Welcome to your home for learning about the intersection of Jewish and Botanical worlds. In this Garden of Eden, you can harvest knowledge, receive seeds of new practices
and weed out misconceptions!
Here you will find a healing home, with resources to nourish you, and fortify you for your work in the world.
What is Ethnobotany?
Ethnobotany studies the complex relationship between (uses of) plants and cultures. The focus of ethnobotany is on how plants have been or are used, managed, and perceived in human societies and includes plants used for food, medicine, divination, cosmetics, dyeing, textiles, for building, tools, currency, clothing, rituals, social life and music.
Nu - what's Jewish about that?
Think of things you and your tongue know: Parsley and Garlic
And some things you probably don’t know from, like ‘Botanomancy’
(a Rabbinically discouraged Medieval practice of using plants for divination)
It’s the myrrh Esther spent 6 months dolling up with (Esther 2:12b), the colors and fabrics laid out in Exodus 25.3-7 for the Tabernacle, and the cedar and cypress that made up the First Temple. So. Many. Plant based Rituals - The lulav and etrog of Sukkot. All of Tu B’Shvat, the olive’s oil for Chanukah, the 7 species. What’s Rosh Hashanah without apples and honey? Or Passover without karpas & maror? Nature and plants are a core, but under-appreciated, aspect of Judaism. It's another way into the culture for the many who feel alienated by G-d language or politics or familial baggage.
In so many times and places Jews have been divorced from the land, not able to farm it, or form inter-generational homes on it. Learning Jewish ethnobotany is an act of cultural reclamation. You belong to the earth, and it belongs to you. Welcome back.
Old World Plant Project
Delve into my current research on ancestral wisdom, through the Old World Plant Project where you’ll learn the pre-war plant based memories of Shoah survivors.
"Ilse, a childhood friend of mine, once found a raspberry in the camp and carried it in her pocket all day to present to me that night on a leaf. Imagine a world in which your entire possession is one raspberry and you give it to your friend.”
- Gerta Weissman Klein, New England Holocaust Memorial in Boston, MA
What is a "Balebuste"?
A balabuste (Yiddish: בעל־הביתטע) is a Yiddish word generally translated as a fully competent, accomplished homemaker. It comes from the Hebrew ba’alat habayit or female master of the home. There's a reverence to it, a cultural pronouncement of the critical role of the person makes things heimish (Yiddish for homey), delicious, and lovely. To be a balebuste is like having a PhD. in the domestic arts, to be a maven of domestic sorcery.
The transliteration can be written many ways including:
baleboste, balabusta, balabooste, bala booste, bala boosta, balabuste, balebosta, baleboste, balabusta, balebuste, baleboosteh, Bala baya, Balabaya, balabuster, and ballabuster.
“A house without a balebuste is like a wagon without wheels.”
(Yiddish proverb)