The Jewish Sufi Pilgrim | Season 1 Episode 2
The Path and the Place: Kabbalistic and Sufi conceptions of spiritual journey, rupture, and return
Episode Overview
In this second episode of The Jewish Sufi Pilgrim, we turn from the crossroads to the road itself.
“The Path and the Place” explores the motif of spiritual journey in two great desert traditions: Jewish Kabbalah and Islamic Sufism. Drawing from both lived experience and sacred text, this episode traces how each tradition understands movement toward the Divine—not only as a metaphor, but as a lived, embodied reality.
In Sufism, the path (yol in Turkish, tariqah in Arabic) is often understood as the natural condition of the human being: a continuous movement toward God through remembrance, devotion, and presence. In Kabbalah, the journey is frequently shaped by rupture—exile, wandering, and return—and becomes a process of tikkun, or repair. These are not opposing visions, but complementary ones: two ways of understanding how the human being travels through a fractured yet sacred world.
Through reflections on Sefer Yetzirah and the Qur'an, this episode explores a shared mystical insight: that God is not only the destination, but also the path itself. The Divine appears both as HaMakom—“The Place” to which we return—and as Al-Maseer, the ultimate destination toward which all movement leads.
Woven throughout are personal experiences of travel, spiritual practice, and the search for embodied sacred medicine across landscapes shaped by Judaism and Islam—from Harran and Mount Sinai to the inner terrain of prayer, sound, and remembrance.
Is the journey something we endure in order to arrive, or something we learn to inhabit as home?
Full Transcript
On my journey as the Jewish Sufi Pilgrim, one of the central motifs has always been movement. This pattern began in childhood, and it has also shaped how I relate to spiritual traditions—and is probably why I gravitate toward two spiritual systems that rely heavily on travel as an image of one’s relationship with the Divine. In this episode we’ll explore how Sufism and Kabbalah unpack the notion of journey and apply it — similarly and differently — to the human experience of Divine relationship.
But first … a bit more backstory on why movement has been such a potent spiritual technology for me, and why I cherish both Kabbalist and Sufi traditions for their journey wisdom. My parents moved regularly for my father’s job commitments. By the time I arrived at college, I had lived at eight different addresses in three U.S. states. At the age of eighteen, I traveled all over Tibet with a group of students doing ethnographic survey work. At the age of twenty, I flew alone to Nepal to work in a children’s home, and returned several more times during college breaks, for a total of almost eight months. A period of travel in-country followed, as I landed in marketing roles that required travel for my clients’ exhibitions. My first husband was from Alaska, so we traveled there regularly for holidays and weddings.
But none of that compared to the real movement that was yet to come. After a sudden and unexpected divorce in 2016, I divested myself of most of my worldly possessions and lived out of a carry-on suitcase for roughly a year, visiting five countries in Europe and traveling over two-thirds of the United States in my little Fiat 500, while petsitting to put a roof over my head. Finally, in 2018, I realized that what I wanted was not to travel more, but to settle abroad. A chance encounter with a friend who told me about the foreign employment system in the United Arab Emirates led me to sell my car, pack my suitcase (again), and jump on a plane to Dubai with no plan—and no Plan B.
As you might have guessed, it worked out. I spent five years in Dubai, built a beautiful life there, and then moved on (as I always do), traveling all over Türkiye, Georgia, the Sinai Peninsula, and mainland Egypt as far south as Luxor. Finally, I settled in Cairo and (I hope) will not move again any time soon.
I share all of this with you as background for this discussion of spiritual journeying. Because while on the surface it might look like I undertook many of my travels for the sake of curiosity, self-expansion, or to check off a bucket list, there is a deeper story. From that first trip to Tibet in 2002 until now—in 2026—I have viewed most of my travel as a journey deeper into my relationship with the Divine, or as a process of discovering what the Divine (or Life, if you prefer, as a sentient collaborator) desires to give me next.
Perhaps this is an important place to start the discussion: with the most foundational qualities (I feel) every good spiritual traveller possesses — presence and receptivity. In fact, for many of us, travel is the only way we can reliably access these qualities on a regular basis. Environments we know all too well tend to lead us to the false assumption that we “know how things go” in that arena, and Life does not always seem too invested in disabusing us of that notion. Whereas when we travel, we are constantly thrown into environments that are not like our own. We cannot predict what will happen, and every interaction demands a deep attention to the moment, as well as a willingness to flow with (rather than against) what unfolds.
