March/April 2021
Welcome to Nisan!
The word Nisan relates to the word “nitzan” ~ meaning bud, and may also relate to the Hebrew word, “nees” ~ miracle. Nisan is a clenched fist of petals and possibility, an anticipation of the miracle that is flowers. Nisan flings the doors open to life. The light is stretching out, warming the earth, awakening bulbs and roots and desire. Nisan is known by many Hebrew names, including Chodesh Rishon – the first month, Chodesh he’Aviv, Moon of Spring and Renewal, or the Moon of Zeev ~ Moon of Brilliance. This month, this new moon, begins one of the four new years in the Jewish calendar. This is the time we practice beginning again, like we do each month, each moon, each day. This is also the month we practice liberation, like we do every year, at Passover/Pesach, and like we do every day. This month, we engage with embodied rituals that help us to loosen and enliven.
I was born, fist first, in the month of Nisan. I was three weeks early, and like a true Nisan Aries flower/baby/lamb, I was eager and ready to emerge. I have celebrated many birthdays at seder tables, eating weird experimental matzo cakes and feeling a deep kinship and resonance with a full moon holiday celebrated by reclining on cushions and a luxuriously long ritual feast. I remember celebrating my 18th birthday at a queer feminist seder at a friend’s dirty vegan collective house, where we smacked each other with scallions, told coming out stories, rolled around naked in the grass to act out getting free from Mitzrayim, and then went dancing at the North Star, the local lesbian bar. I remember licking the sweat off my friends’ necks and shoulders on the dance floor, declaring that this was our new saltwater tradition. Every year, we practice liberation at Pesach, and every year, we can weave old and new practices that support us to get freer and make freedom more possible for everybody, everywhere.
GARLIC ON THE SEDER PLATE
I began placing garlic on our seder plate a few years ago, as I have been working with it as a heart of Jewish plant magic. This practice has been adopted by some other folks in Nishmat Shoom, our little local community of Garlic Eaters. For me, garlic is a symbol for reconnecting with and revealing ancestral healing and protection practices. The term “Garlic Eaters” is in the Talmud- Jews have identified ourselves as “Garlic Eaters” for thousands of years, and we also been identified as Garlic Eaters as an antisemitic trope, persecuted and targeted for our affinity and association with this powerful plant. A story in my family is that my great grandmother Rae carried cloves of garlic in her bra and pocketbook as protection from the evil eye. My mother placed garlic in my ears and fed me raw garlic when I was sick. Garlic has abundant medicinal benefits, including supporting heart health, bone health, digestive and immune support. Jewish folk wisdom from throughout the diaspora tells us that cloves of garlic were often tucked into pockets and pouches, hung on windows and doors, placed under the pillow in labor, and strung onto necklaces for protection. Garlic is braided throughout our sacred texts – a specific delight of shabbat, as medicine for many different illnesses, as amulet. The Talmud teaches that garlic “brightens the face, warms the body, and instills love.” Garlic supports, thrives in, and embodies diaspora: it can travel in hand, pocket, bag, wagon, across land and sea, past the imaginary borders drawn by empire. It carries the dream of generations and exponential possibility: the one becomes many, the many become many more. First grown in the Fertile Crescent, it has traveled with Jews for thousands of years, weaving its way through the diaspora – a flavor present in many dishes in many Jewish cultures. And just as the bulb waits all winter underground and emerges in time, the garlic wisdom my great grandmothers planted in the dark, after many generations, has yielded, unfolded, miraculously multiplied in me.
Garlic protects through zesty and pungent stink, keeping individuals and communities well, holding boundaries while also holding us close. As we re-enliven traditions of protection that are about presence, about being really alive, about unapologetic stink, about being who we are as a form of protection, we can release all the harmful structures, internal and external, that we, and our ancestors, may have adopted to try to keep ourselves safe. We release all the ways in which we have hidden to survive, ways in which we have sought safety at the expense of others, ways in which we have been separated from our traditions, from ourselves and each other in the maw of neoliberalism, assimilation, forced migration, oppression and collective trauma. Garlic helps us remember that policing, borders, militarism – violent practices based in settler colonialism and xenophobia – don’t make anyone safe. Garlic, whose teaching moves on scent, reminds us of times, past and future, in which people build a sense of protection and rootedness through connection to plants, stones, celestial bodies, soil, water, ancestral stories, with the Divine and with each other. Garlic is a community, garlic is torah, garlic breathes the magical breath of abolitionist theology and protection through aliveness. As abolitionist Ruth Wilson Gilmore says, “Abolition is about presence, not absence. It is about building life-affirming institutions.”
Garlic in our pockets, on our seder plates, hung in our doorways – they are all altars. This year, I invite you to place garlic on your seder plate as intention, remembrance, and commitment to practice collective care and co-liberation, to being more ourselves, to being more free.
With garlicky blessings for a liberatory Nisan,
Dori
NISAN INSPIRATIONS
This month I’m reading We Do This ‘Til We Free Us, Abolitionist Organizing and Transforming Justice by Mariame Kaba
Listening to Pesah ala Mano, one of my favorite Flory Jagoda songs
Check out this pre-passover ritual: Preparing for Passover Protection Doorway Ritual, co-created with love by Rabbi Lynn Gottlieb, Rae Abileah, Ilana Lerman, & Dori Midnight, with art by Nomy Lamm, Wendy Somerson & Bekah Starr
Practice Liberation: A pre-passover retreat with Keshira haLev, Annie-Rose London, Elana June Margolis & friends
Sunday, March 21st, 2-7pm EST
JVP Seattle Virtual Seder, Sunday, March 28 | 4:30–6:30pm PT / 7:30–9:30pm ET
Black Lives Matter Haggadah supplement from JFREJ
Poems Seder Haggadah ~ beautiful haggadah of collage and poetry made by Zachary Wager – Scholl and R’ Max Zev Reynolds
Haggadot.com Download a premade haggadah, or mix and match to create a customized experience.
Passover offerings from Kohenet, including a dream seder and a seder led with the Liberate your Seder Haggadeck
Inaugural, a poem by Jericho Brown
Miriam and the Tachash, a queer interspecies love and liberation story I wrote featuring Miriam
Time to Redistribute Those Stimulus Checks, Baby by Susan Raffo
TZEDAKAH
Dare to Survive and Thrive Fund ~ please help support a Black queer/queergendered and neurodivergent being living with multiple disabilities. The first $7k will go towards immediate life sustaining resources for the next six months, including rent, utilities, and food.
