Havdalah #7: Childcare, Organizing, and Hanukkah

Happy Hanukkah, friends! This holiday, we hope you have a chance to connect with what sustains you, be it connection, quiet, sweetness, conviction, action, witness, rest, creation, mystery, or perhaps a miracle.

DARE & SURJ RI Childcare Collective: Volunteer Orientation & Training

• When: Sunday, December 10, 1:00pm-2:30pm

• Where: RSVP for location

  • Childcare Collective Training Signup

• For nearly 40 years, DARE has been a women-led organization centering gender justice and community care. This means supporting parents and caretakers in showing up for this work and making our space welcoming and safe for our kids! If you’re interested in joining the childcare collective, please check out the training this Sunday.

• The DARE & SURJ RI Childcare Collective is a multiracial group of volunteers providing free childcare for local BIPOC-led justice work.

UNITE HERE Local 26 Organizing Training

• When: Sunday, December 17, 2:00pm-5:00pm

• Where: Red Ink Community Library, 130 Cypress Street, Providence, RI 02906

• UNITE HERE Local 26 invites you to an organizing training. Join them to practice the role of storytelling in organizing.

• Organizing Training Event Info

• Sign up: RSVP for Organizing Training

UNITE HERE is the union of workers in North America’s hotel, gaming, restaurant, food service, laundry, and textile industries. UNITE HERE Local 26 represents workers in the hospitality industries of Massachusetts and Rhode Island.

UNITE HERE Local 26 Website

Help a Black DV Survivor Free Her Children from Abuse

The Alliance to Mobilize Our Resistance (AMOR) is fundraising for an undocumented mother in our community, who has been experiencing domestic violence and is fighting for custody of her two children. Please support if you can.

Jess’s Fundraiser

Rent Israelism Film

• When: through Sunday, December 10

• Where: online

• About the Film: When two young American Jews raised to unconditionally love Israel witness the brutal way Israel treats Palestinians, their lives take sharp left turns. They join a movement of young American Jews battling the old guard to redefine Judaism’s relationship with Israel, revealing a deepening generational divide over modern Jewish identity.

• The film is available again to rent, this time worldwide

  • Rent Israelism Film

• After the film, watch Q&As with the film’s directors and main subjects

  • Q&A with Directors

  • Q&A with Main Subjects

• $5 for a 24 hour rental

Let me tell you a story.

Long ago, (in Ancient Times, as most of these stories go), the Jews retake their Temple. The perennial underdogs, they beat back the Occupation, but are left with only enough oil to burn for a single night. Then, a miracle: the oil endures. It endures, it endures, it endures. For eight nights, the lights in the Temple stay on.

This is the Kidz Bop Hanukkah that was fed to me with my latkes in the 5th grade.

Let me tell you the adult story: invaders attempt to convert and otherwise assimilate us on pain of death. Led by memetic folk hero Judah Maccabee, we kill them back (with hammers). The Jews endure. We endure, we endure, we endure.

These are the same story, regardless of whether they’re about miracles, or religious extremists, or resilience, or atrocities, or candles, or occupation, or terrorism, or resistance, or hope. Yet another Jewish holiday with a complicated legacy that lends itself to abstract, academic, sometimes sterile debates.

A common thread in this underdog self-mythologizing is defense from genocide, which serves as a defense of genocide. We see this in Hanukkah as well as Purim, though never with the symmetry seen in the former two stories. Nonetheless, it’s prudent to bring up, especially because something that’s not lost on me is that later in the evening that I’m writing this, there will be Jews all over the country celebrating with me, but very differently; many will be invoking the origin of this holiday under the misapprehension that it’s our Temple under siege again. Some, lacking self-awareness, will say horrifically racist things, condemning Hamas in between bites of chocolate Maccabeans.

When you see yourself as the underdog long enough that it becomes a hallmark of your collective identity, it’s easy to make meaning that isn’t there, and to feel threatened by the idea that a designation may not be static. When, as is often the case, victimization is understood to confer some kind of moral authority, the narrative of inevitable persecution will be alluring. And we all know how powerful stories are.

