When you hear that someone reads tarot (whether for themselves or others), what are some of the first images that pop into your mind? I’ll be honest on my previous associations. I associated it with people who think they’re “reading the future” but most certainly aren’t, alternative/goth kids trying to be “dark” and “spooky”, other people’s outdated assumptions that tarot is dark and evil, and “woo woo” people. As you can see, not a lot positive there. I ask this because these initial images impact how one approaches tarot or, in my case, how they approach letting others know they read tarot.

Very few people in my life know I read tarot and even fewer know that I take it as seriously as I do. It is precisely because of those initial images I have related to tarot. I worry people will take me less seriously as a person and, I suppose, as a clinician, if they know. I worry people will make a lot of off-the-wall assumptions about how and why I do tarot. I even worry that my practice will somehow be deemed “offensive” by default because of the messages of darkness and evil so many people received, myself included. It’s a self-consciousness I rarely, if ever, felt with Judaism even though tarot, too, is a spiritual practice for me. The number of times my dyslexia mentally turns tarot into Torah is indication enough of that.

I’ve taken on tarot as a spiritual practice to take the place of the guidance I used to feel with Judaism. It was less about Halacha and prayer and all of that, but rather about the ways in which I used to receive guidance from Torah and, to a lesser degree, Talmud. Some of this may be particular to my experience because of how Torah was taught in my former synagogue. Each week, we had a class during the Torah reading on the text of the week to understand it further. This would be followed by a sermon that usually drew heavily upon interpersonal and community themes. It was eery how often the learning in the class and/or sermon resonated with me. Torah became a place where I’d see myself and the concerns in my life. No longer engaging with Judaism left that need unmet.

Those who read tarot will perhaps be unsurprised to learn that I was draw to tarot to meet that need.

I found myself looking for that guidance, that eery connection to texts or images that were “unrelated” to me but felt surprisingly resonant. When I felt that loss the most, I reached out to a witchy friend I saw post tarot on Instagram on occasion to see why and how they used tarot. Seeing tarot cards along with Shabbat candles, I knew the two were somehow related. They shared with me that they used it as a reflective practice and I decided it was worth exploring, so I impulse-bought my first tarot deck.

It took a while to really settle into the practice. Like many things I take on, I went in fully for a while, fell off for a lot longer, before jumping back in again. The real push to go fully into it was finding Madam Adam on Instagram (I don’t do TikTok) a few months ago. I was in the midst of a housing search and a job search and a lot of chaos. It was a time during which I really needed some guidance. And I found it in Madam Adam’s “if this came across your feed it’s probably for you…” videos. Like the weekly Torah learning, it had an eery resonance to the issues in my life. After a while, I started my own deep dive- clearly there was something here and it was something I could participate in more directly.

For the past couple of months, I’ve invested some serious time into learning tarot- watching videos, reading guides, reading some of the classic books on reflective tarot readings. The way I read is intuitive, but it’s also a text-based learning using multiple sources. The more I reflect on it, it reminds me of Torah learning with the initial plain meaning (pshat for Torah, intuitive for tarot) with these deep rich layers beneath that you draw upon using other sources written by those with more knowledge and experience than ourselves. Perhaps that is why I’m seeing as much resonance with my life as I am, even as a relative amateur. Tarot, in many ways, is becoming my Torah.