Gathering the Light - 3/10/2024

Hello everyone, and thank you for joining us today for our community kaddish. Today marks the 155th day since the genocide in Gaza began. 155 days where the Israeli military has murdered, starved and deprived Palestinian people in the West Bank and Gaza of agency, safety and basic resources. In many ways, it pains and saddens me that we have to keep coming here to gather, mourn and pray. We should not have to be here. We should not live in a world where governments aid and abet genocide, and do it in the name of Jewish safety.

On the other hand, I know that this is exactly what I need, and maybe what many of you need as well. I need to have a place to put my grief, my rage, my despair. I believe that the martyrs need and deserve to be mourned. I also think of this space as one of community and possibility and hope. 

I, along with 300 other people from across the country, took part in a mass action in Washington DC Thursday night. We spent the day together in training before deploying to our locations. This was a diverse group. We represented dozens of organizations, spanned generations and came from across the US, from California to Maine. While I spent most of the day pretty nervous, unable to eat and having to try and breathe enough not to throw up, there were many people around me who were acting like it was just another Thursday. These are people who have taken part in civil disobedience before and knew exactly what kinds of state violence we might face. 

In the first minutes of our time together, the organizers grounded us in the space. While they noted the vast array of emotions that we might be carrying into the day, they also reminded us time and time again, that this was a day of love and care. We had the power and obligation to care for one another and to create the safety that all of us deserved, because the state was certainly not going to give it to us. 

One of the first  things that we did together as a group was to sing. Our voices came together like a flowing wave of light and energy and it provided me comfort. Sitting in the uncertainty and fear was uncomfortable, and all I had to do was look to my right and left and I would see hundreds of people who shared in the idea that we could build another, better world.  

Much of the time when we organize, we think about what we are fighting against. We are fighting against injustice, against genocide, against apartheid and imperialism, but how often to we dream about what we are fighting for? 

In Judaism, the idea of reimagining the world is often expressed as Tikkun Olam -or repairing the world. Mentions of Tikkun Olam appear for the first time in the Talmud which was written around 1000 CE. As often happens in Jewish liturgy, the idea gets iterated on and explored. One of my favorite enumerations on this phrase comes from Kabbalah, or Jewish mysticism. Rabbi Isaac Luria who lived from 1534 - 1572 imagined it like this: 

During the creation of the world, it was stated that the world was in a state of tohu va vohu, or chaos. From this chaos emerged a world where humans were endowed a divine energy. God sent out ten vessels, like ships, each carrying a piece of divine light as cargo. However, the vessels were fragile and could not contain the power of this divine light and so this divine light scattered. Some remained on this earth and acts as a positive force, but some fell to “sitra ahra” or the other world and constituted evil in our world.

So though there is darkness, there is also an inherent good and it is the job of those engaged in tikkun olam to find the light and create  “A space to err, to fall, to believe, to doubt, to cry, to laugh.” (Rabbi Gershon Winkler and Lakme Batya Elior). 

Zionists use this teaching to try and justify their mission. In the 1920’s Rav Kook, the first Ashkenazi chief rabbi of British Mandatory Palestine, and one of the founders of religious Zionism, took this teaching to understand that Jews needed to collect themselves and move to “Israel.” This was the only way that he understood how to gather the light.  Though I wholeheartedly reject this reading, I also find myself drawn to and challenged by this nebulous question of what it means to take part in repair. What does it mean to gather up darkness? What does it mean to create a world of light? It is hard to undertake such visioning. We have never lived in a world of light. And certainly now is a time of great darkness. It can feel insurmountable to even dream of a world that is better. A world where Palestine is free. A world where our government lays down its arms and invests in life. 

I was given the opportunity to imagine and act on this vision this past week. Despite fear, uncertainty, moments of hopelessness, we came together. We took on the work of picking up the pieces of the broken vessel as a collective. It is impossible to do this work alone. If there are in fact shards of light scattered across the world, we must work together to find them and put the pieces back together. We do this together not because we only see darkness, but because we hold the conviction that we can live in a world where money isn’t used for bombs, and chemical weapons, but instead used for housing, education, healthcare, you name it. 

We have the duty, wherever we are, to find the light. To work toward the world that we imagine. I urge you all to take on the hard work of imagination. We must sit in our grief, and also take the time and energy to dream of what the world we want is, and how we can get there together.

With that, I will pass it over to Kate who will lead us in song.