Hello beloved community,
I didn’t expect to be away for so long. How a month has passed so swiftly, how much I ache to write and sometimes my very obsession snuffs out the creative flame. But here I am, just a few days shy of one full year of writing on Substack. If you’re new here, I’d love to share this, and this, and this as a few of the first seeds in this fertile soil.
Today’s piece means so much to me and the synchronicity of it feels particularly sweet. It was completely unplanned to release this just a few hours before Hanukkah begins.
In Jewish tradition, we see the actions we take now as a prophetic prayer to dream ourselves into this same action next year. When we light tonight’s candles, we celebrate the idea that no matter what we will be lighting them again next year. Projecting ourselves into the future and visioning greater possibility is a promise to both our ancestors and to our inheritors. We will see the light dawn again. We will see ourselves fortified in the year to come. We will repair and renew and rebirth. We will kindle deep relationships with all beings and with the fire of life itself.
In this spirit, I feel honored to share these words.
I look forward to sharing something sweet in just a few days on the solstice. I will also share the total donation amount to Sogorea Te’ Land Trust. This is a perfect time to join or upgrade to a paid monthly or annual membership so together we can contribute even more to this gorgeous work.
With great love,
Rachel
The crisp breeze brightens the corners of her eyes alive as it runs its long fingers through her tight curls, blooming them into a golden mane. Sunlight dances on the waves of her oceanic irises. Her face creases with laughter, cheeks blush with joy. Her father sails beside her. They swim through the city streets, echolocating one another amidst the density of life by sensing the exuberant beating of each other's hearts. They gleefully chase each other with ecstatic grins. The day is wide and they are free.
This scene stretches boundlessly in my imagination. She is the animated version of the only childhood photo I've ever seen of her. He is a phantom that enfleshes only for quick glimpses – the profile of a gentle face, a slim figure in a fitted suit. I know him without ever having seen him.
This eternal bicycle ride of my Omi's (grandmother's) youth plays on perpetually in some alternate realm that meets me unexpectedly, intermittently, and more frequently these days. There is no beginning. No conclusion. It emerges spontaneously in my conscious awareness then recedes into the darkened chambers of my mind where fragments of memories and dreams and imaginings merge nebulously.
Why? What am I meant to see in this dream of her dream living through me now?
This scene came back to me just a few weeks ago in the midst of agony. In dialogue with someone very dear to me, a bomb exploded in my chest upon hearing them say something exceedingly cruel about Jewish people. We were discussing the Holocaust when they asked how Hitler could be driven to such extremes. And then they said it. "Jews must have really been running things to attract that kind of hatred..." In other words, we had it coming.
I panicked. Though their comments were a literal regurgitation of the most toxic, insidious antisemitic conspiracy theories I've heard echoed a thousand times, it was the shock of it seeping through their lips that destroyed me. The innocence of their expression, the sincerity of their contemplation, the closeness of our connection. Like colliding with an asteroid, like being struck by lightning, I was obliterated. In this loose, unguarded moment, their statement was a complete shock, exploding me with heart-pumping terror and world-scorching rage. I stunned myself with the fury I waged at them as tears rained down my cheeks. I was sharp with my words, but not cruel. I spit fire about the grotesque ignorance of this idea, naming example after example of the insanity of victim blaming.
This moment crashed on my shore within a perfect storm. Just a few days prior, my aunt shared the details of her recent trip to Sonnenstein Euthanasia Center to see the very gas chamber where one of my great grandfathers was murdered by the Nazis while their "scientists" timed the expediency of his death as a test case for the 'Final Solution'. The intimacy and the proximity I hold with this catastrophic horror, compounded with the recent and continual amplification of antisemitism by celebrities, athletes, and demagogues, turns my whole body electric. 'Ye is one of the most famous celebrities in human history. He is worshipped like a God. I went to one of his first concerts in Chicago in 2008, way before Kim Kardashian, way before explosive fame. He was already messianically dominating that stage, that audience, like Jesus reborn right before our eyes through the smoke machines and stadium lights.
