One could point to the record heat waves, anti-antifa state repression, tightening grip of christofascism, grindingly ongoing genocides, heightened abandonment generated by capitalism and AI, and murders-by-icy-cops, or “just” the way that these and other unnecessary violences are causing people to get physically sick or emotionally depressed, as if such “personal” woes were not equally sociopolitical ones.
I look at my list of things I want to do, I wish I could do—yet my body seems to have other plans. My mind feels stuck. My heart … well, have many times can it be broken and yet somehow find strength to trust again in this world? Even just that there will be a tomorrow that isn’t worse than today?
For Tisha B’Av, I’ve follow my feet through a city of unquiet ghosts and the quietistic living. I’ve notice the slashed present-day “antifascism” posters on walls of buildings, where on the sidewalks by front doors, “stumbling stones” are embedded—tarnished metal plates listing Jewish names, birth dates, kidnapping dates, specific death camps, and murder dates. I put stones on those “stones” while pedestrians stumble by, not noticing. I stumble on an outdoor installation: a video of 4 Jewish women, now all of blessed memory, talking about growing up in the 1920s–30s, until one Shabbat night, over their ritual dinner, fascism occupied their city. “I knew this was the end of us,” one quotes their mother as saying.
I think about the Kabbalist notion that at the origin of our now-imperiled world, some of the 10 vessels of divine light—intended for societal perfection—shattered on their way to earth, spreading sparks that we humans are meant to gather, toward a world to come. But I feel the shards, the “evil,” which fell too. How our bodies, our fragile mortal vessels, are too small to hold so many shards and shatterings. It makes sense we feel broken. That we grieve, even if we didn’t plan to.
