Kohenet Tikkun Leil Shavuot
May 25 - May 26 2023
8pm-8am Eastern
We invite you to join us virtually for Shavuot!
Join Kohenet for an all-night Leil Tikkun Thursday, May 25 at 8pm to Friday, May 26 at 8am, featuring Rav Kohenet Jill Hammer, Rav Kohenet Taya Mâ, Rav Kohenet Shoshana Jedwab, & many community members.
Together, we will commemorate Shavuot through learning Torah and exploring our individual and collective soul-wisdom! This event will also include learning, praying, meditating, and will conclude with a meditation for receiving revelation.
Let us appreciate all the revelatory blessings of Shavuot together!
Registration is being offered on a sliding scale of $18-$108.
If you have any questions, you may contact trella@kohenet.org.
Schedule:
This gathering will be recorded and available for viewing for the week following May 26th.
Thursday, MAY 25
8pm ET Ma’arivah: A Shavuot evening service where we’ll welcome the holiday with chant and prayer.
9pm ET Rav Kohenet Jill Hammer: Midrashic Visions of Torah In this session, we’ll look at midrashic visions of revelation and consider the images they offer,and wonder what the word “Torah” really means. And, in the tradition of receiving revelation Shavuot at midnight, we’ll enter contemplations of our own at the end of our session. Rabbi Jill Hammer, PhD, author, scholar, ritualist, poet, dreamworker and midrashist, is theDirector of Spiritual Education at the Academy for Jewish Religion (www.ajrsem.org), and co-founder of the Kohenet Hebrew Priestess Institute (www.kohenet.org). She is the author of Undertorah: An Earth-Based Kabbalah of Dreaming, Return to the Place: The Magic, Meditation,and Mystery of Sefer Yetzirah, The Hebrew Priestess: Ancient and New Visions of Jewish Women’s Spiritual Leadership (with Taya Shere), The Jewish Book of Days: A Companion for All Seasons, Sisters at Sinai: New Tales of Biblical Women, and The Book of Earth and Other Mysteries. She lives in Manhattan with her family.
10pm ET Rav Kohenet Shoshana Jedwab: “Where You Go, I Will Go,” Exploring Conversion and Belonging Through Ruth and the Rabbis
In the Biblical world one became part of a people by settling in a territory and accepting the local deity. In the post-Destruction world of the rabbis without land, king, temple or priest, scattered throughout the diaspora, how was the community of faith constituted, and how did newcomers gain entry? In this session, we will read the plain meaning of Ruth’s passionate words: “Where You Go, I Will Go…” as well as rabbinic interpretations in order to glean different paradigms of conversion and belonging.
Rav Kohenet Shoshana “Batshemesh” Jedwab is a percussionist, singer-songwriter, worship leader, drum circle facilitator, prize-winning Jewish educator and the Jewish Life Coordinator at the A.J. Heschel Middle School. As a Jewish educator, Batshemesh has more than 30 years of experience bringing sacred Jewish texts to life for a wide variety of audiences. Batshemesh serves as a founding faculty member at Kohenet where she drums, leads worship, and guides the exploration of ancestral texts, practices, history and humor. Her original, hip-shaking, prayer music grounds body and spirit, and brings the ancestral past into joyous contemporary practice. Batshemesh’ 2018 zipper song, “Where You Go,” based on The Book of Ruth, manifested in Kohenet initiation ceremony and is now an anthem of radical love and inclusion sung in churches, synagogues, weddings and protest marches around the world. Shoshana Jedwab was included in Jewish Rock Radio’s Jewish Women Who Rock the Worship World. www.shoshanajedwab.com
11pm ET Rav Kohenet Jill Hammer and Rav Kohenet Shoshana Jedwab: Journey to Sinai
On Shavuot, the sky opens at midnight and we have extra access to the mysteries of the cosmos. In this session, through chant, embodied practice, meditation, and sharing, we’ll journey in the world of the imagination to our own Sinai, our own revelation experience.
Friday, MAY 26
12am ET Kohenet Nomy Lamm: YOU ARE THE ORACLE: An Exploration of Creative Process through the Sephirot Join Kohenet Nomy Lamm on a journey through the seven lower sephirot on the kabbalistic tree of life as they relate to the creative process. This exploration will include voice work and exercises corresponding to the sephirot, with opportunity for self-revelation and community witness.
Nomy Lamm is a musician, illustrator, creative coach, a kohenet/Hebrew Priestess, and the Creative Director of Sins Invalid, a disability justice based performance project. Nomy sings cosmic power ballads for the rise of the matriarchy in a band called The Beauty, and creates ritual tools for embodied Jewish feminist practice, including the Dreaming the World to Come planner and podcast, and the Omer Oracle deck. They live in Olympia, WA on occupied Squaxin/ Nisqually / Chehalis land with their partner Lisa and their animal companions Dandelion, Momma, and Chanukah. www.nomyteaches.com
1am ET Kohenet Liviah Wessely: Drawing in Protection at the Foot of the Mountain In this session we will create protection for ourselves and others through song, prayer, and energetic work.
