moon of buds, brilliance, birth, & breaking up with empire
Happy new moon & month of Nisan!
The word Nisan relates to the word “nitzan” ~ meaning bud, and also to “nees” ~ miracle. Nisan is a clenched fist of petals and possibility, an anticipation of the miracle of flowering. Nisan is known by many Hebrew names, including Chodesh Rishon (the first month), Chodesh ha’Aviv (Moon of Spring), or the Chodesh ha’Zeev (Moon of Radiance). 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, with each moon cycle. This is also the month we practice liberation, like we do every year, at Passover/Pesach, and like we do every day.
On Passover, we enact a long ritual feast, the seder, in which we tell the story of the Exodus, the journey from Mitzrayim, which means “the narrow place,” to freedom. The seder, and this whole month really, invites us to consider the places in our lives where there is constriction, where we experience narrowness, and do what our ancestors did: dream beyond the tightness and get free. In preparation for my upcoming class on Miriam (more info on that below!), I’ve been spending a lot of time with my face in the bible. The Passover story can easily get flattened, but I’m finding so much richness in this story about living in, resisting, and escaping empire.
Miriam (whose story also gets flattened by patriarchy and in some ways in second wave feminist reclamation) dances in with all this prophetic imagination, anti-imperialism, radical love, abolition and militant joy. She is the person who can see that another world is possible, and not only envisions and believes in it, but makes big moves to bring it to life. She shows us how liberation can be both a Big Climactic Moment and also a practice that we do daily. Miriam is identified in the text as a prophet, not because she literally has visions, but because of her “prophetic engagement with empire,” as Black liberation theologian Allan Boesak says. Miriam embodies a radical recipe for resistance and revolution: a sense/vision/dream/belief that things can be otherwise, bitterness that motivates (aka being sick and tired), doing things in circles (drumming, dancing, singing, camaraderie, horizontal leadership), speaking truth to power, the ability to tend well to transitions, the centering of joy, not leaving anyone behind, and a deep well for everyone to drink from. While history and most passover rituals center Moses and the Mosaic tradition of text based Judaism, hierarchy, and big daddy energy, we can invite some Miriam vibes in this Nisan: swim in wild water, do all our processing through song, talk back to the text, stay hydrated, and midwife the world to come with our voices and bodies. To get into the mood, here’s a Miriam mixtape playlist.
Art by Sarah Beck, inspired by my story, Miriam & the Tachash
Nisan is also my birthday month. I was born, fist first, on Passover, under the full pink moon. I was three weeks early – like a true Aries/Taurus cuspy flower/baby lamb, I was eager and ready to emerge. I have celebrated my birthday at many seder tables, eating experimental matzo bday cakes and feeling a deep resonance with a full moon holiday celebrated by reclining on cushions, eating a luxurious ritual feast, and blessing flowers. I celebrated my 19th birthday at a seder at a friend’s dirty vegan collective, where we smacked each other with scallions, told our little gay stories, stripped down naked and howled at the moon, 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. (It’s called ritual innovation, sweetie.) 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.
art by Sol Yael Weiss
PLANT OF THE MONTH: 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. 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 symbol, remembrance, and commitment to practice collective care and co-liberation, to being more ourselves, to being more free.
Artist Sol Yael Weiss and I are working on a free digital download for a little insert about Garlic on your seder table which we will have available for Passover- stay tuned!
NISAN/PASSOVER INSPIRATIONS
Spoon on the Seder Plate by R’ Elliot Kukla
A Library of Haggadot at Haggadah.com
Black Lives Matter Haggadah supplement from JFREJ
Mango Charoset recipe by Aurora Levins Morales
Poems Seder Haggadah ~ beautiful haggadah of collage and poetry made by Zachary Wager – Scholl and R’ Max Zev Reynolds
A pre-passover ritual: Preparing for Passover Protection Doorway Ritual, co-created with love by Rabbi Lynn Gottlieb, Rae Abileah, Rebekah Erev, Ilana Lerman, & Dori Midnight, with art by Nomy Lamm, Wendy Somerson & Bekah Starr
And of course, a NISAN PLAYLIST for you full of songs about spring and freedom
We cannot cross until we carry each other,
all of us refugees, all of us prophets.
No more taking turns on history’s wheel,
trying to collect old debts no-one can pay.
The sea will not open that way.
This time that country
is what we promise each other,
our rage pressed cheek to cheek
until tears flood the space between,
until there are no enemies left,
because this time no one will be left to drown
and all of us must be chosen.
This time it’s all of us or none.
~ from Red Sea, by Aurora Levins Morales
Wishing you a month of prophetic imagination and liberatory love!
With love,
Dori
