On Settling In

Welcome to the OMFG podcast, Jewish wisdom for unprecedented times. My name is Rabbi Jodi Gordon, and together with my friend and co-conspirator Rabbi Jen Gubitz, we're glad you're with us.

OMFG is not just a podcast, it's a philosophy, a worldview, a way of keeping it Jewish while keeping it real. Sometimes, especially if those times are any time in the last few years, The world just gives you opportunity after opportunity to say, "OMFG!" The world is the world, but Jewish tradition inspires us to call out to each other, and sometimes to God, to figure out what it all means. And so this podcast is our way of inviting you into the conversation.

So in true OMFG fashion, we hope you're wearing some comfy pants and sipping an iced coffee or a seltzer. Welcome to OMFG. So Jen, happy Cheshvan!

I know, right? I can't find my Rabbi's Heart Cheshvan shirt, but I'm bringing the spirit. Jodi, why is it that we rabbis love Cheshvan so much?

Well, as the story goes, it's because after all of the excitement and buildup on the Jewish calendar over the months of Av, Elul, and Tishrei, Cheshvan comes along and brings along with it the opportunity to just live in regular old time. Shabbat, Havdalah, a regular week, rinse and repeat. After all of the celebrating and reflecting and repenting, there is a sense of relief when Cheshvan arrives and we just get to be.

I do want to say that my Tishrei was pretty good because it's my birthday month And Matan surprised me with flying in my mom, surprise. My sister was there too, which wasn't a surprise, but always the best. And wait for it, Dani Nichols. Dani Nichols showed up for my Havdalah bonfire birthday party. So did Jodi Gordon. And it was the best ever.

It was actually the kickoff to my Tishrei Cheshvan of leaning into the Mass Pike, of spending as much time as possible driving back and forth between the Berkshires and Boston. And your birthday was the, the kickoff to all of that. So it was truly a delight.

I love it. I love it. So back to Cheshvan. Cheshvan is often referred to as Mar Cheshvan, Bitter Cheshvan, because the month contains no holy days and because it often coincides with the arrival of colder weather. Mar, however, can also mean a drop of water. And according to the Midrash, more rain falls in watery Cheshvan since it marks the beginning of the Great Flood during the time of Noah. We can also think of Cheshvan as a quiet time to reap the benefits of the spiritual growth of the preceding month of Tishrei and its holidays.

I feel like Cheshvan is kind of like the after-party for the High Holy Days. Except the kind of afterparty where you rehydrate and you wear sweatpants and you talk about how great the party was.

Tishrei was such a great party, and wow, it is so great to be in sweatpants, comfy pants, a Snuggie, whatever is your custom. But one thing to note, actually a correction even, which is that we say that there's no holidays in the month of Cheshvan, but there actually is one. It's just been overlooked and And that is the holiday of Siged, which is observed by the Beta Israel, Ethiopian Jewry, on the 29th of Cheshvan. It became a national holiday in Israel in 2008. And Siged really punctuates the end of the quiet month of Cheshvan, leading us into Kislev, where we get the Hanukkah party started.

Totally. And right, we often talk about like being Jews who live with our feet on multiple calendars and multiple worlds, right? So we know that during this time our neighbors are celebrating Diwali, as well as also sometimes Ramadan, and also especially here in the Northeast, the, uh, the high chag of Halloween. So this time of year is, is not a total bust, right? But there's no, um, you know, sort of major festivals, we could say.

Basically, we just don't have to write sermons for it.

It's a beautiful thing.

That's what this is really about. So For all the joking about rabbis love Cheshvan because they finally get a break and so on, the thing I love about this month is actually the time and space to let it all sink in, to pause after the holidays as the seasons are turning and to prepare for the quieter months ahead.

Yeah, for me, it's not so much the "Yay, no more holidays" feeling as it is, "Hey, regular life can actually be pretty great." And after all of the energy I put into setting my intentions for this new year, I'm ready to just, you know, live them out a bit.

Yeah, it's a month for settling into the everyday, like folding my laundry instead of living out of a laundry basket, doing the dishes and running errands that weren't urgent but still need to happen, as well as that perfect time to snuggle into a warm sweatshirt and just let things be. And so in the spirit of this month of Cheshvan, we're excited to present to you Drum roll, please.