It might not be surprising, then, that these are also important qualities for the spiritual journeyer. They are also qualities which, from my own practice, I have seen valued, taught, and embodied in both Kabbalistic and Sufi mystical traditions—albeit in different ways, and with different kinds of wisdom, both of which I have come to value deeply in my life as a traveler on the Netivot Chochmah (pathways of Wisdom) or Allah’ın yolu (the path of God), depending on which tradition one orients toward.
Let’s begin this discussion with the Sufi perspective—specifically, the Anatolian form of Sufism now known as the Mevlevi tradition. If the term “Mevlevi” is unfamiliar to you, I point you to the famous poet Rumi, who is still widely read around the world today, even though he lived over 700 years ago in Konya, now in central Türkiye, but then part of the lands known as Rum, or Rome—a reference to the Byzantine territories that had recently come under Seljuk rule. Rumi’s life and teachings form the basis for the Mevlevi tradition, and thousands of people around the world still call him Mevlana, a term of endearment and respect. His lineage also continues in various forms to this day.
In Mevlevi Sufism, the term yol—path, in Turkish—is a central construct. A person who is walking the way of Sufism has submitted themselves to a journey on Allah’ın yolu, the Path of God. Some would say that yol is the natural condition of the human being, who is always walking toward God through the process and practice of remembrance. This world is full of opportunities to forget God, the Sufis tell us. Therefore, it is through practices such as sohbet (spiritual discourse), dhikr (recitation of Divine Names), and in Mevlevi practice specifically sema—the ceremony featuring whirling, music, and ilahis—that this remembrance takes hold of the human being and becomes an ongoing state.
Mevlevi teachings and music are full of references to Allah’ın yolu, and one might wonder why this motif became so central in this mystical tradition. On the one hand, we can say that Sufism is the inner dimension of Islam, and therefore develops metaphors like this one to serve the practitioner’s inner journey. On the other hand, the Qur’an itself is full of references to the spiritual life as a form of traveling, albeit in Arabic rather than Turkish terms: sirat (path) is one example, as is tariq (way), and sabil (path/way). The term tariq in particular is the root of tariqah, meaning a spiritual path or order, often understood as the inward or experiential complement to shariah, or Islamic law.
There is one particular Qur’anic verse about journeying with God that I absolutely love, and often use as a prayer in my own dhikr with tasbih, or prayer beads. We’ll look at it a bit later in this episode, and place it at the crossroads with a beautiful Jewish mystical text of similar sentiment.
But classical Islamic texts and ideologies are not the only potential source for the romantic mystical nature of Mevlevi journey motifs. The era of Rumi, in the 1200s, was a time when Turkic peoples still lived by traditional nomadic ideals. Mevlevi dervishes or adherents in the early centuries were often known to move from town to town, composing poetry and living through hospitality and patronage. Movement in this tradition was not (as we will later see with Jewish motifs) a product of rupture. Life on the road was natural, expected, and even beautiful. It was a legitimate way to order one’s reality, and did not inherently suggest that a person was unstable or “running from something.”
Figures who embody this movement in its formative early years include Yunus Emre, a 13th-century Anatolian poet who chose to write his passionate verses in Turkish, making them accessible to everyday people, rather than in Persian, which was more commonly used by erudite Sufis but less accessible to the uninitiated.
Personally, Yunus Emre is my favorite poet—and the one who guides my daily practice on the ney, or Turkish flute. I am building a repertoire of his poetry, much of which has been set to simple melodies and turned into ilahis, or spiritual hymns, that are still sung across Türkiye and around the world today. Many (if not most) of his poems make use of the journey motif. Sometimes the journey is toward God, and sometimes it is toward another place of spiritual meaning such as the “land of one’s sheikh [spiritual guide],” interpreting the process of gaining spiritual wisdom and insight through the lens of travel. Yunus Emre, while preeminent in this field, is just one of many poets of his era who traveled, wrote, and understood spirituality as an experience of the Divine Road, embodied through the human ritual of movement.
And of course, there is Rumi himself. Born near Balkh, which was an important intellectual and spiritual center in what is now modern Afghanistan, Rumi’s family fled the region ahead of the Mongol invasions and made their way westward to Anatolia. Talk about an epic journey—and one undertaken when Rumi was just a young boy. Though the poet himself settled in Konya and remained there for much of his life, his poetry—most famously the 25,000-verse epic known as the Masnavi, which many Sufis regard as a kind of “second Qur’an” in a metaphorical sense—is filled with themes of longing, return, and love as movement. From Rumi’s teachings emerged a form of Sufism in which disciples traveled, circulated poetry and music, and engaged embodied practices where sound and movement functioned as forms of spiritual refinement and healing, restoring the participant again and again to the path—and the destination—which is God.