Celebrities have the power to transform outrageous propositions into palatable or even popular ideas and send them rippling virally through the masses. We don't need to speculate on the possible "risk" of yet another celebrity capturing public attention with antisemitic rhetoric. The data is already here:
2021 was the highest year on record for documented reports of harassment, vandalism and violence directed against Jews according to the Anti-Defamation League. (I can only imagine what 2022's data will show.)
According to the FBI’s annual data on hate crimes, crimes targeting the Jewish community consistently constitute 55% of all religion-based crimes. Meanwhile, Jews are a mere 2.4% of the American population.
Antisemitic violence is breaking records in nearly 30 years of study by the ADL.
I feel remarkably lonely beneath the spirit-suffocating cloak of antisemitism. Despite its enormity, it remains difficult to discuss. When I attempt to bring it up amongst friends, even Jewish ones at times, I'm met with awkwardness and an eagerness to quickly change the subject, leaving me raw. To be Jewish is to question the validity of a relentless pain, to withstand a continuous denial of our stories and our truths, and to have our trauma met with laughter. Just a week ago, Dave Chappelle oriented his entire opening monologue on Saturday Night Live around his ferocious antisemitism, met with a boisterous audience enthusiastically applauding his remarks.
Antisemitism is a culturally acceptable, nationally approved, wildly entertaining form of racism in America.
It is easy to insert an antisemitic joke into casual conversation.
It is easy to feel that it's insignificant –mundane even– to repeat antisemitic tropes.
It is easy to believe a conspiracy theory instead of facing one's own pain, instead of responsibly confronting inconvenient truths of how white supremacy, colonialism, imperialism, elitism organize our lives around consumption, distraction, hypnotization, incarceration.
I've heard it said that Jews are the canaries in the coal mine. Our spine-tingling, terror-lingering sensitivities to precarious levels of safety is a warning cry signaling the proliferation of fascist ideology in society. It is not simply the Holocaust we carry in our bones, it is thousands of years of global torment.
I remind myself often that pale-skinned Jews have only been "white" for ~60-70 years since fleeing for survival en masse to the United States – the few that could. I look at the ship manifestos of my ancestors and see that every other migrants’ nationality is listed obviously as their country of origin, their birthplace. I scan over row after row – Lithuania, Germany, Poland, France, Hungary – sparsely interrupted by the word "Jude" in place of a country. I turn to ancestry.com to dive into the meticulous work my uncle has done to track our family history, and I see a dozen different towns reflected in his research. I asked him naively once, "why did they move so much?"
"Pogroms," he said. "And we were the lucky ones because every single town listed here demonstrates how close we were to annihilation." Every single one of those towns could have been the end of my family’s story, lost to the other side of time.
To be Jewish is hold this question permanently in your heart: "we are safe here, but for how long?"
To be Jewish is to exist within a web of contradictions (though I'd argue this is what it means to be human). Pale-skinned Jews are simultaneous victims of white supremacy and beneficiaries of white privilege -- but the latter has only been true, as I said, for a few decades. Shorter than the average lifetime.
To be Jewish is to be antisemitically associated with a particular kind of “settler-colonial” Zionism as a baseline assumption, when it is only part of the story that a vocal minority is trapped in the trauma response of ethno-nationalism. And where does that come from? In part, after thousands of years of persecution since the inception of Christianity (which robbed Jesus of his own Judaism), when the promise of a safe space for Jewish people emerged just 74 years ago, the weary victims of onslaught rushed to adopt the idea and walked right into an imperial trap. The master's tools will never dismantle the master's house1, but they were seduced. A people so thoroughly dispossessed were offered the refuge of possession as pawns for British colonial powers with lustful eyes on the Middle East, freshly indoctrinated into the cult of “whiteness” for a purely strategic purpose. But this is an old history. Older than “whiteness” and “wokeness”.
If we are willing to see the way white supremacy works on all us, the same story repeats itself, like in early "America" when indentured servants were called "white" and then pitted against Black slaves to decimate a unified uprising. Lest we forget, Hitler learned his tricks from the US, and his favorite boys were slurped like Coca-Cola into American empire - from NASA to the FBI. Liberated from death camps to become colonizers is not a story to be proud of, and this too fractures the Jewish community - turning siblings against each other - as another technology of oppression.
