still have so much work to do and even as we seem to be dragged backwards at times. There is a sense of progression, and we don’t have to hold our breath for a happily-ever-after. We can take pride and joy in the liberatory consciousness we’re increasing right here and now.

LR: What I’m hearing is about process and becoming — a culture of nurturance, of collectively raising each other up. There’s a mothering in that, but it’s also a queer mothering — no one person is responsible, no Messiah is responsible. There’s an inherent celebration of the ritualists and lay leaders, with rabbis and spiritual teachers as anchors to community, but also with a constellation of others who bring forth rituals and community formation as needed.

How does the elevation of Goddess, of Asherah, of divine femininity inspire a sense of cooperativism? I hear this phrase thrown around a lot: “post-denominational, post-rabbinic Jewish future.” How does who we pray to change how we pray together?

JV: Let’s start with the tree. The portal to Asherah is the tree, and the tree has many branches and many roots, but one trunk. On one hand, we want exactly what you say — to honor and celebrate the gifts of many people, to distribute responsibility for communal tending. But we need a common purpose — that trunk — to hold us together. We need common work at the center, and then we get to sprout in all the different directions. The sacred metaphor of the tree reminds us to honor the multiplicity of roots that feed us and the branches that let things flourish and bloom, while also keeping the work in the middle. I’ve seen cooperative communities devolve into an inability to get anything done, and I’ve seen purity culture take root and destroy a community. The antidote is in this metaphor: keep the work in the center, make sure we’re truly honoring everyone as we center what we’re trying to do. That’s the most basic form of what Asherah teaches us.

I’m also thinking about the archaeological evidence of our ancestors dancing around the tree, and Miriam as the dancer. We know so heartbreakingly little about how the ancestors worshiped the Goddess, but we know there’s strong evidence of dancing around the tree. That circle dance is a model of cooperative, equalizing participation. The mystics loved it — a lot of people know the hora and other circle dances, often connected to Eastern European peasant dances, but actually that tradition is at least close to three thousand years old, if not older. It goes back to Miriam, back to these trees. Rav Nachman of Bratslav said every piece of Torah you learn, you also have to teach it to your body. Spending time dancing in circles — versus sitting in a pew that doesn’t move, staring at people performing for us, checking a box and leaving — it moves the energy in a completely different way.

LR: I’m going to sit around the Passover table with thirty of my New York Jewish family members this year — I think I need to get them to dance…

JV: The other seed I’m thinking of is when the ancestors talk about worshiping the Queen of Heaven — another face of the divine feminine, the moon. The women bake cakes, pour libations, and gather firewood with their husbands and children assisting them — there’s such a sense of communal excitement with everyone together. That’s so different from the endless laws about how to bring a sacrifice, and the priest who cannot have any physical disability — which is so ableist and ugly. And then we have this other image: families excited to create the portal through which blessing and nourishment flows through, every one of us having a part.

LR: That makes me think about the courage required to find the role we each have to play, particularly in Jewish ritual. This journal is all about innovation — how we are making things new and different. It feels daunting, for me personally, to find the ways to innovate. I read one of your pinned Instagram posts — someone calling you an idol worshiper — and because of my own politics, I’ve accepted that I might always be called the “un-Jew.” I’m not looking for that kind of institutional belonging. And yet something inside of me still asks: Do I know enough about this tradition to make it new for myself? Can I make it new and still keep the spirit alive? What does it mean to make something new while honoring the old, and how do you let go of the patriarchal or supremacist ideas while holding the kernel of real aliveness at the center?

JV: On one level, you will know if what you’re doing feeds your soul, and you will know if it feeds your community. But I think the most important answer is this: People have the fabric of the world right up against their eyeballs. We all need to take a giant step back, sense the ancestors, sense the future ones, and understand the enormous span of human history we are situated in. Take a look at the world in front of us with that context, and see how absolutely extraordinary this time period is. You and me, Lila, and everybody reading this interview — we were all put on this planet to be part of the generation that is midwifing the future. That future is getting midwifed whether we agree with it or not. The birth is happening.

I have a deep felt sense that God has put each of us here in this time, in this generation, because she gave us what we need to be the midwives the future ones need. If the only way to birth the world we need were to put everybody through twenty years of ultra-orthodox yeshiva, she would have done that. But that’s not what we need. The world needs people who have only one Jewish great-grandparent, or don’t know very much, or don’t speak Hebrew, but love the trees. Of course we should all be on a journey of learning — and also, trust that we are here because we have the tools we need to do the work that is desperately needed. We are enough. You were chosen, Lila, to play the role you’re playing. God wanted you to be exactly as you are. Learn more — yes, we should all continue to grow. But trust that your essence, your being called into existence in this moment, is exactly what is needed to do the work of this moment.