Kohenet Sho'eret Liviah Oreget Shirim, Guardian and Song Weaver, regularly holds ritual space for the Kohenet community, as well as leading, co-leading, and acting as Cyber-Gabbai, co-leading for Yelala, Kesher Pittsburgh, the Nechama Minyon, and leading numerous rituals. She has catered events and taught cooking classes through her company MamaBakes, is a deeply committed activist and organizer in the Labor movement, teaches theatre, and is a theatre director, producer, designer and dramaturg.
2am ET Kohenet Angelique YA Rivera Atzeret: Readying for The Stoppage On Shavout our posture is one of reception, open arms, give me-I am ready as if the height of the moment is the whole point. Join me on a Poeticing (Poetic/Teaching) journey, we will gather the first fruits, ascend, leave it on the high altar, in releasing you receive ( ) and descend no longer working for what already is. Bring an item that will serve as an amulet, a reminder lest you forget that you've already moved on from yesterday, and now onto the next mountainous revelation of unification.
Kohenet (Meshachreret Amah) Angelique "YA" Rivera: A Neurodivergent Jewyorican Poet and Advocate for Decolonial Healing & Liberation.
3am ET Kohenet Keshira haLev Fife: Receiving Revelation in all the Realms: A Four Worlds Exploration
According to Jewish tradition, on Mt Sinai, each soul present received revelation according to their capacity. As we prepare to receive revelation on this Shavuot, we gently open ourselves in the four worlds, readying our bodies, hearts, minds, and spirits to deepen our capacity to receive the truth that we need in this season. The spiral of time remains constant while we are ever changing. Let’s dwell in the liminality of these wee hours, inviting revelation to pour forth.
Keshira haLev Fife is a Kohenet and a bi-racial, queer Jewish person who weaves and supports community in many realms including Kesher Pittsburgh, Beloved Garden, ALEPH: the Alliance for Jewish Renewal, the Institute for Jewish Spirituality, and the Jewish Learning Collaborative. She is also a prayer leader, a ritual creatrix, teacher, facilitator, and songstress.
4am ET Kohenet Avra Shapiro: Divining Our Own Ten Sacred Commandments The Ten Commandments are traditionally read on Shavuot as a commemoration of the revelation at Mt. Sinai. In this session, we will explore various ways of relating to sacred guiding principles, or “commandments”. We will listen deeply to the Torah of our lives and of the earth, and through guided poetic reflections, we will divine our own ten “commandments.”
Kohenet Avra K'Davra, Tekiyat Ha'Emet (Purveyor of Truth) is a non-binary Jewish educator, ritualist, organizer, and musician who believes deeply in the Torah of Sloths and Bonobos. They have taught and led at synagogues, day schools, summer camps, community organizations, college campuses, and more. They are currently pursuing their masters in social work to be a therapist for queer young folks. Check out their music at soundcloud.com/avrashapiro.
5am ET Kohenet Rachel Rose Reid: Seekers of Serach In this meditative song session, Kohenet Rachel of Yelala pays homage to an ancient Jewish Shavuot practice, where women sang all night long to our ancestress, Serach bat Asher. We will learn a little of this practice, and weave meditation, devotional chant, and poetry, as we call on Serach for a little drop of her courage, tenacity, and spirit of abundance.
Yelala is a UK-based constellation of projects founded and co-created by Kohenet Yael Tischler and Kohenet Rachel Rose Reid. We weave rituals, learning experiences, song circles and more. We help those who come into our circle connect with their women/femme/folk Jewish ancestors, as well as the Earth and the Divine Feminine in Jewish tradition. www.yelala.co.uk insta: @yelala_kohenet
6am ET Kohenet Alumah Schuster: From Bein Ha-shmashot (between the lights) to Temimut (wholeness) and the Posture to Receive In the moments before receiving Torah, (the intimate between time) we will study pertinent works and then take time to work them through the body in gentle somatic practice, aligning, opening, sensing and feeling our way to find the space and place of the root of our own Torah.
Interested in the body of texts that are Torah and the bodies we inhabit, Alumah(Guardian of the White Fire) has been a yoga and somatic practitioner for over twenty years working with the Torah of the body to unlock hidden knowing held deep within these vessels that support us.As a chaplain, death doula and aromatherapist she is well connected to the sensate world and the art of body listening in this world as well as the liminal. Find her @ www.alumahschuster.com
7am ET Kohenet Ketzirah Lesser: Listening and Receiving In this session, we’ll explore several names for the Divine from Jewish teachings and what happens sonically and spiritually when we choose to use them in the central prayer “the Shema.” Do we pray to a default concept of the Divine? Or do we use the Shema to connect to the Divine as we, each, understand it? We’ll conclude the session reciting the Shema together, hearing the sacred unity of Divine diversity.
Kohenet Ketzirah Lesser, haMa'agelet (The Circle Maker), is a maker and teacher of the sacred arts. Through Devotaj Sacred Arts, she explores Jewishly-rooted making, mussar, and magick to connect past, present, & possible future(s). Ketzirah creates magickal judaica, magick, and mussar practices inspired by the rich depth of Jewish history and traditions; cræfting artifacts for a forgotten future that is more equitable, just, and spiritually alive. She lives in Washington, DC with her husband, two pet rabbits, and a house filled with enchanted appliances and creatures. Learn more at www.devotaj.com and devotaj.substack.com.