The lie to survive the lie
"But If Not" and the system glitch of civil disobedience
A few months ago, a group I'd been in study with for over a year, as a continuation of Bayo Akomolafe’s We Will Dance With Mountains Course, met around the topic of lying. We rumbled with the following questions: "are the lies we tell ourselves a disservice to our evolution?" and "is lying really acceptable or does it inevitably, eventually cause harm?" I didn’t frame these questions or feel drawn to them at the time, but I trusted the rich possibility of this discussion with these particular people.
Somehow, in the wild, meandering nature of a 2 hour zoom conversation with 18 people stretched across the Earth, spanning the ages of 17 to late 70's, from South Africa to Colombia to Poland, an elder in the group invoked a Holocaust survival story about lying which loosely unfolded like this:
"A young Jewish man, fleeing the Nazis, took refuge in an empty church on his escape route. As he gathered himself that morning, he was startled to see a flood of church congregants file in, but somehow managed to navigate the transition with enough dexterity to go unnoticed as an overnight guest. Though, now, he couldn't leave without seeming suspicious. He shuddered with terror in the pews hoping to blend in among the good Christians, and though he received a few inquisitive looks, the service commenced and he was graced with momentary safety. As long as he could slide out with little to no interaction, this would not be his defeat. Just then a raid of Nazi soldiers flung open the doors, interrupted the priest, and row by row interrogated every single person in the room. With mere minutes to spare before his row was reached, the man pulled a pencil from his pocket. He hesitated, then turned to his neighbor channeling the power of every cell of his being on fire and implored silently with his eyes, "please, please, please." Then with shaking hand, he wrote a name inside the cover of the prayer book. It was his only option. When the soldier reached their row, everyone pulled out their identification. The fugitive performed a futile search of his pockets to build his case. When they reached him, he poured out an alibi: "My wife is sick and I'm bereft. I left this morning in a hurry to make it to here. I somehow don't have my ID. I can't believe it. I've never left home without it. It's always in this coat pocket," he opened his lapel to seem unthreatening, to say "there's nothing to hide here, see? "I'm such an idiot, this will never happen again I swear it. Here, see, this is my bible. It's all I have." He opened to show them the signature. The soldier paused, then turned to his neighbor: "do you know this man? Is he a congregant here?" The man said without flinching, "yes, of course, his wife is very ill, he's not thinking clearly." The soldier paused again, perhaps lingering to see if he could detect anything Jewish about this man - the shape of his nose, the horns surely hiding in his hair. And then they carried on.
The elder stopped here with his retelling, and immediately posed the question to us: "was it right for the Christian man to lie to the soldier?"
Epigenetic trauma roared like a tsunami from the center of my soul. The visceral terror from that anonymous kin of mine in that church long ago already had me shivering, but the audacity of this question... whew. My spirit fully leapt out of my skin. My heart pounded in my chest, and I'm pretty sure my jaw detached with the force of incredulity.
Let me pause and warn you that I'm about to get a little mean, bear with me. Let me contextualize that this is exactly one of those moments where the training fails. You should not be shocked at the questions people ask. No, no, you must not shame or insult anyone for their 'innocent comments' or 'provocations'. You must learn young that the world is full of people who don’t know the language of genocide as a background condition of human existence, who need to learn of it secondhand; whose DNA isn't encoded with such scripts in their mother’s bellies from their mother’s and from their mother’s far back to the beginning of time; who don’t know what it’s like to be some of the first colonized people on the Earth and who don't arrive to this sacred Earth already knowing to be scared. No, no, to be unlikable, to be controversial, is a certain kind of death, so you must be appeasing and gentle and swallow your feelings and respond cordially. In conversations like this, detachment, depersonalization, and the distancing effects of rigorous intellectualism are essential. Well, I’m learning how to get back and take up a little space because I’m not so sure this survival strategy I just outlined is getting us anywhere.
"First of all, is anyone else here Jewish?" I asked. Silence. I realized this was the first time in a year that things got this personal for me.