LR: Thank you. I think that might be the nugget for every reader who finds it. It’s really refreshing to touch back into the way I related to my Judaism before I became a student — to ask, “What is my role to play?” Not, “What can I read?,” or, “What lecture can I attend to position myself so people will listen to me?” There’s some of that strategic work we have to do, but the content, the essence, has to be in our own hearts.

JV: A big piece of the Ivri Way project is trying to answer some of those strategic questions by asking: What is enough? What does someone who knows nothing about Judaism need to know in order to feel confident? From my decades of being immersed in many different Jewish worlds, the Ivri Way offers seven principles that I hope can enable people to walk away feeling anchored in something. I think we’ve been given an inferiority complex that is not ours, and we can let go of it. We can hand it back to whoever gave it to us. We don’t need it.

LR: You said that Goddess put us all here because we each have a part to play. One of the things I’ve struggled with tremendously in the past few years is: What Goddess is letting this violence unfold, enabling me to bear witness to all of it, and to break so deeply into my grief that I struggle to light my Shabbat candles on a Friday night? I’m curious if you could speak to this tension — the gift of being alive in this moment, to innovate on these rituals and bring forth a Judaism that is both new and ancient, versus the responsibility or burden of bearing witness to the unique cocktail of beauty and violence unfolding right now.

JV: I have a problem with the moral command to bear witness in the way it is often presented to us in progressive culture. We are receiving from the communal body — through social media, through the news — an incredible download of information that our bodies were not designed to digest, certainly not sitting alone in a dark bedroom. Think about thousands of years of human history — so many terrible things happened, but they were digested as a community. If we are bearing witness by scrolling through TikTok or Instagram every single day, taking in the poison of what’s happening, and it makes us less able to act, less able to offer our gifts and blessings to the world around us, we end up being a drain on the communal body without offering anything of use. Now, if there’s a situation where no one is bearing witness, certainly we need some witnesses. But we are learning how to be a global body — and every cell of the body cannot be an eyeball cell. We need to figure out what our role is. Just about every person I’ve talked to, including myself, is not well-regulated about how much we’re taking in, and we think that’s a virtue. I don’t think it is. I think we’re getting in our own way. We need to be smarter about what we take in.

And to be clear — I’m not saying turn a blind eye to injustice. We can stay informed without keeping moment-to-moment updates, and we can be strategic about how we receive new information.

LR: Last year on my birthday, I made a commitment to myself not to use my phone on Shabbat, and I failed within a month. It was an alarming mirror held right up to my nose — my nervous system is attuned to that frequency of constant updates. At this point, I think it’s a matter of my actual survival to learn how to turn that off.

JV: For young people increasingly, that’s essential. On one hand, something magnificent is happening — we are becoming a global communal body in a way we never were before. That seems to be what God wants to unfold — a greater and greater sense of the human body coming online. And we are at a very disregulated, awkward, painful, heartbreaking, horrific stage of that becoming. We need to be very thoughtful and strategic about how we navigate it.

I also want to offer a different perspective than the addiction framing. There’s something beautiful happening, and our desire to be part of it isn’t only addiction built into the technology — it’s also a beautiful desire to be part of the awakening of the global communal body.

LR: I feel like a child in relation to the global human body — how do I develop this relationship? It takes quite a lot of intentionality, processes of making mistakes, learning, and maturation to regulate that.

JV: Yes. And the more we can be in smaller communities, the better we’ll regulate our connection to the larger one. Communal bodies are nested. What we do with our family or close group of friends helps us develop the muscles we need to be in right relationship with the communal body of our whole community. And if we can be in right relationship with our community, that develops the muscles for the next scale — and so on. Each one is a training ground and also a support ground. The love and resources of smaller-scale communal bodies can hold us, help us digest and regulate as we plug into the global communal body.

LR: I want to jump to something else. What does queering Jewish ritual and prayer look like beyond the grammar, beyond changing the words? I’d love to hear you speak to that — particularly what it means to relate to Goddess in a queer way. Many people relate to Goddess using she/her pronouns, as the divine feminine, and I feel like a particular type of feminism has co-opted Goddess worship in a way that’s very distinct from what queer ritual and worship can look like. How do you navigate those waters?

