“Our ancestors prayed for this moment,” said a leader at the awe-inspiring Chavaya Festival in Duvall, Washington. How can I describe, in the limited format of letters and words, what I experienced at this music festival two weeks ago?

Dozens of musicians, too numerous to name (see the full lineup here), and leaders of whole-being-inspired prayer lifted our souls in song, dance, and prayer. In community. In nature. By the river. Surrounded by trees, sky, and stars.

I want to express my deepest gratitude and a huge Yasher Koach to festival organizers Jacob Glickman and Aliko Weste, and to the many leaders, volunteers, and singing souls who created this temporary Mishkan in time and space.

I decided to go the day before the festival began. This was not a logical decision. I had known about it for months. Friends and students would be leading sessions, and some of my favorite musicians would be sharing their transcendent gifts of song and prayer.

When people in my community said, “You should go!” my response shifted from “that’s not me” to “maybe I’ll go” to “absolutely not,” when it all seemed logistically ridiculous and impossible. And then I woke up the next morning and found myself buying a ticket.

Surely the soul sings always. It is robed in might and joy, it is surrounded by a noble delight, and the person must raise himself to the height of confronting their soul, of recognizing its spiritual imprints, the rushing of its wings that abound in the majesty of the holy of holies, and they will always be ready to listen to the secret of its holy discourse.

—“The Soul’s Illumination,” Rav Avraham Isaac HaCohen Kook, Lights of Holiness, Vol. 1, pp. 174–175

A return to my singing soul. I am convinced that many forces in the universe conspired to send me to this festival, including angels and ancestors whispering in my ear, and family and friends who reflected back to me my own “YES.”

At first my soul was whispering to me. To feel myself again, in nature, in community, in song and prayer with music, music, music! I couldn’t explain why I was being called to Washington.

For most of my life, nature, music, movement, and prayer have been ways I return to myself. Deserts, mountains, oceans, lakes, trees, rivers. This is where my soul feels itself most easily, where I can listen to the “secret of its holy discourse.”

And then, once there, my soul was singing to me: “I am here! Come be with me! Come swim in this river, dance in this field, be held by these groves of trees!”

I joined in melodies, harmonies, silence, and instruments of all kinds, surrounded by voices reflecting the unnameable beauty and privilege of singing together. And the singing continued when I returned home, at a “Song is Prayer” retreat here in Berkeley with Joey Weisenberg. Sing, sing, sing. Listen, listen, listen. Pray, pray, pray.

Last week, we read in the Torah portion Ki Tetze the commandment to return lost objects to their owners. The Hebrew term is Hashavat Avedah, השבת אבידה. My teacher and friend Diane Bloomfield shared a gorgeous teaching from the Sefat Emet about how this mitzvah relates to our soul.

Our “lost object” can sometimes be our soul, when we forget our true place in the world, our essence. But the Divine is always holding our soul for us, ready to return it when we seek it. Once our soul exists on this plane of Assiya | עֲשִׂיָּה, physical reality, it does not disappear. “What is given from heaven is not taken back”.... (Sefat Emet, Commentary on Ki Tetze, 1901)

And just as a lost object is returned when its owner seeks it, when we seek our soul, it is returned. Shabbat becomes a day of remembering, when we are once again reconnected to this part of ourselves, when we are “re-souled”:

Because in this world forgetting is strong and we don’t remember at all what has been lost for us, and Shabbat is a day of remembering, because the extra soul [given to us on Shabbat] reminds that person to remember and search for what is lost. And this is what is hinted at in the word ‘And he rested’ Va’Yinafash וַיִּנָּפַֽשׁ. (Exodus 31:17)

—Sefat Emet, Commentary on Ki Tetze, 1901

And so, I can only imagine that my ancestors were calling me back to myself when I took myself to Washington for Chavaya. My own soul, connected to the souls of my ancestors and to the greater soul of Israel and this world, was calling me to remember. To remember that my soul is always here with me, that it is never lost. And that I only need to seek it and it will return itself to me.

We are our ancestors. We are our descendants (with the help of the Divine, B”H). At the festival, I participated in an ancestral healing workshop with the amazing Elisha Bokman. Afterward, a discussion arose about “how to” connect to our ancestors.

To me, the answer is simple. We are our ancestors. On the most basic physical level of Assiya | עֲשִׂיָּה, I am here as an embodied soul/nefesh/נֶפֶשׁ, made up of my ancestors’ DNA. My body carries my mother and father, just as my daughter's body carries her parents and grandparents. Their faces, voices, movements, and bodies continue through us.

And so, as we experience the full moon of Elul tonight, may we all embrace our singing souls that are longing to return to us, to be sought by us and felt by us as we move through our broken-hearted prayers for greater healing and return in this world.

May we invite the wildness of our souls to fly, to run, to dance freely, to swim naked in rivers. May we find safe containers and spaces in our communities to mourn, wail, moan, and cry with the calling of the shofar, the true sound of wholeness surrounding that which is broken.

And may we always remember that our soul is here, ready to be returned to us the moment we seek it, waiting for us, longing for us as a hummingbird is drawn to nectar, as the river is drawn to the sea, as the sun is drawn to the horizon. And may we awaken to those moments of return with gratitude for feeling our soul’s return.