As is always our custom, our December service focuses on honoring the dark time of year – exploring the wisdom of the dark rather than praying for the return of the light. We reject the false binary of light/good and dark/bad, especially living in a culture established on anti-Black racism. Dark is where life begins, and it is where creation began.

As the poet Linda Pastan writes:

When God demanded light,
he didn’t banish darkness.

Instead he invented
ebony and crows

You can view this month’s liturgy here. As always, our liturgy was made more powerful, more beautiful, and more true by the wonderful art of Wendy Elishevah Somerson.

Music this month included:

To go in the dark, text by Wendell Berry, performance by Hannah Fogg

Shadow Light, text from Rumi composed by Juliet Spitzer, performed by SheWho

Come Darkness, Come Light by Si Kahn, performed by Orion S. Johnston

Ozi v’zimrat Yah, composed by Cedar Ranney

For Torah Study, we learned about The Book of Judith, a quintessential Jewish folktale that was left out of Tanakh but embraced widely in Christian culture. The slides have a summary of the version in the Septuagint; you can find the full story on Sefaria. Wikipedia has a great overview of where and how Judith has appeared in texts and art across the ages, if you want to start your own deep dive. The illustration on this post is Fringes’ co-leader Elliott’s personal menorah, a reproduction of a piece from Austria in the mid-1700s.

For Mourners Kaddish, in addition to our beloveds, we marked the yartzheit of Gazan poet Refaat Alareer with his poem, written shortly before he was killed in an airstrike, “If I must die.” This illustration of the poem is from @ellenogradyart.