The Jewish Sufi Pilgrim | Season 1 Episode 1
Why this eclectic podcast concept? It all starts with a story ...
Episode Overview
In this opening episode of The Jewish Sufi Pilgrim, writer, musician and independent scholar Lisa England introduces the spiritual crossroads that shaped her journey from evangelical Christianity to Judaism, and into the study of Islamic Sufism, sacred sound, and Turkish music therapy.
Drawing on Jewish mysticism, Kabbalah, and encounters with Islamic Sufi traditions, Lisa reflects on how sacred sound, breath, and musical practice have historically functioned as forms of healing and spiritual transformation. She explores the shared cultural landscape of the Silk Road, where Jewish, Muslim, and Central Asian traditions once met in conversation through music, philosophy, and devotional practice.
This episode introduces the idea of a “liminal geography” — a place where distinct spiritual traditions remain intact yet encounter one another in curiosity and reverence.
The Jewish Sufi Pilgrim explores the history, philosophy, and healing traditions of sacred sound across Jewish Kabbalah, Islamic Sufism, and the multi-faceted musical cultures of the Silk Road.
Full Transcript
There’s an expression in Turkish: dört yol — “four ways.” A crossroad.
It is the place where I seem to live perpetually.
And as a woman, that can be a tricky place to exist.
The Talmud once warned:
“When two women sit at a crossroad, one on one side of the road and one on the other, facing each other, they are certainly engaged in sorcery.”
I haven’t yet found “the other woman” with whom I can indulge this session of sorcery. But even as a woman sitting alone at the crossroad, no matter which direction I face, I tend to draw the side-eye of passersby.
Maybe it’s not about the other woman at all — or the lack thereof.
Maybe it’s about the crossroad itself.
Crossroads are unsettling places. They are thresholds. They are places of encounter, exchange, argument, seduction, trade, prayer, and occasionally — betrayal. They are where strangers meet. Where languages mix. Where customs rub against one another. Where old devotional forms evolve and new ones are born.
Historically, crossroads were not clean places.
They were messy.
And so are the spaces in between spiritual traditions.
Those spaces are where I find my home. And where this podcast will live — Im yirtzeh Hashem and inshallah.
Why me, why this crossroad, and why this podcast?
Well, most people cannot say they have deeply engaged all three Abrahamic traditions in their lifetime.
I can.
I was born Christian in a conservative evangelical context in the American Midwest, where spiritual life was intense and communal. Faith was not decorative — it was structuring. It shaped how you dressed, what you read, what you sang, how you imagined the end of the world.
From the time I could read, I was memorizing portions of the King James Bible. By the time I graduated high school and entered a private religious college, I had read theology as disparate as Erasmus and St. Hildegard, Thomas à Kempis and John MacArthur, Martin Luther and C. I. Scofield.
And yet, even as a child, I had a wanderer’s heart. I spent afternoons reading geography books from the library. I spun the globe and imagined crossing deserts and mountains. Something in me was already oriented toward movement.
In young adulthood, I traveled in China and Tibet. Later, I spent seven months living with local families outside Kathmandu, Nepal — not as a tourist, but as a guest, absorbing rhythms of prayer and daily life very different from the ones that shaped me. By the time I was twenty years old, I had been to three of the five holiest pilgrimage sites in Tibetan Buddhism.
More than a decade later, I would move to the Arabian Gulf with a suitcase and an envelope of cash — and wind up converting to non-Zionist Judaism while there, with a powerhouse of female American rabbis who held a beit din for me in New York over video conference, just as Israel-Gaza tensions were preparing to explode.
Always one for perfect timing, eh?
When my rabbis asked me what Hebrew name I wanted to take, ironically I chose to keep my own: Lisa. Not as a noun, but as an obscure Hebrew verb — lis’a with ayin instead of aleph — that means “to travel.” This word once was used by Rashi the famous commentator in speaking about the Exodus, in a phrase that reads, in English, “and they had no choice but lisa’ — travel.”
(This new understanding of my name was given to me as a gift by Rabbi Gershon Winkler, himself a non-denominal rabbi and passionate advocate for the many shamanic and indigenous elements in Judaism.)
That conversion did not feel like departure. It felt like continuation — like stepping further into an ancestral river that had been running quietly beneath my life for years.
Through Judaism, I entered Kabbalah — the mystical dimension of the Jewish tradition — deeply committed to life, creation, and the mysteries of vibration and being at the heart of the universe. Through the vocal meditation practices of medieval Spanish rabbis Abraham Abulafia and Josef Gikatilla, I learned to open the voice as an instrument of integration and healing.
