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- CORRECTION - Havdalah #14: Purim, Narcan Training, and News Roundup
CORRECTION - Havdalah #14: Purim, Narcan Training, and News Roundup
7 Adar II, 5784 / March 16, 2024
White Rose RI
March 17, 2024
CORRECTION
We originally listed the wrong committee for bill H7784 in the Bill Tracker. This bill will be heard in the House Committee on Environment and Natural Resources. The instructions below on how to submit testimony have been updated.
Ramadan Mubarak everyone! (and happy Ides of March to everyone with a tumblr: RIP your dash).
It’s a time for reckoning with ourselves, in a number of ways: the time change has happened, Ramadan has started, Lent is nearly over, and Passover is coming. James has a stark reflection on Purim, and we have a round up of news in FashWatch (thanks be to Steve).
Enjoy the longer days, everyone, and use them well.
Mind how you go.
Katherine
Reminders for Legislative Advocacy
Be aware that written testimony submitted to any committee is considered public and will be posted to and accessible on the General Assembly website.
All times and locations given below are accurate as of the writing of this newsletter, but the RI Legislature is prone to changing time and locations of hearings with little notice. If you want to give in-person testimony for a bill, go to this Bill Lookup Page to double check the bill status and meeting information before you go. Put the bill number (no H, no S) in the Bills input field and hit Enter for the most up to date information.
Rise of the House or the Senate is when the full House or Senate finishes meeting together and breaks into separate committee meetings.
For in-person testimony, when you arrive and/or during the meeting, you will receive instructions on when and how you can give testimony. Don’t be afraid to poke someone who looks like they know what they’re doing and ask.
The Updated Access to Public Records Act (APRA) Bill
Summary: This bill will improve government transparency and access to public records, which would include body-worn camera footage of police misconduct.
Our position: FOR / IN SUPPORT OF
Current Status: In committee (House)
How to Submit Written Testimony:
Submit testimony by: Monday, March 18, 4:00pm
Write a short statement, 1-3 paragraphs, explaining why you support the bills
Include your name, the bill number (H7181), and your viewpoint (FOR)
Email written testimony to:
How to Give In-Person Testimony:
Attend the committee meeting:
The House Committee on State Government & Elections meeting, Tuesday, March 19, at the Rise of the House (usually around 5:00pm) in the House Lounge at the State House
Bill has not yet been scheduled for a hearing in the Senate
Be prepared to share a brief statement about why you support these bills Include your name, the bill number (H7181), and your viewpoint (FOR)
The Protection of the Freedom to Read
Summary: This bill would protect library workers, educators, and museum professionals from criminal prosecution for teaching about or sharing books with information about sex or containing LGBTQ themes. Forty-four other states, including all other New England states, have this type of protection in place.
Our position: FOR / IN SUPPORT OF
Current Status: In committee (House)
How to Submit Written Testimony:
Submit testimony by: Wednesday, March 20, 4:00pm
Write a short statement, 1-3 paragraphs, explaining why you support the bills
Include your name, the bill number (H7575), and your viewpoint (FOR)
Email written testimony to:
How to Give In-Person Testimony:
Attend the committee meeting:
The House Committee on Judiciary meeting, Thursday, March 21, at the Rise of the House (usually around 5:00pm) in the House Lounge at the State House
Bill has not yet been scheduled for a hearing in the Senate
Be prepared to share a brief statement about why you support these bills. Include your name, the bill number (H7575), and your viewpoint (FOR)
An Act Relating to Health and Safety — Air Pollution
Bill Number: H7784
Summary: This bill would prohibit the department of environmental management from adopting motor vehicle emissions standards based on California's promulgated standards. It also requires any rules or regulations related to said standards be repealed.
Our position: AGAINST / IN OPPOSITION
Current Status: In committee (House)
How to Submit Written Testimony:
Submit testimony by: Wednesday, March 20, 4:00pm
Write a short statement, 1-3 paragraphs, explaining why you oppose the bills
Include your name, the bill number (H7784), and your viewpoint (AGAINST)
Email written testimony to:
How to Give In-Person Testimony:
Attend the committee meeting:
The House Committee on Environment and Natural Resources, Thursday, March 21, at the Rise of the House (usually around 5:00pm) in room 135 at the State House
Be prepared to share a brief statement about why you oppose these bills. Include your name, the bill number (H7784), and your viewpoint (AGAINST)
Help a Dedicated DARE Member Avoid Eviction
DARE has a longtime member who is in need of help with back rent. She is an older Black woman who has been helping organize to stabilize rent in Providence. She has faithfully advocated for the people of Providence and needs our help to stay in her home with her grandkids. Please help with what you can!