Can we find liberatory possibility in diaspora, then compost the notion of "diaspora" entirely, because there is no sovereignty to be found in nationalism? Freedom is gained by remembering we are home wherever we are when we are connected and responsible to the land beneath our feet. The forced migration of my people across sweeping landmasses and enormous oceans means home is everywhere; a divine truth that connects us all. And it is equally possible to find liberation on our ancestral homelands, if we re-cohere as a community in solidarity with all oppressed peoples and release this grip on the same oppressive tactics that have insisted upon annihilating us since time immemorial.
If Jews are indeed canaries, may we see ourselves deep in the underworld amongst millions, billions of canaries of all colors and kinds. What are we birthing together in the dark, at the center of all creation?
If we are the ignored warning, the invalidated alarm, may we see ourselves close to the Earth in this way. Her devastation dismissed. Could this unifying grief usher in the abandonment of all delusion, distortion, and separation and commit us with fiercer loyalty to our shared, beloved mother?
I wonder if some people turn away from Jewish faith because the burden to bear is too great. Judaism overwhelms me with its complexity. I grew up in a Jewish culture that placed an excruciating emphasis on the suffering of our people, with mournful wailing and somber tones of a foreboding patriarch on the bimah2, amidst an incredibly high bar of personal achievement. Judaism is only visibilized through exceptionalism. It is so easy to forget that white supremacy is the force that creates exceptionalism to scapegoat success just as equally as failure, to exacerbate the disease of hyperindividualism, to spotlight the rare people in "inferior" groups who've somehow managed, against all odds, to rise to the "top" of a constructed regime - be it in Hollywood or in business.
"There is a high cost of living to be paid by a Jew. He has to be exalted in order to be normal in a world that is neither propitious for nor sympathetic to his survival. Some of us, tired of sacrifice and exertion, often wonder: is Jewish existence worth the price? Others are overcome with panic; they are perplexed and despair of recovery."
Abraham Joshua Heschel
To be Jewish is to bear the pressure of preventing the obliteration of our people, a burden placed on us in our childhood and reinforced perpetually. To be honest, part of me resents the way I need to write about antisemitism so much more prolifically these days. This is not what I expected. This is not what the vast majority of my writing has been about over the course of my life. And, it is the intensification of antisemitism that has catapulted me into relationship with Judaism like I've never known it before.
As pandemic surges coincided with an upswell of antisemitic rhetoric claiming Jews were the orchestrators of global devastation, I found, on Facebook of all places, a series of courses on Rewilding Judaism by now-beloved friends who described Judaism as a living myth. I followed the stream as it widened into a wild river pouring out truths I had never heard before about this faith of my ancestors – a wellspring of Earth-based, femme-conscious wisdom tradition. I found a Judaism that sang my song back to me with more vibrance than ever, loving and warm and infused with honey. I am falling in love with Jewish mysticism, magic, sorcery, medicine more deeply every day.
I have always loved the way Judaism prioritizes questions over answers. As Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel wrote in "The Mystical Element in Judaism":
“There are people who take great care to keep away from the mists produced by fads and phrases. They refuse to convert realities into opinions, mysteries into dogmas, and ideas into a multitude of words, for they realize that all concepts are but glittering motes in a sunbeam. They want to see the sun itself.
When we stand at the door that opens out to the Infinite, we see how insubstantial is our knowledge. Even when we shut the door to the Inifinte and retire to the narrow limits of our notions, our minds cannot remain confined. Again, to some people explanations and opinions are a token of wonder's departure. In the kabbalists, the drive and the fire and the light are never put out. Like the vital power in ourselves that gives us the ability to fight and to endure, to dare and to conquer, which drives us to experience the bitter and the perilous, there is an urge in wistful souls to starve rather than be fed on sham and distortion. ... They want to taste the whole wheat of spirit before it is ground by the millstones of reason. They would rather be overwhelmed by the symbols of the inconceivable than wield the definitions of the superficial.
