By Anna Blaedel
We cannot afford to cease yearning for each other’s company. –M. Jacqui Alexander
Two weeks ago, I found myself under the remnants of a dear one’s sukkah, remaining after Sukkot, the recounting of desert wandering, morphed into shiva. Invitations to ritualize the close of shabbat with havdalah had been made last minute, the gathering prompted by profound grief and yearning for company to share in it. I felt deeply honored, as a non-Jew, to be invited into the tender intimacy and raw vulnerability of pain, sorrow, fear. We passed the sweet spices, and braided candle. We sang, and gazed up to find the first stars, dotting the sky.
At our guest’s prompting, we each shared a poem; I offered a poem by Adrienne Rich that I often recite as scripture when I find myself unmoored by grief.
My heart is moved by all I cannot save:
so much has been destroyed
I have to cast my lot with those
who age after age, perversely,
with no extraordinary power,
reconstitute the world.
Nourished by ritual and poetry and snacks and company, we shared stories, tears, longings. A world, and local community, where Jews feel and are protected, held. A free Palestine, a ceasefire, an end to the deadly blockade. A system in which our tax dollars go to public schools that teach the genocidal histories that haunt us, and the afterlives yet unfolding–settler colonialism, enslavement, pogroms, the Nakba, apartheid, dispossession and displacement. A world, and local community, where Christians and those with roots in Christian tradition, are doing the slow, sacred, lifetime labor of uprooting the death-dealing toxicities of antisemitism, Islamophobia, colonialism, fascism, Christian nationalism, and militarism from our stories of self, and home, and God, and other. We sat in silence, absorbing the immense threat issued by Netanyahu, that the Israeli military response to Hamas’s violence would “reverberate for generations.” We dreamed, together, of what response we would want to reverberate for generations. After sharing contact information, as well as information about mobilizing with Jewish Voice for Peace, and If Not Now, we planned to gather again, soon.
“Resilience,” writes Hil Malatino, “is not about bouncing back nor about moving forward, but rather a communal alchemical mutation of pain into possibility.” So much is being destroyed, at a pace and scale that is horrifying, and escalating. What is this communal alchemical mutation, if not sacred solidarity, casting our lot with “those who, age after age, perversely, with no extraordinary power, reconstitute the world?” After all, as the Talmud reminds: destroying a single life destroys the whole world; saving a single life saves the whole world. This sacred wisdom is also found in the Quran. Worlds upon worlds upon worlds, destroyed. “There is no escape from the mess of our heartbroken world,” writes Deborah Eden Tull.
A couple of days later, I made my way to another gathering–a coalition of college students, many far from family, and home. From Palestine and Lebanon and Sarajevo, Chicago and China, the Sudan and Somalia and Detroit. They shared movement histories, and nuanced language, and traced connections between policing and prisons in the US and bombs being dropped on hospitals, schools, homes, and children in Palestine, and bloated military budgets that will never keep us safe nor get anyone free. They shared news sources, and mental health resources, and alerted to a new state law that makes it illegal for educators to publicly support divesting from the State of Israel. I brought a batch of homemade cookies, and left with a hand painted 3×5 card that now sits on my altar.
“We must be very strong and love each other,” writes Audre Lorde, “to go on living.” Because, as Louise Erdrich writes, “Life will break you. Nobody can protect you from that…You have to love. You have to feel. It is the reason you are here on earth. You are here to risk your heart. You are here to be swallowed up. And when it happens that you are broken, or betrayed, or left, or hurt, or death brushes near, let yourself sit by an apple tree and listen to the apples falling all around you in heaps, wasting their sweetness. Tell yourself you tasted as many as you could.”
We are haunted in so many ways, and differently. I do not know how Erdrich’s words would resonate with a Palestinian who has watched the waste of Israeli tanks and bulldozers, funded in part by my tax dollars, accumulate over generations, felling all the trees in heaps, so no apples nor olives can be tasted. But I do know that as a member of the Turtle Mountain Band of the Chippewa, part of the Ojibwe tribe, Erdrich knows in her bones her own people’s version of a story of violent removal, genocidal greed–so much destroyed, and being reconstituted, too.
LaMarr Jurelle Bruce writes about how atrocities unfold when supposedly good people take up the task of combatting, correcting, or cleansing that which is deemed evil. “The Crusades, the Atlantic Slave Trade, and the Holocaust, for example, all entailed leaders labeling others evil and stoking violence against that alleged evil.” He proposes a different notion of evil: “a radical will to harm, without mercy or compunction,” sometimes even relishing the harm. The psalmist, cautions against casting our lot with those deriving pleasure from the will to harm, or tolerating the harm itself; and, the psalmist denounces any God who does so, too.
“I want to be nurturing life when I go down in struggle,” writes Zainab Amadahy. “I want nurturing life to BE my struggle.” So much is being destroyed. And yet, so many, too, are struggling to nurture life. “We cannot afford to cease yearning for each other’s company,” dedicating life to life, for the sake of saving our collective life.
Anna Blaedel (they/them) is co-director and co-founder at enfleshed, where they tend to the theopoetic intersections of spiritual, academic, and activist engagement. Anna chaplains University of Iowa students, and is a doctoral candidate in Theological and Philosophical Studies at Drew University’s Graduate Division on Religion. Waking before dawn, lingering in poetry, being an aunt, retreating to the woods or their basement woodshop, tending the garden, sharing silence, and feeding people delicious food are some of Anna’s favorite things.