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- Havdalah #4: Calls, Films, and Allhallowtide
Havdalah #4: Calls, Films, and Allhallowtide
14 Cheshvan, 5784 / October 28, 2023
White Rose RI
October 28, 2023
Happy Halloween from Havdalah, neighbors!
We hope this issue finds you safe and healthy, and ideally preparing to enter a candy-induced coma. This is my favorite holiday, my favorite month, my favorite season, so trust that I will be catatonic for the next two weeks while I recover from the Pixy Stix hangover.
I’m just as excited about our Sidebar, written by our wonderful Katherine, who has generously provided her perspective on the Catholic side of the festivities. Instead of kvelling about her writing — which would doubtless make her scrunch up her nose — I will exercise the restraint I don’t usually have for this holiday. You’re welcome, Katherine.
I can hear some murmuring from the nosebleeds: why a Catholic Sidebar? Fair question; Havdalah is a Jewish publication, although as we’ve said, not everyone on the team is Jewish. Catholicism and Judaism have also historically had a, shall we say, difficult relationship. It was only in 1965 with the changes handed down from Vatican II that the Church retracted its position on deicide — specifically that Jews were guilty of it. This decision came after centuries of brutality and genocides, and itself was not — and still is not — received with unanimous agreement.
Despite this, Catholicism has always fascinated me. I was never a Christian, yet Catholicism was a bright, shiny thing of mysteries and mysticism, old and storied, beautiful but ultimately deeply sad.
Katherine once brought me inside the Cathedral of Saints Peter and Paul, the seat of the Diocese of Providence. As awe-inspiring and majestic as the view of the cathedral is when walking up the Ghibli-esque courtyard, claimed by weeds and somberly quiet when it rains, the interior of the sanctuary itself is nothing short of humbling. I stared slack-jawed at the architecture for I don’t know how many minutes, drifting from the soaring arches to peer at glassed votive candles and into the delicate faces of statues. This may sound odd coming from an atheist, but I have always known that it’s quite possible to have a religious experience in a space outside of your own. For me, it has always occurred through two mediums: architecture, and music. The sanctuary was quiet, the few people present sitting in pews in silent contemplation, but the vast hall was visibly constructed for the benefit of sonorous acoustics: to channel the Divine, to hear it all around you, to be immersed.
I sincerely believe that exploring those places we find alien to us, maybe even assumed to be unwelcoming, sometimes leads us to the familiar echo of what we find sacred. With this in mind, I nudge you gently through the threshold of the strange(r). Explore respectfully.
Bella ciao.
James
Congressional District 1 Special Election
If you live in Congressional District 1:
Early voting starts on October 18th
Election day is November 7th
More info is available at RI’s voter website
Don’t forget to vote!
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.
Jewish Voice for Peace is the largest progressive Jewish anti-Zionist organization in the world. They are organizing a grassroots, multiracial, cross-class, intergenerational movement of U.S. Jews into solidarity with the Palestinian freedom struggle, guided by a vision of justice, equality, and dignity for all people.
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:
To the best of our knowledge (and we’re not experts) phone and internet services into Gaza have gone down as of Friday. 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 apparently has a reporter in the area that is occasionally managing to make contact:
The Guardian also has good, if anodyne, coverage, and does a summary article each day of what’s happened:
Help a DARE Organizer Access Safe Housing
DARE is raising funds for a Behind the Walls Committee member, board member, and single mother who is facing abuse from a neighbor. Funds will be used for legal support and/or a deposit on a new apartment.
Weekly Mutual Aid Distribution with the John Brown Gun Club
Every week, folks meet at Kennedy Plaza to distribute food, hygiene supplies, harm reduction supplies, and more, usually for about 45 minutes. JBGC has been doing these weekly distributions since 2018 and helps about 30 people each week.
To make a donation, visit their mobile-friendly website that has links for direct donations, Amazon wish list, and the Etsy store where 100% of the proceeds fund mutual aid distribution. Link: JBGC Mutual Aid Donations
If you have questions about the distribution or ways to donate, you can reach out to them on their Instagram (@jbmutualaid) or Twitter (@rijbgc).
If you’d like to help with distribution, the JBGC asks that you wear an N95 mask and be up to date on boosters and flu shots.
