This teaching is dedicated to Berrine Cohen DeCarmo, beloved elder of our congregation, who died early this Shabbat morning.
This is Shabbat HaChodesh. The Shabbat – or “Sabbath” – of the Chodesh – “the month, the moon cycle, the renewing moon.”
Shabbat HaChodesh is what we call the Shabbat that falls just before this new moon, this new moon, the new moon of the month of Nisan. Now despite what you think you know about Rosh Hashanah, Nisan is the beginning of the year according to Torah. It marks the arrival of spring and it is the month at whose full moon, at whose fruition, we were liberated from our slavery in Egypt.
On this Shabbat every year we read an extra tidbit of Torah from the Book of Exodus that opens with this verse:
הַחֹ֧דֶשׁ הַזֶּ֛ה לָכֶ֖ם רֹ֣אשׁ חֳדָשִׁ֑ים רִאשׁ֥וֹן הוּא֙ לָכֶ֔ם לְחדְשֵׁ֖י הַשָּׁנָֽה׃
“This month is for you the beginning of months; it is for you the first of the months of the year.” (Exodus 12:2)
Talmud tells us that the new moon of Nisan is one of four Rosh Hashanahs. It is rosh hashanah lam’lakhim – the new year of the kings. In antiquity this was the date they would use to count the years of a king’s reign. (BT Rosh Hashanah 2a) It’s the beginning of the king’s year, the official royal year.
When we talk about kings, our minds mostly stay limited; we think of earthly rulers and we think of men. But in our Jewish mystical tradition, when we say melekh, “king,” it instantly invokes and incorporates the quality of malkhut – “kingship” – which is something more abstract, and which is a feminine principle in Hebrew grammar and mystical thought. We don’t have a good equivalent for malkhut in English; “kingship” obviously doesn’t do it. Malkhut certainly suggests something about sovereignty and power, but not necessarily in a “power over” kind of way. Malkhut is more about the power flowing through the Universe, the inexorable unfolding of the world in which we live. Malkhut is the power of this world’s natural laws; and the sparkle of its Divinity. Malkhut is this world, and the Divine in this world, which we also call Shekhinah. In our mysticism, the Shekhinah, the Divine Feminine, and Malkhut are the same thing.
The Baal Shem Tov’s grandson, a Chasidic master referred to as the Degel Machaneh Efraim, says that the whole month of Nisan has the quality of malkhut. What is that quality? Something of the feminine, and something about unfolding divinity. He describes this month, the one that begins next week, as being a Divine Mother. The month of Nisan is a Divine Mother that births the entire year.
You might know that our Hebrew calendar is made up of months with Babylonian names. We picked up these names in our Babylonian Exile 2500 years ago. The name of the month Nisan doesn’t appear in Torah. Instead, in Torah this month is called Aviv, “spring.” It is the spring month, the month of the Equinox.
Now our mystics had a love of using wordplay to expose the Divine undergirding of the Universe. For them, the world is made up of Hebrew letters and numbers. The letters are the atoms, the words are the molecules. And with that knowledge they explore all the Divine chemistry.
In this tradition, the Baal Shem Tov’s grandson, the Degel Machaneh Efraim, takes the Hebrew word aviv – אביב (alef, bet, yod, bet) – and breaks it in two. He reads it as av (אב), father, and yod-bet (יב)– two Hebrew letters that total the number 12. And in that delicious way that the mystics cheerfully disregard the human biology at the core of their metaphors, he sees this month that begins with the word “father” as the mother of the entire year. This month is the womb of all the months; the other months are the toldot, the offspring, the progeny, of this one. The entire year resides in this next month as if in utero.
He conjures this image not only for the gee-whiz quality of it. He does it to draw our attention to the importance of this prenatal moment in time. This is our chance to influence the spiritual genetics of the year ahead. What DNA will we contribute? With what shall we seed the coming year? With love and compassion? Or with anger and bitterness? With learning and justice? Or with cynicism and apathy? Or maybe, the Degel Machaneh Efraim suggests, it can be with teshuvah, with a return to our highest visions and our deepest selves.
The Degel Machaneh Efraim invites us to genetically engineer the coming year. Whatever qualities we plant in this month of Nisan will be birthed into the world over the coming twelve months.
The month of Nisan, the womb of 12, the new year of kings, is Malkhut. This month of Nisan is Shekhinah. It is the Great Mother of time.
This being a Shekhinah kind of month goes all the way back to Talmud, which says:
כל המברך על החדש בזמנו כאילו מקבל פני שכינה
“Whoever offers blessing for the new moon (meaning this specific new moon) in its proper time, it is as if that person were welcoming the face of Shekhinah.” (Sanhedrin 42a)
It then offers a short-form blessing: barukh m’chadesh chodashim. “Blessed is the One who renews the moons.”
And it offers a long-form blessing, and it’s juicy:
ברוך אתה ה' אלהינו מלך העולם אשר במאמרו ברא שחקים וברוח פיו כל צבאם. חוק וזמן נתן להם שלא יְשַנּוּ את תפקידם. שַׂשִׂים ושמחים לעשות רצון קונם. פועלי אמת שפעולתן אמת. וְלַלְּבָנָה אמר שתתחדש עטרת תפארת לעמוסי בטן, שהן עתידין להתחדש כמותה ולפאר ליוצרם על שם כבוד מלכותו. ברוך אתה ה' מחדש חדשים
“Blessed are You, Adonai our God, King of the Universe, by whose word the heavens were created, and by the breath of whose mouth all of heaven’s hosts came into being. He set for them a regimen of time, so they would not alter their mission. And they are joyous and glad to perform the will of their Creator. They are workers of truth whose work is truth. And to the Moon He said that it should renew itself as a crown of beauty for those He carried from the womb, as they are, like the moon, destined to be renewed, and to praise their Creator for the name of His glorious malkhut. (His kingdom. His Shekhinah.) Blessed are You Adonai, Who renews the moons.”
In the secular world, when the new month arrives, we just tear a page off our calendar. But in our Jewish world, at the turning of the month and especially the turning of this one, we welcome the face of Shekhinah. We commemorate our rebirth in the Sea as we came forth from the Narrow Place of Mitzrayim. And we pour our love and intention into this month that is the womb of the year to come. This is a moment bursting with meaning and anticipation. A moment of the Divine being renewed and our being renewed with it.
The extra bit of Torah we read says, hachodesh hazeh lakhem – this month, this Mother-Month, is yours. And what Torah doesn’t say, but probably means, is “what will you do with it?”
Some side notes:
The Degel Machaneh Efraim also connects Malkhut to Nisan by pointing to Proverbs 8:15: Bi m’lakhim yim’lokhu. Through me (“me” here being the voice of Wisdom or Shekhinah) do kings reign. That is, it is through Shekhinah that sovereignty/kingship/malkhut is possible. If we talk about kingship being sourced in a Divine right, it is Shekhinah that is the anchor.
The Degel also points out that there are 12 months and there are 12 permutations of the Divine 4-letter name. Each month is associated to one permutation. God’s name in its proper order – YHWH – is the permutation assigned to the month of Nisan. This is the month in which the Divine appears in its fullness, represented by being spelled in its native order.