I’ve been struggling with this in the context of my work with Never Again Action (NAA). The thesis of the organization — that Jews have a special empirical understanding of persecution and thus a special ethical dispensation that makes us especially worth listening to — is still premised upon this idea of identity-based moral authority, the weight of which is presumed to be heavier for Jews and other historically oppressed peoples. 

NAA is not the first or only leftist Jewish organization to utilize these arguments, but these arguments are not ones that I find persuasive or compelling, or true. Even if I were to humor them for the sake of following the chain of logic, the proposition of moral authority derived from marginalization is unjustifiably flimsy, and even dangerous. If identities grant us moral authority, then by that logic, they can also impugn our integrity once the context changes from marginalization to supremacy. Listen to what I have to say about ethnic cleansing, not because I, like every human, have the universal right to an opinion on it and the ethical responsibility to oppose it, but because I am a Jew, and I declare that I Have Seen This Before. My voice be like a shofar to blow down the walls of injustice and hatred, but also like a niggun to gently shame this country that has no conscience nor capacity for it. But do not ask me to protest the genocide done in my name, with Israeli guns and American money. To call upon me to account for myself and for how I stand in relation to the world and my cohabitants is inappropriate; I am only to be chosen by and made to answer to God.

This familiar posture is not a story I want to tell. But it is a version of a story I told myself up until only a few years ago. It is a version of a story all of us have recited.

Let me tell you a different story.

Someone has a breakthrough in therapy because she finally believes that a parade of personal traumas is not evidence of her character, but of the existence of chaos; things don’t necessarily happen to people because they “deserve” them. How disorderly. How relieving. She endures. She endures, you endure, we endure.

We are not defined by what happens to us in the passive voice, and luckily, neither are our moral obligations or our business (the common welfare, a phantom voice calls it). This reframing is harder and easier, scarier and more liberating. Suffering is not a measure of ethics, causing suffering is. We are what we do, not what is done to us.

The story I have been telling in this Sidebar is, I believe, obvious. It has lived by a terrifying cliffside in my mind for over a decade, in a grey place where the wind is bitter cold and rises in a Lear-like howl that demands and begs an answer. Sometimes, I think it is mine.

Let me tell this story frankly.

A people are occupied. They are ghettoized, incarcerated, tortured, bombed, gassed. Their bodies are often unable to be buried, except where they are already entombed in wreckage. They lack even clean water. If this is Hanukkah, the people searching for miracles in the rubble of their churches and mosques are the underdogs here. And yet, the miracle of miracles: Palestine endures. It endures, it endures, it endures.

When I light my candles tonight, I will be thinking of them, as well as the story I have always thought of on this holiday.

Let me tell you of Hershel and the Hanukkah Goblins.

A city somewhere in Eastern Europe, unremarkable and covered in snow, sits dark during the Festival of Miracles. Our protagonist, Hershel, arrives before the first night and is flummoxed. The townspeople tell him that the synagogue on the hill, abandoned, is haunted by goblins who hate Hanukkah, and so the townsfolk dare not light any candles for fear of incurring their fury. While the curse persists, there will be no Hanukkah.

Hershel of Ostropol, a more fitting folk hero for diaspora than old Judah, tells the townsfolk that he will break this curse. He sets off for the synagogue and proceeds to spend all eight nights there, diligently lighting the candles of the menorah each sundown. During his vigil, he experiences visitations the likes of which would make Jacob Marley blanch. He never balks, and through a combination of guile and audacity, he patiently outlasts them all, all the way up to the Goblin King, and successfully breaks the curse. He never balks, but he is terrified. His life is on the line. The peace and sanity of the village is on his shoulders. At any moment, his nerve may fail him. At any moment, his bluff may be called. And yet: Hershel endures. He endures, he endures, he endures. Each night, even knowing that darkness feels safer, that lifting the shadows requires of him a nearly intolerable level of steel, he illuminates the old synagogue and looks at what new horror awaits him.

This year, I light the shamash, I bring it to the wicks of its sisters, I force myself to behold what lurks in the shadows. The goblins have our faces, and must be faced. They are full of wrath and terrible to behold, but they must be endured.

Needle Drop: “Godbrother” by Daniel Kahn & The Painted Bird

Hey all, not much branded fascist activity has been happening in RI, but Steve Ahlquist has been doing some great coverage of the reprehensible anti-homeless police activity in Providence over the last week. Go check it out!