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Elza is a freelance illustrator from Ashfield, Massachusetts. She is a member of Nakamu Queer Trans Fabrication. Elza grew up in a Jewish family but felt disconnected from Judaism as a queer and trans person. In her 20s, she began reconnecting with Judaism through queer and trans Jewish communities on the East Coast. She started making art about her experience and gained a following among others looking for similar connections. Elza is now a very alternative Jew, not considering herself traditional but religious. She is involved in organizing a queer and trans Hebra-Kadisha, a Jewish burial society, to provide care for queer and trans individuals after death. The traditional Hebra-Kadisha is strictly binary gendered, so the goal is to create a more inclusive and respectful space for queer and trans individuals. The Hebra-Kadisha prepares bodies for burial according to Jewish ritual, and Elza's organization is working on creating a tahara guide with more inclusive language and practices And then I need to do like a class, if I can wind up the audio. That's okay. Very technical. So, could you start by just introducing yourself? Okay. My name's Elza. What do you want me to say? Um, just whatever you want to say about yourself. Um, it could be like where you live, like what you do, like... Sure, yeah. Okay. Um, my name is Elza. I'm a freelance illustrator. Uh, I live in Ashfield, Massachusetts on a small farm. Um, I am a member of Nakamu Queer Trans Fabrication. Hold on. Oh, okay. My phone is buzzing. I'm like, oh, I should have, uh, put that somewhere else. There we go. Yeah, and, um, could you maybe talk about your kind of, like, experience with, like, Judaism? Sorry. I'm glad. Hopefully it's not super ongoing. Actively moving trees this morning. Um, do you want me, was the introduction okay? Do you want me to do that again? No, that was good. Okay. Yeah. How is it going? Yeah. Do you think it'll, like, be like this for a while? I don't know. I don't know at all. Gotcha. Um... Yeah, I see a person's, like, up in the woods. Um... Yeah, I'm not really sure what... Unfortunately, there's, like, rural, like, there's no way to know or do anything about that. Um, and there's not really anywhere we can go where you're not going to hear that. Okay. Is it, do you think we can work with it, or? Um, yeah. It's pretty loud. Yeah, I guess I'm, like, do you think it'd be, like, would you want to go inside, maybe, or? The only, the trouble with inside is just that it's a really small house, and I have, like, everybody else moving around. So, like, there's not really anywhere for us to go where there's not going to be, like, people coming in and out of the shop, and, like, sounds of people doing things. Okay. Yeah. Okay. Then we'll just keep going, then. Okay. Sorry. No worries. Okay, yeah. Um, can you talk about, kind of, like, your relationship to Judaism, maybe, like, how it was, like, growing up, et cetera, like, to now? Sure. Um, I was born and raised in a Jewish family. We were members of Reform congregations in the Midwest, and I would describe my upbringing as fairly secular. We were, kind of, your regular, kind of, twice-a-year Jews where we would go to High Holy Days, but we didn't have, like, you know, regular attendance at the temple. That said, it was really important to my grandparents that all of us, my siblings and I, went to religious school. It was important that we went to Hebrew school, that we all had the name of vote. I actually dropped out of Hebrew school for an acting group that I was in. I felt, growing up, culturally connected to Judaism, religiously disconnected from Judaism, and increasingly culturally disconnected from Judaism as I came to understand myself as a queer and trans person. I just didn't have any visible models for queer and trans Judaism in my community. It was just not something that really was available or visible in the 90s and early 2000s in our Reform Jewish community. So, I had a bit of a mitzvah, and then I would say that I kind of just removed myself from Judaism and from Jewish community for, I think, a good 10 years. I felt really disconnected and wasn't interested in really pursuing much related to Judaism. In my early, mid-20s, I started to reconnect because I met Jews where I lived on the East Coast who were queer and trans, and who were finding all these connections to Judaism in ways that were more kind of marginal and alternative and unusual. I'm someone who's really interested in Jewish magic and mysticism and folklore and kind of like all the elements of Judaism that get relegated to superstition and kind of like, oh, that's the stuff we left in the old country, and we don't talk about that. Growing up in a very assimilated community, it was like, we're normal. There's nothing weird here. That was very much the line, and I didn't, you know, I was weird. I wanted something weird to connect to. So, I was really excited to find all of these other queer and trans youth who were kind of digging deep into Jewish tradition that I never learned about, that was more