Film at Red Ink: 5 Broken Cameras
When: Sunday, October 29, 8:00pm
Where: Red Ink Community Library, 130 Cypress Street, Providence, RI 02906
5 Broken Cameras is a deeply personal first-hand account of life and nonviolent resistance in Bil'in, a West Bank village where Israel is building a security fence. Palestinian Emad Burnat, who bought his first camera in 2005 to record the birth of his youngest son, shot the film and Israeli filmmaker Guy Davidi co-directed. The filmmakers follow one family’s evolution over five years, witnessing a child's growth from a newborn baby into a young boy who observes the world unfolding around him.
The film is 94 minutes, in Arabic and Hebrew. All ages welcome but parental discretion advised. Suggested ticket price is $10 or pay what you can — all proceeds go to Medical Aid for Palestinians.
Why She Writes — An Afternoon Chat with Joy Harjo, Internationally Renowned Performer, Writer and Poet of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation
When: Thursday, November 16, 4:00pm EST
Where: online
United States Poet Laureate and winner of the 2022 Academy of American Poets Leadership Award, Joy Harjo, joins the Willett Free Library for a chat about her most recent memoir, Catching the Light, and to discuss her rewarding lifetime as a writer and poet. In Catching the Light, Harjo examines the power of words and how poetry summons us toward justice and healing.
Katherine (she / her)
The end of October, the beginning of November, always feels odd to me — and not just because of the time change. It starts a ticking clock in my brain, the halting transition from Ordinary Time to the great feasts of Catholicism, and it begins with Allhallowtide.
Allhallowtide — October 31 to November 2 — is a deeply unbalanced three day triduum in the Catholic calendar, one day eaten by candy and costume, another folded away into nearly nothing. It is a time to remember the saints, the martyrs, all the faithful dead.
October 31, All Hallows’ Eve, starts the three day observance, and going from the commercial Saturnalia of Halloween the night before to the austere service the next day gives one a sort of theological hangover as well as a sugar crash.
All Saints’ Day follows, and it is a commemoration of all of the known and unknown saints of the Church. Saints, in Catholic parlance, being those already in heaven, as opposed to Purgatory. Or elsewhere. It’s an old feast, from when the tradition of honoring the martyrs under Rome ran into the problem of too many dead and not enough days (for martyrs, you see, go straight to the top, fast pass). The solution was to have them all celebrated on one day of the year.
The last day of Allhallowtide is All Souls’ Day — The Commemoration of All the Faithful Departed — the ones who didn’t die for the faith, who weren’t saints, regular Joes and Janes who have to work out their unfinished business of unshriven sin via Purgatorial therapy. In short, myself and everyone else I’m likely to meet. It gives the day a slightly awkward sort of sadness. That'll be us soon enough; on a long enough time scale we're all dead men walking. As the tombstone says — as you are now, so once was I. As I am now, so you will be.
The triduum has a homely sort of grief about it, comforting and comfortable in turn, more of the familiarity of the poppy than the Passion. Of the three, only All Saints is a holy day of obligation (the American bishops know how many times they can try and compel their congregations into the pews on an off day and expect to be listened to; they ration them. Lord, we’re spoiled), and so it does a rough double duty for its sister day, All Souls. Perhaps because of this, I’ve always found that All Souls echoes oddly in my head; honored in the breach, a memorial to our unnumbered dead that we hope ended up on the right side of Hell, but with no way of knowing outside the bounds of the undiscovered country. Like throwing pebbles down a well, without a splash, and only the assumption that at the bottom there’s water.
An oddity of the calendar, from which we can see the beginning of Advent, a strange moment of quiet stillness in the beginning of the secular downslide into the overwhelming, cacophonous, Halloween Thanksgiving-ChristmasNewYearWhatareyougettingwhereareyougoinghappyholidaysTheMostWonderfulTimeoftheYear — the last deep breath in before the plunge.
Take a moment: inhale; exhale.
Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.
Requiescat in pace.
Needle Drop:
Things are quiet, currently, but not really peaceful; there’s some stuff brewing that hasn’t reached the point of news yet, but we’re keeping an eye out. Watch this space.
