Good morning, beloved community. I hope today greets you with some sweetness. I’m honored you bring yourself here each week, or whenever you do or can. This piece took a while to compose, and as always, it is a real gift to share it with you.
With big love,
Rach
For years prior to the pandemic, I was desperate for a collective slow-down. I felt trapped in a struggle I was forced to internalize. Rest was still not normalized. Instead, it was a utilitarian notion – only to be done so that more labor could be produced in waking hours. The deep, spacious sanctuary of sleep was traded for "nap pods" with a 15-minute limit, and always booked anyway. Fear and dread rumbled in my belly. The pace of the world was accelerating toward an unsustainable fever pitch with no indication of re-evaluation. We would burn everything in sight with our insistence upon eternal sunlight. In the quietest places in myself I begged the world to get still and soft. I dreamed we might step off the high speed train together and let it ride empty into the distance while we all danced in its dust, that we might feel the temperature cool and our heartbeats slow.
How healthy we could feel in our bodies, how big we could feel in our hearts!
Time felt like a bully. Modernity made it my enemy. Everything had to be done immediately because it should have been done yesterday. I was always late and simultaneously always mentally 20 steps ahead to track what I would inevitably fall behind on. A trap. I was exhausted by the performative ways of being, the scramble to secure private empires, the desperation to display the latest acquisition (whether it was a bag or a business).
But that pause never came. I stepped off one high speed train and boarded another headed to UC Berkeley and the Masters Program in Urban Planning. In the Winter of 2018, one of my mentors came over for a visit. I must have looked more wrecked than I realized because she wouldn't even allow a conversation until I ate a snack, which was just the appetizer that catalyzed me into devouring a full meal in front of her while she waited and watched me eat. Both of us silent.
"Better?"
I nodded, belly warm, tears heavy.
"What's going on?"
I poured out a dozen stories of overwork, burnout, impossible demands, administrative failures, traumatizing classroom experiences which included being told to go sit in "the ghetto" where the Jewish and Black students had been congregated.
She asked me question after question about my history, my past, my relationship to work, my patterns, my beliefs.
After a long pause she said "arbeit macht frei". My mind went blank. Those words were indelible imprints in my being, tattooed into my consciousness, but shockingly my mind could not recall their meaning. She said it again, this time with an imploring gaze like an ancient sage sat before me and it was imperative I get the message. And then in unison we said "work makes you free"1.
In the griefswell of that moment, the magic of memory transported me back to myself at 7 years old, lying supine on the stone in my childhood backyard like a lizard, watching the sky dance. I needed so much time. I needed to lie there in the sun for hours. I needed it, like water, like food, like breath. There are few things more core to my nature than to do nothing for long, long stretches and it is in those precise spaces that everything that means anything is happening. And I would venture to say this is at the core of beingness, for all beings. Slow time. Free time. Borderless time. Sovereign time. Sacred time. Timeless time. To be amongst the more-than-human world means a deep witnessing of effortless effort. As Lao Tzu said: "Nature does not hurry, yet everything is accomplished." My body, our body, was not designed nor intended for insatiable, relentless, destructive work to serve the machines of industry and empire.
"Arbeit macht frei." For the first time in my entire life, I could not simply see those words emblazoned above the gates of Auschwitz as though that was then and there. It was here now. It was always here. It's been here as long as I can remember. It's lived for centuries within my lineage. How deeply incorporated this idea was in my system was a matter of life and death. I kept trying to get away. I left the system for months and years at a time starting in 2015. But I always came back. And though my life-force hung on a precarious thread, to actually *stop* would mean annihilation, because it did for thousands of years of people who led me here into this life. Shortly after my visit with my mentor, my Omi met me for the first time since before she died in 2008, under the redwood tree in the backyard of my Oakland apartment, and then in dreams night after night. As many of y'all know, she hasn't left. She's writing her life alive in my novel right now and this is only possible because, finally, I stopped.