connected to things that I cared about. So, I started to get a lot more involved in Jewish community. I started to make art about my experience as a queer and trans Jew and the things that I was interested in, and that was a huge turning point for me. I got a much bigger following with my art among other Jews and people who were really looking for the kinds of things that I was looking for. And it's just kind of grown from there. So, now I'm definitely a very alternative Jew. I would not consider myself traditional, but I do consider myself religious. I'm very culturally connected, and participating in the organizing of the Hebra-Kadisha is, I think, one of the most important things to me in my Jewish life right now. Awesome. And then, could you talk about the Hebra-Kadisha? So, our Hebra-Kadisha was kind of born, oh gosh, I think, I want to say like it's been two, almost three years, possibly. I would have to check. We've been organizing and kind of building to the place that we're at now for a while. It grew out of a group of people, mostly in the Valley, who had started a book club about Jewish ritual around death, which I think, you know, it was on folks' minds because of losses in the community, but also folks were just interested in learning more about tradition, learning more about ritual. And to my understanding, that led to the development of, you know, the beginning of organizing the Hebra-Kadisha. I came in a little bit later, but still within the first couple of meetings. And the goal with organizing a specifically queer and trans Hebra-Kadisha was that Hebra-Kadisha, the traditional practice is really strictly binary gendered. There's a women's Hebra-Kadisha, there's a men's Hebra-Kadisha. There are laws about, you know, who can do what, although most of the customs around Tahara are around the ritual preparation of the body. Our men have their customs, but it tends to be fairly strict. You know, there's this custom that you do for men, this custom that you do for women. And as trans people, some of us who, you know, don't feel like we resonate with the experience of strictly male, strictly female, or some of us who do resonate with male or female, but are concerned about, you know, our bodies being cared for after death by people who don't understand us. Oh, we're late. We're late. Where do you want me to start? If you could start again by talking about how it's like traditionally this very binary tradition. Sure. So, Hebra-Kadisha is traditionally a really strictly binary gendered tradition, a ritual. There's a men's Hebra-Kadisha, there's a women's Hebra-Kadisha. There are customs around who's allowed to prepare whose body. And for trans people, this is really difficult, both for trans people who are non-binary, who, you know, have to be uncomfortably slotted into one of two binary systems that don't fit, or for trans people who are men or women, but who are concerned about people potentially not respecting them. You know, a traditionally cisgender Hebra-Kadisha may try to do a really respectful Tahara for a trans person, but, you know, with a lack of education, with a lack of, you know, kind of like community connection, a lot of us felt like that wasn't something that we wanted for ourselves or for our loved ones. It's all really important to us to have the option for queer and trans youth to be cared for by queer and trans youth after death. And that was something that was really guiding us when we started the organization. There are other Hebra-Kadishas around the country, and I think the world, who are doing work around trans inclusion and interested in sort of adapting the liturgy to be more trans-inclusive, and training the Hebra-Kadisha members to be more aware and educated around trans people. And some of their work we're really inspired by, but for us, we really wanted it to be a by-and-for community sort of a thing. And then, could you also just explain, like, kind of what a Hebra-Kadisha is, just like kind of generally? Yes. So, a Hebra-Kadisha is a Jewish burial society. It's sort of like a holy society, a holy group. And that would be people in a Jewish community who volunteer to be the ones on call when someone dies to prepare the body according to ritual for burial. So, in Jewish burial, there are certain things that need to happen. Before the funeral, there's like the ritual purification of the body by water, which is tahara. There are specific shrouds that a person is dressed in. There's a specific kind of coffin that's used. The Hebra-Kadisha's job is to care for this person's body and prepare it so that it's ready to go to the funeral and be buried. And this is, I think, in most communities around the world, it looks different. It's very specific to what's been handed down in certain places. There's not a whole lot of halakha. There's not a lot of law around what has to happen at a tahara, what a Hebra-Kadisha has to do. It's mostly mimpak. It's mostly custom. So, it's something that we have a lot of history around in certain places and less history around in other places. But it's a way for people to sort of make sure