I then said: "If you’re lying to survive the grander, vaster, all-consuming lie, the mythology, the deception, the manipulation manufactured by a sociopath perpetuating the evils of white supremacy through a genocidal terror project... if you're lying because the whole world has become a lie in which you must lie is to save yourself from the gas chamber for no reason except that you are who you are... if you're lying because an entire society sells their souls to the devil and turns their friends into monsters and burns millions of them alive... WHO IS LYING?! The architects of the universe of lies or the ones lying to survive it, lying to do right in it, lying to keep their soul in tact in it?!"
I spat all of this out with such ferocity, but I remember every word with crystal clarity because it was one of the few times in my life I didn't play the “good Jewish girl”. And as I say all this, I want to acknowledge the tremendous privilege that is confronting white supremacy in specific moments like this one of insidious antisemitism so deeply buried someone doesn’t even know it’s there, or in the wake of a synagogue shooting, or somehow if a bigot finds out you're Jewish... not every day, all day, like Black, Indigenous, Muslim, people with disabilities, and many other marginalized kin who confront this inescapably, almost constantly, because this pale skin I have is quite a force I don’t hold lightly. This is a spectrum of violence. And it is part of my devotion to destroying oppression by honoring sacred solidarity while recognizing the crucial differences in extremity, in form, in frequency, etc and responding accordingly. As in, in reverence to the Combahee River Collective Statement: “If Black women were free, it would mean that everyone else would have to be free since our freedom would necessitate the destruction of all the systems of oppression.”
I wrote in a prior post about being "well-indoctrinated by the cult-ures that promise us so many things, that prey upon our earnest dreams for better, for freedom, that lie and then kill us and then lie about killing us and then make everyone lie to survive the lie.” This is what I meant. This lie haunts me relentlessly. It triggers all of my survival mechanisms. It is the devotion of my life to shatter the metastization of this murderous mythology predicated on lies.
Just a few hours ago, on this honorary day, I listened to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s sermon “But if Not” for only the second time (it's only ~20 minutes so please do yourself the favor). It is a sermon to turn to in times of deep spiritual reckoning, and I think it's safe to say we are all in that place now and will continue to be as we confront the compounding crises of our times. It is another facet of Dr. King's gorgeous, prismatic explorations on civil disobedience, centered on the following lines of scripture, in which three young men (Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego) respond to King Nebuchadnezzar's tyrannical orders:
“If it be so, our God whom we serve is able to deliver us from the burning fiery furnace, and he will deliver us out of thine hand, O king.”
“But if not, be it known unto thee, O king, that we will not serve thy gods, nor worship the golden image which thou hast set up.”
This is a sermon on refusing to bow to evil kings, evil powers, evil people playing God.
At the beginning of the speech he says something I didn't expect, that still stuns me, not because it offers something I didn’t know, but because I felt WITNESSED. Witnessed in ways by this man, Dr. King, like his hand reached out and landed right on my shoulder and I had the great honor to gaze into his eyes with humble awe and feel the power of him speaking to me, and my ancestors, and the whole of Judaism and witness us in solidarity in this struggle toward freedom.
“And never forget that everything that Hitler did in Germany was legal! It was legal to do everything that Hitler did to the Jews. It was a law in Germany that Hitler issued himself that it was wrong and illegal to aid and comfort a Jew in Hitler's Germany. But I tell you if I had lived in Hitler's Germany with my attitude, I would have openly broken that law. I would have practiced civil disobedience. And so it is important to see that there are times when a man-made law is out of harmony with the moral law of the universe, there are times when human law is out of harmony with eternal and divine laws. And when that happens, you have an obligation to break it, and I'm happy that in breaking it, I have some good company. I have Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego. I have Jesus and Socrates. And I have all of the early Christians who refused to bow.”
I was raised with Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel held close and visited with often through his revolutionary texts and through his daughter Susannah (something I’ll share more about another time), and the brotherhood between Heschel and King is something that swells my heart with the adoration of truth. That is what feels true to me: side by side we return to harmony with the moral law of the universe, side by side.
