Underneath the Underneath29 Jul 2025

Av, Grief, and Cosmic Permission: The Torah of Alchemizing Loss

In this week’s Underneath the Underneath, we enter the month of Av — a time when the Torah invites us into the depth of loss, not to avoid it, but to be transformed by it. Drawing from classical and contemporary sources — the Talmud, Psalms, the Piaseczner Rebbe, Francis Weller — we explore grief not as weakness, but as gateway.

What if the tears themselves are a kind of prayer?

What if the ruins are not a failure, but an initiation?

From the Five Gates of Grief to the gates of tears that remain open even when all else closes, we ask: how do we meet our sorrow with presence? How do we make space for the losses of our lives — personal, ancestral, collective — and emerge not diminished, but more whole?

This episode offers Torah for anyone who is ready to feel, to release, and to walk the sacred ground of grief with integrity and courage.

Ohmek Session dated July 29, 2025

__________

Episoder(135)

Shoftim and Elul: Who Stands at Your Inner Gate? — On Discernment, Surrender, and the Inner Prophet

In this episode of Underneath the Underneath, Yocheved enters Parshat Shoftim at the threshold of Elul — and finds inside it a map for the inner work of this season.The Torah opens with a deceptively ...

11 Aug 56min

What Fire Reveals — A Teaching for Tisha B’Av and the Nine Days

In this episode of Underneath the Underneath, Yocheved enters the Nine Days and Tisha B’Av through the element of fire — and asks what fire actually does to us when we’re willing to stay with it.Drawi...

21 Jul 50min

Devarim: The Long Goodbye — Three Prophets, Three Eichas, One Sacred Question

In this episode of Underneath the Underneath, Yocheved enters the book of Devarim — the long goodbye — and finds inside one word the full arc of a people, a leader, and a life.Moshe stands at the edge...

14 Jul 55min

Matot-Masei and the Three Weeks: Gestation, Grief, and the Stories We Tell in Between

In this episode of Underneath the Underneath, Yocheved enters the Three Weeks — the 21 days of bein hametzarim — through a surprising teaching from Rebbe Nachman that changes how you see this season e...

7 Jul 59min

Pinchas and 17 Tammuz: Grief as Testimony — Four Women, Four Voices of Loss

In this episode of Underneath the Underneath, Yocheved enters the threshold of Parshat Pinchas alongside the beginning of the Three Weeks — and asks what it means to grieve as testimony.Through four w...

30 Jun 54min

Chukat-Balak: The Hidden Conversation— Why the Pause Is Part of the Torah

In this episode of Underneath the Underneath, Yocheved explores the mysterious open space between the Torah portions of Korach and Chukat—a silence that stretches across thirty-eight years in the wild...

23 Jun 50min

Korach: Where Are You God? — The Sons Who Did Not Die, the Sheol, and the Sanctity of Unresolved Grief

In this episode of Underneath the Underneath, Yocheved enters the story of Korach — and finds inside it not just a rebellion, but a lineage.The wound beneath Korach’s uprising was real. The argument w...

16 Jun 49min

Shelach: We Were Like Grasshoppers — A Kabbalistic Map for Meeting Complexity

In this episode of Underneath the Underneath, Yocheved enters the story of the spies — one of the most pivotal ruptures in the Torah — and asks: why did ten of the twelve collapse when they encountere...

9 Jun 52min