that the care in a Jewish community continues right up until the last moment. They call it hesed shel emet, the last, the truest kindness. Because it's something that you're doing for somebody who has no way to repay you. They have no way to even be aware to thank you. But it's showing the person that last care. And also a way to support the community, a way to care for the family, a way to care for the people who are grieving. And then, in your Hebra-Kadisha specifically, what do you guys logistically have to do in order to make it less binary? Is there a specific language you're changing? Yeah, so a lot of what we're doing in terms of, we're working on a tahara guide. A lot of what we're doing around liturgy is definitely making some alterations to the language. It's a very binary gendered language. But there are folks working on gender neutral alternatives to nouns and grammatical structures and verbs and various things. Like with a lot of other languages, folks are sort of innovating and adapting. So we're working with the non-binary Hebrew project language and adapting. So that our goal is to have blessings that we can say that are masculine gendered or feminine gendered or neutral gendered, depending on what folks want. But there's also tradition around, there are slight differences between the shrouds for men and the shrouds for women. They're pretty neutral, but there's one or two items that are different between men and women. And we sort of have a dream of creating our own tahara team at one point and being able to kind of adapt so that there is kind of a neutral option for folks. And then I guess kind of going off of that generally, I don't know, I guess this really makes me think about this idea of tradition not being rigid, instead of being able to be flexible. And I guess I'm wondering, do you think rigidity is stronger, flexibility is stronger? Do you have any thoughts? Does that make sense? Yeah. It's something I think about a lot. And I think it's something that is very integral to Rabbinic Judaism, specifically. I mean, the whole history of Rabbinic Judaism is taking the Torah, the book that we have that lays out everything that we're meant to do, and adding to it the Talmud, the commentary, the commentary on the commentary, the conversation between rabbis, between communities. It's taking a rigid text and making it a living text. And a lot of that is interpretation. You know, it's looking at something and saying, okay, this is what's written, but in our community, in our time, this is how we're going to need to interpret it so that we can live, so that we can be closer to the spirit of it than the letter of it, in many ways. And I think it's holding attention because it's not just throwing out the tradition. It's not just saying, you know, oh, that was written so long ago, it's not relevant to us anymore, it doesn't make sense for us. It's not saying that. It's saying that this thing that was written by our ancestors is deeply meaningful to us, and we aren't our ancestors. We don't live in our ancestors' times. We need to figure out how to adapt their traditions to our present-day lives. I think a lot of Judaism is about that. Obviously, there's different opinions within the Jewish community and different Jewish communities on how much adaptation is okay and what's okay to change and what's not okay to change. But that's something that I really love about Judaism is that it's just a constant conversation about what is the best way to balance between flexibility and rigidity. I'm someone, for myself, I really long for a certain amount of tradition. I feel comforted by history and by being able to trace something back to people that I'm connected to through the past. And I also need the flexibility to still be myself while I do that. There's certain things that I'm not willing to compromise on. I need to be able to be who I am and live the life that I love while connected to that tradition. So, yeah, I think for me it's a really fraught but interesting topic. You said rabbinic Judaism. What does that mean? The Judaism that developed after the destruction of the last temple, the second temple. So, it's distinguished. There are other kinds of Judaism, but we're distinguishing Judaism. Rabbinic Judaism is the most, like when you think of Jews that you know, pretty much all of them are going to be rabbinic Jews. There are very small communities of folks who follow different kinds of Judaism. I think Karaites are slightly different. But temple Judaism is the Judaism of the Torah. Like when there was a temple at which you offered daily sacrifices, at which you did certain rituals, there were high priests. That's the Judaism of the original Jews, the people who were our ancestors. After the destruction of the temple and the exile of the Jews from the Holy Land, Judaism had to change. Rabbinic Judaism developed because all of these different communities of Jews in diaspora, in different places, Jews who had left. There was no temple anymore and everyone was scattered all different places. Rabbinic Judaism is the Judaism that developed to allow