As a queer, rural, and Diasporist Jew, I find home in taboo– in the spaces between normative worlds and determined paths. This is where I find permission to be alive in today’s world. -- Lila Rimalovski
As a queer, rural, and Diasporist Jew, I find home in taboo– in the spaces between normative worlds and determined paths. This is where I find permission to be alive in today’s world. -- Lila Rimalovski
LILA RIMALOVSKI
Lila Rimalovski is a multimodal creator facilitating connection between the more-than-human (ecologies, landscapes, spirit) and the human (body, mind, heart) through sacred place-making. Farmer and herbalist by training, artist by dream, and ritualist by new moon, Lila’s work attempts to stitch the body back to the land to affirm a sense of wonder, belonging, and deservedness of existence in this complicated place and time. Born on the west coast and raised by Northeastern maples, Lila currently makes home in queer Jewish community on Ohlone land in Oakland, CA.
www.instagram.com/altars__everywhere
Part #2 - LABA PROJECT
winter 2023
Home-land
various materials foraged, found, and gifted from this bioregion; silver tableware from maternal great grandparents
In diaspora, what if the land is the temple, the soil the torah, and the table the central altar? What if diaspora is complete, fulfilled, and not oriented towards a longing for a distant, utopic, and imagined Jewish homeland?
Home-land sculpts Jewishness from relationship with the human and more-than-human beings of this bioregion, the ancestral lands of the Ohlone, Coast Miwok, Kashaya, and Southern Pomo people. Mirrored Shabbat tablescapes bring curiosity to the ways in which that land, ritual, and culture diverge and converge to create a localized Judaism, and concocting a messy reality that is both realized and disconnected.
This piece evokes the 19th century Yiddish concept of doykeit, meaning “hereness,” which posits that Jews can experience freedom wherever they are. This practice necessitates radical adaptation of ritual and culture in bioregionally specific ways and, in turn, requires deep solidarity with the human and more-than-human beings of place.
How might the very existence of rest (of Shabbat) rely on stewardship of the ecosystems we call home?
“This is Torah and I must learn.” Babylonian Talmud, Berakhot 62a
Part #1 - Explore
Spring 2023
We are 1/3 through the year-long LABA fellowship. Tell me what you are thinking so far about the theme of TABOO and your current project idea inspired by it.
I’m interested in Jewish ritual for spiritual reckoning and also for cultural reclamation. I often wonder: what if everyone was so deeply rooted in their ancestral lineages that, at all times, they had access to all the appropriate cultural tools they needed to navigate being a good human? I’m exploring how to bring Jewish ritual and prayer into spaces where it might not be found or sought. Or, where Jewish people might not expect to confront their Jewishness. As a white Ashkenazi Jew, I’m especially curious how public rootedness in my lineage might invite discourse on race, assimilation, land, and identity. What happens to my whiteness when my cultural practices enter every realm of my life?
For this project, I’m seeking to do this explicitly through social practice: a multi-layered interactive ritual with dance, music, and the simultaneity of cultural tools to feel joy and grief. As a seasoned event producer, ritualist, and novice DJ, I’m especially curious how a journey through Jewish sounds from my lineage (Klezmer music, Bulgarian polyphonic folk singing, niggunim, Kabbalat Shabbat prayers, etc.) can be brought into place of celebration (a House music dance floor) to offer a Jewish experience in a taboo context. How might Jewish sounds in a new space create a different experience of being Jewish?
As a queer, rural, and Diasporist Jew, I find home in taboo– in the spaces between normative worlds and determined paths. This is where I find permission to be alive in today’s world. How can my Jewishness invite me to be at home in a body that contains the stories of my ancestors, the easy and the hard? How can my Jewishness invite me to be in home on this land as a white settler? How can my Jewishness invite me to be at home in community, intergenerationally and across class and culture and race and ability? God is in these questions; God is in the in between.
