I, too, feel much anger at this world, so broken by fascism and its attendant phenomena, pushing many people toward sloppy (at best) and dangerous as well as deadly (at worst) positions and practices. My Xanuka flames burned bright with rage tonight—a rage I tried to temper by placing my new sticker as protective amulet on my menorah. Will non-Jewish anarchists who stencil, wheat paste, and spray paint their veiled and not so veiled antisemitism on walls pause when they see this Jewish anarchist sticker to consider that not all Jews are Nazis, as one prominent tag makes the equation here?
Yet my Chanukah candles held another emotion on this Shabbat evening, when I wanted so much to usher in “the world to come,” if only as temporary time-space. They wouldn’t catch fire. It took many a false start, with matches seeming to light the helper candle, but its wick repeatedly sputtering and dying out. When it finally began to burn, it had trouble getting its waxy comrades to alight. And in the low-grade flames, close to lacking air to continue, I felt the full weight of grief—on this the tenth yahrzeit of my beloved friend and chosen mom, Mary, whose twinkling eyes dimmed and closed, whose breath slowed and extinguished, as I watched, gently touching her arm and quietly whispering “I love you.”
I knew today was her death date, but didn’t feel it until my Hanuka candles confronted me with her absence—the light and love lost. I didn’t even have emotions about Mary when early today—coincidentally—I finished a final draft of my version of the Mourner’s Kaddish for a forthcoming anthology by @dorimidnight of blessings for the end of the world. It reads in part,
“May there be abundant wholeness, and life,
for all of us
and for all beings in the universe,
beyond all borders;
and say, Amen.”
May it somehow be so.
