May/June 2021
Sivan, which can be translated as “season” or “time” in Akkadian (an ancient semitic pre-Aramaic language), can also mean “muddy”–speaking to the dirt-based realities of the agricultural cycles that our ancestors danced in. In the wheel of the year, Nisan (the month of Passover), marks the season of our birth/rebirth/liberation, Iyar is a month of healing and wandering and preparing for revelation, and then Sivan brings us into the blossom, blush and crush of late spring, what is often thought of as “wedding season.” Thankfully, we can liberate ourselves from that narrow concept and experience and embody this month as a time of opening up like flowers, falling in love like bees, and tasting what ripens thanks to the collaboration between earth and sky, rain and sunlight, human hands and Divine forces. This month, we harvest and make offerings of our first gleanings. We honor and sanctify our reciprocal relationship with Mystery as earth-bound bodies who plant seeds, pray for water, tend earth, and open our hands in receptivity.
Last year I was invited by Rebekah Erev and Nomy Lamm to write about Sivan for their amazing Golden Dreams of Olam Haba Calendar, which you can still order, by donation, here.* I am delighted to share some of my reflections on the month below.
The holy day of Sivan is Shavuot, which holds many festivals in one: the Festival of the Reaping of the Wheat; the Festival of Weeks (the end of the counting of the Omer, exactly seven weeks after Passover); the Offering of the Bikkurim ~ First Fruits; and Z’man Matan Torateinu, the Giving of the Torah. Of course the Torah is given during Taurus/Gemini season!
In ancient times, Shavuot was an agricultural festival celebrating the completion of the harvest with gratitude and joy. Hard-working people filled golden baskets with the seven sacred species they had set aside for offering—wheat, barley, grapes, figs, pomegranates, olives, and dates. Like some ancient Gay Pride before corporate cooptation, we paraded through the streets, riding upon oxen with gilded horns, dripping with flower garlands, on our way to deliver baskets heavy with the sweet, ripe first gleanings to the Temple in Jerusalem. As many Jewish Holy Days are set upon pre-existing earth-based, seasonal celebrations, this day later became the temporal home to celebrate the Giving of the Torah, a day we open ourselves to receive Revelation in the form of the Torah, a physical manifestation of Divine Love.
According to the midrash, Mt. Sinai burst into blossom in anticipation of the giving of the Torah. I love this a response – flowering as a language of excitement, blossoms opening as an act of trust and faith. And just like a flower is the product of the collaboration of light and seed, and fruit is born from the bees’ love affair with blossoms, Torah is the fruiting body of this cosmic dance between us and the Divine, earth and sky. Many wise ones think of this as the moment we receive collective purpose and identity as a Jewish people, the Torah defining who we are and what we are committed to. For thousands of years Torah has meant many things:
Torah as covenant, love letter, ketuba—a wedding contract between us and G-d,
divine law, sacred instructions,
home away from home,
elemental journey,
honey drenched nourishment
and a living, ongoing, collaborative process that we
constantly create and are created by.
In this month, we are invited to dream into what the Torah means to us now. What does Torah mean in the World to Come, the world we dream of? We are taught that when the Torah was given, all Jews who ever existed and ever will exist were right there at Mt. Sinai. There we were/are, held in a moment of expansive, magical time travel. We get to deconstruct the myth of the “chosen one” as prophet and remember that we all have access to prophecy – we choose ourselves. We are also told that G-d lifted up Mt. Sinai and held it over the people, turning it over like a big trembling triangle of revelation, queering the mountain the way that many of us queer the Torah. While this moment is often narrated with a spectre of fear, I like to think of it as a moment of inversion and shifting perspective in order to open to vision, changing our shape or posture to be more receptive, which is sometimes necessary for revelation. As the mountain was lifted and inverted what was revealed? Perhaps we saw the Torah of worms and bones, the deep Torah that was birthed from the Holiest of Holes. As we stretched out our palms and lifted our faces to peer under the earth, what fell into our open hands? What was the Torah we each received in that moment as the mountain opened to meet us? If this moment transcends time, then there is a part of us that is/will always be there, still receiving, still revealing. Revelation is a process.
These days, many people celebrate Shavuot by weaving garlands of greens and flowers around places of worship and homes, eating decadent spreads of dairy and honey, and engaging with the tradition of Tiqqun Leil – staying up all night studying. Some of us may study the actual books of the Torah and Talmud, finding the honey in queer spaces, in spaces that center the wisdom and leadership of indigenous Jews, Jews of color, and Sephardic and Mizrahi Jews, spaces that welcome people who have read Torah all their lives as well as people who have felt disconnected and alienated from the Torah.
