Lineage
I’m תַּעֲלֻמוֹת.
That’s pronounced
“Tah-ah-lu-MOTE.”
(You can call me Taal.)
(hey, what does תַּעֲלֻמוֹת mean, anyway??)
pronouns: he ☾ him
Here’s a little bit about me:
I was raised and educated in the American Conservative Movement, which was a pretty poor fit for me, but I wound up with reasonably deep Jewish resources. I also got just enough exposure to the Reconstructionist Movement growing up to know I could demand more of my tradition if I felt like it.
In college, I found a Jewish community of peers for the first time, and I dove into daily lay practice and more esoteric and kabbalistic studies.
After college, I moved out west and was able to immerse myself in Renewal Judaism with a direct lineage to Reb Zalman and in-person relationship with other luminaries in that tradition. I also met my future wife in this scene, and she — having also been raised Conservative — soon decided to go to rabbinical school, which put us on a lunatic fringe of mainstream liberal Judaism.
Now she’s a rabbi, and I am a rabbi’s husband. I haven’t come up with a better title than that, although I guess “rebbetzer” is a thing now. She is — or we are? — founding a community (don’t call it a synagogue) called Ma’alot where all of the above influences can just feel like one organic thing. I am a co-founder and facilitator of נצח (Commitment), the container for men’s work in our community.
I encountered the Buddhadharma on my own in high school, in a book called An End to Suffering: The Buddha in the World by Pankaj Mishra. This was enough to indicate to me that I had a path here. When I got to college, I encountered a religious studies professor with a Rinzai Zen lineage, a student of Kyozan Joshu Sasaki Roshi, and began to take his classes and sit zazen with him and a dozen or so other students every morning before class.
The fundamentals of Zen appealed to me, but I did not find my own Dharma home until Zoketsu Norman Fischer Roshi came to campus, and I had the enormous privilege to sit with him. It was immediately apparent that the kind of Buddhist Jew I was belonged in the Soto school, and I went on to sit and learn with Soto sanghas throughout my travels.
At age 25, I realized Buddhism was becoming more of a life path than a mere hobby or interest, and I made a personal declaration of commitment to the Buddhadharma. Years later, when I settled in one place, started a family, and knew for sure that mine was a householder path, I took the lay precepts with my teacher in the lineage of Zengaku Soyu Matsuoka Roshi and my teacher, Zenkai Taiun Michael Elliston Roshi, who gave me the Dharma name Kyosaku.
I have been spiritually connected to the Underworld and outer planets since I was a child. Though I did not have the cultural resources to develop this capacity under the guidance of a teacher until later, I found my way on my own.
I was given my first proper divination tool — a set of Anglo-Saxon runes burned onto wood chips — when I was 10 years old, to replace one I had made on scraps of paper I ripped by hand. I was given my first Rider-Waite-Smith tarot deck for my 20th birthday. That same year, I fell in love with someone who introduced me to early-internet modern astrology.
I followed the lunar and solar cycles in accordance with Jewish tradition, but I did not have the inkling to begin studying astrology until I met Sadalsvvd and found the online Hellenistic astrology scene in 2020. There I met Hawk, who accepted me as a private student for a six-month course in the spiritual foundations of traditional astrology. After that, I took a one-year horary astrology course with Adam Elenbaas, one of Hawk’s root teachers. After launching my horary practice, I completed a private course of study in traditional electional astrology with Kira Ryberg.
My lineages also include teachers and teachings in art, music, qigong, psychedelic practice, and other hobbies, but not from within any container discrete enough to identify as traditions.
Friends
Though blessed with many formal teachers, my practice as I know it would not exist without an unfathomably deep peer lineage of friends made online during the transit of Saturn through Capricorn and Aquarius, i.e. March 2020–March 2023. These relationships form a hypersangha with whom I am grateful to deepen and broaden my practice every day.
