On the Election - 11/10/2024

Hello everyone, and thank you for joining for today’s community kaddish. It has been exactly 400 days since the start of the genocide in Palestine. Over the past 400 days, somewhere between 42,000 and 300,000 people have been killed in Gaza alone, with thousands more killed in the Zionist Entity’s multi-pronged assault on not just Palestine, but Lebanon, Yemen, Iran and Syria. To say that this scares and disgusts me would be an understatement. 

One of the questions that I keep asking myself is this: to what end will Zionism go? When will they determine that they have “defeated Hamas” and ensured their own safety? How many countries will they bomb, how many people will they kill, how much land will they destroy and how much climate devastation they will cause in the name of Zionism? I do not think that we have the answer for this, and regardless of what the answer is, we know that their goals are genocidal, firmly rooted in white and Jewish supremacy and are without any sense of morality. With Trump’s win this week, someone who claims to be the most pro-Israel president ever, I worry that an end to this genocide is even further away and that the forces of Zionism will only be able to expand further. 

Even though it seems somewhat pointless in this moment, I still pray that this will end soon. I hope that in these last months before Trump gets in office, the Democratic party takes some sort of action to stop the weapons, and stop the genocide. I also pray that all of those across the Middle East who have been targets of the Zionist Entity find safety and healing, that the missing are found, that people can get food and medicine and that this happens tomorrow. I know that this is overly optimistic, but I pray anyway.

Last week when we gathered, we talked about how in some ways, the results of the election did not matter and that regardless of who won, we would have a president who supports genocide, doesn’t care about LGBTQIA+ rights, and who treats immigrants with violence. That being said, the results of the past week have hit me with some decently long spirals about what the future holds interspersed with a lot of numbness and I feel like I have had many of the same conversations over and over with friends and loved ones:

Bad question, but how are you holding up?

I think I’m as okay as I can be, but definitely feeling [insert emotion from sad/scared/angry/not surprised/numb] what about you?

Yeah, about the same. 

Anything I can do to support you?

No, I don’t think so, but I appreciate that you reached out. What about you?

Yeah, same. 

Some of these conversations have gone from emotional check in to immediate problem solving and action planning. For example, friends have shared ways that they have tried to take care of others in their lives, or have chatted about mutual aid networks they want to join or grow. I have already been part of planning calls for different kinds of organizations who want to expand their networks, how we want to think about organizational security, and talked with my supervisor about how we imagine continuing to be grant funded if Trump and RFK abolish the NIH. 

For me at least, I don't really know how I’m feeling, or know how to tap into myself. The part of me that makes lists and takes action is so much at the forefront right now, and slowing down to have any kind of emotional check in feels impossible. I have been dreading presenting some words for you all today because I simply do not have them. So I went to Jewish Currents. And I found this:

The ambient misery of this week is a kind of mourning for the hopeful futures that have already been foreclosed and the lives that will inevitably be sacrificed as a result. It would be hubristic to propose a manifesto for progressives at such a time; however, it is not too early to contemplate what might have been done differently to prevent a Trump restoration…It was all but predetermined by a crisis of liberalism years in the making, one born of imperial arrogance, haughty indifference to voter grievances, and an educated elite cloistered from its public and confused about its core values. We are indeed not going back—instead we’re going forward into a dark, dystopian, genocidal future that liberals played no small role in shaping.

These lines really resonate with me because I do think that in my haze, I have very much been feeling something that can only be described as ambient misery with anger toward the Democratic establishment. In no world did I think that Kamala Harris was going to save us, and though I am not surprised at all by the election results, I am still grieving for exactly the reasons that David Klion writes. 

I want to be optimistic that things can change for the better and as someone who has been an organizer for much of my adult life, I do so because I do think the world can be better. I organize because I am implicitly an optimist. I want to believe that if we strengthen our networks, take care of each other, run the right sequence of direct actions and legislative campaigns, that we can end the genocide, end the war on drugs, have open borders, house and feed everyone, and end capitalism, imperialism, facism and zionism. I know that this is not true, and has never been true, and it feels so much further away this week than it did last week, even if in some ways, not much has changed. 

This week, I have been holding this tension of: we are all doomed, and there is a way through this together, and that is what I most want to hold on to. We do not have the luxury of doing anything else. 

Yesterday, a group of us convened for the first time to create a Providence anti-Zionist jewish minyan, aka an alternative to a synagogue. One of the people, led us in a song that I think all of us really tapped into. The words, written by Kohenet Keshira HaLev Fife are quickly becoming a mantra for me: It is upon us, to dream beyond us - we’re the ones we’ve been waiting for.