people to be Jewish where they were. And to be connected to tradition while still keeping the focus on their lives where they were. It added the oral Torah to the text of the Torah. The oral Torah is the whole history of all the commentary and all the laws. When people talk about Judaism today, they're mostly talking about rabbinic Judaism. You talked about this a minute ago. You mentioned adaptation being part of rabbinic Judaism or Judaism. Could you talk about that a bit more? Do you feel like adaptation is an inherent part of Judaism? I do. I think it depends on who you ask. To me, the whole process of rabbinic Judaism, which is adding commentary on the center text and then commentary on the commentary, and it involves a lot of rabbis and sages arguing with each other over what is the correct interpretation and what people should actually be doing. Actually, in one of my favorite stories from the Talmud, it involves rabbis arguing directly with God. Using the phrase, it is not in heaven, which means you gave us the Torah. It's not with you anymore. It's with us. We have to figure it out now. To me, rabbinic Judaism, yes, is all about interpretation. It's all about holding that tension between what is written originally versus what we understand in our lives. Also, sometimes the Torah is full of contradictions. It's full of tensions. Depending on how you look at it, I look at it as the product of the writings of many different people of many different ages who all had different experiences and were sometimes in conflict with each other. It's hard to look at it as a text that is just taken completely directly on its face because I think that's too simple for it. I think it's a text that demands to be interrogated. It demands to be wrestled with. That's the other thing. Israel, the name that was given to Jacob that became the name for the Jewish people, people who wrestled with God. I think that, to me, is also a part of that feeling of adaptation. We're not meant to just be obedient and not think about it and not struggle with it. It's actually inherent to who we are as Jews to wrestle with it, to talk back and question and make something of our own out of what's given to us. I was wondering, could you describe the process of Tahorah? I know you said that you experienced being... I haven't been called for Tahorah. I've never actually performed Tahorah. But I was the volunteer at our training. The members of our group who have performed Tahorah wanted to train other prospective members. Because you need a lot of people to be on call in a Hebridesha. When somebody passes, the Tahorah is supposed to happen very quickly. The goal is to have a large pool of members who can be called at a moment's notice. We held a training for people who want to learn about Tahorah, want to know what they might be asked to do during Tahorah. We thought about a lot of different ways to do it. We decided that what we wanted to do was to perform a mock Tahorah for folks so they could actually see what happens. I volunteered to be the body, which is usually called the mate, which is the male form. Matea is the female form. Matea would be the non-binary form, so I was the matea. But folks in my cover were really adamant that we not call me that. Because there's a tradition of not tempting fate, not inviting the evil eye. So we called me the Hayeh, the wife. But I was the person on whom the Tahorah was being performed. So I got to experience it from a really unusual, for a living person, vantage point. So the steps of the Tahorah, the body comes to the location where it's being performed. This is usually a funeral home these days. But honestly, it can be anywhere. It's wherever the Hebridesh is able to go. There are not any Jewish funeral homes close to us here. So folks in the group have been called to various non-Jewish funeral homes. But the body comes to where the group is. The members of the Hebridesh come in. There's sort of a preparation of the body that has to do with just practical cleaning. So you'll be cleaning someone's nails or brushing out their hair or sort of like washing them head to toe, just to make sure that there's no blood, no bodily fluids. The person, you know, head to toe gets sort of carefully taken care of. And then the sort of center of Tahorah is the ritual purification by water. So there's a certain amount of water that needs to be talked about fully. You want to fully immerse the person in water, which is sort of difficult. In some places, you're able to actually lower a person into something like a mikvah, like a ritual purification pool. But that's really unusual. So mostly Hebridesh throughout history have done this by pouring a certain amount of water over the person. And, you know, the Hebridesh sort of turns the body of the person so that the water can touch every part of them. Do you want to go ahead? Yes. So there's a blessing that's said while members of the Hebridesh pour a certain amount of water over the person from head to toe. Then the person is dried and dressed head to toe in the Tahorah team, which are the traditional shrouds, which