I first encountered Mevlevi Sufism in a deep way relatively late in my spiritual path, in 2023, when I first went to Türkiye, taking up the role of international pet sitter again on what would become my next significant phase of wandering—one that ultimately brought me here to Egypt. I had been seeking a system that would apply the makams, or musical modes of the region, to spiritual, emotional, mental, and physical ailments. That highly niche and as-yet-unanswered request was met while I was in Türkiye itself, where I first encountered the work of my dear sheikh, Dr. Rahmi Oruç Güvenç, whose posthumous presence has been with me gently ever since.
On that trip I also traveled to Harran, in the southeastern province of Urfa. This now-Arab village on the border with Syria was once a prosperous Upper Mesopotamian city and home of Prophet / Patriarch Abraham and his wife Sarah before their own sacred migration down into Canaan. In Harran, I became friends with a local family and often helped them in the tourist gift shop they ran. Someone there taught me the phrase Yolun açık olsun—“May your way be open.” I began wishing the tourists farewell in this manner whenever the buses would pull away, and they loved it.
To me, this is the essence of the Sufi spiritual quest: may you, through remembrance of the Divine, find that your way is always open to ever-deeper levels of spiritual Friendship and Companionship, until one day you return forever into the bosom of The One. This is something I now wish not just for tourists at an old archaeological site, but for myself, my neighbors, and the entire world. In whatever form, or by whatever name, The One—the Divine Unity—appears within your spiritual path, may your way be open for remembrance and return.
Now, let’s turn to the other great desert spiritual tradition that centers heavily on the motif of journey—and that is Judaism. The inner dimension of Judaism, like Islam, has its own name and tradition. Whereas in Islam it is called Sufism, in Judaism this inner dimension is termed Kabbalah. This beautiful term simply means “that which is received,” which is itself a reference to one of the primary qualities of the spiritual traveler I mentioned earlier: the capacity to receive. Kabbalistic practice—as with many other Jewish practices—centers heavily on a core text, the Zohar, a mystical commentary on the even more foundational Torah, the central text of Jewish tradition.
Interestingly, one of the recurring motifs in the Zohar is that of travel. In the text, a band of rabbis known as the Chavraya, or the Fellowship, travel together throughout the land of Israel in the era following the destruction of the Second Temple, engaging in spiritual discourse with one another. In some ways, this practice mirrors the traveling bands of dervishes in Anatolia, who—while not engaged in rabbinic discourse—did communicate with one another through shared poetry and music. In this case, the discourses of the Chavraya become part of the structure of the Zohar itself. We might even call them a literary motif. And by the way—I love the name the Chavraya, because it makes me think of the rabbis as a group traveling through Middle Earth, seeking to cast the One Ring back into the fire of Mordor. But I digress…
From here, if we zoom out from this famous group of traveling mystical rabbis and move into the Torah itself, we find that the very first Jewish journeyer—if we can call him that within this frame of reference—was Prophet / Patriarch Abraham himself. A wanderer by design—much like the Turkic peoples from whom Rumi and his followers emerged—Abraham is described in Torah as journeying from the Lower Mesopotamian city of Ur, in what is now Iraq, to the Upper Mesopotamian city of Harran, in what is now Türkiye. There he encounters Divinity under the name El Shaddai, and follows the directives of The One by this sacred name down into Canaan, where he lives in a semi-nomadic, clan-based pattern for much of his life. Later, a famine in the land leads his descendants into Egypt in search of sustenance.
From here, the theme of journeying comes into sharper focus, with perhaps much less romantic charm. For the Exodus is the point at which nomadism gives way to bondage, and journeys out of bondage—or as a form of escape from inhospitable host cultures—become the more dominant type of journey in Jewish narrative. For this reason, in wider Judaism, unlike in Sufism, the journey has been less an acceptable or celebrated lifestyle, and more often an unavoidable response to rupture—frequently in the form of rejection by the dominant culture. Though perhaps emotionally heavier, this is another valuable facet of the spiritual journey motif. For how often are our deepest and most profound spiritual journeys initiated by some kind of “dark night of the soul,” as mythologist Joseph Campbell would call it?
