Taking Leave

In this lyrical memoir, NYU performance art professor Kapchan (Traveling Spirit Masters) chronicles her search for a “spiritual method, another way of living, of being and seeing.” Born in 1958 to a Jewish father and a Protestant mother who converted for marriage but returned to the church after the relationship crumbled, the author grew up “between faiths.” After moving to Morocco as an adult, she developed an “almost alchemical attraction” to the mysticism of Sufism, and later to the mind-expanding trance ceremonies of Gnawism (a tradition that combines sub-Saharan African rituals and music with North African beliefs), finding in these practices the ability to see beyond “the fabric of misrecognition that keeps humans gently asleep in our dreams... wherein we mistake what we can see for all that is.” In 2018 she moved to Abu Dhabi and, somewhat improbably, found her way back to Judaism. While she draws elegant parallels between faiths, Kapchan is at her most revelatory when she’s exploring spirituality itself as a kind of endless search for meaning—“taking leave” of one religion, identity, or mode of thinking to seek another—as well as contemplating the limits to that process (“Am I not always identified as a Jew by others, because of my name and my physical type?... From what in fact can we take our leave, and what sticks to our very cells like epigenetic glue?”). Astute and nuanced, this resonates. (Sept.)