are a series of garments, usually eight of them, that are all made of like a natural white fabric like linen or cotton. It has to be biodegradable. They're a little bit based on the garments that a high priest would have worn during temple Judaism. And then once the person is dressed head to toe, they're moved very gently by the Hebridesh into their pine coffin, which is taken directly to the funeral, usually. So when we did the Tahorah training, I kept all my clothes on, but I laid on the table. Members of my Hebra mind going through the process of cleaning me head to toe, turning me this way and that, pouring the water over me, saying the blessings. And then they did actually dress me in the full Tahorah team, which was really kind of surreal for me. And we wanted people to be able to see what all the steps were and what all of the garments were. And then they lifted me from one table to another, which sort of represented the transfer to the coffin. And then I got up because it was, you know, and then it was sort of a, it was a really interesting moment. You know, the members of my Hebra helped me take off all of the shrouds that I was wearing. And it was actually, it was really emotional for all of us involved. You know, I had a lot of folks coming up and kind of hugging me afterwards and saying, like, I'm so glad that you're not actually dead. For me, it was really an experience of being very deeply cared for. And it was something that I felt strongly about doing. I felt strongly about volunteering for, because for me, a lot of what I'm bringing to the work that we're doing as a Hebra is a focus on sort of Tahara as like body justice. And, you know, I have the perspective of a queer and trans Jew, but also a fat and disabled and chronically ill Jew, somebody who has medical trauma. There are a lot of ways that throughout my life, my body has been mistreated or dehumanized, or, you know, generally kind of not cared for and not respected in ways that I feel strongly shouldn't happen to someone after their death. And that's what I want to bring to this work, is the ability to be in that space and caring for and respecting and seeing that person from all of these different sort of angles. And I wanted to volunteer because I wanted the members of my coverage to know how to live with that person and know how to, you know, care for a body that isn't the standard body that, say, like, you know, medical students train with. You know, there's a lot of parallels to, I think, health care for me and ways that people kind of just imagine what a body looks like and are presented with actually the diversity of people's bodies. And it was really powerful for me to have all of these people who I so deeply trust be so gentle and so caring with me throughout the whole experience of the Zahara training, kind of being held and washed and lifted and, you know, blessings said over me and very gently dressed. It made me feel just really reaffirmed in what we're trying to do for people. You know, you don't often get, I think, the perspective of what it feels like to have it done to you. But being in that space, in that position, really just reaffirmed for me that this really is care. It's really care that we're giving to somebody's loved one. And, yeah, it's just a really intimate process, a really intimate gesture. Yeah, thanks so much for sharing that. I'm curious, like, what is the Zahara, like, sonic language? Like, is it silent? Like, are people talking? Yes. Again, it's very different depending on who's performing it, but it's never silent. There's always, I mean, there might be moments of silence during it, but blessings are said over the person. So, you know, there are specific blessings used at specific times. Something that feels really important to us as a Hebra is to have an element of singing. And that we do with Ngun, which is sort of like a wordless melody. And we're interested in kind of practicing Nguning together so that we are able to kind of sing with each other really naturally when we get called for Zahara. But, yeah, folks have told me that there are sometimes people speak to the deceased during the Zahara. Sometimes, you know, they're speaking to each other just to coordinate, like, okay, we need to lift like this. I'm like, can you do this while I do this? From the perspective on the table, from the training, it was, I had my eyes closed the whole time. So I really was getting the sensory feel of it, but also the audio of it. And it was a lot of just quiet murmuring and gentle voices and song and blessings. It felt very, it almost felt like being able to sleep a little bit. But there were also moments that was really interesting. There were moments of laughter, which I think we talked about after at the training. Because I think it was a little jarring for folks that there was some laughter. And I think some of it came out of the fact that clearly I was alive and it was a little bit difficult to maneuver me and, you know, get me into the various garments. So I think there's less likely to be laughter at an actual Zahara, but I think it does happen. And