Towards a Progressive neo-Hasidism
Community Testimonials
Alexia Levy-Chekroun
Gashmius Reader
PhD Students
(Paris, France)
Dear Reader,
My name is Alexia Levy-Chekroun, and I am an avid reader of Gashmius Magazine. As the year winds to a close, I wanted to write to you and share how the work that Gashmius has been putting out into the world has deeply impacted my life.
I am a PhD student in Paris, but my family comes from the south of Algeria and settled in Alsace, at the border between France and Germany. I grew up queer and mizrahi, with a strong hassidic influence, so when I stepped out of orthodoxy at 18 and began to attend liberal services and hang out in activist jewish spaces, I felt very lonely. None of them felt like a close fit.
All the Jewish spaces that were queer-friendly were very much centered on a rational, western European approach to the Jewish tradition that does not represent my mystically-inclined Mizrahi and Hasidic background. But on the other hand, most Mizrahi and Hasidic spaces are not queer-friendly. In order to feel whole, I needed to experience spaces structured around the possibility for queer people to reclaim Hasidic/transcendental Jewish life. I needed to feel, deep in my bones, an intellectual emulation co-articulating non-western/rational Jewish thought & progressive reasoning/queer inclusivity.
So when a friend coming back from NYC first showed me Gashmius on Instagram, I was quite blown away by the vision. An articulation of Jewish and Hasidic tradition provided by progressive and inclusive Jews? That was all I could ask for! Gashmius is that liminal space that all in-betweeners like me did not know they were hoping for.
But in order to make this publishing sustainable, they need our support. Today I am asking you for a one-time donation or to become a sustaining member of the work at Gashmius. In the next year, they hope to raise $170,000 to expand their offerings to include print publications, more regular releases, and learning fellowships to foster the next generation of neo-Hasidic thinkers and artists.
Rabbi Dev Noily
Senior Rabbi at Kehilla Community Synagogue
(Oakland, California)
Dear Reader,
My name is Rabbi Dev Noily, and I’d like to share with you a story.
Sometimes, rarely, something appears in the world that, as soon as you behold it, makes you feel the warm, golden light of what is vital coming to meet you. In that same heart-opening moment, you can suddenly feel the depth of the lack and the longing that this gift has come to address. For me, Gashmius Magazine is that kind of rare gift.
In a world that changes too fast and too much for any of us to keep up, where our awareness is alternately lured in by the frivolous and burdened to the breaking point by the catastrophic, so many of us are searching for the loving and the righteous and the true. We seek the “river that flows from Eden to water the garden” (Genesis 2:10) - the spiritual, moral and intellectual tributaries that we can follow to the Source, that can show us how to live in a way that beholds and honors the sparks of divinity in everything that is.
Gashmius is like a treasure map to those tributaries for me. The storehouses of Hasidic tradition overflow with wisdom. But so many of us are separated from that wisdom by time, language, culture, collective trauma, and romanticized memory. Gashmius is like Jacob’s Ladder– connecting these distant realms to the earth where our bodies live, and changing us in the encounter.
I’m thinking of Jericho Vincent’s stunning piece on Feminism and Neo-Chasidism, of the tikkun (mending) of the invisibility of Chasidic women through Eva Strum Gross’s brilliant comic of Malka of Belz, and Jesse Noily’s deeply diasporic exploration of the production of the foundational text of Jewish mysticism. (Yes, I’m Jesse’s proud parent as well as his student.)
These, and so many other writings and resources that Gashmius have produced and collected, are where I turn for my own learning and inspiration, and where I excitedly send other seekers who are thirsty for the waters that can sustain us and connect us to our source in this time.
But in order to make this gift sustainable, they need our support.
Today I am asking you to make a one-time donation or become a sustaining member of the work at Gashmius. For just $18 dollars a month, you will enable them to edit and publish four releases of the innovative poetry, art, or writing that allows me to follow those tributaries back to their Source. In the next year, they hope to raise $170,000 to expand their offerings to include print publications, more regular releases, and learning fellowships to foster the next generation of neo-Hasidic thinkers and artists.
I hope you will join me in supporting this work.
Sarah Farbiaz
Gashmius Summer Intern - 2024
Undergraduate student at Brown University
Dear Reader,
​My name is Sarah Farbiarz and I am a student at Brown University. I’d like to share with you how transformative Gashmius Magazine has been for my life as a Jewish college student.
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When I first came upon Gashmius last year, I’d been confused about how to bring more spirituality into my religious life and what my role was within a fractured and often uninspiring Jewish landscape.
Here, for the first time, was Hasidic spirituality that wasn’t impossibly hard to access, and it spoke directly to my deepest and most immediate questions. It took just a couple of minutes on the Gashmius website to to feel at home in a web of invigorating conversations — both old and current — about the place of spirituality and tradition in contemporary life; about prayer; about values; about gender; and about what it means to be a human being.
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The magazine was rigorous and applicable, innovation unfolding out of deep tradition. During a complicated and painful year, here was art that was poignant and grounding, a safe place to ask big questions and, in response, to receive revelatory and clarifying Torah. Alicia Ostriker’s poetry re-framed my spirituality. Rosabel Rosalind’s art made its way onto my dorm room walls. Shaul Magid’s translation of R. Aharon Shmuel Tamares’s essay “Herut” quieted profound confusion and pain as I grappled with difficult politics.
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Instead of just talking about mysticism in the abstract, Gashmius was a living, breathing attempt to bring it to life with all of its strangeness and contradictions intact. What I read reached from within the strangeness of Hasidus and brought me, along with all of the swirling questions of contemporary American Jewish life, into its warm embrace. I felt drawn into a community of thinkers and spiritual practitioners, and I felt less alone.
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As a summer intern, I learned to see the Hasidic tradition as a serious piece of my own lineage. I had fun, built relationships, was trusted and taken seriously as a thinker, a writer, and a human being.
I felt the best I’ve ever felt about American Jewish culture.
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Back at college now after my Gashmius summer, I feel grounded and electrified– and my communal spiritual life is transformed. I organize Jewish learning and art-making. I lead new prayer spaces and have thoughtful conversations about what they can and should be. What I learned at Gashmius holds me, providing inspiration, sustenance, and, always, beautiful Torah.
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But in order to make this publishing sustainable, they need our support. Today I am asking you to join me in supporting this work that is changing the lives of college students like me.
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Best,
Sarah