What I call this spacetime I'm immersing myself in is a "Sabbatical", a well-known concept, yet every time I choose to claim it out loud to others, their whole being reflexively reacts with revelation– a deep sigh, a spark in their eye, an eternal resonance. This week, I watched a documentary on Abraham Joshua Heschel. Heschel lived with my Omi's family in Frankfurt for several months before both his and my families were devastated by the Holocaust. Heschel was one of the most influential figures of liberation in modern history, who also happens to be Jewish. He was considered a brother to Martin Luther King Jr, and was instrumental in some of the most significant achievements in social justice and interfaith unity including “Nostra Aetate” – a monumental declaration by the Catholic Church to embrace positive relationships with the world's religions, abandon its mission to convert Jews to Christianity, and abolish their doctrine of anti-Semitism, forged through the friendship between Heschel and Cardinal Augustin Bea. Nostra Aetate paved a path of transformation, including opening the portal for Christians worldover to recognize the Jewish roots of their faith, that Christianity would not exist without Judaism. It was Heschel's theological contributions that inspired MLK Jr. to center the Civil Rights Movement on the Old Testament. Heschel also loved the Black Church (which is a shorthand way of describing what's said in the film, so I encourage y'all to watch it!!)
In the film, the Sabbath itself is a central figure because it is at the core of Jewish practice. Benjamin Sax, a scholar featured in the film, describes the Sabbath as a "cathedral in time... to reconnect to creation." He says, "the Gregorian calendar does not respect Saturday, the Jewish Sabbath, as the day of rest, and in order to become part of the greater society, Jews were being forced to give up this very important part of religious life...". Theologian Walter Brueggemann credits Heschel for helping us see the Sabbath as "intensely Jewish but also not Jewish at all... it's human."
"The meaning of Sabbath is to celebrate time, rather than space. Six days a week we live under the tyranny of things of space. On the Sabbath, we try to become attuned to holiness in time."
- Abraham Joshua Heschel
I watched this film with tears streaming down my cheeks. The seed my mentor planted several years ago is bearing fruit in unimaginable ways as I drain every last drop of colonization from my being, from my lineage. We lost the Sabbath. We lost rest. We lost so much that makes us human because of the insanity of white Christian patriarchal supremacy. The last few years have initiated me agonizingly and euphorically into my role as a cycle breaker. My whole being is a prayer of reclamation and world renewal. This violence ends here. Arbeit macht frei ends with me.
Some of you may know that we are currently in a Shmita year according to the Jewish calendar – the “year of release", a yearlong Sabbath. During Shmita years, debts are to be forgiven, agricultural lands to lie fallow, private land holdings to become open to the commons, and staples such as food storage and perennial harvests to be freely redistributed and accessible to all. A movement is rising in realtime to suggest that Shmita is a means of addressing global catastrophe – environmental, economic, social – to challenge contemporary expectations of continual economic growth and individual profiteering at the expense of the collective. The roots of Jewish faith are antithetical to capitalism. This is why my body rejects it. All of our roots are antithetical to capitalism. This is why your body rejects it too.
I am healing my relationship to time, to labor, to life, to Earth, to everything, flowing on the mystical non-religious currents of my ancestral faith, particularly its Shamanic underpinnings. It was and is survival consciousness that forced us to assimilate to persist against endless genocides which led to the "long-held Jewish exilic hope for acceptability by the predominant society, by a rational, scientific 'western' civilization'" writes Gershon Winkler in the life-changing text "Magic of the Ordinary: Recovering the Shamanic in Judaism". He goes on to say Judaism:
"has more in common with peoples whose teachings are earth-based and honoring of the feminine than with peoples who have proven themselves misogynous and ravagers of the earth; with peoples who are respectful of spiritual paths other than their own, than with peoples who consider their way the only way. ... The Jewish people is an earth-based femini-conscious people that believes in a God who cares as deeply for a worm as for a person..." and he speaks powerfully to the zombified world we now inhabit where people en masse are "clamoring to retreats and workshops to drink thirstily from the wellsprings of the very knowledge that their ancestors had tried for centuries to wipe out."
..."This is a good thing," he says, "because their ancestors, too, long before they got colonized and overridden by the Church, were keepers of aboriginal wisdom."
It is here that I go, to the wellspring of my origin story, to all the places where life once thrived, where technologies and infrastructures were organized around wellness, abundance, and common good. This is your origin story too.
In closing for today, I want to lift up the course I'm offering, which looks like it wants to start Sunday, September 4th. If you also are committed to supreme decolonization toward personal and collective freedom in this lifetime, you will be companioned in this tender, heart-open space on your/our path. It would be an honor to journey with you. Learn more here.
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The slogan Arbeit macht frei was placed at the entrances to a number of Nazi concentration camps. The slogan's use was implemented by Schutzstaffel (SS) officer Theodor Eicke at Dachau concentration camp[6] and then copied by Rudolf Höss at Auschwitz.
Nothing sounds better than a global shmita. Beautiful storytelling here, Rach.