#hag sameah

Happy Hanukkah! 

Hag Shavu‘ot Sameah!

In mystical Jewish thought, the holiday of Shavu‘ot was interpreted as a kind of symbolic wedding between G!d and the people of Israel. After the Exodus/elopement into the desert, the people and G!d commit to each other at Sinai, a sort of wedding, and so the Torah is a sort of ketubba [wedding contract].

This mystical marriage, in fact, is a moment of cosmic unity, bringing together binaries like the heavens and the earth (through the Torah which descends from heaven and the mountain which reaches up from the earth), the night and the day (which join, through the all-night study, into one dizzying experience of Revelation), and male and female (in the Divine, understood as the mystical ‘groom,’ and the people of Israel, personified as the bride). 

This idea of bringing together opposites and joining that which was separate is expressed in the idea of tiqqun, which means ‘to return to a state of completion’ or ‘to repair’ (as in the popular phrase tiqqun olam, ‘to heal the world’). Thus the night of Shavu‘ot is a tiqqun, a restoration, a movement towards wholeness and bringing together those things which should be united but are now separate.

I love Alicia Jo Rabins so much... Her Girls in Trouble project reimagines Biblical women with vibrant, poignant, and complex midrash.

This song is about Vashti! When I was little, I thought everyone knew she was the heroine of the story, and I was shocked when I got to college and learnt that other people grew up with a different version of the events. :P

I’m done dressing up for you, I’m done dressing up for you So long I’m done, I’m done dressing up for you You gave me a golden crown, you gave me a golden crown Sometimes a golden crown just wears a person down Get yourself a pretty new wife, get yourself a pretty new wife I’ll walk out that door and get myself a life...