Middletown Library Narcan Training
When: Tuesday, March 26, 6:00pm
Where: Middletown Library Local History Room, 700 West Main Road, Middletown, RI 02842
Learn how to recognize, prevent, and respond to an opioid overdose by using naloxone (Narcan)
Registration is encouraged on the Middletown Library website, but drop ins are welcome!
This free program is offered by a collaboration between the Middletown Prevention Coalition, the Newport County Prevention Coalition, and the Middletown Public Library
James (he / him)
Purim is nigh, and I am desperately trying to ignore it.
Purim has never been an event I feel a great attachment to. This fact seems counterintuitive to many who know me; my theatricality and love for peacocking around in costumes would certainly lend itself to a stirring performance in a spiel, and the seriousness with which I take October 31st would naturally (but incorrectly) lead one to assume that I have a similar affinity for what’s often called “the Jewish Halloween.” I have no fondness for hamantaschen, and my favorite character in the Purimspiel, Vashti, vanishes after Act One, if she's even cast at all. On especially busy springs, I often skip Purim festivities altogether. I regard it as a fun, albeit optional, episode in the Jewish calendar.
The climate surrounding Purim this year has obliterated whatever mild enthusiasm I might have otherwise had. Like Hanukkah (a holiday I vastly prefer), Purim’s foundational narrative centers around victory over an attempted pogrom… and a different state-sponsored massacre perpetrated instead, under the banner of “self-defense.”
As the Israeli military — aided by settlers and the collaboration of the major Western empires — continues its brutal campaign of ethnic cleansing against Palestinians, racist caricatures permeating Purimspiels in shuls across the United States are an inevitability. This has made it painfully difficult for me to engage even academically with the text of the Book of Esther. There's a part of me that doesn't want to acknowledge the holiday at all, that doesn't want to think about it. Who wants to think? I hear Milton Sanford Mayer echo in my head.
It's the same impulse that asks me to sleep through the trials when they are upon us, that wants things to be just easy enough that I can make it through the day without the reality of the present crashing down upon my body, crushing me into paralysis, arresting me in my steps, frozen stupid in the shadow of the cresting wave looming above —
Is this self-protection? Or is this self-soothing?
When Nex was killed, I felt nothing. When Aaron died, I felt nothing. When we received word of the Flour Massacre, I felt nothing. Do not misunderstand me; I did not feel apathy, I did not feel indifference, I did not feel numbness. I felt nothing.
Is this self-protection or is this self-soothing?
It was not a choice I made. I had several loved ones, trusted friends, assure me that this was a normal reaction to the extremely abnormal. My brain, I am told by multiple professionals who know better than me, is doing its job.
But, surrounded by friends who do feel what has happened, I knew in my gut something was wrong.
It was not a choice I made.
Wasn't it?
I saw headlines. Read one essay. Listened to friends describe footage. Absorbed via osmosis the collective trauma that I had opted out of. I watched nothing. I read nothing. I scrolled quickly past posts like crossing a street to avoid an unpleasant interaction. Each of these moments was a choice. It was a choice made out of the sharp awareness of the taut thread across the space between my ears, made out of manic clarity and the understanding that to make a different choice would be to finally hear that thread snap.
Microscopic fraying, like sliding a finger down a violin’s strings, whispers from the thread, to burn is to acknowledge that existence in this present moment is itself an act of complicity.
I make the choice that keeps me from snapping. I will still snap — I'm starting to think that we all will. It is still a choice I am making. That choice is as compulsory as it is a luxury. That choice is the wrong one, I know it as I make it. No, that's not correct, not exactly; it's just not the right choice. But making the not-right choice is still the move, because it is made in the interest of some abstract self-preservation. It is the choice made to ensure that there will be more choices to make in the future. Existence is not complicity, and the ceasing to exist only achieves the freedom from impossible choices.
That freedom, demonstrably, is not free. Aaron deserved better. He deserved to be here. There are a lot of people who should be here now who aren't.
With the choices being self-soothing and self-harm — or the third way that is unequivocally the wrong one, no matter how selfless or noble — it's no wonder that I'm hearing taut strings everywhere, the minds of my loved ones discordant, dissonant, a manic-depressive orchestra.
The sound is deafening. More than that: it's undeniable. And it makes me wonder —
A crucial plot point of the Book of Esther relies upon Ahasuerus being completely oblivious to the lead-up to Haman’s massacre of the Jews. How is this possible? It strains credulity that someone, even a monarch woefully out of touch with his own kingdom, would occupy such a position of power while simultaneously possessing a blissful unawareness of the turmoil prerequisite to an imminent genocide.
