Which is one circular way of saying that this post is “late” in coming, given that I marked the start, or head, of the Jewish New Year, 5787, a little over a week ago. But it’s also just the right time to write it, when it’s abundantly clear to me how much I’m carrying the warm glow of that evening in my heart, beyond borders of time-space and geographies.
Which is what we diasporic anarchic Jews do, for better and worse: carve out moments of self-organized “revolutionary rituals” in order to patch up our broken hearts enough to strengthen them for the “movement” ahead of us, hopefully revolutionary in liberatory ways, but these fascist days, frequently the reverse.
I’m thus so grateful to @oyveyamsterdam for building up space for Jewish life in a city where one could easily focus on the enormity of Jewish loss and especially death, whether in relation to those fleeing to Amsterdam from the Inquisition or European pogroms, or those being kidnapped, deported, and murdered in the Holocaust. For managing to bring a dormant synagogue that somehow survived the Holocaust to life again with some 150 of us, of all ages — singing, reading poetry and blessings aloud, naming and honoring our ancestors, blowing shofars, breaking bread and tasting the sweetness of apples dipped in honey, and also decrying capitalism and genocides and other “forces that destroy the promise, the hope, the vision.”
That is no small feat in a place that tried to extinguish all of that and more, and points toward peoples of all spiritualities, genders, cultures, and so on, weaving themselves together in similar or even shared “rituals of resistance, which is what I like to call such blessed moments: When not only is time nonlinear, but our solidarity breaks down walls, joys and sorrows find shared empathy, and we see flickers of what other time-spaces would/could/should feel like when we “overthrow & ruin the pyramids” of unfreedom for all.
(photos: a hand-written sign on the wall during Oy Vey’s Rosh Hashanah; partial glimpse of interior of the old synagogue, whose congregation was destroyed by fascism; cover of the “zine” of the blessings, songs, poems, and rituals used that evening; one of many round challahs set on the tables that night.)
