Licking Moss from the temple walls 🐋🌲: Tevet, the month of Mud, Miracles and Beheading!

Rebekah on Squaxin land in Olympia, WA, in a moss heavy forest with sword ferns in the foreground.

Chodesh tov Tevet! Happy almost solstice! Happy 7th night of Chanukah! This 7th night Tunisian Jews began a festival called Chag HaBanot in celebration of their daughters and the stories of brave Jewish women. Particularly of Judith who chopped off the head of an Assyrian army guy to save the Jewish people. This holiday is making a resurgence this year I’m noticing on social media. If you have the Olam HaBa Magical Planner (we have just a small amount left if you still want to get one) you can see the Judith art I did. I depicted her as a woman of color whereas most depictions I’ve seen show her as white. Not to be logical or anything but if she was living in the middle east thousands of years ago, she clearly was not white. Let’s retell this story outside the reigns of white supremacy!

And now onto other slow ancient musings that recenter matriarchy like moss and whales and deep humming. 

At the suggestion of one of my students from the Embodying the Hebrew Letters class, I started reading Robin Wall Kimmerer’s book, Gathering Moss. This intimate book takes us on a journey into the enchanting world of mosses. Living on the Salish Sea in literally a rainforest, I have daily moments to revere the forest carpet, wallpaper and chandeliered world of mosses.

The book was recommended during our letter Mem מ class. In each class we explore a letter (and on new moon / Rosh Chodesh classes we explore the Hebrew month we are entering) During class we learned this letter is connected to the element of water, the womb, the sound and vibration of humming, the season of winter, the hanged one (or hanged man) of the tarot, the pelvis and stomach and the number 40. This letter more than any other to me is connected with the ancestral realm. In Judaism we believe that the ancestors live in the waters under the earth. When I think about our oldest ancestors I can’t help but think of whales. I am connecting Mem with whale. Wading back through the ancestral waters of time I’ve come to understand whales as our ancestors. That they still live in the seas, singing songs in waters, vibrating through bubbled nets and making epic migrations each year. They give me understanding of my own history of the ocean as my original ancestral womb. 

Moss is our earth side ancestor. Mosses existed almost 300 million years old. They are the ancestors of flowers, ferns and trees. Another water logged being, moss gives me hope on cold winter days. Letting the moss drape my shoulder as I trapse through the woods gives me ripples of memories of summer bare feet on mossy rocks. 

In Jewish thought (both the Zohar and in Lurianic thought) Noah was reincarnated as moss because he failed to lead his generation to repentance. I’ve been studying a lot about repentance, the Jewish idea of teshuva (returning to wholeness, coming back to the truth of ourselves, or perhaps a more evolved truth, because we are supposed to make mistakes and learn from them -- more on this in the workshop on Sunday, see below). Coming back in my next life as moss doesn’t seem so terrible. There could be worse things. Especially since I also learned there was a custom among Palestinian Jews in the 19th century of licking moss from the temple wall to cure barreness. Could Noah be making teshuva through his life as fertility supporting moss?! I can’t think of a more complete return to wholeness.

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