The Jewish journey that begins this cycle of journey-through-rupture is the Exodus from Egypt—which is itself a response to rupture, as the Israelites are freed from hundreds of years of forced labor. This is then followed by forty years of wandering in the desert of what many believe to be the Sinai Peninsula. Last year I visited Mount Sinai myself, and if that is indeed the mountain where the famous Sinai Covenant was given—what a beautifully desolate place it is through which to journey. A mystic and mythic landscape if ever there was one. From there, the people wander in the wilderness until Moses dies, and they go on to enter Canaan under the leadership of Joshua, where, according to the text, they establish themselves in the land.
The themes set up in the early Jewish experience of Egypt and the settlement of the land—exile, wandering, dispersion, and return—continue again and again throughout the people’s story. The power dynamics can be troubling. Whereas Abraham was a wanderer in a nomadic era, his descendants move toward establishing control and governance over the territories he once traversed. What follows are periodic transfers of control from the Israelites to foreign powers (notably the Assyrians and Babylonians), who ultimately divest them of the land and send them into exile—another forced journey. Later, they return, then are exiled again under Roman rule, and after the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE, are dispersed across the world for many centuries, until the formation of the modern state of Israel. Throughout that time, history shows us that Jews travel sometimes by choice, but often by force… when, for whatever political or social reason, a host culture becomes inhospitable.
These patterns show us a different understanding of the spiritual journey—one in which a fracture occurs within the harmony of creation, and the journey becomes a means both of surviving that fracture and finding one’s way toward repair. It is perhaps this idea of the spiritual journey that has influenced me most heavily over the last ten years, as my own period of adult international wandering was largely initiated by an unexpected divorce in 2016, as I mentioned earlier. The last ten years have, in many ways, been a response to that rupture—seeking to heal it, and also to journey my way into a different life, a process which is still unfolding. Kabbalah teaches the concept of tikkun, or repair—returning the world toward its original created order. In the Jewish story, and in my own, movement has been a way of processing and undertaking that repair. This is one of many reasons I claim Judaism as my axis mundi among the desert traditions.
In Jewish spirituality, then, we see what I like to call a “diaspora consciousness”—a way of understanding oneself as being “abroad from the spiritual homeland,” yet still deeply oriented toward it in spirit. For centuries, rabbis wrote and spoke about the land of Israel as a spiritual homeland, toward which a diasporic people would turn and give honor—much as Muslims pray toward Mecca without expecting to live there. Only in the 18th and 19th centuries, as citizenship in modern nation-states became increasingly available to Jews, did the conversation begin to develop politically around returning to a homeland. The result of those conversations—a way of materializing the spiritual journey into a physical return—was (and is) Zionism.
In this way, we can see that while not all journeying in Jewish spirituality is rupture-based—such as Abraham’s call and journey—much of it over the last two thousand years has indeed been shaped not by Divine call, but by exigent circumstance. Which—in some mystical traditions—is the Divine call itself, albeit in an inconvenient, often even destructive form, allowing for the death of the old and the rebirth of the new.
Now that we have a framework within which to explore both traditions, let’s look at different facets of journey that appear in both Sufism and Kabbalah—each offering different ways of relating to God or the Divine. In any journey, we have three core implied elements: the journey itself as the overarching construct, the movement between two points, and the destination. Each provides a different way of understanding the human-divine relationship.
Interestingly, this is where we see a stark difference between the outer, or religious, journey of any tradition and its inner, or mystical, dimension. Outer or religious journeying tends to be linear in nature. God is a destination you reach after death, and life is a linear path—ideally toward higher and higher states of holiness, and therefore readiness to meet God. The movement along this journey is largely coded as conformity to religious law, internalization of sacred text, and right behavior in society.
But on the mystical journey, we see a spiraling kind of movement that returns again and again—where God becomes both the destination and the journey itself. Heaven and hell are no longer future states, but levels of consciousness one actively inhabits now (as one long-time Sufi practitioner I know would put it). In Sufism, the mystical adherent is constantly with God as both the journey and the destination. In Kabbalah, the journeyer becomes aware of the emanations of the Divine—the sefirot, as they are commonly called—throughout creation. One may move nearer to or further from this awareness, but every movement of the human journey can return us to it again. This is what one might call a spiraling consciousness, and from my way of thinking, it is just one of the many ways that mysticism carries forward an older, more cyclical—and perhaps even feminine—understanding of consciousness, even when the Goddess herself is no longer explicitly named.
