Shabbat is a day of rest, reflection, and renewal.
This weekly spread is offered to help us question: how do we want to shape our sacred time?
Each Friday night, we invite you to light Shabbat candles with us and reflect on the state of the world and our responsibility to it as we read through the Hebrew alphabet and its wisdom. Let this practice support you in welcoming in the Sabbath as we collectively tend to and hold our care, questioning, and actions this week.
Pulling from The Kabbalah Deck by Edward Hoffman, here’s what came up this time.
VAV // THIS WEEK
This week, what came up or was present for us?
As we light the candles for Hanukkah this week, we are asked to face the darkness that their light illuminates. Vav opens the word vidui for “confession,” encouraging us to reconcile who we are with who we hope to be.
This week, notice that which you’ve been ignoring, hiding, or neglecting, and take care and responsibility for it. If you need help seeing in the darkness, call on your relationships. As the prefix meaning “and,” vav reminds us that this difficult work does not have to be done alone. Actively make time and space to grow the connections between yourself and others, both offering and asking for support. Learn from one another’s interdependent struggles and successes to bring context and clarity to your choices. Remember that you have both agency and dimensionality. We can move, and we can move in more ways than one. Let the lights of our lives brighten the way.
TIFERET // THIS SABBATH
This Sabbath, what nourishment do we need and what deserves our sacred time?
Tiferet sits at the heart of the Tree of Life, with all other points of the sefirot flowing directly or indirectly to it. This shabbat, Tiferet wants us to pay attention to our hearts. Where do they constrict and where do they expand?
Take time this weekend to heal where your heart hurts and nourish it with things it loves. Tiferet literally means “beauty,” and reminds us to seek this out even in the midst of loss. We rebuilt after the destruction of the temples, we will do so again. Charge yourself up with art, music, and books that help you rededicate your heart to joy and justice.
GIMEL // THIS WORLD TO COME
Moving towards this world to come, how do we hold our values and bring the ways we want to build into the next week?
It’s a new moon, a new month, a new beginning. A time of new growth. Gimel opens the word gilgul for “cycles,” reminding us to look at the patterns and habits of your life and ask, what’s working for you and what needs to change?
Learn from gimel’s practice of adaptation as it works to integrate the oneness of aleph and the duality of bet. Change is constant, and transformation is always possible. Write about what you’ve been processing on pieces of paper, burn them, and bury the ashes in the ground. Seeds grow first in the dark. Gimel also begins the word gan for “garden” and invites you to put tender care into this new learning cycle. As Adrienne Maree Brown says, “What you pay attention to grows.”
#SHABBOSSPREAD
Let us know how this reading sits with you and what it’s asking you to bring into your life with the hashtag above. As always, take what you need from the cards and leave what you don’t. We’ll see you next week. Shabbat Shalom!
Maya Sungold is a facilitator, farmer, and fiber artist who works through practices of cultivation and collaboration to support relationships in continued resistance and resilience. In spinning both fiber and web, they build change and creative adaptation, queer time and radical imaginings, tender accountability and perfectly possible contradiction into their art-making and community-building. Their work aims to shape space and structure for connection, reflection, and creation to resource us as we live into the world to come. You can connect with them on Instagram at @soulxstitch.
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