Months ago, in the old year of 5784, I heard a rad rabbi being asked, “Which Jewish holiday is holding you best in times such as these?,” and they replied, “None.” Instead, they explained that they crave a small daily ritual done with even one other person; that none of the millennium-old technology of marking the Jewish year—practices and prayers as resistance and resilience to aid us in liberation and life—spoke to them amid genocide and fascism.
There have been times aplenty when humans have had to bear the worst—the worst of the barbarity that humans, and especially their hierarchical structures and ideologies, are capable of perpetrating. And evidence aplenty that Jews around the globe leaned on their holidays during those times—indeed, risked life and limb to celebrate them. Our communal rituals are that sacred.
Yet as this new year crept closer, coming so near to another marker, Oct 7; as genocide and fascism both expanded their reach; as capitalist-fueled climate catastrophe became more catastrophic; as the daily list of atrocities has become so long, it’s impossible to keep up—I couldn’t comprehend being able to go to two nights and days of outdoor, in-person, self-organized Rosh Hashanah services by a canal. I couldn’t follow through on preparing and setting up the ancestor-grief altar I’d promised as my contribution. “None.” None of it felt right.
What’s felt right has been throwing myself into mutual aid tasks, remotely, for North Carolina since the hurricane hit.
So when a Jewish friend texted me yesterday and I shared “I don feel capable of sitting thru RH services,” and they replied, “I feel like you’re [instead] praying with your heart and body in your own way,” I canceled. I thought I’d do nothing—except NC mutual aid.
Ancestors had other ideas. They whispered in my ear, urging me to light candles, taste of apples and honey, and look for little sparks in 5785, however small and fragile and ephemeral, while listening to a pal blow a shofar in a recording they texted a bunch of us on a Jewish anarchist thread, with the words, “Here’s to walls coming down.”
May it be so; may we be those sparks.
(photo: art behind my candles by @_mazatli_)