Rebekah Erev On Love, Magic, Tu B'Av, And The Evil Eye

Welcome back to Disloyal! We’ve been on a production break over the summer, and will be back in your feeds soon with a brand new series about the Jewish Museum of Maryland’s current exhibit Blacklist: The Hollywood Red Scare. 

But this week we have a special episode hosted by Naomi Weintraub (they/them), production assistant for Disloyal and Community Artist-in-Residence at the Jewish Museum of Maryland. Naomi speaks with Rebekah Erev about reclaiming Jewish magic, holidays, time, and rituals, and what the summer full moon festival of Tu B’Av can teach us about love in all its manifestations.

Rebekah Erev (they/them) is an artist, a teacher, and a kohenet, Hebrew priestexx. Rebekah is co-creator of the Queer Mikveh Project, a collaborator on the Olam HaBa: Dreaming The World To Come planner project, and creator of the Moon Angels/Malakh Halevanah Oracle Deck and the in progress Golden Oracle. 

Transcript

Rebekah Erev: I feel the magic that is woven into our culture. And also, side note, that's meant to be shared, Judaism welcomes people to share our culture with others outside of our culture and people are welcome to convert. Though we don't proselytize. But this magic is part of us reclaiming our sense of belonging and remembering what's been forgotten or downplayed in lieu of more dominant practices or exclusive practices.

Naomi Weintraub: Disloyal is a podcast committed to a broad representation of thought, ideas, and creative imaginings. The opinions expressed by guests on this podcast do not necessarily represent the opinions of the staff, management, board or volunteers of the Jewish Museum of Maryland.

Welcome to Disloyal, a podcast from the Jewish Museum of Maryland. I'm Naomi Weintraub, community artist and resident here at the Jewish Museum of Maryland, and production assistant for the Disloyal Podcast.

And welcome back to Disloyal. We've been on a production break for much of the summer, but we're coming back with a brand new series exploring our current exhibit, Blacklist: The Hollywood Red Scare, which is on view at the museum until October 31st, 2022.

But this week we have a special episode about one of my favorite holidays, Tu B'Av. It's a summer full moon festival that celebrates love, dancing and the moon. And today I'm joined by Rebekah Erev to talk about it. Rebekah Erev is an artist, a teacher and a kohenet. Rebekah is a co-creator of the Queer Mikveh Project, a collaborator on Olam haBa, Dreaming the World to Come Planner Project, and a creator of the Moon Angels/Malakh Halevanah Oracle Deck and the in progress, Golden Oracle. Rebekah Erev, thanks so much for joining us on Disloyal.

Rebekah Erev: Thanks for having me, Naomi. Really great to be here.

Naomi Weintraub: So, I was wondering if you want to introduce yourself, that would be really great.

Rebekah Erev: Yeah, I'm really glad to be here. It's an exciting week for me with the release of the Indwelling Dreams of Olam haBa 5783 Planner. We just put it out there in the world and Tu B'Av is also one of my favorite holidays too. So I'm excited to talk about it and bond over this love, earth-based, queer holiday.

Naomi Weintraub: Tell us about your Olam haBa Planner Project and the importance and process of creating an object which honors and lifts up Jewish time?

Rebekah Erev: Yeah. So Dreaming the World to Come is the name of the project and it's a concept in Jewish thought often referred to as Olam haBa. And it's a project I do with Nomy Lamm, an old friend and collaborator of mine. And we also welcome in 12 to 13 contributors each year to write different rituals and reflections on each of the Hebrew months.

The kind of conception of the project is that it is this collaborative and collective dreaming project. So we're interested in re-imagining time and how we're relating to time and part of our vision of The World to Come is a place where the voices of the diaspora of the past, of the future, of the present are celebrated. And diaspora is our identity as Jews.

So, yeah, it's a planner where you can write down your actual dreams or you can write down your lists for the day or you can write down your waking dreams, but it's also a place to reflect on what are we building together and how are we living this idea of Olam haBa through our actions and our collective work for justice, for reparations, for queer and trans liberation, for indigenous liberation, for abolition, and for honoring the gorgeous world that we live in.

