Welcome to Tishrei and to this new year of 5782!
During this season, we offer each other this greeting:
שנה טובה ומתוקה ❧ Shana tova u’metukah! (Hebrew)
Anyada buena i dulce! (Ladino
A zis nay yor! ❧ אַ זיס נײַ יאָר (Yiddish)
A good and sweet year!
It is a beautiful practice to wish someone not only goodness, but “metukah” ~ sweetness for the year to come. The blessings of sweetness flow through our tradition, our history, and specifically the high holy days. We place honey on the table for the whole ten days of awe (a custom first recorded in the 7th century BCE), we dip apples in honey (a custom first recorded in Spain in the 1300s), and we make and consume a lot of honey drenched desserts.
Hebrew words all have 3 letter roots, and the root for sweet, “metukah” is מתק / M T K, meaning*:
- to be sweet, palatable
- to partake with delight, smack, suck, gnaw
- to indulge
So when we offer this greeting to one another, we are not wishing each other just a pretty good year, we are invoking a year so delicious we want to suck and gnaw with delight, a year so ripe, the juices of it run down our chins. (*Thanks to R. Mónica Gomery for sharing this root wisdom with me.)
Invoking sweetness is a healing mechanism and ritual practice in many traditions, including in Jewish worlds. As a child, on my first day of preschool, I was offered a tiny paper cup of honey and a paper plate with the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet drawn on it. We were told to dip our fingers in the honey and trace the aleph and then lick our fingers, ingesting this blessing that our learning be sweet. Sugar and honey are central remedies in Sephardic healing — sweets are offered when one first enters a home, sugar is sprinkled in corners or at the site of an accident, and honey water is sipped for fright. Sweetness is also offered to sheydim/demons in a demon -releasing ritual, as the person asks to be released from the clutches of a harmful thing. To me, this is like transformative justice for demons! Rather than banishing these beings, we understand that they may just be really hungry, and like us, they have needs and like us, they crave sweetness and are motivated by sweetness. Based on this tradition, I also imagine we can make offerings of sweetness to the parts of ourselves that are ready to be released and the harmful patterns we want to be released from.
This is a season in which we spend so much time reflecting on where we’ve missed the mark, both personally and collectively, and we are hopefully engaged in the hard work of loving accountability and re-aligning ourselves. And so we can pour a little honey over everything we do, offer honey to the hurt places, and bring a little more sweetness to our process of Teshuvah/return. In my workshop on apple and honey magic, I offer a few suggested honey practices for this season, which you can take on if you are moved. Here are some ideas: placing honey on the altar of your kitchen table for the whole ten days of awe, writing your own name with honey on an edible leaf and eating it as a self-love spell, an apple and honey bath, making garlic infused honey, and offering honey to the demons/patterns you are releasing. Medicinally, honey is anti-inflammatory and antimicrobial and supports our immune and cardiovascular systems. Honey is made from the love affair between bees and flowers and light and emotionally and spiritually can buoy and mend our broken hearts. As we pour honey in our own lives, many of us also wrestle with questions about how our own healing and pleasure practices can be in service to collective healing, abolition, and access to liberatory pleasure for everyone.
There is so much to be devastated about right now. We are living in a time of great unraveling, climate collapse, the breakdown of both life- supporting and life-threatening systems, death, inequity, and violence created and accelerated by capitalism, and to top it all off, a pandemic. And most of us are feeling it daily, whether we speak to it or not. In a season that invites us to turn inward and turn towards the wounds, we find profound grief, so much loss, and perhaps a sense of hopelessness. The Days of Awe is a time when we slow down enough to feel all of this vulnerability and the ancestral guidance is to do this in company, with community, and in connection. And yet, this year, we are distanced. We are not gathered up, singing and praying so close to each other’s bodies, we almost feel like one. How do we do this work that we cannot do alone, in a time in which there is so much distance? How do we keep loving each other when we are seeing humanity at its total worst? How do we keep believing in change, believing that our own personal transformations and healing have an impact, when we are not seeing that reflected in our larger world? How do we keep choosing life in a time when there is so much unnecessary death?
Our ancestors may not have sat with these exact questions, as they did not face these particular crises, but every fall they practiced finding joy and resilience in the face of the unknown, with a sense of great vulnerability and in touch with the precarity of life. The wisdom of Judaism has never been in finding answers, but rather in wrestling with and loving the questions. Our tradition has gifted us with a guide for this season, and really for any season of change, fear and loss. Three things, they said, will steady, soften, hold and buoy you.
One, Teshuvah – return to yourself. Find your way back to your breath. Shed what is no longer yours to carry. Practice coming home. Let go. Reconnect.
Two, Tefilah- prayer. Pray with your voice, with your tears, with your body. Pray in the streets and in the fields. Pray with your friends and pray alone. Pray over your food, your children, your seeds. Pray over water. Do not worry about what it sounds like, that you don’t know how, that you don’t know the words – your grief and your love is the offering. So many things can be prayer.
