Milk Sisters: Forging Sisterhood at Kohenet's Hebrew Priestess Institute

Abstract

Since 2006, the Kohenet Hebrew Priestess Institute has trained women as Jewish spiritual leaders outside the rabbinic paradigm. The group understands itself not only as a clergy-training program but also as a sisterhood. Taking the self-description seriously, this essay traces how the ethnographer's embodied presence as a lactating woman helped forge kinship ties at the Kohenet Hebrew Priestess Institute. In particular, it considers the social effects of the breast pump's rhythmic pulsing, the symbolism attached to milk as a sacred substance, and the ritual power of breast milk for creating familial bonds. In doing so, it challenges the Western anthropological imagination of kinship, which remains dominated by "blood-based" descent, predicated on biological parentage and heterosexual marriage. While anthropological studies have examined how queer families and assisted reproductive technologies are complicating Euro-American notions of kinship, consideration of the consubstantial effects (a patently Christological language) of food and milk-sharing have largely been limited to non-Western and pre-modern cultures. In this article, I show how "milk kinship" opened up new horizons of relationality in the ethnography of contemporary Jewish life. This study deploys and creates intimacy in place of ethnographic distance, not only to shed light on the social construction of Jewish community, but also to perform a feminist ethnographic methodology rooted in care.