So let’s look at an example of this, first from Jewish tradition. We’ll turn to a text that is far older than the Zohar—unless, of course, you subscribe to the theory that the Zohar (or at least its traditions) were preserved for centuries before being revealed publicly in the 13th century. That text is Sefer Yetzirah, a mystical treatise on the power of the Hebrew alphabet, composed sometime between the 3rd and 6th centuries, likely in the region of Mesopotamia or the Levant. The teachings are attributed to Abraham, or sometimes to Rabbi Akiva, though such attributions were a common literary practice used to lend a work authority and intellectual weight, and the actual authorship remains unknown. The work outlines 32 Netivot Chochmah, or 32 Paths of Wisdom, consisting of the 22 letters of the Hebrew alphabet (each understood as a pathway of wisdom) and the 10 sefirot, which in this early text refer not to the later, fully developed symbolic system of the Zohar, but more simply to numerical or enumerative principles, each comprising a path.
One of the most famous of the Sefer Yetzirah’s spare, cryptic verses reads as follows:
וְאִם רָץ לִבְּךָ, שׁוּב לַמָּקוֹם;
...v’im ratz libcha, shuv l’Makom …
“When your heart runs, return to The Place.”
This cryptic little verse has been interpreted in various ways. Jewish meditation teachers often reference it as returning to the object of one’s meditative focus when intrusive thoughts arise. Others understand it as a return to love of the Divine when attention has been overtaken by worldly or material concerns. Still others see it—and I am one of them—as a beautiful “journey teaching.” When your heart spirals ever further away from the Divine (as inevitably happens in life, even on the mystical path), return to The Place. The Divine is that Place: the simultaneous origin and destination from which we are always coming, and to which we are always returning.
There is also a Rabbinic understanding of HaMakom, or “The Place,” as a name for the Divine. The logic is often expressed something like this: God is the container of the universe; everything exists within Him, and within His care—therefore, He is The Place. Practically, this appears in a number of ways. For example, in Jewish mourning there is a custom to say HaMakom y’nachem etchem—“May The Place comfort you.” Or in study: Baruch HaMakom, baruch Hu. Or in simple prayer: HaMakom ya rachem—“The Place, have mercy on me.” In Genesis 28:17, the Prophet Yaakov (Jacob) declares over the ground where he has his vision, “Mah norah haMakom hazeh!”—“How awesome is this place!” And then follows it with another declaration of place:
אֵ֣ין זֶ֗ה כִּי אִם־בֵּ֣ית אֱלֹהִ֔ים וְזֶ֖ה שַׁ֥עַר הַשָּׁמָֽיִם
… ein zeh ki im-beit elohim, vezeh sha’ar hashamayim.
“… this is none other but the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven.”
Imagining and relating to God as a place has been deeply meaningful to me on my journeys, and has brought comfort both in my own dark nights of the soul, and in moments when I felt most uncertain how to move forward in unfamiliar places. I chanted this beautiful phrase often over the ground in Harran, Prophet / Patriarch Abraham’s once-temporary home, as an offering of honor and a kind of shamanic blessing. I also love the Mah Tovu prayer—a liturgical prayer recited by Jews (especially in Ashkenazi tradition) as they enter the synagogue or come to a time of prayer. It arises from the blessing of Balaam, a non-Jew, over the children of Israel in Numbers 24. The prayer exclaims over the beauty of the tents of Jacob and goes on, in the extended liturgy, to speak of makom.
In the traditional liturgical sequence, one of the verses reads:
יְהֹוָה אָהַֽבְתִּי מְעוֹן בֵּיתֶֽךָ וּמְקוֹם מִשְׁכַּן כְּבוֹדֶֽךָ
Adonai, ahavti me’on beitecha u’makom mishkan kevodecha.
“O Lord, I love the dwelling of Your house, the place where Your glory resides.”
But I actually love the feminized version by Rabbi Jill Hammer and Taya Mâ Shere, founders of the former Kohenet Hebrew Priestess Institute, which reads:
שכינה אהבתי מעון ביתך ומקום משכן כבודך
Shekhinah, ahavti me’on beiteich, u’makom mishkan kevodeich.
O Shekhinah—the One Who Dwells—I love the dwelling of your house,
and the place of the shrine of Your Presence.
I hope, for myself personally, that I always dwell in the house of Shekhinah, the Divine Presence, and both love and return to Her as The Place.