I studied Hebrew and Aramaic. I taught mystical chant and biblical goddess theology through the Temple and School of Divine Radiance, which I founded and directed from 2021 to 2025. I practiced openly as a Hebrew qadosha — a kind of priestess — and took shamanic journeys. And helped others awaken these ancient devotional paths within themselves.
And somewhere along the way, something interesting began to happen.
I noticed that sound — specifically, the daily sound practices that came to me through my mystical explorations — created more inner spaciousness, spiritual-sensory connection, and embodied understanding than all my text study or historical analysis.
That practice has become the foundation of my multi-religious, intersectional, and thoroughly modern Jewish life.
Each morning, before the city fully wakes, I practice sound.
Breath. Letter. Tone.
Sometimes Hebrew permutations of sacred letters. Sometimes long open vowels shaped through breath. Sometimes tones that follow the contours of makam or older migratory musical patterns.
I chant the Mevlevi dhikr every morning. I recite a personally created, non-sectarian version of the rosary built around El Shaddai’s promises to Abraham and Sarah as my spiritual mother, rather than around the traditional Marian prayers.
Above all, I love the feeling of sound running through my body, opening every part of me to the lived experience of God in my body — which, as Rabbi Jay Michaelson might say, is the real point of this human journey.
Over time, I began to realize something about this practice: it is where my intersectional devotion actually lives.
Not as theory.
Not as a literal crossroad.
But as vibration.
In this morning sound practice, Judaism, Islam, remnants of my Christian heritage, and even pre-Israelite temple traditions do not collapse into one another. Their mystical technologies resonate in parallel as one four-thousand-year caravan of Desert Devotion.
Kabbalistic letter mysticism.
Sufi breath and remembrance.
Nomadic musical sensibilities carried through Central Asia and Anatolia.
Different traditions. Distinct cosmologies.
But in the body, sometimes they harmonize.
That realization changed how I began to understand the traditions themselves.
Judaism and Islam share much historically, but they often articulate the spiritual journey differently.
In Jewish thought — especially in Kabbalah — the spiritual path is frequently framed as a journey of return after rupture.
Exile. Dispersion. Fracture in creation.
The human being participates in tikkun, the repair of the world, and the journey toward divine communion can feel like a movement toward freedom — a reassembling of scattered sparks.
Islam carries its own historical memory, of course, but in many Sufi teachings within Islam, the journey is described somewhat differently.
Rather than a rupture that must be repaired, the journey itself is understood as the natural condition of the human being.
The traveler walks.
The heart is polished through remembrance.
The seeker does not necessarily fix the world so much as learn to see the Divine everywhere within it.
In this sense, the path itself becomes the medicine.
In my view, these are not opposing visions.
They are distinct orientations toward the same Divine horizon.
Through Judaism, I encountered Kabbalah — a mystical tradition that unfolds hidden aspects of Torah and covenant and organizes the world through a complex tree of divine emanations.
Through Islam, I encountered Sufism — the mystical path within the Islamic tradition, deeply rooted in Qur’anic cosmology and devotional life.
And through living encounters between Jewish and Muslim mystics across many centuries, I began to glimpse something remarkable.
Others who were doing the same.
For example, I met incredible modern music-making Jews who were members of Sufi communities, made pilgrimages to Rumi’s shrine, and joyfully participated in what their Ateshi-Ashk Chishti sheikh, Dr. Ibrahim Abdurrahman Farajaje — known affectionately as Ibrahim Baba — has called “multi-religious devotion.”
Through these connections, sound became more than aesthetic.
It became ontological.
Breath. Letter. Tone. Vibration.
Stripped of dogma, the sounds themselves become a prayer available to every voice.
Creation itself, as utterance.
Running through traditions and across them — with reverence for convergence and distinction.
And yet, life was not finished with me.
Somewhere along the way, I encountered the work of Dr. Rahmi Oruç Güvenç — a Mevlevi sheikh and lineage-holding Central Asian shaman who traced the shared pathways of nomadic and Islamic forms of healing through music.
In his teachings, something in me recognized a new kind of journey — and home.
Not because I needed another conversion.
But because I heard music that integrated what theology kept distinct:
Music that carried Jewish, Persian, Turkic, and Islamic devotional DNA in its very structure.
Music that, like me, had traveled.