We've been making this physical object of the planner, but we've conceived of it as more than just this one ritual object of a community building project. We've posted a Rosh Chodesh Circle for the past year. We're about to launch our podcast, Dreaming the World to Come and interviewing our contributors on that podcast and helping people reorient to Judaism from earth-based feminist libratory perspective.

Naomi Weintraub: Yeah. I'm just personally really moved by this project. So hearing you talk about it is really energizing for me as an artist as well and it's guided this year for me. The planner every day, I'm coming back to it and it is this ritual object for me that has helped me feel super grounded. So I'm personally very grateful.

One thing I really love about the planner that I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about is every Jewish month you'll share a plant, you'll share the-

Rebekah Erev: Body.

Naomi Weintraub: Yeah, body part.

Rebekah Erev: The letter, the astrological sign, that kind of thing?

Naomi Weintraub: Yeah. Can you talk a little bit about that, the choice of giving people tokens of information about each of the months?

Rebekah Erev: Sure. Well, I myself as a Capricorn love categories and categorizations and I think a lot of us love those associations because they really help us hook in with things that we relate to in our daily life. So astrology, especially the last handful of years has garnered such a pop following. And the Hebrew letters are something that even if we didn't really learn Hebrew, many of us know the shapes and the symbols of them and these connections between the month and the letters, a plant, the astrological signs, the archetypes come from a variety of places.

I've been in this five year or so research project around the letters. And for longer than that, been studying the Sefer Yatzirah, The Book of Creation, which is also connected to another big interest of mine, incantation bowls, which were likely written around at the same time, a time in the world when Jews were living... Well, some Jews were already in diaspora, but there were Jews living in Palestine, Syria around this area, Iraq and in community with other cultures.

So Zoroastrians, Christians, and they didn't always get along famously, but there also was a sharing of cultures. So that's my interest in these objects in a lot of ways and because they're magical documents of how people practiced. And the Sefer Yatzirah is this Pre-Kabbalistic, mystical text. And it's pretty short. I was introduced to it by my teacher, Jill Hammer, who wrote a wonderful book called Return to the Place about the Sefer Yetzirah, that I would highly recommend.

In that book, there are connections between the letters and months and astrological signs and body parts. And then the tarot connections with the letters follow the major arcana, go in order from olive to Tov following through each of the tarot archetypes. So that's how you find the letter connections there.

There Is another school of thought about it too, but that's the more mainstream common connection. And then the archetypes we use in the planner come from the Kohenet Institute and connections with the different months and letters. So that's where some of that stuff comes from. I mean, these archetypal connections are also ones other people besides the Kohenet Institute have explored at length. Rabbi Tirzah Firestone, Rabbi Lynn Gotlieb, other people that I've learned from as well. But that system of connecting them with each of the months comes from Kohenet.

And then the plants, the connection with the plants for each of the months are connections that I made and through research, through talking to friends, through Nomy and I's talks and this ongoing class I taught for two years and continue to teach called Embodying the Hebrew Letters. So we're connecting plants and animals with each of the letters, which is part of another bigger ongoing project that I'm working on of making a oracle deck.

Naomi Weintraub: Awesome. Thank you for sharing that wisdom. So I think I'm going to shift into asking you a little bit about Tu B'Av. So, can you briefly explain what Tu B'Av is?

Rebekah Erev: Yeah. Tu B'Av is the 15th of Av, the Hebrew month of Av. Av means father or ancestor in Hebrew and it comes six days after Tisha B'Av, which is our holiday of inconsolable grief where we're commemorating the destruction of the first and second temple. And that has become a day of grieving more global harms as well. So a lot of my framing around Tisha B'Av right now is very much around the destruction of the earth and the destruction that colonialism has done and white supremacy and patriarchy.

So we have this time where we're really in grief, feeling it fully in community around that and then we transition to this holiday of love, Tu B'Av. And one of the first parts of Tu B'Av, in ancient times, how I've learned about this holiday and how I like to remember it, because often the story is told in a very gendered way and I like to tell it in a more non-binary way. So in ancient times, the people who wanted to be the dancers took a piece of white clothing and they went to the Mikvah and down to the water somewhere maybe in the river and they cleansed their clothes, their white clothing and everybody was together doing it. This is maybe where we can start to kind of queer this holiday of probably people were naked. Maybe they were wearing their white clothes and they took it off and put it... Just enjoying the world, enjoying their bodies and rinsing off the grief. Because not only had they just experienced Tisha B'Av, but they had also been in three weeks of morning pre Tish B'Av as well.

