Day 82: Walk Through the Door
Photo by Isabella Dellolio Photography
Amherst, MA
May 31, 2020
June 2, 2020
Day 82
Thank you to everyone who shared words of support and love this weekend as I became a bat mitzvah at the age of 46. I am as committed as ever to the inextricable relationship between faith and justice, prayer and action, inner and outer work, and will continue to write, speak out, stumble, listen, and learn in the spirit of Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, who wrote in 1963, "The greatest heresy is despair.” And so very grateful to Rabbi Ben Weiner and my fellow travelers this past year, whose own words you can read here.
We must mobilize our despair into action. No one is exempt.
Since Sunday, I have been a swirl of reading, listening, trying to keep up with the news, and talking with Mani and a couple of close friends and my kids about everything that's happening.
This morning, I put in my air pods, started my Strava app (I am on my way to being a running geek), and hit "play." I don't think it's a coincidence that I set a new personal best -- 6.2 miles in 65 minutes. My body and spirit felt downright propelled by music, rage, solidarity, and uncompromising love.
It is not enough to "say their names" or to express our feelings about what's happening. Having strong emotions like outrage, shock, fear, and despair is not only ok but immensely, profoundly human -- but process those in your journal, on the phone, on a run. That's what friends are for. That's what art is for. Emotion alone will not move the needle towards true justice, and moving the needle is everyone's job. White people must actively amplify Black voices, learn from and follow Black teachers and leaders, share actions and resources, and be willing to risk something if this toxic system is ever going to fall. We must taken it upon ourselves to understand the true history of this country and the ways in which it is operating exactly as it was designed to. These horrors are not new and they are not an aberration.
I know we all have our own lives we are trying to maintain. The pandemic has taken a huge toll on all of us. For some, death has been close. For some, livelihoods have been shaky if not destroyed. For some, mental and emotional health has been precarious. I was going to try to write a whole separate post about this, but now that I'm finally sitting my ass in a chair, really it is not that complicated: We have to live in the AND.
The AND is a between place. Our personal and societal literacy when it comes to this place is severely undeveloped. The AND place is also something that the culture of white supremacy -- in which we are all immersed, whether you see that or not -- does not recognize. We are taught to believe in opposites -- good and bad white people, good and bad cops, good and bad writing, good and bad activism.
If we are going to be true allies to Black lives, if we are going to do this work every day for the rest of our lives -- because this work will not be done in our lifetime -- we have got to let that shit go. The truth is you get to have your feelings, you get to have your personal struggles, your own worries and fears, you get to tend to your life, you get to write what you are writing, you get to love what you love in this world -- AND it is your responsibility to walk through the door of anti-racism work. It is a choice that we must make each day, continuously.
Along these lines, I wrote my drash (a short written reflection, usually text-based) for my bat mitzvah about walking through the doors of the synagogue, both literally and also in the more figurative sense of making a personal commitment to Jewish communal life. What I want to say to you about that here -- before you read it -- is that this is really analogous to the work of dismantling racism.
We have to make a commitment. Maybe it's guilt that gets you through the door, maybe it's love, maybe it's moral outrage, maybe it's longing for change. The important thing is showing up. Not because it makes you feel good, but because you are an important, irreplaceable member of the community, and all of our faces and voices matter.
All of us have the power to reach the people we can reach, as well as to turn inward in deep self-reflection about where racism and whiteness live in us. If you are looking for reflective writing prompts to help you open some of those interior doors, join Leesa Renee Hall's Patreon community.
We must all do the work. If you are opting out, own that choice. But if you say you care, do something. To paraphrase Rumi, we must not go back to sleep.
Bat Mitzvah Drash
Since the quarantine began, my running game has been strong. It gets me outside, into the body, connected to nature. It has been a much-needed counterbalance to the amount of time I spend online. The truth is, some Saturday mornings -- especially now that we can’t walk through the doors of the JCA, something I’d begun to look forward to over the course of the last year -- I’d rather be outside. Adjusting to praying “alone together” at home has not come easily, and I’d be lying if I didn’t tell you I’ve noticed the impulse to recede. After all, I’ve asked myself, who will notice if my little square isn’t here?
In other words, the pandemic has given me yet another opportunity to wrestle with what I’ve come to see as a central element of consciously living a Jewish life: The tension between yirah and ahava, fear and love.
Twenty years ago, I served as a Hillel director. I remember telling students not ten years younger than me that there was no such thing as a “good” Jew or a “bad” Jew. This belief remains one of the constants on my Jewish journey. I have grappled with going to synagogue out of guilt and obligation -- yirah -- and I have leaned into the community out of ahava -- love -- learning your voices and faces and coming to take comfort in your presence.
Over the course of preparing for this day, and now in the midst of conditions unimaginable even just a few months ago, I see that we must step out beyond this binary into some space between either/ors. I am reminded of a famous section of the Rumi poem, “A Great Wagon.” You might recognize the first two lines:
Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing,
there is a field. I’ll meet you there.
When the soul lies down in that grass,
the world is too full to talk about.
Ideas, language, even the phrase “each other”
doesn’t make any sense.
The breeze at dawn has secrets to tell you.
Don’t go back to sleep.
You must ask for what you really want.
Don’t go back to sleep.
People are going back and forth across the doorsill
where the two worlds touch.
The door is round and open.
Don’t go back to sleep.
This year of study and preparation has woken up new aspects of my neshama, my Jewish soul, a soul that has stirred in me from a young age, since long before I really understood that I was even Jewish and had no form into which to pour the fullness of my Jewish being.
Now I have form -- prayer, community, study, song. I do not want to go back to sleep. And maybe, like Rumi wrote, what compels me to show up is less important than the showing up itself. Beyond wrongdoing and rightdoing, beyond good Jew and bad Jew, in a time when we can no longer walk through the physical doors to our place of meeting, we can gather here, in this virtual field of connection and community.
Just as our ancestors have always found a way to keep tradition alive during dark times, we will find sparks of continuity in the midst of crisis and change. Maybe sometimes obligation and love, yirah and ahava, are not so different after all. Whatever gets you across the doorsill where the two worlds touch -- I’ll keep meeting you there.