Three, Tzedakah – reparations, collective care, solidarity, and mutual aid. Our ancestors taught that tzedakah is not charity, tzedakah is justice in action, more akin to what we call mutual aid. Tend to each other, they remind us again and again. Survival through interdependence is part of our inheritance.
Perhaps these three pieces of ancestral wisdom can be a guiding light for the great unraveling, also known as the Great Turning. Perhaps these practices can help us build more capacity and love the life that we have here, now. These holy days are about choosing life, choosing joy, choosing connection and change and accountability, even as we face grief and pain.
This year is extra special because it begins a Shmita year, which occurs every seven years. Shmita, which translates to “release,” is a sabbatical year in which the land rests, fences are knocked down, debts are forgiven, and people are freed. It is a year full of possibilities for radical release, profound recalibrating, and deep rest. Rav Kook writes: “What the Sabbath achieves regarding the individual, the Shmita achieves with regard to the nation as a whole. A year of solemn rest is essential for both the nation and the land, a year of peace and quiet without oppressor and tyrant…It is a year of equality and rest, in which the soul reaches out towards divine justice, towards God who sustains the living creatures with loving kindness.” How can we be inspired by this ancient agricultural wisdom? It reminds me of this question: “How will you be useless to capitalism?” asks Tricia Hersey, the brilliant founder of the Nap Ministry.
Tishrei is full of holidays! From Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur to the harvest festival of Sukkot in the middle of the month (Build a sukkah! Shake a lulav! Hang out with ancestors in a hut!), to the rain festival, Shemini Atzeret (pray for rain!), to Simchat Torah (dance with the Torah!) this month is what some might call “extra”. You could do a lot of things – there are so many stellar high holy day offerings and practices and traditions! To learn more about these holidays, get yourself the Olam Haba Verdant Dreams of the World to Come planner! This month, inspired by this Shmita year, I hope to lay on the earth a lot, release stones back to the earth, dive into learning more about the connections between shmita and reparations and Judaism beyond Zionism, have some healing conversations, and sit by some water.
As a blessing for this month and Shmita year, I want to share this beautiful new poem from my friend and mentor, Aurora Levins Morales. Please support this incredible queer Puerto Rican Jewish elder by joining her patreon and learn more about her liturgy project, Rimonim.
let them go like birds released from cage let them go like fruit rinds giving themselves to the soil let them go like pebbles rolling away underfoot on a steep trail let them go like crumbs scattered for pigeons let them go like sweat dripping from our brows If we have messed up, let it go into the great compost heap and become the nutrients for new seeds, intentions, blessings pink blossomed, azure, ripe with tender food. If others have hurt us, let clean water irrigate the wounds and let the runoff water effortless gardens that spring up between the furrows of sleeping fields between the cracks of unswept sidewalks, take over the untended lawns. Let grudges crumble to dust. Let shame dissolve into loam. Let each harsh word we hurl at ourselves be turned into petals before they land. Let everything, all of it, be recycled. Let the trash become jewels we string into necklaces and drape around each other’s necks. Let us enter the year of fallows burdenless. loose-limbed, lie down on the dark earth, do nothing, let tiny rootlets emerge from our fingers let ourselves be covered with moss and instead of doing become the sapling students of the elder trees, and be ourselves into the new year and be ourselves toward the new world that waits like an autumn bulb packed with unimagined colors ready to wake and bloom just under the skin of what is.
TISHREI MAGIC
Enjoy this TISHREI PLAYLIST! Full of songs about new beginnings, being vulnerable, honey, apples, life, death, and more! May you feel my (very Gen X) love for you as you listen!
JEWISH ANCESTRAL HEALING Sukkot Summit
September 20-27, 2021
I was interviewed for this podcast last year and am so delighted that this year I got to interview two dear friends, Aurora Levins Morales and Dean Spade. To listen to these conversations and other incredible interviews, you can register for the free Sukkot Summit, featuring an exclusive pre-release of the Jewish Ancestral Healing Podcast Season 2 interviews. Taya Mâ Shere and Season 1 guests engage spiritual leaders, artists, activists and visionaries on their journeys of ancestral healing, embracing resilience, and ancestor reverence practices rooted in Jewish traditions and counter-oppressive devotion. Learn more and register here
If you are looking for community offerings for the High Holy days, this is a great listing of OFFERINGS FOR THE DAYS OF AWE from JVP Network including virtual and in person services, and other events.
TZEDAKAH
One of the core practices of the Days of Awe is to give tzedakah. Please donate if you are able and share widely:
House of Tulip, New Orleans is a nonprofit collective creating housing solutions for TGNC people in Louisiana.
Imagine Water Works is a Native, Creole, queer, trans-led organization that supports climate justice, water management, and disaster readiness and response. This fund goes directly to relief efforts led by locals.
STOP LINE 3 ~ donate directly to the frontlines to support water protectors organizing to stop line 3
With much love and wishes for a year of deep rest, repair, reconnection, and healing, a year in which border and prison walls crumble and the sweet honey of justice and liberation flows throughout our lives and lands.
With love,
Dori