Ahasuerus cannot be this unaware, unless he chooses to be. He is not in the dark about the oncoming violence — he is indifferent to it. An old, lecherous ruler whose buffoonish facade belies his absolute dominion, it's hard to not see parallels between him and our own god-kings currently vying for the crown, down to the performative shock at the suggestion of his being a benefactor to a genocidal maniac.
This role in the Purimspiel is often depicted humorously; the status of villain is reserved for Haman, and Ahasuerus, despite clearly being capricious enough for his Queen to fear him, is ultimately understood to be benevolent… because he chooses not to know, and chooses not to be involved, until Esther intrudes upon his sanctuary of ignorance. Even when he does decide to enter the fray, it is only to order the execution of Haman on his own gallows, an action that can easily be read as retaliation not for Haman’s planned pogrom, but for his impudence above his station in the orchestration (no pun intended) of mob violence in Ahasuerus’s kingdom. When it comes to the safety of his wife's people, the king claims that his hands are tied, having seemingly exhausted all his proactive choices for the moment. Then he turns the other way when the slaughter comes, not looking to see whose blood paints his streets. He again chooses to disengage, to ignore, and to drink and be merry.
When trials are upon the land, the king does not just sleep; he parties.
That's what frightens me about feeling nothing. Something feels broken inside my head, something that I want to repair, and quickly. Because in the world outside my head, the world of reality, what is the material difference between a choice made out of self-preservation, and a choice made out of disinterest or malice, if the choice is the same?
Megillat Esther is a scroll about choices, hard ones. Esther is so widely beloved because she does make the hard choice. But what if I'm not made of that?
I'm trying to drown out a cacophony, but noisemakers can only obscure Haman’s name in the fiction of the purimspiel. Inside my head the thread vibrates, the orchestra screeches, demands to know who the descendant of Amalek is in this lifetime. Will it be our names that someday prompt hisses and jeers?
Peter Viereck, himself the son of a Nazi sympathizer, wrote this in 1941:
"Well-publicized among Germans, already before Hitler came to power and during a period when he still depended on their consent rather than coercion, were the many actual deeds of butchery… Some day the same Germans, now cheering Hitler’s strut into Paris, will say to their American friends and to their brave German anti-Nazi friends: ‘We did not know what went on, we did not know,’ and when that day of know-nothing comes, there will be laughter in Hell."
I hear the laughter now.
Needle Drop: “Buzzer”, Dar Williams
News Round-Up
Things have been chaotic this month, but the right wing of Rhode Island continues their culture war crusades without regard for how busy we are (abominably rude of them).
Luckily, while fash work hard, Steve Ahlquist works harder; our prolific friend has been doggedly covering city council meetings and bill hearings over the last couple weeks on his Substack, including documenting the efforts of conservatives to snatch control over local politics. Please check out these articles and subscribe to his publication!
Jewish Voice for Peace Weekly Flyering at the Train Station
When: Every Wednesday, 5:00pm-6:00pm
Where: Providence Train Station, 100 Gaspee Street, Providence, RI 02903
JVP RI invites all to join them in their efforts to spread the word about their work and simple actions people can take to demand an end to the genocide in Palestine. They meet on the Statehouse side of the train station.
Weekly Kaddish on Michael Van Leesten Pedestrian Bridge
When: Every Sunday, 1:00pm-1:30pm
Where: Michael Van Leesten Pedestrian Bridge, Providence, RI 02903
Jewish Voice for Peace RI and allies will be hosting a weekly gathering on Sundays to recite the Mourners Kaddish and communally grieve the Palestinians murdered by the Israeli military. You need not be Jewish to attend; all are welcome to participate.
Power Half-Hours for Gaza
When: every day, Monday through Friday, 3:00pm EST
Where: online
Jewish Voice for Peace is holding Power Half-Hours for Gaza every day — join us as we channel our fury and sorrow into collective action to stop genocide.
The same link will work every day.
Continuing Actions for Palestine
The siege of Gaza has continued and intensified. Palestinians are in desperate need of water, fuel, medical supplies, and more; however, this aid has been locked up at the border and prevented from entering into Palestine. Please contact your representatives to call on them to work for a ceasefire and to get aid into Gaza.
This toolkit has a variety of links, including call scripts, groups accepting donations, phone banks, petitions, and more:
Telecom services in Gaza are periodically being disrupted. This makes knowledge of what is happening there very difficult to get and to verify. Various social media websites — including and especially Twitter — while vitally necessary in getting ordinary voices heard, have also been full of dis- and misinformation of people deliberately trying to cause trouble. Especially now, be aware of who is sharing information and why they’re doing it.
Al Jazeera reporting has continued to be the most accurate and reliable so far:
