Welcome to Sivan, the month of blossoming revelation. As I write, my garden is full of busted open peonies and bees that can hardly lift themselves out of the roses, their leg warmers are so heavy with gold. I’ve been doing a lot of weeping, grieving with all of you, and also feeling grateful for the irrepressible forces of life, the color, the blush and crush of gay Sivan. Below are some words about the themes and holy days of this month, some suggested practices, and other news and upcoming stuff.
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 Sivan, 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 ourselves in receptivity.
The holy day of Sivan is Shavuot, which is actually many festivals rolled up 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 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 revelations.
According to the midrash, Mt. Sinai burst into blossom all at once in anticipation of the giving of the Torah. I love this floral language of petals popping open in excitement, ready to receive. If a flower is the product of the collaboration of light and water and seed and earth, and fruit is born from the bees’ love affair with blossoms, maybe Torah is the fruiting body of a cosmic conversation between us and the Divine, earth and sky.
I don’t know what to think or feel about the literal torah most of the time, but I like the idea that it is a living body full of magical letters and fire, a tree of life, and that it tastes like honey, as the ancient rabbis say. I think about this dream I once had about stealing the torah to bring to someone’s house who was in labor. In the dream, I broke into the backdoor of a synagogue, opened the back of the ark, grabbed the heavy blue velvety scroll, and ran back out into the night to a house with one candle in the window. After I shared the dream with my teacher, Jill Hammer, she told me about a Jewish custom of bringing the keys to the synagogue to someone in labor, and sometimes even the torah itself.
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 and that we choose ourselves, we choose each other. 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 text. 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 did we each receive 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.
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. This is a time to engage in wisdom practices, dive into divination practices, let things be revealed and opened. Some of us might choose to spend time with the Decolonize Palestine reading list, the torah of Leslie Feinberg, writings from the Disability Justice Movement, or watch this documentary about radical Jewish lesbian activist, Laura Whitehorn. There are more ideas for study listed in resources below! Or perhaps you want to stay up late courting oracular visions, practice bibiomancy (ask a question, close your eyes, open a book, move your finger around til you feel like stopping, and read the text your finger lands on as oracle), spread out your tarot cards, or study the poetry of the stars as sacred text. And of course, sleep can always be a portal to revelation. Make some dream tea, take a milk and honey bath, tuck some mugwort under your pillow and dream deep.
SUGGESTED PRACTICES FOR SIVAN:
listen: SIVAN playlist ~ milk & honey gemini breezes
altar for sivan: An empty bowl or basket for receptivity. Vessels. Flowers. Ripe fruit. Emerald green things. Sacred texts, formative texts and texts you are wanting to open to. Divination tools. Milk and honey. Offerings.
milk & honey on your tongue (and in your bath) : taste a finger dip of honey each day as a practice of what revelation tastes like. make a daily offering of sweetness to yourself. Draw yourself a bath, pour 1 cup of milk and as much honey as you want and soak.
move: practice trembling. practice receptivity – what are the moves and postures for receiving? feel your holes. Imagine all the invisible energetic navels of the body (between your eyes, your throat, your heart, your belly, the palms of your hands, soles of your feet) can open and close like flowers. Do mountain work – walk up mountains, lay at the base of mountains, dream about the inside and underneath of mountains. Press your face into as many flowers as possible.
make: Pan de Siete Cielos, a Sephardic Shavuot 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 giant clit on top, all spiraled inside 7 rings of sweet bread with a serpent coiled around it. yum.
STAY UP LATE & STUDY:
Shared Grief is Not Enough, an article by Rebecca Pierce
We Teach Life, Sir poem by Palestinian poet Rafeef Ziadah
Birds of Palestine, storytelling sessions
Torah of Teshuvah and Palestinian Liberation, a 16 min talk with R’ Lynn Gottlieb
What are we talking about when we talk about a police free future?
This amazing resource on the history of domestic worker organizing
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.
take action: sign petition Tell Congress: Stop the mass expulsion of Palestinians in Masafer Yatta
Tzedakah: In the spirit of giving your first harvests away, leave bouquets of flowers at people’s doorsteps. Clean out your closets and give stuff away. Give tzedakah/reparations to artists who are the prophets of our time.
Send reparations & support to Mayfield Brooks’ project, Improvising While Black. IWB is an interdisciplinary dance project and dance improvisation experiment which grew out of artist mayfield brooks’ multifaceted inquiry into the creation of spontaneous movement, racial representation, survival, and a collective of dreams and desires for a different future. IWB finds futurity in the hustle, the fugitive, the ancestor, the queer outlaw, the flesh, and improvisatory modes of dance as resistance. It seeks to rupture settler colonial logic, anti-black violence, and other ideas that perpetuate an industrial complex mentality.
