“Deep calls to deep
at the thunder of your floodgates:
all your waves and your billows
have gone over me.”
– Psalm 42, 7-8
Welcome to the month of Tevet! Tevet is often called “the month of contradictions” because while the word “Tevet” shares a root with “tov”, meaning goodness, this month is also known in the Sefer Yetzirah as the month of anger. But do anger and goodness need to contradict? As people who work to dismantle “light supremacy” and know and love the gifts in the dark, we also know that anger is sacred and indeed, good too.
The month of Tevet holds the Winter Solstice, the darkest, longest night of the year.
There is a midrash (Jewish story) that says that on the Winter Solstice (or some say on the First of Tevet) the Leviathan, a majestic and terrifying sea creature/dragon/serpent/monster, rises from the deep and roars a mighty roar.
“G!d created in the sea big fish and little fish. The size of the biggest fish was one hundred parsangs, two hundred, three hundred, even four hundred. If it was not for G!d’s merciful repair [tikkun], the big ones would have eaten the smaller ones. What repair did G!d make? G!d created the Leviathan. On every winter solstice, Leviathan would rear their head and make themself great and snort in the water and stir it up, and the fear of them would fall on all the fishes in the sea. If this were not so, the small could not stand before the great.”
– Otzar haMidrashim, Hashem Bechachmah Yasad Aretz 6
just a friendly sea monster doing their somatic practices
In this legend, it is the monster’s roar from the depths on Winter Solstice that restores the power imbalance, humbles the bigger fish, and protects the most vulnerable, which is all part of Tiqqun, the Divine Work of Repair. Leviathan, this beast from below, is kin to and descended from some Sumerian deities, like Tiamat, a Goddexx whose name is also thought to be the root of the word, Tehom – the primordial deep, saltwater, chaos, depth, the place creation is birthed from.
So I am thinking of this month, Tevet, not as a month of contradictions, but as a month of depth, a month in which “deep calls to deep”, a month we the invite the sacred monsters to rise, and though they may bring some chaos and lots of feelings, we trust that that balance will be restored by their noise. Kislev and Hanuka light the path into these depths, where we meet Leviathan and our own creatures of the deep – our anger and rage, our beloved patterns forged by trauma, the parts of ourselves we have submerged. And perhaps here we also find ancient and collective rage for all those who have been labeled monsters or called scary, those who roar at injustice.
I love the possibility that the Leviathan is a beast of collective resistance and fury who magically brings about balance in the salty deep. I also love imagining/feeling in my own body this luminous monstrosity swimming from the darkest, deepest place in the bottom of the sea towards the light, breaking through the surface of the water with a thunderous roar.
When I was in 10th grade, I was sent to the school counselor after I pushed a fellow student, who was sexually harassing younger femme presenting people, up against a locker, and spat out some half baked witchy curses I had learned from reading books at the Psychic Eye Bookstore in North Hollywood, where my weirdo friends and I hung out after school. This therapist (shout out to Leni Wildflower. Yes that was her real name!) sent me home with a tennis racket and prescribed me this medicinal homework: hit a pillow 30 times a day while screaming at the top of my lungs.
I am so grateful for this intervention and this adult, who gave me language and tools and literally something to hit things with. Leni Wildflower was the first person to name “trauma,” reflecting back to me how good and necessary my anger was. Rage is a sacred monster, much like the Leviathan. It is said that G!d created the Leviathan to be G!d’s playmate, because even G!d gets lonely sometimes and needs company. This sea monster has a divine purpose, and so does our anger. Rage ripples through the waters, bringing a sea change, revealing what has always been there below the surface. How is the Leviathan rising up in you this month?
Through Tevet, we spiral deeper inward, making a flipturn into the growing light at the winter solstice, and hopefully bringing with us something that has been waiting underground, a wildness, a truth we may have been holding down, a roar from the deep. There is so much to roar about, be it old anger or fresh hot rage. Can we open to it and the wisdom it brings?
I’m dancing my way into perimenopause and honestly I’m really enjoying the hormonal fire – I feel a kind of aliveness and clarity like never before. Toni Morrison wrote, “Anger is better. There is a sense of being in anger. A reality and a presence. An awareness of worth. It is a lovely surging.” In my work with elder Joanna Macy, she often spoke of anger being the flip side of love- that our rage at oppression and transphobia and ableism and oil companies and the carceral system and all injustice is just the other side of our deep love for justice, our love for trans people, our love for sick and chronically ill and disabled people, our love for each other and freedom and this beautiful earth.
So as we move into Tevet, this month of depth, we move with so much love, with growing compassion for and deeper listening to our sacred monsters, and we pray to learn from the wisdom of Leviathan, remembering that our anger has the power to transform and move us towards liberation.
INSPIRATIONS FOR TEVET
LOVE AND RAGE : Lama Rod Owens’ book, Love and Rage: The Path of Liberation through Anger , is a beautiful companion for the month of Tevet, as he asks how can we metabolize our anger into a force of liberation in the face of systemic racism and state-sanctioned violence?
Enjoy this video about Judith, our Jewish ancestor of holy rage
MUSIC FOR TEVET
- PLAYLIST FOR TEVET for rolling in the deep
- Let the Waves Wash over Me by Miner, sung by Sol Yael Weiss and Margot Seigle
- I took the month of Kislev off from newsletter-making to do other writing and dreaming, but here is the playlist for KISLEV, which I hear is a real hit with cats.
- For more scream-y rage music, here’s this playlist, brought to you by perimenopause.
RAGE, BUT MAKE IT FASHION : My friend, artist Naima Lowe, is making these incredible Fuck the Police cashmere scarves and other gorgeous screenprinted accessories that embody the power and beauty of sacred anger. Support queer Black artists and get one for your favorite fashion forward abolitionist!
TEHOM/DEPTH WORK: If you want to trip out and read really dense feminist postmodern theology, spend some Tevet time with Face of the Deep by tehomic theologian Catherine Keller.
TZEDAKAH :
Wishing you a deep, wondrously dark Tevet and winter solstice.
With love from the depths,
Dori
