I Am Prayer: An Embodied Yom Kippur Companion

A Yom Kippur companion exploring embodiment, expanded consciousness, and social transformation.

Yom Kippur has always held more than guilt, obligation, and passive atonement. I Am Prayer: An Embodied Yom Kippur Companion engages this holiest of days as a portal into embodied practice, ecstatic awareness, and prophetic action.

The six voices in this collection approach Yom Kippur as poets, practitioners, organizers, and artists. Editor Eden Pearlstein opens with the Kabbalistic teaching that prayer isn’t something you do, but something you are. Marcia Meislin offers a somatic liturgy of the body, while Rabbi Jay Michaelson reflects on fasting as an ancestral technology of altered consciousness rather than self-flagellation and shame. Rabbi Jill Hammer guides readers into the Holy of Holies through immersive visualization, and Rabbi Nate DeGroot takes Isaiah’s call to feed the hungry out of the prayerbook and into the street. Jessica Tamar Deutsch’s luminous illustrations make the invisible visceral, alive with the color, energy, and dynamism of this holy day.

Together, the essays, rituals, and artwork in I Am Prayer invite readers to enter Yom Kippur through the body—approaching the Day of Atonement as a celebration of the sacred through the full scope of human experience.

I Am Prayer is part of Ayin’s Illustrated Holiday Companion Series. Previous installments include companions for Pesach, Sukkot, and Rosh Hashanah.

Edited by Eden Pearlstein
Written by Eden Pearlstein, Nate DeGroot, Jill Hammer, Marcia Meislin, and Jay Michaelson
Illustrated by Jessica Tamar Deutsch
Designed by Shrenik Ganatra

About the contributors:

Eden Pearlstein is an inter­dis­ci­pli­nary lan­guage artist and cofounder/editorial direc­tor of Ayin Press. Over the past two decades he has created an eclectic portfolio of audio, visual, textual, and curatorial works and projects. Eden is the author of Noth­ing Is for Every­one: Poems, edi­tor of Selah: A Báyò Akómoláfé Read­er, and cre­ative con­trib­u­tor to SUR­VI­VA: A Future Ances­tral Field Guide by Can­nu­pa Han­s­ka Luger. Eden cur­rent­ly lives with his wife and two kids in Philadelphia.

Rabbi Nate DeGroot (he/him) directs The Shalom Center, carrying forth the prophetic legacy of the organization’s founder, Rabbi Arthur Waskow, by helping to steward and seed an emergent Jewish sacred justice. Nate lives in Detroit, Michigan with his wife and two kiddos, where he also serves locally as a part-time congregational rabbi, educator, and service-leader. Nate was ordained at Hebrew College in 2016 and previously worked at Hazon (now Adamah) in Detroit, IKAR in Los Angeles, and he founded Mikdash in Portland, OR.

Rabbi Jill Hammer, PhD, is an author, scholar, ritualist, poet, midrashist, and dreamworker. Rabbi Hammer’s books include The Moonstone Covenant; The Omer Calendar of Biblical Women; Undertorah: An Earth-Based Kabbalah of Dreams; Return to the Place: The Magic, Meditation, and Mystery of Sefer Yetzirah; The Hebrew Priestess: Ancient and New Visions of Jewish Women’s Spiritual Leadership (with Taya Shere); Siddur haKohanot: A Hebrew Priestess Prayerbook; The Jewish Book of Days: A Companion for All Seasons; Sisters at Sinai: New Tales of Biblical Women; and The Book of Earth and Other Mysteries. She is the cofounder of the Kohenet movement and the Director of Learning and Ritual at Beit Kohenet, a learning and ritual space for recovering, reclaiming, and recreating Jewish spirit wisdom on the margins. Rabbi Hammer is the Director of Spiritual Education at the Academy for Jewish Religion, a pluralistic rabbinical and cantorial seminary. She and her family live in Manhattan.

Marcia Meislin is a leadership coach and facilitator who draws on her training in Gestalt therapy to integrate body, mind, and spirit. She brings this lens to her Jewish practice and community, where prayer is infused with joy, music, movement, and creative ritual. Author of a memoir on food addiction and recovery, Marcia values meaningful connection and shares her enthusiasm for life with her beloved husband, children, extended family, and treasured friends.

Rabbi Dr. Jay Michaelson is the fourth-most-popular queer neo-Kabbalistic psychedelics scholar to have published a short story collection with Ayin Press. He has also written books about Jacob Frank, panentheism, and the redemption of ordinary sadness. For thirty years, Jay has practiced what Eden Pearlstein calls “Operation Bifurcation,” which these days involves writing the weekly newsletter Both/And with Jay Michaelson and researching mystical experience at the Emory Center for Psychedelics and Spirituality. He does not own a parakeet.

Jessica Tamar Deutsch is a visual artist whose work plays at the border of experimentation and tradition. Through painting, illustration, installation, and her ketubah practice, she explores ancient stories, ritual, and mythology as living creative practices. She is the author and illustrator of The Illustrated Pirkei Avot and The Lost Princess, the illustrator of How the Sun Was Won, and the illustrator behind Ayin’s holiday zines. Her work has been exhibited internationally, including the traveling solo exhibition Rebbe Nachman’s The Lost Princess. Illustrations from The Illustrated Pirkei Avot are held in the permanent collection of the Jewish Museum Berlin. She earned her BFA in Illustration from Parsons School of Design.

Zine Details
24 pages | 8 x 10 in. | $18.00 
Publication date: September 8th, 2026