Some may study the Torah of Collective Liberation and Prophetic Visions – perhaps this month you may want to dive into the works of Octavia Butler, Leslie Feinberg, writings from the Disability Justice Movement, reflections on Healing Justice from Susan Raffo, the Torah of Marine Mammals as channeled through Alexis Pauline Gumbs in her new book, Undrowned. Some of us might want to stay up all night courting oracular visions, spreading out Tarot cards on our Tallit/prayer shawls laying under the almost summer sky, listening to the Torah of crickets, reading Earth and Stars as a Sacred Scroll rolled out before us. Some of us might want to sleep, tucking garlic under our pillows, dreams as our portals.
You are invited to dream into the widest, wildest imagination of Torah and Revelation in Sivan, from parades of goats wearing flower crowns to collaborating and making out (consensually) with anything and everything that brings you into deeper knowing and aliveness. Bring your offerings, open to Mystery as a lover, and let revelation and prophecy flow like milk and honey.
SUGGESTED PRACTICES FOR SIVAN
Make an altar: An empty bowl or basket for receptivity. Vessels. So many flowers. Ripe fruit. Emerald green things. Sacred texts, formative texts and texts you are wanting to open to, or to help open and reveal something for you. Divination tools. Milk and honey.
Take a milk and honey bath! And taste a finger dip of honey each day as a practice of what Revelation tastes like, making an offering of sweetness to yourself.
Blossom: Connect with the abundance of local flowers and fruit of this season, delight in one of the Seven Species (wheat, barley, grapes, figs, pomegranates, olives, and dates) or make a flower essence for revelation (see this post for instructions)
Move: play around with postures for receptivity. Open hands, open mouth, open arms. Tremble. Walk up mountains. Press your face into flowers.
Make: Pan de Siete Cielos, a Sephardic tradition and the sexiest bread you’ll ever eat. This sweet, dairy filled bread has Mt Sinai in the center, crowned by Miriam’s Well perched like a clit on top, all spiraled inside 7 rings of sweet bread with a serpent coiled around it.
Write: Write yourself a love letter from the Divine, from the stars, or from a tree. Write a love letter to the earth, flowers, the Divine.
Vision: This practice comes from an activity I used to do when I was a teenager called “Trash Divination.” Take a moment to ground and center. You may want to focus on a specific question or theme, or just open yourself to what comes. Take a walk or move around in your neighborhood, your yard, or your kitchen. As you walk, stay open to the oracles and messages in your path–trash or treasure–and allow yourself to receive revelation without trying to control what form it takes. Write down any reflections from your stroll.
Listen: Milk + Honey SIVAN playlist
Offerings/tzedakah: Honor your gifts by sharing with community and loved ones. Give your first harvests away. Leave bouquets of flowers at people’s doorsteps.
Donate to Black Mama’s Bail Out
“Over the past 3 years, Black Mama’s Bail Out Action has aimed to protect our families, to intervene on this malicious money bail system that locks up our loved ones, and to contribute to the long legacy of breaking down barriers from our loved ones. Black Mama Bail Out Action is to honor and revive the traditions and legacy of our ancestors. Through honoring and reviving this tradition, we will be centering our collective decisions and actively supporting our Black mothers and inevitably our foundation as a community. We know Black mothers, broadly defined, hold and nurture our communities. We also know when Black mothers are kidnapped by the criminal legal system, our communities suffer. This action highlights the crisis of money bail and pretrial detention. Money bail and pretrial detention destabilizes our families and creates long-lasting ripple effects. Ending money bail means taking our people off the auction block by eliminating the structures that keep loved ones caged. From shackling folks with electronic monitors, investing in risk assessment over community-based solutions and favoring profits over people, we must knock down all the structures that target, criminalize and cage people.”
*You can order the Golden Dreams of Olam Haba calendar here. All remaining sales of the Olam haBa planner for 5781 will directly benefit the Chaplin-Thompson family’s secure housing campaign, as an act of Reparations. You can choose whether to donate $25, $50 or $100, knowing 100% of your donation will go toward securing permanent housing for this Black family. For more information about the Chaplin-Thompson family’s justice struggle, go to: tinyurl.com/WeStillNeedJustice.
Wishing you a Sivan doused in milk and honey and full of openings, revelations, and golden dreams,
Dori