I think it actually is important that there's space for it, you know, because the people performing it are full of life, you know. And there's sometimes I think things happen that are going to be funny. And, you know, as long as there's this intention and this baseline of respect, really the most important thing in Zahara that we try to hold and tell other people is that, you know, there's all kinds of ritual. There's all kinds of practices. But it's really the intention that matters the most. And you can perform Zahara for somebody regardless of what you know, I think, as long as, you know, the Zahara that you're able to do is the best one. And, you know, as long as the intention is there. So really it's about cultivating that love for the person and that respect for the person, who is most likely going to be somebody that you don't know, depending on the size of the community. But it's really – it's meant to be kind of unconditional. And then could you remind me of the name of the collective and also, like, if you know, like, what the meaning of the word is? Yeah, so we talked a lot about what we wanted to call ourselves. We settled on Nakamu, which means comfort. And it comes from a blessing. Sorry, can you just repeat that? Yeah. Thank you so much. Yeah, so we talked a lot about what we wanted to call ourselves as a collective. And we settled on Nakamu, which means comfort. And it comes from a blessing about comforting your people. It's like a cry out to the divine, you know, comfort your people. But it really sort of is at the core of what we do. You know, it's community care. It's intimate care for the body that has cared this person through life. It's care for the loved one of that person who knows that their loved one is in good hands. There's elements of, you know, supporting the family through grief a little bit. There's elements of caring for each other and comforting each other, because Sahara is a really intense process. And sometimes you are going to have connections to the deceased. And sometimes, you know, it's just going to be difficult. So supporting each other and comforting each other is another major aspect of what we do. So we chose Nakamu for those reasons. And it was also really important for us to have the words queer and trans in the name of our collective, because we wanted it to be really clear and specific that this is a Hebra by and for queer and trans people. And then another thing I was wondering about is earlier you mentioned, like, kind of the connection between, like, burial and death and, like, returning to earth. Yeah. I think what I like about Jewish traditions around burial is that it's very focused on the natural. In Jewish traditional burial, there's no embalming. There's no kind of, like, sort of concrete barrier between you and the earth. You're supposed to be in biodegradable clothing. You're in a pine coffin that's going to degrade over time. You're supposed to be able to just go back into the land. Do you want me to say it again? Yeah. Okay. One of the things that I really appreciate about Jewish tradition around burial is that it's very focused on nature and returning to nature. The garments are meant to be natural materials. The coffin is pine. It's very plain. There's no embalming. It's very much about, you know, letting your body return to the earth. And I like that because, for me, the way I kind of access spirituality is through connection to everything. I'm someone who my version of monotheistic Judaism is sort of almost like a Phenozen pantheism, like everything being one thing, everything being connected to each other. That's the most spiritual concept for me. So I really like thinking of burial and death as sort of releasing the distinctness of your body, you know, you being this individual, this separate thing, letting those barriers kind of like melt and dissolve, and you become part of everything again. You become part of the nature of this all around you. That's something that, for me, connects to the way I sort of view my spirituality. Are there any deaths? I'm kind of curious, like if you don't mind sharing, like what was your first experience with death? That's a good question. Like what kind of experience? I guess anything that kind of feels significant, but also it doesn't need to be super, like do you have kind of like a first memory of death? That's a good question. I feel like if I dig back to like, actually, this is funny. I don't have a distinct memory of death, but I found going through a whole bunch of my drawings from my childhood, I found a little booklet of papers that were kind of like stapled together, and the cover of the booklet showed a line, a horizontal line, and then a sort of an oval shape under the line, and then a red kind of like stick figure almost in the oval under the line, and the top of the paper said, The last of Pepple Ho died, which took me a little while to, you know, that was phonetically sort of what it said, and then I turned the page, and there were five names in a list, and it was my great-grandfather, my cat, my next-door neighbor, I think there were