JV: I think there’s a real trap of gender essentialism that Goddess language can sometimes take us to. I’m curious from your practice — how would you define queer in this context?

LR: The most basic layer is a non-heteronormative, non-cisgender experience of the divine. But beyond that, it always feels like the third way — the path of infinitely more possibilities, of inversion, of re-creation, of making more life possible.

JV: That’s really beautifully put. Jewish tradition gives us a divinity of many different genders, and my understanding through my faith is that each human contains many genders. So there’s an infinite number of possible, differently-gendered connections between us and the divine, and each one is its own channel of blessing and potential. When I’m really in my masculine energy and connecting with the masculine face of the divine, that’s one kind of relationship. When I’m in my masculine and connecting to the divine feminine, that’s another. There’s a really powerful spiritual practice in exploring that entire array of possibilities. None of us comes out of the gender machine unscathed, and I think healing can happen when we explore all the different configurations of relationship between us and the One.

LR: Can you speak specifically to relating to the Goddess in a queer way?

JV: To get really practical: “Lecha Dodi” is this gorgeous love song to a feminine divine embodiment. When cis men celebrate it, there’s something heteronormative about it that has its own blessing and possibilities. But when women or non-binary people feel invited into the romance of that — if they’re into relating to God that way — there’s something sapphic and gorgeous and very queer about singing and dancing “Lecha Dodi.” The tradition assumes it’s a heterosexual song, but it doesn’t have to be. It’s an invitation into love with the divine feminine. For those who feel excited about bringing the romantic, sensual side of worship — if you are female or non-binary and you want to do that in a queer way — go for it. It’s there.

LR: As an animist Jew who has been deeply influenced by the Indigenous cosmologies of my friends and community members, there are many days when I don’t feel like a monotheist. And there’s something complex about what you were saying — that the divine can have many faces, and that can still be a monotheistic practice. I’m curious how Asherah plays into this as well, particularly as she was previously thought of as the idol that in many ways provoked Judaism’s deep-rooted monotheism. What would a Jewish polytheism look like?

JV: Colloquially, “monotheism” has been a very manipulative term used to describe Judaism, but what we’ve really meant is a cycloptic, masculine-divine, masculine-human religion — which is not monotheism as far as I’m concerned. That’s a very small God. For me, monotheism means do you say “yes” when asked: At your very deepest essence, do you believe in the Shema or not? We say Adonai Eloheinu, all the multiple divine forces, are one. At their essence, there’s a oneness: a peace and a wholeness that underlies everything.

For me, it’s a very mystical perspective, very much in the Goddess tradition of our ancestors who saw divinity in a tree and in the moon. There is divinity pouring through the moon, through every blade of grass, every person, every animal, every stone and rock — and the source of all that is one. That’s for me a really important part of my Judaism: that there’s one source, and no conflict between the different powers. They all come from that one source.

I’m not really an advocate for Jewish polytheism — many paths exist, and people walk as Jewish polytheists, and that’s their Torah. But what a lot of people define as polytheism is actually right at home in this mystical, Goddess-based tradition that honors the sacredness and the Torah and the transmission of all things and beings in the world as expressions of the One.

And one of the reasons oneness is the root of everything, for me, is that it invites me to love the stranger. If I understand the stranger — the strange phenomenon, the strange human, the strange animal — as another expression of the One that gives me life, it can never be my enemy. One of the names of God is Shalom — peace, completion. That’s the root of my monotheism, and I think it’s a great gift at the heart of Jewish truth, obscured by the idol worship of patriarchal Adonai, which is a very small puppet god and not actually the enormity of the One with a thousand faces.

LR: I feel more at home in my Judaism hearing you say that. Thank you. There’s a question emerging that I’m not quite sure how to articulate, but I’ll ask it in the simplest terms I can: Why Goddess instead of God? In the Ivri Way, why is that the word that you’ve chosen, or that has been given to you, or that has arisen?

JV: I use “God” all the time. I’ll talk about God and what she wants from us. I’m here for claiming all the words, particularly the most potent ones — and in Western culture, “God” is the biggest one we’ve got. I’m absolutely going to take that back and use it for this theology of goodness. I use “Goddess” a lot in my ceremonies and writing because she has been neglected, and so it’s a very powerful portal I want to invite people through — but only as one of many. If I worshiped Goddess and banished God, I’d still be connected to a diminished oneness, and I want the oneness of all.

