Instagram story viewer> @dancingmobot> Posts

Mónica Gomery

@dancingmobot

2.7K

followers

1415

following

✨ rabbi & poet
🌷 MOTHER OF MOTHER OF, forthcoming from Tupelo Press
🌖 MIGHT KINDRED, Prairie Schooner Book Prize 2022
find my other books 👇

POSTS STORIES REELS TAGGED

Woke up to this very sweet review in @publisherswkly. Grateful to my wonderful press @univnebpress, and very grateful for generous readers who handle this collection with so much care. 💛💛💛 by @dancingmobot

136

6

4 years ago

I’ve been writing a book that asks what it means to nurture and create amidst political turmoil and climate crisis. I’m humbled and so so grateful for the gift of (the astonishing!!) Ilya Kaminsky selecting it for the Helena Whitehill Book Award. This is a dark and deranged time. It’s been surreal to receive this sweet news amidst all the apocalyptic news. I’m wrecked. This book is about being wrecked. And about all the ways we mother the world and are mothered by it.

The world of this book includes: the archetypal childless cat ladies™️ of Judaism; matriarchs of Biblical, literary, and familial origins; the first crown of sonnets I’ve ever completed; queer gender-abundant love and partnership; weird names for G-d; laments for the earth; grappling and wrestling with the beauty and violence of my religious tradition; song; ghosts; grief; Noah’s ark; the ocean; and many interpretations of “be fruitful and multiply.”

I’m so grateful this book is finding a home with @tupelopress 🙌

At the risk of cliché, this poem by Brecht has surfaced again and again— “In the dark times/ Will there also be singing?/ Yes, there will also be singing./ About the dark times.”

I’m here singing, with all of you. ❤️ by @dancingmobot

333

139

2 years ago

Last week I had already decided that we would discuss this incredible excerpt from Anne Carson’s ‘Gnosticism’ in the next @brooklynpoets Virtual Writing Group. Next day I woke up to the Nobel news. A matron saint of poetry! Anne Carson’s work has given me so much permission as a writer— to let myself get weirder and weirder, to be spiritual, to obsess over ancient texts, to create from a wild and unknowing place, to let the many voices inside me speak. Such a legend. If you want to spend more time with this poem, come hang with me on Wednesday night at the Brooklyn Poets virtual writing group! JUST TO HANG ONTO LIFE IS WHY by @dancingmobot

330

3

6 days ago

Very stoked to be leading the weekly Virtual Writing Group at Brooklyn Poets in October! I’ve learned so much at BP, both as a student and a teacher, and I love this writing community dearly. Drop in online on Wednesday evenings, 5:30-7pm ET, for a poem, a prompt, time to write, and time to share. Head over to @brooklynpoets for more info. ✍️💡☕️ 
Also, this pic of the brilliant @oye414 working the mic in the first graphic!🔥 by @dancingmobot

25

1

16 days ago

“To notice that saying Mourner's Kaddish for someone is a practice that comes from students saying Mourner's Kaddish for their teacher. There's something very sweet for me there about like a queerness of relationship that's in the roots of this as a grieving text.” - Rabbi Mónica Gomery, from the Kaddish episode

Weaving together interpretative translations, research, interviews, and sounds, Ways of Awe is a queer anti-Zionist audio companion for the Jewish High Holidays.

Link in bio to listen.

Mónica Gomery is a rabbi and writer. She currently serves on the clergy team of Kol Tzedek Synagogue in West Philadelphia, and taught on the faculty of SVARA from 2015-2024. Mónica is a co-founder of Let My People Sing! and the author of three books of poetry. She is passionate about supporting people who have been denied access to, disconnected from, and marginalized by ancient traditions to gain access to these traditions as a resource for empowerment and transformation in their lives, so that they can become vessels for healing and justice in the world. by @dancingmobot

61

2

a month ago

Lilith x @heebmedia x @rabbinicfitcheck is delighted to present the 5787 High Holiday Lookbook! We asked your favorite Jewish feminist rabbis what they were planning to wear for the High Holidays—and how they made their choices.

Rabbi Mónica Gomery’s top three considerations when dressing for the High Holidays are:

💫 Consistency: I wear the same thing for each day of the Yamim Noraim— white slacks, a white kittel-like shirt, white non-leather shoes and my tallit. I really like having a uniform and not having to make choices day-to-day or year-to-year. Personally, it lets me focus on other things— music and nusach, details I’m keeping in my head, kavanah as I lead and pray.

💫 Differentiation: These clothes are reserved all year just for Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, including my high holidays tallit. It helps me feel that I’m stepping into something sacred and utterly distinct.

💫 Team unity: It’s so important to me to feel synched up with the team I’m co-creating high holidays leadership with! Following an ancestral custom shared across both Sephardic and Ashkenazi diasporas, we all carry a clove of garlic for protection in our pockets during services that come from the same bulb. Pictured here with our garlic are Aly Halpert, Rachel Chang, Rabbi Ari Lev Fornari, and me, who together hold down the bimah in the main services at Kol Tzedek in Philly.

