Shavuot 101 w/ the Ancient Sacred Erotica of Sumer and the Jews

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This Sunday night through Tuesday night Jewish people around the globe celebrate the holiday of Shavuot. Shavuot is the festival of “revelation,” face-to-face encounter with the Divine. It commemorates the moment in the wilderness when the Divine spoke from Mount Sinai, teaching us how to live a good life through justice, compassion, and joy. Our tradition imagines this encounter as a sacred marriage: the Divine is our beloved, the Torah is our ketubah, our marriage contract. (In some Sephardic communities a literal ketubah binding the people to the Divine is read on Shavuot.) This sacred union was not just with the ancestors, but also between Jews today and Goddess, for we are taught that every soul in the Jewish lineage, past, present, and future, stood at Sinai. We might have forgotten the experience, but our spirit remembers.

Shavuot is also the harvest festival, when we celebrate the first produce of the land. In many ancient traditions, “union with the Divine” and “harvest” are intimately intertwined. Spirituality and materiality are not opposites. It is precisely the ecstatic dance between Spirit and flesh, between holy presence and earthly pleasure, that causes the fields to ripen and our endeavors to thrive. Spirituality can be made manifest in wheat and barley, in honey and milk, in the sweet stuff of our ordinary lives. To savor our joys is not an obstacle to the Divine, but a portal to it.

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I’ve been studying the 4,000 year old sacred poetry of Sumer, the place from which the Biblical ancestors of the Jews, Sarah and Abraham, come (Gen 11:31). Sumerian poems praise the feminine Divine and describe the sacred erotic union between goddess Inanna and god Dumuzi that blesses the land with fertility. Many historians believe that these poems depict a fertility ritual in which the priestess plays Goddess and the king, God. The text is thick with longing, pleasure, and blessing (this translation is from Diane Wolkstein’s excellent work “Inanna: Queen of Heaven and Earth”):

“Inanna sang…

My honey-man, my honey-man sweetens me always

My lord, the honey-man of the gods

He is the one my womb loves best.

His hand is honey, his foot is honey,

He sweetens me always...

Inanna sang:

“Make your milk sweet and thick, my bridegroom.

My shepherd, I will drink your fresh milk.

Wild bull, Dumuzi, make your milk sweet and thick.

I will drink your fresh milk.

Let the milk of the goat flow in my sheepfold.

Fill my holy churn with honey cheese.

Lord Dumuzi, I will drink your fresh milk.”

(There is no academic evidence linking this ancient Sumarian text of erotic harvest rites to the Jewish tradition of eating honey and milk on the harvest holiday of Shavuot, but I’m not an academic. I’m a mystic. To me, the echoes are true and holy.)

The blatant eros of this Sumerian poem is not foreign to Judaism. The Biblical text of Song of Songs lushly depicts the erotic love affair between a man described as shepherd and king and a bold woman described as both sister and bride. In fact, Assyriologist Samuel Noah Kramer offered evidence that The Songs of Songs is simply a version of the erotic fertility story of Dumuzi, the shepherd king, and Inanna, the sister bride.

But there’s a profound democratizing shift between the mythos of Sumer and those of the Jewish festival of Shavuot. In Sumer, the priestess and king enact the ritual of divine union. In Judaism, intimacy with the Divine is for everyone. You don’t need to be royalty. You don’t even need to be a priestess. You just need to be awake, metaphorically, or literally: On the first night of Shabout, there is a mystical tradition to stay up all night learning words of ancestral wisdom, like a nervous bride too excited to sleep. As the night deepens, the veils between the worlds grow thin, and sleep-deprivation and spiritual longing can sometimes open a portal, allowing some to melt into union, an encounter of profound love, of knowing one’s truest nature as part and partner of the One.

The tradition is to reach for this union through the text of Torah, but our mystical tradition affirms that every human body is also a Torah. The medieval mystic Ramban writes (on MKatan 25a):

“It seems to me that the soul in the body is like the names of God on the Torah parchment.”

The night of Shavuot would be a ripe time for exploring the presence of the Divine in the Torah that is the body of our lover, blessing the harvest of our lives with bodies that are awakened to the sacred present in flesh.

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The sacred text of the holiday of Shavuot is the Book of Ruth. The Book of Ruth describes ancient harvest times. (It is also the only Biblical text that explicitly passes the Bechdel test: two women speak, and they speak to each other, and they speak to each other about something other than a man.)

The Book of Ruth has its romance and erotica, too. When Naomi tries to send Ruth back to her own homeland after her husband, Naomi’s son, dies, Ruth declares her love for Naomi, vowing (Ruth 1:16-17): “Where you go, I will go; wherever you rest, I will rest; your people shall be my people, and your Divine my Divine, where you die, I will die.”

In a way Naomi becomes Ruth’s spiritual guide. Speaking on the level of archetype and myth, we might even say that Naomi becomes Ruth’s priestess. The poems about the union of Innana and Dumuz describe the role of the priest or priestess in fertility rites:

“Ninshubur, the faithful servant of the holy shrine of Uruk, led Dumuzi to the sweet thighs of Inanna…”

In the Book of Ruth, it is Naomi who directs Ruth to the “feet” (Biblically, feet can be a euphemism for thighs/loins/genitals—ie Isaiah 7:20) of the wealthy farmer Boaz, amidst the harvest. And when a child is born to Ruth and Boaz, the text tells us that the child is given to Naomi, as if to say, just like a harvest of grains may belong to the priest who joined the gods in union, this harvest, too, belongs to the “priestess” who orchestrated the union from which it came.

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The ancestors say that Shavuot is not a revelation that happened, it’s a revelation that is still happening. The mountain is not off in some wilderness, it is here, in Brooklyn, in Philadelphia, in Berkeley, in Houston. It is the unmoving landmark in each of our lives, from which the Divine is speaking to us, if we are willing to unstop our ears.

Each year this festival arrives to remind us to not only read sacred stories but to enter them, to celebrate our harvest, whatever it is, to explore our love story with Spirit through text, flesh, and abundance.

This Shavuot, may you be blessed with much sweetness. May you savor the pleasures of the body. May you find yourself at the foot of Sinai. May you know yourself as worthy of revelation. May you receive the Torah, the messages of truth, that you crave most in this season of your life.

Ken teheye ritzona

May it be Her will

Picture by cottonbro studio