The Torah of Nothing Special.

The Torah of Nothing Special is actually pretty remarkable. In Jewish tradition, we're all about distinctions: day from night, blessings from curse. And often we use the language of kodesh, or holy, and chol, the regular. Chol isn't bad, it's just different from kodesh.

Specifically, this distinction between kodesh and chol is about time. We try not to make it a habit to attach kodesh and chol to proper nouns, but rather we use it to describe the particular qualities of time. So kodesh, or holy time, is set apart, it's special in particular ways.

Shabbat is kodesh, holidays are kodesh, seltzer water is kodesh.

B'tach.

And chol refers to that time that's the rest of the time, the time outside of those sacred ones that are set apart. So when we make Havdalah, the ritual ceremony that separates between Shabbat and the rest of the week, we bless God as Hamavdil ben Kodesh l'chol, the one who separates between holy and the regular, sacred and ordinary.

This is how I was thinking about it recently. God actually created all the days, not just the remarkable ones, not just Shabbat. It turns out that God also created your average Tuesday when you need an oil change and you forgot to make a doctor's appointment.

Which is every day of my life. That's not just Tuesday. We actually really, right? We actually really need moments that are whole, ordinary, to feel the gifts of moments that are kodesh. If we were a Jewish version of Groundhog Day and we woke up to every day being Rosh Hashanah or, you know, Tisha B'Av, it would be really exhausting to maintain and quite depressing in some circumstances. And also, if that were ever a Netflix series, I would like to be the rabbinic consultant. And Jodi, I would like you to be my partner on that. If you are traditionally observant of holidays where you don't work and you can't cook and you have to observe, observe, observe. Every day being kodesh, or in this case, chag, would be unlivable. Truly, living in the ordinary helps imbue the sacred with beauty and joy.

It reminds me of that meme that I feel like we've both seen posted around the end of Tishrei when all of a sudden it's like, Sukkot, Shmini Atzeret, Simchat Torah, and it's a picture of a Berenstain Bears book cover. And it is like the case of the Berenstain Bears and too much yontif. But we cannot maintain kodesh, we cannot maintain yontif all the time. But this idea of you need the regular for the holy, it reminds me of that beautiful song, Al Kol Eila, which talks about how you need the sting of the bee in order to appreciate the honey, or the bitterness in order to enjoy the sweet. So a monotonous kodesh, never-ending holiness, would be intolerable. Just as much as monotonous hole or sort of monotonous mundanity or the monotonous regular everyday would also be.

Most people won't argue with a month of nothing special, right? We just want things homeostasis. That's what we humans want is for things to just be the same. Change is hard, but in case you're looking for some energetic rest, right? Not just like do nothing rest, but some rest that really imbues you with more energy. Rabbi Jill Hammer, who is a lot of things, including a PhD, a midrashicist, a mystic, poet, writer, and priestess, offers us another approach to Cheshvan. She teaches that it's actually the month of hard labor, an underground time when we turn over the soil within and without. When we seek our roots, we merge with the earth, and give our strength to it so that it may bloom again in the spring.

She also writes that this month is a time to write down our dreams, to explore our memories of our ancestors, to paint or write our stories, to go as deep as we can in finding our roots so that we can prepare to grow. So maybe Cheshvan is the originator of the novel November, the time when many people go underground and try to write 50,000 words of a novel. Shout out to the many people I feel like we know in common who are doing that. I can't wait to read your, your work.

Um, it's like the original hibernation. Totally. Basically, wait, basically bears are full-time Cheshvan observers. Bears and chipmunks, right?

Right. Berenstain Bears love the month of Cheshvan.

Um, Love it. So I loved researching this. Perfect. We're gonna have to propose that to their family as like— or we'll just steal the copyright and do it ourselves. So the earliest book on mysticism, Sefer Yetzirah, suggests that the physical sense associated with Cheshvan is smell. Kohenet katsira hama'agelet lesser. A kohenet, side note, is a Hebrew priestess ordained in the work of earth-based spiritual practice and ritual. I know a lot of amazing Kohenet folks who are doing this work. So Kohenet Katzira notes that since we don't know what the smells of Cheshvan were in the ancient world, instead we should explore the smells of now, which she suggests are the smells of life transitioning and people coming together, like crisp leaves, fires, apple pie, mulled cider, and so on. So basically, pumpkin spice lattes are Jewish.