This holiday of Tu B'Av is this transition out of grief into... When we grieve, we open ourselves to experience the love and the joy that's also present because our grief is often at losing a connection or losing someone or something that gave us joy and connection.

So here they are, they're washing their clothes off and then they are trading clothes. So not sure exactly how the sizing worked on all of this with different bodies, but the idea was to equalize around economic status and that was the intention for trading the clothes. So you would be wearing something that wasn't your own and then you would go out. It was a celebration of the grapes ripening and the beginning of harvesting them and you would go out into the fields and out into the vineyards and dance among the grape vines.

And then there will be the people watching from the outside and watching these dancers, these people just ecstatically celebrating their own ripening, their own joy, their own transition and what we know will come of the grapes, which will be juice and wine and delicious fruit to feed the community. And what is drinking wine, but also another transition of states. And then the idea was you would meet your love and perhaps that was just a lover for the evening. Maybe it was a lover for a few weeks. Maybe you found a couple lovers. Maybe you formed a triad and maybe you met your bashert, who you will pair with for your life.

And although I also am a believer that people have many basherts and that maybe that lover for the night was also a bashert but might not be a partner kind of thing. So yeah, this is the holiday how it was celebrated in ancient times. And yeah.

Naomi Weintraub:I love the picture you just painted for us and also the connection to the Mikvah. I hadn't known before either and that's really exciting. I'm excited to talk more about that. So you're teaching a course called Jewish magic and art. Do you know of any magical or artistic aspects of Tu B'Av?

Rebekah Erev: Yeah. So I think all of it's magical. And something last summer I did with a Jewish magic class is we each took a piece of white cloth and we dipped it in wine or grape juice and then we tied it together and we danced around with this circular kind of... That's the other part of Tu B'Av, it falls on the full moon. So it's a full moon holiday as well. So these tied together pieces and then we laid them around the altar represent the whole moon as well.

I think magic is in whatever you intend it to be. So the whole festival to me is magical and I've been a Tu B'Av parade with a goat, with flowers all over it and just hanging out with friends and talking about love. Nomy had a great idea to do a Jewish singles personal ads for Tu B'Av or something. So anything that celebrates love to me feels magical and this holiday is nothing less.

Naomi Weintraub: That's beautiful. I think something that really resonates from A World to Come Olam haBa Project is that idea of reclaiming holidays and rituals and tradition. And Tu B'Av is extremely ripe for that. I've found that throughout my life too. It was first introduced to me in a very queer or gay way. It's always been funny to me now when I'll be like, "Let's celebrate Tu B'Av" and people will kind of be like, "I don't know if I want to do that" because they don't know my interpretation or these new and exciting ways that we can reclaim the holiday. But yeah, I mean, I'm curious what you think in general just about the concepts of reclaiming Jewish ritual and tradition and why that's important or if you think it's important.

Rebekah Erev:I do. I think it's important because it's been so meaningful to me personally. I grew up in very assimilated households and our connection with Judaism was around Hanukkah with my grandparents or Rosh Hashanah with my grandparents, but we didn't belong to a synagogue. I grew up in a very Christian town and area. So I asked my mom if I could have a bat mitzvah. I engaged our family in Judaism and that was me working to find meaning and where I found meaning as a child and teenager was in trees and my imagination and spending time outside and the fireflies. I grew up around on the east coast and feeling the wind in my hair, biking around or being creative and moments of having experiences where I felt connected to my ancestors and to my grandparents. I'm very close with my grandparents.

So we make meaning where we find it and that things become relevant if we relate to them and that we can all relate to animal companions or friends that we've had and experiences with them in whatever small or big ways. We can all relate to day dreams or sleeping dreams. We can all relate with the feeling of being together with people we love and singing or praying, even if it was tiny, small things. Even if it was just like nobody really knows the blessings for lighting the Hanukkah candles. We're going to look it up every year and kind of get the tune wrong or whatever.