That encounter led me deeper into the historical landscape of the Silk Road — not as a romantic fantasy, but as a cosmopolitan corridor where Jews, Central Asian nomads, Sufi mystics, physicians, poets, and pilgrims shared space.
Inside roadside caravanserai.
Inside imperial courts.
Inside darüşşifa hospitals.
Inside shrines.
They debated.
They traded.
They translated.
They borrowed.
They argued.
They listened.
And of course, they made music.
This podcast is born from that sacred yet messy terrain.
It is not an apology for syncretism.
These traditions are distinct. They have their own disciplines, cosmologies, and visions of divine communion.
But history tells us that they also met.
And when they met, I believe something incredible happened.
Brilliant minds bumped against one another. Mystics encountered parallel metaphors. Breath practices crossed languages. Modes of music migrated across empires.
Sound, especially, traveled where doctrine hesitated.
This remembrance, I believe, matters more than ever in our divided world.
Even now in Cairo, I live inside this crossing.
On Shabbat, I often daven at the Ben Ezra Synagogue, where the Cairo Geniza once held over 100,000 medieval Hebrew manuscripts — fragments of contracts, poetry, letters, theology, and everyday life — tucked away in an upstairs chamber.
And on weekdays, I walk six blocks from my home to the mosque of Sayyida Zeinab, granddaughter of the Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him, where pilgrims gather at her shrine.
This is life:
Between geniza and shrine.
Between niggun and dhikr.
Between Shabbat and sama.
This is not confusion.
It is an choice of liminal geography.
Some people are uncomfortable at the crossroad, of course. They prefer clean lines. Clear affiliations. Singular loyalties.
I understand that instinct.
But history is messier than modern boundaries.
And my own life has confirmed something simple:
The Divine is encountered in vibration before it is defined in doctrine.
While some might call a journey like mine “confused,” I have come to understand it as the blessing of living beyond a single set of borders.
Which brings us back to sound.
Throughout this series, we will explore:
• Devekut and fana
• Letter mysticism and breath practices
• Pilgrimage and shrine culture
• Judeo-Arabic philosophy
• Khurasan as a cosmopolitan laboratory
• Migratory lineages of music that still carry the emotional and spiritual DNA of these encounters
• Islamic and Jewish languages, liturgies, and texts
• And so much more
We will ask how sacred sound functioned as medicine, theological transmission, and embodied wisdom in medieval Central Asia and the early Ottoman sphere.
And we will return again and again and again to the crossroad.
Because in my view — Talmud notwithstanding — the crossroad is not a place of sorcery.
It is a holy place of synthesis.
A place where difference is not erased. Like the Divine, it can only be encountered.
And as for me? Well, I still have not found a literal home. Cairo may not be my final geography. Anatolia may call again. The Silk Road extends north and east.
But through the Jewish, Sufi, and nomadic musical lineages of the Silk Road, I have found another kind of dwelling:
A tekke of taksim.
A shul of niggun.
A shrine of makam.
A moving, migrating, ever-expanding soundscape rooted in historical encounter. And while I explore it, I hope you’ll come along.
The title of this podcast is rooted in my personal location: Jewish first, Sufi by association, and always a pilgrim — on the move.
As Rabbi Jay Michaelson again would say, “The Jewish way continues to resonate in my heart.”
But that resonance … rather than turning inward … calls me further outward:
To sit in synthesis — which, come to think of it, maybe is its own kind of sorcery — wherever four ways converge.
So meet me at the crossroad.
Warm up your voice.
Tune your instruments.
Saddle your camels.
I’m the Jewish Sufi Pilgrim.
Sacred sound is my path.
And this podcast is my caravanserai.
Welcome.
Listen and read more
Transcripts and related resources will always be posted here on Substack.
External podcast archive: https://podcast.lisaengland.com
About Turkish Music Therapy: https://turkishmusictherapy.com
Host website: https://lisaengland.com
About the host:
Lisa England is a writer, musician, and independent scholar of Desert Devotion and Migratory Sound. She explores the devotional traditions of the Middle East and Silk Road, especially the historical meeting points between Jewish mysticism and Sufi spirituality. Her work focuses on voice, music, and instruments as carriers of this shared inheritance, beyond the boundaries of theology or dogma.
Currently, she is focused on music as medicine across medieval Central Asia and the Ottoman world, with particular attention to voices and healing practices often overlooked in modern transmission — such of those of Jews and women mystics. She honors the legacy of Dr. Rahmi Oruç Güvenç as a spiritual guide in this work, and a steward of medicinal music traditions from Türkiye and the Silk Road.