The ways in which the Jewish calendar maps onto the Gregorian year are always fun to notice. For example, this past year’s Hanukkah overlapped not just with Christmas, but with New Years and Kwanza too. There’s something there, a special kind of rare mash up that exposes a number of truths meeting each other in the streets and it is always profound to feel what they celebrate in one another.

This Friday’s Sabbath Queen is a special kind of calendar mash-up: Shabbat Shira (Sabbath of Song) named for the Song of the Sea (Shirat haYam, a.k.a. The musical ending to the great waters’ epic parting and passageway to freedom) meets the annual mid winter New Year of the Trees (Tu B’Shvat), when our saplings drink in the waters of the new year . Same waters? Maybe!

It’s Torah meets Farmer’s Almanac meets the Full Moon meets Mythology. It’s liberation meets libation, it’s resilience meets resistance. It’s a complicated mashup – our epic story of freedom pairing itself with a story of destruction – a story of birth, rebirth, renewal and all through the natural phenomenon element of Great Waters. 

In the coming week, Tu B’Shvat invites all of us to look to trees—rooted, resilient, and standing strong especially in these times of uncertainty, and to find the divine in earth’s bountiful harvest:

  • FamilyLab: Fruit Feast – This Sunday – 2/9 – is for fruit lovers and tree huggers. We’ll set a tasty Seder Table (pictured above) with special guest Mother Earth, whose gifts keep on giving. 
  • ReCollect – This Wednesday – 2/12 – As we live in the winter months, we mark Tu B’Shvat and gather – in person & online – to recall and ritualize the fruits our loved ones bore on their tree of life.

So, what will be the watery revelations of this coming together? Only the Sabbath Queen knows, but we will sing and we will sound and we will let the wisdom of the waters guide us. 

See You on Friday (in-person or online)! 

With great love,
Shira Kline
Co-Founder and Spiritual Leader 

P.S. there is a special Ashkenazi (Eastern European Jewish) custom to honor and feed birds on Shabbat Shira… so come one and all song birds and be nourished as is the tradition!