Beloved Community in Land and Spirit
If you had told me just a few years ago that I would be studying at a theological seminary, I don’t think I would have believed you. The path that led me to study the intersections of ecology, Judaism and Indigenous solidarity has been a winding one. In May of 2021, I will be graduating from Starr King School for the Ministry from the Masters in Social Change program. Upon reflection, I see my path’s origins in my childhood as well as new bends that have been carved by the COVID-19 crisis.
I grew up two hours east of the Bay Area in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada mountains. My parents built our house on 12 acres in a meadow surrounded by oaks and pine trees. It was an idyllic and beautiful childhood. At that time, I did not know that the people Indigenous to that place are the Wopumnes-Nisenan-MeWuk tribe. Nor did I know of the violent history of genocide in the region.
As a child, I felt connected to the land and developed a curiosity for sustainable food production which I would later follow in my undergraduate studies. While my rural upbringing fostered my spiritual connection to land, it disconnected me from my Jewish heritage. Because I was one of few Jewish people in my town, I felt resistance and resentment towards my Jewish identity. After my bat mitzvah, I felt that I was done with God, with religion, and with my Jewish heritage. It was too painful to feel like I didn’t belong in my hometown.
In my undergraduate education I followed my connection to land care and studied Sustainable Agriculture and Food Systems. I also found a home in Queer Studies classes and minored in Gender & Sexualities. These two areas complimented each other because holistic land care requires understanding power structures and re-imagining relationships. After I graduated, I wasn’t sure how to follow my passions. Eventually, I read Anita Diamant’s The Red Tent. While reading the re-imagined story of Dinah & her four mothers, I realized I could claim a Jewish heritage that honored the feminine and find communities where it was safe to be Jewish.
I returned to the Jewish summer camp of my childhood where I lived and worked for two seasons as the gardener for six months of the year. The camp is located on 160-acres on Me-Wuk land. I loved the combination of living with the beautiful land and Jewish community. It felt like a homecoming of two identities that weren’t able to co-exist in my childhood.
I also began to notice that, as the gardener, I was bringing techniques for growing food that didn't really make sense in that ecosystem. I became curious about how Indigenous people tended that land since the beginning of their time. This curiosity led me to graduate school, where I began to ask a complex and painful question: what does it mean to be a Jewish person of European descent living in California, in lands that I love, that have been stolen from Indigenous people?
For me, that question can't be “moved with” without spirituality, without the container of something greater than me. One of the ways I “move with” this question is through my work as an organizer with Jews on Ohlone Land (JOOL). JOOL has been my home base and beloved community for asking these questions, returning resources to Indigenous people and engaging in collective Jewish healing. JOOL has allowed me to not only figure out as an individual how to be in right relationships with Indigenous people, but also as a member of a community of Jewish people who are working on this generations-long process.
Jews on Ohlone Land was founded by Rabbi Dev Noily and Ariel Luckey. Both have long-term relationships with the founders of Sogorea Te,’ a women-led indigenous land trust in the East Bay. Jews on Ohlone Land works to activate the East Bay Jewish community to support Indigenous solidarity, primarily through individual and organizational contributions to Shuumi - a land tax for non-Indigenous people. Sogorea Te’s vision is to return land to Indigenous stewardship in this land called Huichin. Because Ohlone Indigenous people are not federally recognized, they do not (yet) have the sovereign recognition that would allow them to govern their own ancestral homeland. Instead, they are working with a land trust model to take land off the speculative market and return it to Indigenous women-led communities, a process called “rematriation” (rematriation example, example, example).
One of Sogorea Te’s projects’ is called Himmetka - the “Chochenyo word for ‘in one place, together’” - which are resiliency hubs with “ceremonial space, food and medicine gardens, water catchment, filtration, and storage, first-aid supplies, tools, and a seed saving library” (Sogorea Te’ website). Himmetka hubs “provide essential, culturally relevant, resilience and survival support in some of the most marginalized parts of our city.” What speaks to me particularly about the project of Himmetka is the acknowledgment that when we go through times of chaos and catastrophe, our nervous systems will experience trauma and we will need rituals to work through that trauma. It has been an important learning for me to think about how preparing for disasters can and should include preparing ritual and ceremonial spaces.
Along with the disaster of COVID-19 and the underlying systemic injustices and neglect that have been highlighted (i.e. vaccine access, child care access, ability to work from home, and so much more), I also see something like a silver lining. COVID-19 has been a significant shift in reality, or at least our relationship with reality. Whenever there are significant shifts, there are also huge openings for new ways of looking at reality and new ways of connecting to ourselves and each other. During the COVID-19 pandemic, I've had more time to reflect on questions: who am I, what am I responsible for, what have I inherited, what do I want to pass on to the future generations? I've also had many sparkles of imaginings of what the world could be. If we were able, in the course of a weekend, to completely change our lives when shelter in place happened in the Bay Area, what would happen if we all got together to totally shift reality, in ways that are generative and good for this earth and each other?
If you asked me today how I feel being a student at a theological seminary, I’d say it feels quite perfect. Where else could I ask interreligious and interdisciplinary questions that will likely take generations to answer in the context of a beloved community?
Leora Cockrell (she/they) grew up on Wopumnes-Nisenan-Mewuk land in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada Mountains in Northern California. Leora identifies as a white, disaporic, queer, Jewish, rurally-raised settler. Leora received their bachelor’s degree in Sustainable Agriculture and minor in Sexuality Studies at UC Davis. After working in the food system for five years and experiencing spiritual crises, Leora returned to her Jewish heritage and community to reclaim the Indigenous roots of Judaism and support the sovereignty of Indigenous people where she lives. Leora will be a graduate of the Masters of Social Change Program at Starr King School for the Ministry in the spring of 2021. They currently live on Lisjan, Ohlone land in the East Bay. To learn more about her beloved spiritual and political community and work visit Jewsonohloneland.org.
To learn more and give to Shuumi, please visit the Sogorea Te’ website.
JOOL Note: A drash is a teaching about the Torah that usually takes place in a synagogue. We've remixed that practice. In this digital space, JOOL members teach about the Torah of Jewish/Indigenous solidarity work. Individuals offer their perspectives on the questions and ideas that are moving through them. We hope it's a wild and sacred space. By lifting up different points of view, we practice our values of transparency, learning and relationship building. And we celebrate the diversity of our collective, where many different voices are joining together, connected through shared values, to call for Indigenous sovereignty.