Thank you for joining us through the Days of Awe for this series! Same time next year? 😉 by @dancingmobot

268

9

a month ago

Just before entering fully into the portal of the new year… feels like the last moment to squeeze in a summer-related post. I’ve got big gratitude to pour out for a gigantically nourishing and spiritually transformative time in the Pacific Northwest this summer. 🌲🏔️🐚🌲🌿🌲🦌🌊🌲

Thank you, Olympic Peninsula, for bringing me to my knees in awe every day for a week. My spirit really needed it.

Thank you @tupelopress, for time and space to write, for Gentle House, for a writing desk in the embrace of the mountains, for the deepest hospitality and generosity.

And thank you Seattle for Mt Rainier, for queers skinny dipping in the lake as shabbat comes in, and especially especially for Hannah and Shelby ❤️!!

I’m charged up like a crystal and ready for the next portal.🌀 by @dancingmobot

168

20

a month ago

“We make it possible for G-d to grieve by doing this ritual three times a day. G-d needs to move grief through G-d's system in order to be a whole G-d.” - Rabbi Mónica Gomery, from the Kaddish episode

Weaving together interpretative translations, research, interviews, and sounds, Ways of Awe is a queer anti-Zionist audio companion for the Jewish High Holidays.

Link in bio to listen.

Mónica Gomery is a rabbi and writer. She currently serves on the clergy team of Kol Tzedek Synagogue in West Philadelphia, and taught on the faculty of SVARA from 2015-2024. Mónica is a co-founder of Let My People Sing! and the author of three books of poetry. She is passionate about supporting people who have been denied access to, disconnected from, and marginalized by ancient traditions to gain access to these traditions as a resource for empowerment and transformation in their lives, so that they can become vessels for healing and justice in the world. by @dancingmobot

104

0

a month ago

Hoping to channel some of this excellence for the high holidays. Seeing Rosalía in concert this summer was a lifetime greatest hit. ❤️🪩 by @dancingmobot

50

7

2 months ago

Weaving together interpretative translations, research, interviews, and sounds, Ways of Awe is a queer anti-Zionist audio companion for the Jewish High Holidays. Episodes go live next week—on Rosh Chodesh Elul 5786 (August 12/13 2026). ✨️

Join talmud scholars, rabbis, and artists as they unearth the meanings, grammar, and ancient gossip inside the holiest prayers of the Jewish year. Created by Maia Brown and Shelby Handler, these audio collages range from meditative to liberatory, grief-stricken to playful, irreverent to awestruck, and from the ancestral to the immediate.

From Rosh Hashanah to Yom Kippur, the Days of Awe, or the Yamim Noraim, are a portal for collective reckoning and return. Each episode of Ways of Awe features a different prayer and could be listened to during the ten days, or in the month of Elul leading up. Whenever and wherever these sounds find you, we hope they deepen your relationship to and reinvention of our annual traditions—in service of diasporic flourishing and decolonial imagining. by @dancingmobot

529

40

2 months ago

Elul is coming! Come write with me!
On August 16, 12-3pm ET, I’ll be teaching a VIRTUAL workshop rooted in the ancient poetry of Psalm 27, roaming its longings, its syntax and themes. We’ll be reading psalms and poems, discussing, and doing some generative writing. I’d love to write with you as we enter this sacred season that asks so much of us. What are you asking back?

One Thing I Ask of the Infinite: A Poem for Elul

At the heart of the High Holidays, a poem pulses. Psalm 27 is traditionally recited by Jews every day between the new moon of Elul and the end of Sukkot. For seven weeks, we return again and again to this layered, resonant poem—reverberating between the confidence (hubris?), anxiety (humility?), and hope (faith? doubt?) that echo through its verses. The human condition sings through the psalm. The psalm walks beside us as we step toward a new year in an aching world.

What might our practice as contemporary poets bring to this ancient text? And what might this ancient poem stir in our writing today?

In this three-hour workshop, we will explore the themes and longings of Psalm 27—on its own terms, in dialogue with classical commentaries, and in conversation with contemporary poetry. We’ll ask questions of the psalm and wrestle with its language, writing with it and toward it. If you’ve never sat with Psalm 27, you’ll leave better acquainted. And if you know it well (can recite it in your sleep!), this workshop aims to defamiliarize the familiar and offer new readings. You might begin your own version of Psalm 27, or follow the poem somewhere entirely unexpected.

yetzirahpoets.org to register

(And thank you @alhalpal for your beautiful rendition of this psalm) by @dancingmobot

66

7

2 months ago

☀️Meet our Summer Retreat Teachers: Rabbi Mónica Gomery, Program Faculty

💙Rabbi Mónica Gomery is a lover of poetry and song, which share a common root in Hebrew. She is a co-founder of Let My People Sing! and now serves on the clergy team of Kol Tzedek synagogue in Philadelphia, where she stewards the community’s culture of prayer and music. She was ordained in 2017 at Hebrew College, and has taught Torah and arts through SVARA: A Traditionally Radical Yeshiva, Ritualwell, Yetzirah: A Hearth for Jewish Poetry, the Institute for Jewish Spirituality, Brooklyn Poets, Jewtina y Co, and other organizations. She is the co-creator of P’tach Libi: A Siddur for Shabbat and Festival Mornings, and the author of three books of poems. A teacher smiles and leads a group gathered in a wood-paneled room, with participants standing in the foreground and a whiteboard behind them. by @dancingmobot

42

0

3 months ago