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After a blissful season of High Holies, here comes daily life…
Here’s a little story from this past summer that began a cascade of questions for me. In July some rabbi friends that I admire organized a monthly day of fasting and activism related to the situation in Gaza. I know that people reading the Megillah have a wide range of feelings about Gaza and about Israel, and that’s not really what I’m chewing on here. I agree with the content of my friends’ position, and I blithely signed on to be a faster.
The fasts are every called for the third Thursday of each month, and the idea is that any individual might just fast, or she might use the day to learn more about Gaza or to bring people together for prayer gatherings, letter-writing or other actions of conscience. As it happened, during the first month of the fast, July, Mickey’s daughter, Shirra, and her family were quickly fixing up their house in Ottawa to sell, under rather stressful circumstances, and I had arranged to go up there for a couple of days to help them out. That initial Thursday fast was on day three of my time in Ottawa. We had been scraping and painting like fiends. I was covered with ivory latex. It was extremely hot and muggy. And, needless to say, Shirra and family didn’t have a working shower. I’d been going back and forth in my head about fasting. I’m not the greatest when I don’t eat. (Yes, Yom Kippur somehow gives me some special burst of energy, blessed be. But that’s not usually how it goes for me…)
I woke up early that Thursday morning, pulled on my skanky painting clothes and realized that there was no way in the world I was going to fast for Gaza that day. And I began to think, as I was pouring my first huge cup of coffee of the day, about some contrasts between the job in front of me and fasting for Gaza. The kids’ situation wasn’t Gaza by any means, but they really needed some help. I was there. I know how to paint a room. My power to affect the world was, in that small corner, not infinite but not insignificant either. By ten PM or so that Thursday night, after we’d painted the bedroom, repaired and painted the scrapes in the living room and dining room, emptied, patched and painted the study and put a second coat on the upstairs hall, I felt that indescribable pleasure of having accomplished something that I could actually see.
And this got me to thinking back over a lifetime of sporadic, occasional forays into the world of activism by symbols. I remember signing up on the work schedule at the Catholic Worker to do a shift praying in front of the Lockheed plant, where they were making some component of nuclear weapons, standing there alone in my tallit at sunrise. I remember getting arrested with seven friends blocking a bulldozer that was demolishing homeless people’s encampments on Fifth Street in Los Angeles. I remember my second arrest, at the Nevada Nuclear Test site, on the fiftieth anniversary of the bombing of Nagasaki. I remember davening in Jerusalem on Rosh Hodesh with the Women at the Wall, being part of the entourage which carried a small sefer Torah from the kotel (the “Wailing Wall”) to a little patio a few hundred yards behind, where they had worked it out for women to be able to read Torah without being assaulted. I remember, ten years ago, davening shacharit with a tiny minyan (including Mina’s father Gabe Cohen, of blessed memory) next to the barricades in Seattle during the anti-globalization uprising. And so on.
I think back to the rebuilding trip I took with four friends to Louisiana last year, which I wrote about some months ago – also in most ways a symbolic action, a gesture of showing up in a place of need and injustice more than accomplishing anything as concrete as a painted bedroom (well, there was that bumpy mudded laundry room ceiling that Lyla and I can lay claim to…)
And my feelings are mixed about all this. My politics have changed very little, if at all. I still stand behind the content of each of these gestures. But as I look back on this little history of mine, what these actions lack for me, in most instances, is seriousness, commitment, endurance. At this stage in my life I admire people who commit themselves to a place, a problem, a community, and stay with it. So I admire Frank Fanto for going to New Orleans not once but over and over, becoming knowledgeable, speaking with passion, growing and changing in his approach there as he comes to understand the situation more deeply. I admire the community which has coalesced over decades around the Nevada Test Site, vigiling year after, teaching, contemplating, building relationships on all sides of the nuclear weapons debacle. I admire the Alliance for Democracy folks of our community, who not only jumped on the Green Tortoise and went up for a wild weekend in Seattle ten years ago next month (yes, that’s right!) but ever since have kept bringing speakers and teachers, offering classes, actions, films, making connections with other issues, generating ongoing inquiry and activism about globalization. I admire the Fair Trade activists of Thanksgiving Coffee Co., Corners of the Mouth and other businesses who put their livelihoods on the line where their politics are. And yes, I admire Brian Walt and Brant Rosen, rabbis whose commitment to peace and justice between Israel and Palestine is deep-seated, ongoing and at some personal cost.
All of these enduring activists need people like you and me to “jump on the bus” when they ask us to, and I’m not ashamed of being a bit player in these occasional events. But these days I’m asking myself some questions that I haven’t really considered before about why I choose the bit parts I do. How much do I care about the issue at hand, and how much is about making the scene with my friends? Is there not some banal element of “fashion” in what I do, a kind of social positioning, like getting a tattoo or wearing hemp clothes? As in: “I’m the kind of person who gets arrested at the Nevada Test Site…” Or, to put it all more positively, what kinds of response to suffering and injustice can I offer which really make use of my particular gifts? Where ought I really to commit myself over time? Where should I take risks, be willing to pay some cost? How can I get smarter about what I do, better informed, deeper in my thinking and my passion both? And, if I make an enduring commitment in one corner of the suffering world, how can I turn away from all the other needs which command attention at the same time?
One particular question for me: as a rabbi, do I have something special to offer by showing up as a part of these symbolic actions? And why should it matter? A lot of organizers like to have clergy folks participate in actions, as though it stamps the gesture with some Higher authority. And maybe it does. But really, does my showing up mean that God is on my side? What about the cleric in the counter-demonstration across the street?
As usual, few answers, more questions. The High Holy Days offer much-needed time to contemplate. And then we beat the willow twigs to importune for rain, we read the last words of Torah and rolled it back to the Beginning, and now it’s time to re-enter the world of action, where, while questions continue to abound, decisions and commitments have to be made.
- Rabbi Margaret Holub © 2009 (home)
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