But there's something still magical about it because our cells remember, people have done this before. So my journey has been the more I search, the more I find what's particularly meaningful to me and others who are also interested in those things too and building community around that.

And colonialism and white supremacy and patriarchy have done a number on all of us and on Judaism and on mainstream Judaism and it never felt right to me this very Zionist connection with Judaism. That didn't feel like what I had experiences with or what I knew. And the more I learned about what Palestinians have been experiencing and the history of colonialism, the more... I can't use that to relate with Judaism. I need to find other paths and finding other queer Jews who were interested in that is what's excited me and helped me move forward and find fun, creative ways to do things.

And really they're the most simple things a lot of the time, is really lighting the Shabbat candles. That's a pretty simple thing, but if you bring the light into your body and around you to protect yourself, if you get candles from a friend who makes beautiful bees wax candles, if you like I do from Jonah Aline Daniel. If you welcome your ancestors, just the energy of your loving benevolent and ancestors around you, you kind of start to feel them and then you feel them a little bit more and then you feel them a little bit more.

And if you look in each other's eyes after you say the blessing and see the candle reflected in each other's eyes, all those things become meaningful and give you this felt experience of connection and belonging to something. And it takes work. I think that a lot of times people are like magic, it's something special that's kind of hard to grasp. Well, we're all going through that and we're all trying to make it meaningful for ourselves. And that wrestling that us Jews are so famous for doing as part of the finding a sense of belonging.

The point of capitalism and white supremacy and patriarchy is to make a good deal of the population feel a sense of otherness and it's based on extraction. And that is not magic to me. When I hear about people throughout the diaspora and their relationship with the evil eye and the evil eye across the board. And this is a symbol that's beyond Judaism and that has been shared in many cultures, is when someone looks at you and is jealous, they're giving you the evil eye. And then there's all this protection that people need to do on this. The spitting, the putting your hand up, the different herbs and plants that will protect you from the evil eye, that'll protect your children from the evil eye because the evil eye attracts demons, attracts sickness, attracts depression. And that to me is our ancestors' wisdom of understanding there are other forces in this world besides the benevolent ones and we are all susceptible to them.

So when someone projects onto us the values of white supremacy or patriarchy or capitalism, which are jealousy and envy, then we need to protect ourselves from that. And to me, that's such deep wisdom and it's these teachings that are a thread throughout time and Judaism of focus on benevolence, focus on the goodness of the protective energies, the caring energies of the loving of oneself and others and let's help those who are engaging with these white supremacists patriarchal things that get into all of us of jealousy and envy. Let's help protect, not just ourselves, but protect the other person. Because if it's a widespread cultural value to be protecting from the evil eye, we're all saying we don't want that energy. That's not what we want. We want something else and we want this kindness. We want benevolence. We want people to thrive together. 

And I think that's part of why magical practices have been suppressed in Judaism because we had to assimilate to patriarchy in order to survive in many ways in this world that was of patriarchy and white supremacy that was become so widespread, unfortunately.

Naomi Weintraub: Got my evil eye right here. I mean, it's funny to hear you talk about, or not funny, but it's interesting to me to hear you talk about the evil eye in relationship to jealousy and extraction because I was feeling a ton of fear in winter. I couldn't shake this fear feeling and I put the evil eye on my key chain as kind of a way to just give myself an anchor of I'm doing at least one thing to almost telling myself, okay, the fear is acknowledged. The evil eye is acknowledging the fear and now you can go and live your day. And just even if this is just a note way of me being like, "Naomi, your fear has been seen." And that witnessing and putting intention or just placing a container on something, it's something I learned from Jewish tradition and is really built into when I notice these patterns of magic as well. It's about noticing and taking pause and witnessing yourself almost too.

Rebekah Erev: I feel the magic that is woven into our culture. And also, side note, that's meant to be shared, Judaism welcomes people to share our culture with others outside of our culture and people are welcome to convert. Though we don't proselytize. But this magic is part of us reclaiming our sense of belonging and remembering what's been forgotten or downplayed in lieu of more dominant practices or exclusive practices.

Naomi Weintraub: So you were talking about the concept of bashert earlier, which can be translated as soulmate. Can you explain what bashert means and what you think about that concept?

