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Mónica Gomery

@dancingmobot

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

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Belatedly beaming out this Elul poem at the very end of Tishrei, after dear @dancingmobot. Based a true story where I was utterly gobsmacked by blowing shofar back and forth with some anonymous neighbor. I never figured out who it was, which feels exactly right. Thank you to @themassachusettsreview for giving it a place to sing in this season. 🌬

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Join us this week for our Yawp workshop & open mic ft. C. (Constantine Jones), and free community groups including Writing Group, Poetry Aloud and our Virtual Writing Group. Please note that there will be no Writing Group and 144 Montague will be closed on Friday until 6pm, when we’ll open for our Yawp! It’s also your last chance to register for workshops with Rosebud Ben-Oni and Joshua Mehigan. Learn more about each at the link in our bio ✨

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We’re not afraid to dive deep into poetry with our festival, events, community groups, workshops, craft labs and more both at our space in Brooklyn Heights and online this month! We hope to see you around! Learn more about all of these at the link in our bio ❤️‍🔥

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“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.

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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? 😉

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Join us.
Monday September 21st at 3:30pm
In-person in Brooklyn, NY or on Live stream
Wear white. Bring a small stone.
Register LINK IN BIO

This Yom Kippur, though our grief, outrage, and despair, let us turn our most holy of holy days into a day of mass mourning, collective atonement, and dignified action.

WE REMEMBER

We remember the lives of all those taken from this world too soon, too violently, too needlessly. We bring their dreams and visions and ideas and joys with us.

WE REFUSE
We refuse to pretend there is a ceasefire in Gaza. We refuse to speak of Israel’s genocide of Palestinians in the past tense. We refuse to be complicit in ethnic cleansing, in ever-expanding war, in the use of our money to bomb entire families. And we refuse to welcome war criminals into our city.

WE RECOMMIT

We recommit to steady and care for one another. To challenge each other to act with creativity and courage. To embody Judaism at its most liberatory, standing in loving solidarity with Palestinians and all people.

Supporting organizations:
Jews For Racial & Economic Justice, Rabbis for Ceasefire, IfNotNow, Shoresh, Congregation Kolot Chayeinu/Voices of Our Lives, The American Council for Judaism, Jewish Voice for Peace, and JVP-NYC.

Multi-faith Allies:
Christians for a Free Palestine NYC, Judson Memorial Church, Faith in Harm Reduction, Faith for Black Lives, and others.

Photo credits from Yizkor 2024: Alexa Wilkinson
Photo credits from Yizkor 2025: Isabel Gadd, Gili Getz, & Ruvan Wijesooriya

Art by Roan Boucher @pollinator_press_art

Music: El Maleh Rachamim chanted by Rabbi Mónica Gomery

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“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.

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23/31 #sealeychallenge Of Darkness and Tumbling by @dancingmobot

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“Which is why we don’t have Kol Nidre every day of the year. The difference between poison and medicine is dosage. Too much Kol Nidre would be poisonous.” - Rabbi Xava De Cordova, from the Kol Nidre episode

Link in bio to listen.

Rabbi Xava De Cordova is a disabled, Sefradi, Mizraxi trans woman and co-host of the world's first Queer Talmud podcast, "Xai, how are you?". She is a long-time SVARA-style Talmud learner and SVARA teaching kollel fellow who got her start as a teacher by creating Beit Midrash Behind Bars, an organization that facilitated Jewish learning opportunities for incarcerated people in Washington State. She is also the co-Rosh Yeshiva of Shel Maala, which she co-founded with her incredible co-Rosh, Binya. She lives in Providence, RI, where she regularly produces Jewish ritual theatre (or did, before the pandemic) and does her best to steward the radical tradition she's been blessed to inherit.

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A few weeks ago, Han and I wedded each other, and wedded the web that holds us. It was a joy-grief-kinship-fest of cackle weeps, friends feasting & pulling each other into the Yiddish dance spiral, an unforgettably ridiculous Tisch, being completely throttled by ritual, and being joined by ancestors under the chuppah, in the lake, on the dance floor. Not only did we get to experience it all (in awe that we get to love all these humans), but over and over but I had my memories expanded by our beloveds: hearing about all the little meetings & moments our dear ones had with each other. And it was somehow big enough to hold all the losses & estrangements inside a shelter of utterly life-affirming familiedness and big gay sacred absurdity! My molecules were rearranged by the witness of our people.

Which is to say I actually do feel changed by ~~marriage~~! The ritual of it is still composting, renewing, expanding, tenderizing & challenging me. Meaning, it was also hard: I felt some spiritual muscle fibers split and knit more strongly together: the steadydeep cord between Han and me, the lines between us and those across the veil, the braid of our chosen & blood families woven tight.

I can't believe I get to be a wife to someone who I become more whole by being wifed to her. Wife, in this useage, is a verb for the expansive belonging and grounded presence Han has showed me is possible. (Also look how hot she is in that suit.)

Thank you to every dearly beloved who made it all possible--in disbelief just to know youse.

Beautiful 📸 by brilliant Connie @silverandsaltphoto 🙏🙏

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Ways of Awe is live. Listen wherever you get your podcasts or visit the links in our bio. ✨️

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

Ways of Awe was written by Maia Brown and Shelby Handler, based on translations originally shared with the Kadima Reconstructionist Community in Seattle, WA on unceded Coast Salish, Duwamish land. All episodes edited by Maia Brown. Audio engineering by Daniel Guenther. Thank you to Ross Kirshenbaum, or Levoneh, and Peter Lippman, and Jimmy Austin for our show music, and to Jenny Asarnow for their field recordings. Thank you to the Jack Straw Cultural Center Artist Support Program and the King County Office of Arts & Culture, Smart Ventures Program, and Signal Fire Coop.

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“...there is no such thing as sort of a finished meaning–in any texts, arguably, but certainly not in the way that I’m interested in thinking about our tradition.” - Maia Brown

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 this Wednesday before Rosh Chodesh Elul 5786.

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