two other people, I don't remember who they were, but it was people in my life who had passed by the time I was five, and I realized that the cover, the title of the booklet was The List of People Who Died, and the best part about this was I had stapled another two blank pages, so at five, not only was I keeping a list of who had passed, but I was prepared for it to get a lot longer. And I think that was the moment that I realized that death was real, and that, you know, I was going to know people who were going to be added to this list. So I think that's probably the earliest. I remember going to my great-grandfather's funeral. That was the first funeral I ever attended. I never met him, so it was really abstract for me, but I think it was the first time. And I remember the death of my cat around age five. I don't remember the death of my neighbor, but clearly it had an impact on me. But, yeah, I think it's something that I started thinking about fairly young and sort of being interested in. But I would say that I didn't have a major death in my family really until my 30s, which is very rare, I think. I lost both of my maternal grandparents in 2017, and I think that loss was the one that changed a lot of how I look at death and look at griefing and really spurred me to want to get involved in death work in a more intentional way. How does it, like, change how you felt about death and grieving? I mean, I think it was just the first time that someone had passed who I had spent a lot of time with. I had lost people who had, you know, come in and out of my life or I'd been close with them, but I hadn't seen them in a long time. You know, I was very close with both of my grandparents. They were really, really important to me. And their deaths, you know, they weren't unexpected. They lived long lives. But it clarified for me, I think, the way grief works, the way it's sort of the little strange details of it, you know, the process. And also something happened at the memorial for my grandparents that I think really made me incredibly angry. And sort of fueled a lot of my interest in getting into death work and into caring for people's bodies after death. My grandmother was, like me, also fat. And at the memorial, another family member made a disparaging comment about her weight at her memorial. And it made me absolutely furious. I had to leave the room. I couldn't believe that the way that people had talked about her during life was still happening, even in such an intense moment. And it made me think about how people will talk about me after I pass, and how my body might be treated, and how I can potentially be a force of advocacy and protection for other people with marginalized bodies. So, yeah, I think that was a big moment. Let me pull into what I think is my last question. Okay. Like, yeah, like, how, like, have you thought about how you want your body to be handled after you die? Yeah. It's something that I'm still thinking about in a big way. It's also something that's changed a lot over, I think, recently, over the past couple of years. I never, before I got involved with the Habakkadusha, I never thought about having tahara done for me. It was just never something that I considered. I didn't really know much about it. I didn't think it was important. For a lot of my life, I thought that maybe I would just want to be cremated, which is not, it's kind of against Jewish tradition. But I didn't like the idea of taking up space in a graveyard. I think a lot of my resistance to burial actually came from the traditional funeral industry, like the modern sort of mainstream funeral industry and, like, all of the process of, like, embalming and concrete liners and, you know, everything that's less, everything that kind of bars your body from returning to nature. I think now I'm the most interested in a natural burial, whether that's, you know, something like, you know, just being returned to the earth in, like, a fine coffin or in, you know, some sort of alternative structure. I learned a little bit about human composting, which I was sort of very interested in. And then the more I read about it, the more I kind of understand that it also has its drawbacks. It's just a lot of different options. I think there will be more even, hopefully. But, yeah, I want something that will let my body just kind of go back into whatever is there. And I do actually think I want Tahara performed for me. If it can be performed by a queer and trans celebrity show like the one I'm a member of, I think that would be really meaningful for me and I think meaningful for my family and my chosen family. So, yeah, it has definitely influenced what I've thought about what I want for myself. And it's, you know, inspired a lot of conversations with a lot of different people around, like, what we want and how we can support each other. Hard conversations to have, but necessary ones. I mean, the more you plan, the more you'll be prepared and able to advocate. Awesome. Yeah. Thank you so much. Yeah, no problem. Hopefully that was helpful.
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