Rebekah Erev: Okay, yeah. So my concept of bashert is meant to be, yes, it can be translated as a soulmate and I've officiated many weddings and that has been part of my work in the world. And I always talk about bashert in a wedding ceremony, but I think this capitalistic idea that you have one bashert or it's a romantic sexual partner is different than my conception, because I think we have many people who can be bashert to us and feel this sole recognition with. And they may be a handful or 10 people that we kind of travel with from lifetime to lifetime, our soul group. And when we meet them in our lives, we recognize them and they recognize us hopefully. And sometimes those are really difficult relationships. Sometimes they're really beautiful and difficult relationships and sometimes they're relationships that last for a short time and sometimes they're relationships that last for a longer time.

But I think that even expanding the concept even more feels really right to me of you can do work in the world or find something you're interested in that feels bashert that you're meant to engage with or a movement where you feel really at home and your soul's calling is awakened within. So I think it can be a lot of things.

Naomi Weintraub: So you've written about and have a course called Your Most Treasured Commitment: A Guide to Deepening Self Love. Can you tell us why you decided to create this course and anything else that you want to share about it?

Rebekah Erev: Yeah. That course came out of an experience I had of doing something similar myself. So I married myself maybe 13 years ago and wrote a long vow to myself and in front of friends with flowers and witnesses. I think I did that maybe it was 14 years ago, right before I started my Kohenet training. So it was part of my transition into more fully actualizing my gifts and service to the world and I wanted to share that work with other people and help provide some kind of guide to do that and to become your own bashert.

Naomi Weintraub: I'm personally very interested in it. This is why I wanted to include it in here. I'm doing a lot of stuff thinking about self-compassion. Well, I guess that's actually a question for you. The course specifically says deepening self love. How would you define self love and maybe what are ways that people can engage with that on Tu B'Av?

Rebekah Erev: Oh, that's a great question. One of the many ways to cultivate self love is by finding our joys, what gives us joy in life and noticing those moments and cultivating them, appreciating them. A friend told me once, there are three components to a fulfilling life, savoring, awe and gratitude. So savoring those moments of delicious food or laughing with a friend or making yourself laugh or dancing, singing, reading, whatever is giving you joy and delight and noticing it and relishing it and awe, feeling when... I experience awe as a practice that yes, there are moments in life where you see a beautiful sunset or the ocean after a long time or hear an incredible performance or something. And that feeling of awe feels more on the surface but that day to day practice of experiencing awe, of the way that our bodies have sensation and can see details or hear music or touch another person and feel contact or notice the moon, this big rock in the sky, wow, and then feeling gratitude for all of those things of...

To me, gratitude is a pause even if just for a moment, oh, thank you for giving me that moment of awe, of gratitude. Thank you for this collaboration between myself, my body, my spirit and the rest of existence in this life because there are a lot of difficult things in life that we endure and there's a lot of despair that we're working on overcoming collectively and a lot of grieving to do and that the sweet moments or even... Moments of awe aren't even always sweet. I mean, it can be awe in horror in ways too that this exists. But present to what's happening, that's the gift.

Naomi Weintraub: So that's Rebekah Erev. Rebekah Erev is an artist, Kohenet and teacher. Rebekah is a co-creator of the Queer Mikveh Project, a collaborator on the Olam HaBa, Dreaming the World to Come Planner Project and a creator of the Moon Angels/ Malakh Halevenah Oracle Deck and the in progress, Golden Oracle. Rebekah Erev, thanks so much for joining us on Disloyal.

Rebekah Erev: My pleasure.

Naomi Weintraub: And thank you listeners for tuning into Disloyal. We hope you enjoy the podcast and we'd love to hear your feedback. Visit disloyalpodcast.com or send us an email to disloyal@jewishmuseum.org. You can follow us on Twitter at Jewish Museum MD or on Instagram at Jewishmuseum_MD. If you're in Baltimore, come visit the JMM. Go to Jewishmuseummd.org for more information and to become a member if you're interested in supporting content like this podcast. Disloyal is a production of the Jewish Museum of Maryland and it's produced by Mark Gunnery with production assistance from me, Naomi Weintraub. Our executive director is Sol Davis. You can subscribe to Disloyal wherever you listen to podcasts. Until next time, take care.