I think of the system glitches that break solidarity with white supremacy, rupturing a link in the chain in big or small ways that disrupt the kinetic energy of this all-consuming force. I think of that Christian who defended his Jewish brother in the church that day -- who risked his own life to break the human law and serve a higher law that knows all as sacred. I think of Rabbi Heschel who fled Nazi Germany and became one of Dr. King's allies in the Civil Rights Movement. Heschel did not consent to America's mythology, he saw it clearly. He was not a patriot to this land. He maintained his shape, his allegiance to the same higher power Dr. King held faith in, to those eternal and divine laws.
“Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter”
– Dr. King
“There is no limit to the concern one must feel for the suffering of human beings. Indifference to evil is worse than evil itself, [and] in a free society, some are guilty, but all are responsible.”
– Rabbi Heschel
This was a critical thread weaving his life with Dr. King's – living in devotion to what King called “creative maladjustment”... by refusing to normalize inequality and to work continuously to expose injustice so that, “we may be able to emerge from the bleak and desolate midnight of man's inhumanity to man, into the bright and glittering daybreak of freedom and justice." Heschel was a system glitch and he walked beside Dr. King to ensure white Americans were clear that what they should fear most is their silence, their inaction, their consent in the face of oppression; for what could be more poisonous? We're still having that conversation.
These are capacity-exceeding times. We are called to learn our magic again, to reweave a stronger faith to unshakeable moral integrity, to remember the many, many who endured, persisted, and conspired for our survival and arrival to this precise moment. They carried with them so many lessons to weave into intergenerational collective prayers for liberation thorough the evisceration of white supremacy and all oppression. I think of this ancient story Dr. King reminds us of -- that Nebuchadnezzar and Hitler and the KKK and the Proud Boys will rise and fall with futile dynastic reconfigurations but with horrifyingly dangerous consequences that ask us to shapeshift too, to continue glitching the system, to withdraw consent from sick systems, to be righteously wayward, to grow as ancient and eternal as divine love that transcends all.
Dr. King's sermon nears its end with:
“You may be 38 years old as I happen to be, and one day some great opportunity stands before you and calls upon you to stand up for some great principle, some great issue, some great cause—and you refuse to do it because you are afraid; you refuse to do it because you want to live longer; you're afraid that you will lose your job, or you're afraid that you will be criticized or that you will lose your popularity or you're afraid that somebody will stab you or shoot at you or bomb your house, and so you refuse to take the stand. Well you may go on and live until you are 90, but you're just as dead at 38 as you would be at 90! And the cessation of breathing in your life is but the belated announcement of an earlier death of the spirit. You died when you refused to stand up for right, you died when you refused to stand up for truth, you died when you refused to stand up for justice.”
I didn't know Dr. King was shaping my thinking when I began to realize those who insist on being agents of oppression must kill themselves first. That in many ways we share this Earth with, we're governed by, etc. the dead people who are committed to perpetuating a death cult-ure even at the expense of their own lives. The ones who say with gut-burning hypocrisy that my ancestors were "life unworthy of life."
This is why my life is a prayer to everything that serves life and makes life more possible for all beings everywhere. I'll close this post with Dr. King's own closing words to remind us that though we may feel spirit-level weary by the centuries of suppression and oppression living inside our cells, by the insistence of such forces still so potent today, we are in exquisite, divine companionship when we retain our faith, when we remain maladjusted to the illness around us, when we lie and disobey to defy the tyrannical mythologies we're here to transmute.
“Where you’re going this morning, my friends, tell the world that you're going with truth. You're going with justice, you're going with goodness, and you will have an eternal companionship. And the world will look at you and they won't understand you, for your fiery furnace will be around you, but you'll go on anyhow. But if not, I will not bow, and God grant that we will never bow before the gods of evil.”
With deep, reverential love for your life, for mine, for all life,
Rachel
"It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society."
- Jiddu Krishnamurti
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I so appreciate the way you weave Dr King’s sermon into your storytelling here. His quote: “Well you may go on and live until you are 90, but you're just as dead at 38 as you would be at 90!” reminds me so much of a favorite quote from Ed Abbey, “solidarity without action is the ruin if the soul.” Words that trickle through my mind often and which you’ve blown open here.