The universe, exposed to the violence of our analytical mind, is being broken apart. It is split into the known and unknown, into the seen and unseen. In mystic contemplation, all things are seen as one.”
I am enamored with this lineage of edgewalkers and fugitives and dreamers and lovers, these brilliant seekers beyond the known, beyond proof, beyond evidence and reason. I am untangling the poisoning Christianization of Judaism, and in this undoing I find compassion for the process of survival – that hiding our faith inside Christianity, that rubbing our faith in the grindstone of empire until it was threadbare, may have been the very thing that preserved it long enough for a new generation of people to rise up - a mighty wave of cycle-breakers. I feel us now, cleansing toxins and rehydrating withered roots, reweaving the tapestries of our belonging rich with information, with tools, with blueprints that stand in technicolor contrast to capitalism, racism, elitism, nationalism, and Christianity to bloom an alternative world that would make all oppression not only insane but dysfunctional, disruptive, and unnecessary. The technologies embedded in Judaism, like Shmita, would wipe out capitalism instantaneously if it was lived in its fullness. That to me is the definition of faith.
My companion's comment a few weeks ago collided with the highly flammable tinder simmering in my belly. Antisemitism remains too easy to digest, to internalize. Antisemitism need not struggle to enlist its recruits. It does so through one of the most potent tools available: culture.
After the sacred rage of my initial response diffused with the help of a sobbing phone call for support, compassion returned to widen my heart again to this person. I was able to distinguish them from this antisemitic idea. I looked at them with an unconditionally loving gaze. I was unafraid. I saw how damaging it was for them, for who they are in truth, to be infected by this depravity. I also saw clearly that this took residence just on the surface of their being -- it hadn't sunk in to shape their worldview, it was the shallow indoctrination of American culture at work, like the way we all know the Nike slogan to be "Just Do It" or could picture the golden McDonalds logo without hesitation whether we consume those products or not.
I gently cleaned out the wound and poured my honey into it. I realized how lucky I was that they felt safe enough in our connection to actually say those words out loud to me, to allow that energy to move through them, because, as this person has taught me so beautifully: it is not the thought (which we can't control), but the act of suppression that breeds violence. In the end, we were both impressed by the way we could hold this conversation together. I was grateful for the space made for my righteous anger to burst forth on behalf of all of my ancestors to speak long-buried truths without punishment, with patience. I was able to radiate the beauties of my faith I'd been cultivating inside myself for the last 3 years in a dialogue I wouldn't have had otherwise. I told them: "it's not that I feel a religious connection to Judaism, it's not even that I'm attached to the identity of being Jewish. What I’m passionate about are the practices, the culture, the lifeways. What inspires me are the core tenants of service to humanity and the earth, the humility, the integrity, the commitment to behold life itself as a holy experience, to be reverent of the sublime calling it is to incarnate. My love is of a cosmology that is my portal to the whole.
I do not feel held in a world of fellow Jews. I feel held in a world where Judaism is held with appreciation, admiration, respect, and wonder, where the gifts of Judaism can be shared generously, in reciprocity with the abundant offerings of other cultural, spiritual, intellectual, artistic, culinary, etc expressions of this planets' immense diversity. I feel held in a world where our unique lifeways lead us to the common wellspring of all life, to steward these waters and nourish ourselves in kinship.
My Omi returns to me often, holding this vision alongside me. She shows me that her light could never be dimmed, that her joy could never truly be stolen, by Hitler or anyone, and that to make her memory a revolution is to feel the breeze brighten the corners of my eyes, to feel freedom expand my heart, to nourish a presentfuture where this is true for all beings everywhere. This is the dream of a dream I am living now.
Thank you so much for your generous presence here. If you value what you find here and would like to support my work, consider leaving a heart and/or comment. It truly means so much, and I always love to hear from you.
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Audre Lorde
the raised platform in the synagogue from which the Torah is read and services led
I feel like I've been been awakened to an entirely new appreciation for the remarkable beauty and the deep ache of the Jewish experience. The way you artfully weave these complex, multigenerational issues sparked new connections for me at the micro and macro scale. You make your ancestors proud, friend.