I'm going to pause here to say that I lovingly disagree. I recently went to Starbucks with my children on a Sunday afternoon and felt like, oh, I need a special— like, I'm going to get something special. My standing order is iced coffee with 2% milk and one Splenda. But I was like, ooh, I'm going to try this pumpkin spice latte I hear so much about. Yuck. No, not for me. Not too sweet. Too sweet. It tasted like chemically. It was really— it was. Yeah. Heavy.

At Tate. At Tate. Have you had the— they're like classic latte or their kabocha squash latte?

No, but I love the word kabocha.

Is that how you say it? Kabocha? Kabocha? I actually think, Jodi, it's kabocha.

Like mi habocha. Oh God. Friends, Jen, this is Cheshvan. Tell me, how do you plan to observe the Torah of nothing special?

We had a quiet weekend this past weekend, and I washed the couch covers.

That's intense. That's like real work.

I mean, I put them in the laundry machine.

Oh, okay, fair.

It felt very mundane and very important. I really like a well-put-together couch. Also, I recently discovered while I was traveling and had no other options that the cold brew at Dunkin' Donuts is good. And that is revelatory as a coffee snob in Boston. We drink iced coffee all year here. Um, so I think this isn't special, but I'm gonna like switch up my basic coffee routine of boxed cold brew from Wandering Bear and maybe get a cold brew from Dunkin' Donuts once in a while.

I'm still waiting for Wandering Bear to support us, to like sponsor us and send us free iced coffee.

Because Wandering Bear and Steamed Bears, this is a theme that we didn't even know was gonna come up during this.

I'm into it, I'm into it. I think for me, I'm thinking about my Cheshvan, and it feels like the right time for my professional work to do a little tzimtzum, a little holy contraction, to make some space for life. So I have a really big plan for tonight. I, I discussed it with Josh last night, which is basically that I need to either like refile, or if we're being honest, just clean up my side of the bedroom. So after a month of holidays, I have got bags of random things that need to be returned to The Loft and Old Navy. I have got dresses draped on chairs that need to be hung back up, and generally I, I just need to sort of like get my living space ready for the next season. But for me, the Torah of nothing special actually becomes really special. You know, this past week, having the capacity and the time and the space to be the house that has the pizza and the snacks for the kids to come eat with their friends after trick-or-treating— not possible in Tishrei— but we were like the official trick-or-treating home base. And that was just, on the one hand, nothing special, and on the other hand, totally awesome.

I love that. I love that. Couch covers, returns, cold brew, pizza. All good things.

Love it.

So if you feel like this month is a month of nothing special, the holest of the hole, then folks, you're living in Cheshvan quite well.

Also, don't worry about Thanksgiving because it's the first night of the month of Kislev.

Allow yourself to dwell in the in-between. The ordinary, the nothing special. See what can emerge when you are not trying to cultivate anything.

Obviously, wear comfy pants and drink seltzer, which are the official uniform of Cheshvan. Maybe enjoy watching some predictable TV, knowing it'll be slightly different but the same framework as every other episode.

And enjoy that which is predictable. And perhaps sit with this offering written by Judy Brown and sourced from the good old Reform prayer book Mishkan Tefillah. What makes a fire burn is space between the logs, a breathing space. Too much of a good thing, too many logs packed in too tight, can douse the flames almost as surely as a pail of water would. So building fires requires attention to the spaces in between as much as to the wood.

When we are able to build open spaces in the same way we have learned to pile on the logs, Then we can come to see how it is fuel and absence of fuel together that make the fire possible. We only need to lay a log lightly from time to time. A fire grows simply because the space is there, with openings in which the flame that knows just how it wants to burn can find its way.

Have an awesome Cheshvan! We'll see you next time.

This episode of the OMFG podcast was brought to you by rabbis Jen Gubitz and Jodi Gordon, editing by Jesse Ulrich, and snark straight from Adonai.