Gratitude

with Shoshana Bricklin & Taya Mâ

IN THE BEGINNING: A CALL TO GRATITUDE

…is a haftarah | chanting of sacred text in which Shoshana Bricklin weaves Taya Mâ’s Tehom chant from Psalms and the Haudenosaunee Thanksgiving Address / Greetings to the Natural World* in traditional haftarah trope / cadence. This is part of a series Shoshana has created chanting prophetic texts in a way that combines ancient calls for justice with the words toward change needed today. 

*in Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer, the author was told, about the offering and sharing of the Haudenosaunee Thanksgiving Address: “It’s supposed to be shared, otherwise how can it work? We’ve been waiting five hundred years for people to listen…”

THANK YOU …

is a prayersong by Taya Mâ in which she offers gratitude cascade as an attunement and invitation into the practice of abounding gratitude as an expression of devotion …

What supports you attuning to gratitude?

We invite you to offer a gratitude cascade ~ a continual flow of gratitudes, far beyond counting ~ aloud today…

Shoshana Bricklin …

… is a political priestess whose training as a kohenet grounds her work as a lawyer, local public policy expert and electoral activist.  Her political work has recently pivoted into working inside government on issues of climate change and sustainability. She creates new chanted prophetic texts, haftarot, that combine the ancient calls for justice with the words (and sometimes music) of the change-agents of today.  She crafts haftarot to empower those working for transformative change and justice by weaving words of the Prophets with more modern voices including Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Audre Lorde and many others, and has re-framed a Jewish liturgical mainstay to address critical geo-political issues such as rape, sex trafficking, economic justice, climate change the call for justice for the Palestinian people and reparations for slavery. Her Priestess name “Oreget ba’chochim” (knitter in the thorns) serves as a descriptor of her haftarah creations which connect and knit together many voices across time and space to speak truth to power, even and especially, at the most uncomfortable (i.e. “thorny”) moments.