Now, let’s let that beautiful teaching from Sefer Yetzirah sit dört yol’de—at the crossroads—with a verse from the Holy Qur’an:
رَّبَّنَا عَلَيْكَ تَوَكَّلْنَا وَإِلَيْكَ أَنَبْنَا وَإِلَيْكَ الْمَصِيرُ
Rabbanaa ‘alayka tawakkalnaa wa ilayka anabnaa wa ilayka al-maseer
“Our Lord, we have put our trust in You; we turn to You; and to You is the final destination.” [Qur’an 60:4]
According to the Qur’an, this prayer is spoken by Prophet / Patriarch Abraham and those with him. I smiled at this, because for my journey, at least, Abraham and his family have been the ultimate teachers—whose Mesopotamian-rooted spiritual worldview transcends and precedes (in my opinion) the religious traditions that later claim them.
At face value, this prayer might sound like a more “religious” expression, reinforcing the conception of spirituality as a linear journey from birth to meeting God after death. But notice the phrase “wa ilayka anabnaa”—“we turn to You.” This turning, like so many forms of turning in the desert traditions, involves repentance and surrender, as well as orientation. But seen through a mystical lens, this is perhaps not so much “turning away from things I’m supposed to feel ashamed of” (which I recognize as a more conventional religious framing), and more of: “let me turn again and again to You on this spiraling journey which will ultimately end in You, as well.”
I find myself returning to this prayer again and again, and setting it alongside the injunction to “return to The Place” as found in Sefer Yetzirah. As any spiritual journeyer knows, one must put one’s trust in the Divine at the outset of the journey, and at every moment along the way. This is the work of remembrance, as emphasized in Sufism, and of receiving, as found in Kabbalah. But one must also return to The Place, and turn to the Divine, throughout the journey as well—even as one spirals ever onward toward the Divine as our al-maseer, or “ultimate destination.”
While al-maseer is not one of the traditionally enumerated 99 Names of God in Islam, I find it to be a potent expression—a kind of companion to HaMakom, but oriented toward the ultimate sense rather than the ongoing. Which makes sense, as Judaism traditionally places less emphasis on the end of the world or Olam Ha-Ba, the world to come, than does its counterpart Islam. Yet both names are needed for a more complete picture of the Divine as destination—in each moment, and in the ultimate sense.
And this perhaps brings us around to the wisdom of this episode’s crossroads: journey and destination are both constructs for Divine relationship in Islamic Sufism and Jewish Kabbalah. Both traditions offer wisdom for one’s movement—physically and spiritually—and both frame one’s relationship with the Divine as a kind of return. In both traditions, God is the path and the destination. But there is a fundamental difference in emphasis:
Jewish (and therefore Kabbalistic) tradition emphasizes journeying as a response to rupture—an experience of growth and healing after rupture, and a way of living that is often characterized by moving just ahead of rejection. Whereas in Sufism, journeying is a natural characteristic of the human condition—a metaphor through which all humans can understand, order, and relate to their spiritual path—and a way of life not primarily initiated by rupture, but by the natural human urge to expand and grow through shifting landscapes.
Though the Jewish experience of journeying has been the predominant lens of my prior journeys—through significant periods of my life where rupture did precede long-term travel—I find that the wisdom of Sufism beckons to me for this next phase: a way of relating to the journey not as “something I’ll eventually get out of” (i.e., the Jewish notion that someday we return home), but more as “a home in its own right” (i.e., the Sufi notion of being at home on the road, and ever in motion).
Which construct speaks to your soul? Which tradition is closer to your personal orientation? And how are these rich journey teachings helping you live out and embody your relationship with God? I invite you to consider these questions in the days ahead. At the time of this recording, Muslims have just re-entered ordinary time after a significant month of sacred time—Ramadan, culminating in Eid al-Fitr. Whereas Jews like myself are entering eight days (or seven, in Israel) of sacred time for Passover—the most iconic Jewish holiday, and one that commemorates the very first “post-rupture journey” of the Jewish people.
If you’re listening in time with this episode’s release—or encountering it at another moment in sacred time, sacred history, or the unfolding of your own sacred journey—I wish you safety and godspeed—or goddess speed—on Netivot Chochmah and Allah’ın yolu.
Until next time—yolun açık olsun. May your way be open.
I’m the Jewish Sufi Pilgrim, and I’ll see you back here at dört yol (the crossroads) very soon.
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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.