A time for tending - Dreaming class begins TONIGHT!
by Rabbi Nate DeGroot
Register HERE!
In Torah, Shavuot doesn’t seem to have anything to do with revelation, or Mt. Sinai, or cheesecake. Rather, Shavuot is a celebration of the first fruits.
A month or so into the dry season, as spring gives way to summer, grain seeds planted at Passover ripen. In the early days of Sivan they are harvested, milled, and lovingly baked into two loaves of fresh bread. Like the two tablets of Torah, perhaps, the priest lifts the two loaves into the air, an offering of joy and intimacy and interconnectedness to the Breath of All Life. Shavuot has commenced.
Most of us didn’t plant grain on Passover. Or if we did, we probably didn’t plant it in the bioregion of the Bible and so our timelines don’t match. And even if we did have grain to harvest in the Land 49 days after Passover, there’s no Temple for us to bring our offering. And so we shift our frame.
From harvest to revelation. Grain to Torah. Temple to mountain. From a select few to all of us — past, present, and future. A time to do and listen, of covenant, of supranatural sensorium, of dreaming new worlds into being.
This, then, is a time for tending.
Over seven weeks, as the weather stubbornly begins to warm, we become the grain. Our task, growth as preparation. Daily we count as roots and shoots awkwardly start to uncurl. The lawn needs to be mowed. We need a haircut.
If at Shavuot we harvest the first fruits of our own spiritual development, elevating fresh loaves of the journey we’ve been on, connecting to Yahhhh and receiving the Torah uniquely spoken to us in a language only we can hear, then now is the time to tend.
Today is day 32, which is four weeks and four days of the Omer.
Tonight, with the start of Lag B’Omer, we begin a three-part class taught by the amazing Kohenet Keshira haLev Fife, helping us do that preparation work for Shavuot. We hope you’ll join us!
As Divine agents of creation and as living links between our ancestors and our distant descendants, we are the ones who will set the blueprint for the future. So what will we dream? And what will we create?
In collaboration with Jewish Studio Project, we will use the Jewish Studio Process to begin peeling back layers to uncover what wants to be revealed to and through us.
Shavuot is perhaps the only Jewish holiday named for that which came before the celebration itself. It’s not called “Revelation.” Or “Bread Offering.” Rather, it’s called “Weeks.” Because as much as it might be about what happens when we arrive at Sinai, or the Temple altar, it’s really about the daily work, the dreaming work, that we’ve done in the weeks leading up to our pilgrimage of the spirit. The work that began at Passover. And the work that begins anew tonight.
We hope you will join Keshira, The Shalom Center, and Jewish Studio Project as we prepare together over these next three weeks for the celebration that is on its way.
Many blessings,
Rabbi Nate DeGroot
We are living in the Jewish diaspora, in a world that’s being created in every moment, and we are its co-creators. So what will we dream? What will we create?
Through the Jewish Studio Process - a unique methodology that builds creative capacity by combining art therapy practices with a reimagined approach to Jewish learning - this series invites participants to learn, imagine, play, dream, create, and connect. By bringing text study and art making together in a facilitated way, we cultivate curiosity, openness, and resilience. No artistic experience or special materials needed; just openness and curiosity!
May 4 - Receiving and Renewing Timeless Revelation - We will explore what it means to experience time as spiralinear, returning anew to each season. How we might we open ourselves to receive the wisdom that wants to be revealed with this next arrival?
May 11 - Embodying our Ancestors’ Dreams - If one source of wisdom comes through dreams - our own and the dreams of those who came before us - what do we do with the dreams we receive?
May 19 - New Futures Revealed on the Mountain - As we approach Shavuot, we open to the revelation that wants to come to and through us, inviting the creative process to help us root toward what we might do with this newfound insight.
Kohenet Keshira haLev Fife (she/they) sprinkles sparkles, disrupts expectations, and offers blessings wherever she goes. She serves as Founding Kohenet of Kesher Pittsburgh and is a Core Faculty Member with the Institute for Jewish Spirituality; she also enjoys working with Jewish Studio Project and Kirva among other national Jewish organisations. Keshira is also a member of The Shalom Center’s Cohort א.
Additionally, she delights in serving as a facilitator, teacher, life spiral ceremony/ritual creatrix, shlichat tzibbur, liturgist and songstress. Her work in these realms is informed by her lived experience as a queer, bi-racial, child-free Jewish person living with chronic illness, her belief that Book, Body and Earth are equal sources of wisdom, the quandaries she has encountered as a scholar of the Orphan Wisdom School, and her deep commitment to a thriving, liberatory Jewish future.
Keshira received Kohenet smicha in 2017 and earned her BS (2000) and MS (2001) at Carnegie Mellon University. Though both the lands of the Osage & Haudenosaunee people (aka Pittsburgh, PA) and the Gadigal people (Sydney, AUS) feel like home, Keshira and her beloved have been in an extended period of travel since January 2023.