As in heaven, so on Earth: cis men are sacred and holy just as trans people are, just as women and nonbinary people are, just as fill-in-the-blank are. We are all holy and we all have our part to play. I want to help birth the world that honors that, and I will emphasize Goddess because she has been out of balance and we need to bring her back into balance.

LR: I have one last question. We talked about the cultural norms of leftist or progressive movements seeping into religious and spiritual spaces. So many melodies to Jewish prayers feel so melancholic to me, to every cell of my body. I want every ritual, unless it’s specifically a moment to honor grief and death, to be infused and overflowing with joy. With Jewish joy. I’m curious about your relationship to joy in Jewish spaces, and what the role of joy is in creating new ritual and prayer.

JV: This is a very powerful and resonant Torah for me. I’m someone who carries perhaps an unusual amount of trauma, so I’m naturally drawn to grief practices — particularly the neglected ones of our ancient mothers and aunties. That’s comfortable for me, and it’s part of my own unfolding to welcome in Jewish joy. I think it’s such an important piece of healing — to move beyond the reactionary, not to move beyond our wounds, but to hold our wounds alongside the healthy tissue. We really need to cultivate that healthy tissue.

I’m also really interested personally in pleasure — thinking about pleasure as holy and sacred — and that’s certainly an important part of my work.

When I first encountered progressive Judaism, it was very foreign to me because my childhood Judaism was so different. It was kind of head-scratching that progressive Judaism seemed to be all about the pain of the Holocaust and the anxiety of defending Israel. How is that enough to sustain a soul? I ended up cultivating and finding the path I now walk and teach, and joy has to be part of that. We have to honor the wounds. And also — this isn’t only in Jewish circles, it’s in a lot of progressive circles — the wounds can cannibalize us. I don’t think we’re being good stewards of our wounds if they flood us so entirely that we can’t also cultivate healthy tissue. It’s a delicate balance. So many of our wounds, when we’re marginalized, have been erased and silenced — on one hand, we really need to name the pain and stand for it and honor it. And I think particularly in this moment we are in desperate need of that Jewish joy, that religious and spiritual joy, that building of healthy tissue as the ground to stand on so that we can tend to our wounds and also do all the other powerful work of being human.

LR: Thank you so much. Is there anything else you want to share that we didn’t touch on?

JV: One thing. In some progressive circles — maybe not so much at Harvard Divinity School — faith and God and all that stuff get a strong allergic reaction. The word for faith in Hebrew is emunah, which comes from the root meaning to nurse or to carry. Faith is something that we take care of and that takes care of us. In a time like this, when so much we thought we could rely on is being swept away, faith can be a really resilient, sturdy anchor. And faith does not have to mean climbing into the patriarchal death trap. We can have faith in this very ancient, authentic, powerful story — the divine feminine, every human as sacred, the sanctity of every being and everything. I’m so excited about this journal because I feel like you are giving people something they really need in this moment.

LR: Would you close us out with a prayer?

JV: I was actually going to ask: Do you want to pray together?

LR: I would love that.

JV: Let’s both get comfortable in our seats, in whatever way helps us feel grounded and open. Take a moment to take a deep breath and notice what’s going on in the body. Where’s the chayut — the life energy? Is it stuck? Is it moving freely? Is it fiery? Is it cool?

From our places of deep center, I call out to Asherah — the One within us, between us, and beyond us. Thank you for the gift of this conversation. Thank you for the gift of spiritual and religious camaraderie, for remembering that we don’t walk alone. Thank you for the gift of Torah, for the wisdom of the ancestors that survived to reach us. I want to bless this project — this Asherah project, this journal — that it may reach many, many hearts and minds and bring healing, joy, connection, and hope to many people. And that those who work on it are able to take great pride in the importance and power of bringing more Asherah into the world.

LR: Amen. Selah.

1. The Ivri Way is the core Torah that Rabbi Jericho teaches and lives by. In their words: “Ivri is the oldest name for the ancestors of the Jewish people. The Ivri Way is based on the wisdom of those ancestors. It is mystical, Goddess-rooted, embodied, and open to all. It is shaped by the teachings of Kabbalah and the wisdom of the biblical Morah Miriam. It heals old wounds, cultivates thriving communities, and ignites liberatory consciousness in the world.”